NATURE AND SENSUAL APPETITE
Poison Nut Productions
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In Nature the pivotal role is Humanity, the play’s everyman. And to anchor Nature in its era, director Ann Faulkner imagines that Humanity also mirrors the impetuous, lusty young Henry VIII–Humanity’s choices provide an allegory for the sacred and profane options that Henry would have faced. This useful conceit also offers an antidote to the excessive abstraction of Rastell’s set speeches.
Fighting for the loyalty of Humanity are Studious Desire and Sensual Appetite, while Ignorance and Experience provide, respectively, dubious and well-tested advice. A courtly Messenger orates on the princely requisites of moderation and enlightenment for the intelligent governing of the kingdom. Studious Desire, still stuck in a postmedieval haze, lectures on pre-Copernican cosmology (as uncritically derived from Ptolemy), and speciously explains to skeptical Humanity why Earth is round and how it stays up. Using a map that reflects the latest in 1520 cartography, Experience expounds on geography, with unctuous references to the ignorant God-forsaken savages whom European explorers were intently trying to save through smallpox.
Though the audience suggestions were lamebrained–“Cats on Quaaludes” and “Pirate Women Who Sing From Cleveland”–they were works of genius compared to what the 12 Gals did to them. In one typical idiocy the show’s director, Jock L. Schloss, pretends to buy a cat from an audience member, feels the cat scratch him, and kicks it offstage. Blackout.
