Consent, Courtship, and Comedy in Keiko Inexperienced’s The Mattress Trick

Inexperienced equips her viewers with a magnifying glass from the very starting utilizing prologue to ask scrutiny. Libby Barnard, the actor who performed Harriet on this planet premiere, entered simply because the lights started to dim. She acknowledged that she was delivering the “prologue” and admitted that prologues are a little bit of a playwright cheat since it’s the probability to plant concepts within the viewers’s head earlier than the story even begins. With this chance completely teed up, she lets us know that this play is about intercourse—“so I don’t wish to get any emails after the present.” She additionally explains that “the mattress trick” is an historical dramatic trope utilized by storytellers throughout many continents: one character is made to consider they’ll mattress with particular person A, when they’re truly set as much as sleep with particular person B. The trick is historically forgiven within the story for the reason that fooled particular person was normally duped into sleeping with their betrothed. The actor who performed Harriet acknowledged that the idea appears bizarre if not altogether offensive by as we speak’s post-Me Too requirements. She affords that she might perceive the way it might really feel to go to mattress with one particular person and have them appear fully totally different by morning mild. When Barnard’s speech slides sideways into this “morning after” story the viewers is left to query: is the actor talking or the character? It’s on this theatrically slippery and inquisitive area the place Inexperienced units The Mattress Trick.

The far-fetched mattress trick trope is introduced near current day viewers by way of references to beloved variations of the trick nonetheless loved as we speak. Marianne’s mom drunkenly regales an unseen karaoke membership viewers with the story behind 1979’s chart topping hit “Escape (The Piña Colada Tune)” by Rupert Holmes. The tune is an account of an sad married couple every secretly looking out the singles column to fulfill somebody new solely to finish up responding to the opposite’s advert. Harriet cites Revenge of the Nerds for instance of a mattress trick when attempting to defend her involvement in a scholar manufacturing of All’s Nicely. Furthermore, there’s Inexperienced’s personal prologue the place the character who could or is probably not Harriet shares a narrative of watching a buddy turn out to be unusual to her after a one-night stand as in the event that they have been out of the blue another person totally. The prologue suggests the mattress trick as a metaphor as a substitute of a literal three-person scheme, however it’s no much less potent to the listener. An viewers member could be hard-pressed to seek out a facet of the historic plot machine that they haven’t accepted indirectly.

Shakespeare’s language, together with the opposite All’s Nicely themes, are woven into Inexperienced’s contemporary ensemble comedy. Harriet’s metatheatrical means to drift each out and in of the story stems from her standing as a theatre scholar. She steadily quotes Shakespeare and even performs Helena’s monologues as it’s her want to grasp the theatrical gadgets of All’s Nicely that hold the story pushing ahead alongside Marianne’s ill-fated telephone dates. Lulu, performed by Rachel Guyer Mafune, employs an Iago-like soliloquy, explaining her villainous plan of entrapment for her boyfriend, so seamlessly it might go nearly unnoticed that she was breaking the fourth wall. Rhyming couplets are positioned fastidiously all through the play offering a feverish sense of pace because the characters careen in direction of their inevitable damaged hearts. Whether or not an viewers member is a die-hard Bardophile or has not thought in regards to the play since they forgot to learn it in a highschool honors class, all will get pleasure from The Mattress Trick.

Each Shakespeare and Inexperienced performed a trick on their very own characters, giving them all the instruments they wanted to return collectively however no means to discover a clear method out.

The place Shakespeare wrote the Countess and King of All’s Nicely unknowingly united in emboldening Helena’s actions, The Mattress Trick has Marianne’s just lately divorced dad and mom— Benny and Anna—who engaged in a mattress trick of their very own throughout courtship. The Countess in All’s Nicely counsels Helena to look previous the category divide and comply with her coronary heart to Bertram with little acknowledgement of her personal luxurious life with peerage. Although Shakespeare was very able to writing a robust and unyielding male monarch, the King in All’s Nicely is launched whereas getting ready to loss of life. When Helena revives him, he grants her a want in his weak state whereby she requests to marry Bertram. The older era of All’s Nicely is fallible and accessible and so is the older era in The Mattress Trick. Benny, performed by MJ Sieber, is a hardworking, underpaid professor trying to rediscover pleasure in his life post-divorce, one drone buy at a time. Anna, performed by Alexandra Tavares, is tanned and again on the town from Florida to retrace her personal less-than-sunny post-divorce selections. Marianne, performed by Sophia Franzella, struggles to decipher their respective relationship recommendation as she tries to keep away from the sharp edges of her love triangle. How form of Shakespeare and Inexperienced to supply such concerned parental figures! The older era desires a greater love life, one freed from the unfair restrictions they felt of their salad days, for the youthful era. However it’s their uniquely down-to-earth qualities that make them unable to guard the youthful era; their grounded perspective offers no vantage level from which to navigate the teenagers out of their messes. In that method, each Shakespeare and Inexperienced performed a trick on their very own characters, giving them all the instruments they wanted to return collectively however no means to discover a clear method out.

Having expertly addressed the titular creative trope and created a saucy new Shakespeare adaptation, Inexperienced dares to interrogate the place of consent on a Shakespearean stage. Early in Act I, the rooMMAtes have a tense dialogue about All’s Nicely and its try to reframe sexual assault as a constructive prevalence, which results in the subject of consent. Harriet makes an attempt to “save” Shakespeare’s story by explaining that Bertram was technically married to Helena when she tricked him. They’re interrupted earlier than they, or the viewers, can arrive at a conclusion, however Harriet’s clarification stealthily introduces the notion of intent into the dialog—the intent being that Helena was attempting to consuMMAte her marriage by way of the mattress trick. All’s Nicely has been forgiven for hundreds of years as a result of Helena’s act was seen as “pure” insomuch that her husband wouldn’t have had intercourse with one other lady apart from Helena’s intervention.