“Don’t answer the question they’re asking. Answer the question beneath the question. The equivalent question.” - Father Garnet, Equivocation (Bill Cain)
If you are guarding the king's door and someone arrives to kill the king and asks if the king is within, do you say no and lie, or say yes and let the king die? Do you perform the truthful play and get executed for treason, or do you perform the false play and allow people to believe its lies? This is the dilemma at the heart of Bill Cain's Equivocation, now in previews at Manhattan Theatre Club, directed by Garry Hynes (who won the Joe A. Callaway Award for Excellence in Directing for The Cripple Of Inishmann in 2009).
Somewhere in the play there were a couple of lines that I wish I could rewind and listen to about finding the truth of the story in one's play. Telling the facts (or the facts one is given) but in such a way that it reveals the truth. At a Roundtable reading I attended at Lark on Thursday, there was a fascinating discussion of truth vs. history. The playwright needed to stay true to history in order to ensure her play was well-received by the Dominicans, whose history it regards. But the actors felt that the drama was in the (fictionalized) relationships of the man with the people around him, and the potential encounters he might have had, rather than the ones he did have. How does one stay true to history and still have an interesting play? History is only so dramatic... the facts of the way things happen isn't nearly as fascinating as the way things could have happened. The drama of a dictator whose power is taken away from him, stripped of history, is an incredible story... and yet Trujillo, to whom it actually happened, is interesting as well, particularly because his story is a part of history that the average theatregoer has never heard before. But if we've never heard it before, then what does it matter if the details are accurate? Because the Dominicans, who have the ability to effectively blackball the play and the playwright from their culture and history (which she spent years proving she was worthy of), care about the details. What an incredible dilemma.
In fact, it's the dilemma in Equivocation. The Dominican community effectively commissioned the play, as Robert Cecil commissioned Shakespeare (or Shagspeare, as he is known in the play) to write the king's version of the gunpowder plot. The playwright is faced with writing a truthful story, which may deviate from the facts at hand but tells a compelling, interesting story, or writing to the letter of the Dominican history. Ultimately, the playwright will have to equivocate in order to write the play that will feel truthful within the factual historical context.
And the fact that I have learned about an entire country's history about which I knew nothing, went on a wonderful fictional journey combining Shakespeare and my birthsake holiday, and can tie the last two plays I saw so intimately together... is why I chose this life.
Happy Valentine's Day!
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