The Convent of Pleasure by Hannah Cowley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Convent of Pleasure by Hannah Cowley Angelina Del Balzo Hannah Cowley The Convent of Pleasure. ERRATA An online reading presented by Red Bull Theater in New York, NY in collaboration with R/18 Collaborative, presented live and recorded on Zoom on March 14, 2022 and available on Video On Demand from March 14–18, 2022. Directed by Kim Weild. With Heidi Armbruster (Madame Mediator), Becca Ayers (Servant to Lady Happy/M. Facil), Talley Gale (Lady Virtue/M. Advisor), Cloteal Horne (Lady Happy), Anthony Michael Martinez (Take Pleasure/Ambassador), Rami Margron (Princess/Prince), Maria-Christina Oliveras (Lady Amorous/M. Courtly), and Josh Tyson (Dick/Mimic). Program Notes by Liza Blake (University of Toronto). Even as theaters in North America are beginning to resume traditional live and in-person programming, Zoom theater has not gone away, and there are signs that online staged readings and productions will continue with more frequency and higher professionalism than before the pandemic. Red Bull Theater, a New York company that specializes in performing lesser-known classic drama, continues its robust programming of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama by women from the last two years, productions that have included benefit readings of Frances Burney's The Woman-Hater and Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem (reviewed in Eighteenth-Century Studies 54.4, Summer 2021), now joined by Margaret Cavendish's closet drama The Convent of Pleasure. The March 2022 production embraced Cavendish's experimental approach to dramatic form as well as the play's inventive depiction of gender presentation and desire. This production of The Convent of Pleasure, presented in collaboration with the R/18 Collective, a group of eighteenth-century theater scholars dedicated to "re-activating Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre for the twenty-first century,"1 is one of the most high-profile productions of the group since its founding in 2019. As universities are more than ever emphasizing public engagement, the R/18 Collective suggests one effective possibility open to theater scholars. Liza Blake, [End Page 125] co-director of the Digital Cavendish Project, served as the primary interlocutor for this iteration of Red Bull's usual robust supporting programming. In addition to providing the program notes, Blake introduced the form and content of the play to its nonacademic audience in a five-minute video introduction with director Kim Weild that related Cavendish's dramatic work with that of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, two frequently staged dramatists at Red Bull. Blake highlighted Cavendish's thematic exploration of the seeming difference between the natural and the unnatural, a focus of the plot and of the play's metatheatrical conventions. This production was also publicized by a panel discussion, "The Closet or the Stage? A Conversation about Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure," that was hosted by the R/18 Collective a week before the live performance, at which Misty G. Anderson, Liza Blake, Julie Crawford, and Kristina Straub explained matters including the eighteenth-century "closet" and its relationship to the public stage, Cavendish's Royalist circles, and women playwrights after Cavendish. (Anderson also served as the production's uncredited dramaturg.) The format of the panel and the energy and insight with which the panelists conversed resulted in a lively post-panel Q&A, exemplifying successful engagement beyond the academy with eighteenth-century drama and encouraging future readings and future productions. In her pre-show conversation with the audience, director Kim Weild emphasized the ways that Cavendish pushed drama forward as a genre, and the production emphasized this innovation by creatively making the most of the Zoom format. The opening minutes of the play, in which Lady Happy's suitors bemoan their unsuccessful attempts to woo various women, were projected in black and white, with background images from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prints. As Lady Happy began to describe the appearance of the convent through the seasons, the screen changed to color, as when Dorothy steps into the technicolor world of Oz, and the interior backgrounds became colorful photographs from seventeenthcentury palaces such as Versailles. The production did not return to the colorless landscape of the play's opening, subtly pushing the audience to register that the play's conclusion in...