Friday evening, I skipped a Dark Crystal screening and a house concert (with some considerable regret in both cases) in favor of driving up to Maine for a production of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters (1746). But I'm related to the director (because of course I am), and some things are important, especially when said director 's life has been going haywire. In any case, the show went up at the Freeport Playhouse, a gigungous space by the standards both of the town's size and those of the audiences for the high school and community theater productions (like this one) that it chiefly hosts; but this is what you get when you have L.L. Bean bankrolling you.
Servant is an odd play, in some respects. It's not just that it's rumored to have been written essentially as a vehicle to showcase the talents of the original lead (playing the eponymous main character, Truffaldino.) And it’s not just that eighteenth-century theater tends to be strange (for us) in general. The thing with Servant is that it was written squarely in the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte, but at a time when every possible change had be rung on the latter, and thus audiences (and playwrights) wanted something new; so it’s much more scripted than the improv.-like style of its predecessors, and heavily influenced by contemporary French theater. Almost like the Commedia’s stock characters acting in a plot by Rousseau (or Shakespeare, but I’ll get back to that.) As such, there’s still a fair amount of improvisation involved; in this case, this included substituting endless L.L. Bean jokes for the endless Venice jokes.
Plot? You actually want to know about the plot? Look, you can pretty much figure that out from the title, other than that Truffaldino displays a Scooby-Doo like desire to eat constantly, and that one of his masters is, in fact, a woman pretending to be her own brother. Pantalone is old, Silvio and Clarice are airheads, the Dottore harangues everyone constantly in semi-literate Latin, Truffaldino is alternately a very clever person doing something colossally stupid and a buffoon accidentally being clever. The fourth wall gets broken repeatedly: I’m not sure whether that’s in the original, or a modern adaptation. (I’d once have assumed the latter, but that was before I found out about the existence of The Knight of the Burning Pestle.) There are endless stupid misunderstandings that could have been cleared up instantly, except that (a) the plot would then collapse, and (b) anyway, no one in this play is smart enough to do that, except for maybe our cross-dressed heroine and her beloved, and they’re under a lot of stress, what with being on the run from the law and all.*
Instead, I’m going to talk about humor.
1) The frankly sophomoric.
“Some people have asked me whether we added in the all the, you know, sex jokes,” the director remarked to me over dinner. “But aside from adding one very subtle line about oral sex [totally in keeping with the show’s tradition of improvisation], nope, it’s all in there…” I can sympathize: it always amazes me when residents of the 21st century assume that past societies had no concept of dirty jokes, but I guess most people didn’t grow up on The Canterbury Tales. Or read Catullus in college. Or ever visit Pompeii. Or sing folk songs. Look, people: lewd humor did NOT originate with the internet. And so, yes, that ENTIRE plot point was probably written primarily to set up the visual pun with the rocks.
This brings me to my second point:
2) Clowning.
As a play in the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte, a lot of this humor here relies on successful clowning. Props flying around with wild abandon, the ability to do a pratfall successfully, that kind of thing. And the guy playing Truffaldino does it quite well, but somewhere in the second act I realized that, even as I was laughing my face off over jokes that the rest of the audience was a few beats behind me in getting, I wasn’t finding most of the clowning all that great.
And that, I then realized, was because I’m spoiled.
Not by television shows, or any of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, or any of the more obvious sources. Rather, I saw the Flying Karamozov Brothers production of The Comedy of Errors (taped on VHS, off public television) at an impressionable age, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. As I suggested earlier, The Servant of Two Masters is already not unlike a lot of Shakespeare’s comedies (farcical servants, cross-dressing, mix-ups); and the style of clowning in it is also similar to that in the aforesaid production of Comedy of Errors (and probably also in Shakespeare as originally performed, but I’m not an expert on Shakespeare’s comedies.)
And of course, the Flying Karamozov Brothers (and Avner the Eccentric) can out-clown pretty much anybody.
Usually while juggling simultaneously.
Man, I’ve got to see if we still have that VHS tape.
Anyway. The Servant of Two Masters! Not as good as Shakespeare put on as a collaboration between several of the late 20th century’s greatest comic acts: but then, what is? Well worth seeing!
* They, incidentally, are derived from the stock character of the Capitani. This (and various other aspects of the plot) inevitably got me wondering whether some underground 18th c. theater group wrote a Commedia-style play where the male leads wind up hooking up.
I also kind of want to see a re-imaging of this play that takes the fact that both of them are technically on the run from the law--a point that Goldoni brings up but then doesn’t really explore--and refocuses at least some of the plot around that. Servant Noir, I guess.
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