The Carleton Players have made an excellent performance of Anthony Clarvoe’s play The Living last weekend, deserving of such adjectives as deep, austere, and powerful.
The set designer chose to keep the backdrop for the play very sparse, consisting of nothing more than a series of platforms and some arches in the back that suggest Gothic architecture. The text from one of London’s bills of mortality is printed on the center platform. The play opens with John Graunt (Chasya Hill ’10), a man who in a later day and age would have been considered an epidemiologist, reading aloud from one of those bills.
Graunt: This is a publication that comes out every week. Has for sixty years now. Each parish reports how many christened, how many died, what they died of. It's called the Bills of Mortality. People subscribe, glance through. At year's end, they publish a summary. Convulsion, 2,036. Dropsie and Timpany, 1,478. Frighted, 23. Grief, 46. Overlaid and Starved, 45. Plague, 110,596.
The Living is about the Bubonic Plague.
Specifically, it’s about the Great Plague of London in 1665, one of the last major outbreaks of plague to appear in Europe. Many of the characters in the play are actual historical people, though their lives have been fictionalized. The play follows the stories of the people who choose not to flee London when the plague broke out and how they manage to cope with what, to them, feels like an apocalypse. The five major characters are all very different people and bring different viewpoints to the catastrophe. Lawrence, the Lord Mayor of London, is an administrator who’s used to being in a ceremonial post and has had authority thrust upon him when the king flees. Thomas Vincent (Jonathan Figueroa ’12) is a preacher who tries to find meaning from the plague through religion. Graunt, ever the scientist, seems disconnected from events on the ground (until the very end, but I won’t give away any details for fear of a spoiler). He prefers to view the spread of disease as an enormous puzzle. Sarah Chandler (Liliana Dominguez ’10) is an ordinary person. Her entire family dies of the plague, and, still grieving, she gets drafted to act as a nurse for the dying.
Edward Harman (Kai Knutson ’11) is the archetypal Good Doctor, one of the few doctors who doesn’t flee London because he sincerely wants to help people. All his medical knowledge, however, is no match for the Black Death:
Harman: “If I treat them, they die. If I don’t treat them, they die. If I keep them warm, they die. If I keep them cool, they die. If I lance the buboes they die in terrible pain. If I don’t lance the buboes, they die of pain from the buboes!”
The Players did a great job with the costumes, which were, as far as I could tell, historically accurate. Harman’s plague doctor outfit was especially good. It made Kai look very tall and very creepy.
Though The Living is technically a historical play, it has an air of timelessness about it. The Players recognized this fact by placing a plague doctor right next to a guy in a hazmat suit on the playbill. It could just as easily be about AIDS (the play was first published in 1990) or about that airborne Superebola Michael Crichton keeps warning us about.
The script is multiply quotable, but Jonathan (as Vincent) got the honor of speaking the best line of the evening. Vincent is a dissident preacher, who keeps getting arrested and expelled from London, then sneaks back in to preach some more. The mayor asks him why he doesn’t just give up and leave, especially considering that there is a plague on now. Vincent’s reason is simple.
Vincent: “I am not dead yet.”
We’re not dead yet either, we are the living, and we have a responsibility to exercise those common forces that “keep the world from flying apart”, as Graunt cites at the very end.
The Living has two more performances this Friday and Saturday in Arena Theater. If your schedule makes it at all humanly possible, go see it.
