Next Act's "God's Spies" Examines the Writing of "King Lear"
Photo by Ross Zentner.
William Shakespeare’s genius has fascinated and confounded scholars for centuries. How could one man – with little formal education – write so many of the Western canon’s greatest plays? How could the son of a glove maker invent hundreds of new words and write 154 sonnets that have made lovers swoon for generations? If you believe playwright Bill Cain, the Bard of Avon may have had some help with one of his later works.
In his new play God’s Spies, Cain speculates that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was locked in a London boardinghouse with a prostitute and a Scottish lawyer. They are quarantined together during a bubonic plague outbreak in 1603. Working out elements of the story with his unlikely collaborators, Shakespeare is inspired and challenged by the people he shares a room with, who each offer the Bard new insights into the human condition. This creative take on the Lear origin story is receiving its world premiere at Next Act Theatre through May 21. Presented as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, it is also the final directing project for David Cecsarini as Next Act’s Artistic Director.
Cain’s complex, often literary work has been in steady rotation at Next Act for the past four seasons, receiving excellent productions of Nine Circles, How to Write a New Book for the Bible, Equivocation, and The Last White Man. In all of these pieces the playwright has exhibited great storytelling, linguistic skill, a fascination with history, and unabashed uber-nerdiness for Shakespeare’s life and work. Influenced by his previous vocation as a Jesuit priest, Cain also poses many questions about morality, sin, forgiveness, and organized religion, along with ideas about god and the afterlife. All of these interests are on display in his latest work, which was inspired by – and originally written during – our national lockdown for COVID-19.
Photo by Ross Zentner.
The play opens just after a failed transaction between seventeenth-century sex worker Ruth (Eva Nimmer) and her flustered, would-be customer Edgar (Zach Thomas Woods). A Scottish Presbyterian with a thick brogue and a suspicion that he’ll be sent directly to hell for any earthly pleasure, the young lawyer is in London to celebrate the coronation of the Scottish King James. On the side he decides to pick up some copyist work and follow a lovely young lady back to her place so he won’t die a virgin, as the plague threatens the lives of everyone in the bustling city.
His client with nearly illegible handwriting is none other than Shakespeare, or “Shax” (Mark Ulrich), who is struggling to write a new play after he had such a hit with Hamlet. But what was meant to be a couple of quick business meetings for the Bard turns into a much longer period of forced isolation when the house is boarded up and marked with a red X, meaning that the plague has been detected there. While the three are confined, affection and understanding grow as the group brainstorms character motivations and lines for Lear.
As the Bard, Ulrich is an approachable, fallible, regular guy. Shax’s writing occupies much of his brain space, but the actor ensures that the character never comes off as a tortured genius. Ulrich is equally adept with gorgeous Shakespearean dialogue lifted from Lear and lighthearted, off-the-cuff comments that give us a playwright who doesn’t take himself too seriously. Audiences who know King Lear well will appreciate the character’s “aha!” moments that will find their way into the final play.
As the inexperienced Scot, curious about what he’s missing and wracked with religious guilt, Woods is delightful to watch. He physically carries the weight of Edgar’s possible sin on his shoulders. He is also the character who is most obviously transformed by the quarantine — awakened to the mysteries of love and brought back from the brink of madness and death by his companions, after contracting the plague. Woods also handles many actual Shakespeare passages with aplomb.
As Shax’s persistent critic and dramaturg Ruth, Eva Nimmer is unexpectedly formidable. She pairs unflinching honesty with the heart of a poet and the hands of a lowly caregiver — cooking, cleaning, cajoling, and nursing the other two through the plague crisis with little regard for her own safety. Nimmer balances a wariness of emotional engagement and relentless practicality with her loftier desires in a way that feels true. And her final moments onstage are a joyous release.
Rick Rasmussen’s evocative set gives the actors a convincing Elizabethan apartment that easily transforms into The Globe for the play’s ending scenes. But director Cecsarini has created a strangely stylized England, where a Scottish Edgar speaks with an accent as thick as haggis but the Brits sound like Midwesterners. And in this squalid corner of London, where dead bodies, rotting food, flea-ridden rats, and general filth are aiding in the spread of the plague, the boarding house looks like a spotless fairytale cottage. It doesn’t have a single smudge of dirt and there’s not a speck of soot on the characters’ clothes. These choices remove some of the literal and emotional truth from the play.
Other incongruities in the script, mostly included for a laugh, rankle the ear. And where Cain’s other work is notable for its tight plotting, this play frequently feels like it’s ambling around, looking for something to do, which muddies the finer points of the story. Also, similar to our own quarantine experience, the longer the three characters are isolated, the more urgency is lost. These underdeveloped moments stand in great contrast to the long sections of Lear that the trio acts out. Hopefully in future iterations of God’s Spies, the play will flow more naturally between Shakespeare’s scenes and the frame Cain has placed around them.
Overall Next Act’s production should be lauded as a fine capstone on Cecsarini’s distinguished tenure at the theater and an essential step in the development of Cain’s play, which will hopefully have a long run on stages across the country.