Black (Plague) Humor for These Dark Times
by Lauren D. Woods
From the first few minutes of The Amateurs, as the seven deadly sins enter the stage, with their comically grotesque faces and voices, the whole theater is laughing. It’s a perfect image for what the play entails—walking a fine line between laughing at the absurd darkness of life and impending death, as well as the real human foibles that make up the characters.
The Amateurs, performed at Onley Theatre Center and directed by Jason King Jones, follows a band of actors traveling across Medieval Europe, making props, practicing their parts, and navigating their performance for a rendition of Noah’s Flood. They do this all while trying to impress the Duke so he’ll take them into his walled village and save them from the ever-encroaching Black Plague.
Noah’s Flood, the play within the play, is a Medieval morality play—a genre of theater in Medieval times that dramatized the conflict of good and evil through a protagonist’s personal struggle. These plays were popular Christian allegories in Medieval times, examining the roots of human behavior. And this is where the play starts to feel really meta, because of course the audience too is watching a play with moral themes, although much more complex than a simple allegory. These themes grow and layer as the story progresses.
As they continue their journey, the struggles of these actors quickly become real and tangible. There is an unplanned pregnancy with a question about paternity, big decisions have to be made about the production, there is a possible visitor from the dead, and a new traveler with a secret opens another window into this period of history.
Meanwhile, they practice and practice. One of the highlights is Larking, played by Michael Russotto, a bloviating director of the production who also plays God. The two starring female characters, played by Emily Townley and Rachel Zampelli, play strong, complex women. The acting across the board is excellent, particularly as the actors pivot from the comic to dark moments and back again.
The germ of the idea for the play came to the playwright, Jordan Harrison, from a 15th-century play, Noah’s Flood, in which Noah’s wife, contrary to any telling of the story from the Bible, refuses to get on the ark. It’s a departure from the traditional telling of a moral allegory, one that instead centers the human individual. And in various ways throughout, the play explores and revisits the idea of individual agency and the human response to a tragedy.
After all, the Black Plague first came in a pre-Renaissance time, when morality completely revolved around the church, when God was the explanation for everything, and when the plague was widely believed to be a punishment from God for human sins. And yet—at the same time, as the plague moved on, killing without regard for any individual, the Renaissance approached, tens of millions died, and people began to question that explanation. It is here in this pivotal moment of history, and the play, that the themes and the choice of setting, make the most sense.
Things start to go off script—in Noah’s Flood, that is, when Hollis, played by Townley, a character who has endured the death of a loved one, continued trials, and seemingly no answer, tells the character Noah no. She is not getting on that ark. One can only imagine the Medieval actors, faced with the same quandary of playing Noah’s family during the plague, facing the same questions. How does one react in the face of senseless and seemingly endless destruction? Is it an act of God, or where is God anyway? Is it moral for this one to die and this one to live? Do you continue and play along with the script, or create meaning in another way? What’s happening in Medieval Europe? And, for that matter, what’s happening, right now, outside the theater’s doors? This production, after all, took place on March 7, just after the first three coronavirus cases were confirmed in Maryland.
Speaking of going off script, Evan Casey, who has until now played Gregory, a bumbling set designer, transforms into the persona of Harrison to explain what the play is really about—the experience of AIDS. This is a complete surprise to the audience unless they have read the liner notes, which include an explanation from the artistic director, Jason Loewith, of his decision to produce The Amateurs, and the importance of this theme.
Any departure like this in a play bears the risk of pulling the audience from the story. It can divide audiences, who may find it gimmicky, and prefer to discover the metaphor for themselves. In this case, for a particular reason, I found it worked. Without revealing too much, Harrison shares about his own coming of age at the height of the AIDS crisis and the impact it had on him. The parallels are striking and rich. The interlude draws on and enriches the story, rather than detracting. Casey also makes a believable transformation from Gregory to Harrison, and back again.
True, the interlude might have been a little shorter or more focused. The tangents go on, and while thought-provoking, I found myself anxious to get back to the story. At last, the main narrative resumes with the characters continuing on in their makeshift ark to practice and perform. But now, having seen Harrison’s intervention, the triple layering of symbolism is clear, and the story takes on a new meaning as the audience considers the destruction of Noah’s flood, the Black Plague, and the AIDS crisis. Of course, lurking behind it all is the fourth layer of destructive illness, and one that could not have been anticipated—a new plague, sweeping the world, again—the elephant just outside the theater.
Only some can be saved from the great flood, of course. And as the play goes on, Hollis’ questions, her pushing back, resonate further. The play within a play seems to ask: What good is a morality play in an arbitrary world? What kind of morality is it when some are saved from disaster and some are not, without any apparent reason? And who can focus on theater anyway, with the tragedy around us?
The characters are well cast, the humor effective and achieved. There were some opportunities for the deepening of characters and exploring their motivations and backstories further, but that was an opportunity for the writing and not the acting or production. The ending, in terms of mood and inevitability, is spot on, with some well-crafted and surprising scenic design to set it off. It hits the spot, all the while poking fun at itself.
The play feels right. It is rich with layers, and the friend I traveled with and I spent the entire hour home back to the DC area discussing its themes, the way the play seemed unusually to bleed into our lives, and vice versa. When I dropped her off at home, she came back immediately and knocked on my car window. I thought she’d forgotten something. She showed me her phone. The first case of coronavirus had made it to DC.
Performances of The Amateurs will continue as scheduled through the weekend in the 150-seat Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab. The theater will reassess the situation on Monday.
Run time: 100 minutes with no intermission
Olney Theatre is located in Olney, Maryland, in Central Montgomery County. You can purchase tickets online or by calling 301-924-3400.
Lauren Woods is a DC-area based writer. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Wasafiri, The Offing, The Washington Post, and others.