An Open Access Review Journal Encouraging Critical Engagement with the Continuing Process of Inventing the Middle Ages

August 22, 2018

The Last Sharknado


The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty (harty@lasalle.edu)

Medievally Speaking may not be the most obvious venue for a review of the sixth (and supposedly last) installment of the Syfy Channel’s Sharknado franchise, but this last Sharknado made-for-television film does include a wonderful segment set in Camelot.

Within the academy, we have of late been having any number of heady and heated discussions about the history, legacy, and current state of medievalism and Medieval Studies.  And such discussions are welcome and healthy, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the phenomenon we call medievalism is fueled by its continued ubiquity in popular culture.  Thus “the medieval” continues to pop up in commercials for beer, pizza, auto parts, cell phones, insurance, and financial planning, to name only a few products and services that have recently eagerly embraced some version of the Middle Ages in their advertising and marketing campaigns. 

Film and television continue to present their own version of “the medieval”—admittedly with mixed results—but we have recently had appearances of elements from the Arthuriad in a number of cinematic genres where we might not expect them, such as a spy film, a Mad Max film, a transformers film, and a film based on a video game.  Television too has given us a fairly riveting series on the Vikings and on Alfred the Great, and not so riveting series set on the Welsh borderlands under Edward II, and another about the Templars and their search for the Holy Grail in fourteenth-century France.

All of which brings me to the Syfy channel’s 2018 made-for-television film The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time. The franchise began in 2013 with a made-for-television film, Sharknado, on the Syfy channel that, to everyone’s surprise, became an instant cult hit.  The original film and its sequels (all directed by Anthony C. Ferrante) combine multiple genres—comedy, disaster, gore-fest, science fiction—and are worthy successors to the B-movies that were made in the 1950s and 1960s.  The films are puerile, jejune, gross, badly acted, cheaply made, and improbably plotted.  Depending upon a viewer’s tolerance for low culture, the films are either hysterically funny, or just plain stupid.

A sharknado is nothing less than a gigantic cyclone that has sucked up hordes of man-eating sharks which are then dumped on land where they threaten to devour the entire population of a city.  Thanks to Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws (from a 1974 novel by Peter Benchley), sharks as monsters have become part of our cultural fabric—the Sharknado franchise just stretches that fabric as far as it can. The hero of the franchise is a bar-owner and surfer named, appropriately, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering), who in the first film sets out to rescue his estranged wife, April (Tara Reid), and their teenage daughter before the sharknado that has hit Los Angeles reaches them. The sequels see Fin and April defending New York and Washington, DC, from subsequent sharknados, until a final sharknado in the fifth film, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017), triggers the end of the world. Each sequel introduces additional characters, and features guest appearances from an eclectic group of actors and celebrities, all of whom seem to have come along for the ride for the laughs.

In the final installment of the franchise, Fin, with help from April, who may or may not be dead, and their son, Gil, travel back in time to undo all the previous sharknados to prevent the apocalypse that ended the previous film.  They begin in the age of dinosaurs in a segment that pays homage to Jurassic Park—the Sharknado franchise is filled with references and nods to any number of film and television series.  Just when things look bleak and hopeless, April arrives astride a pterodactyl, Fin undoes the first sharknado, and he and his companions fast forward to what they anticipate being the present, only to find themselves in Camelot.

That April astride the pterodactyl is a clone of Daenerys Targaryen astride her dragon from A Game of Thrones is no accident, and indeed the inhabitants of Camelot mistake the pterodactyl for a dragon.  And like one of the dragon in Thrones, April’s pterodactyl is shot down by a giant arrow.  In Camelot, Fin and company first encounter a bewildered peasant, whom Fin repeatedly calls “Frodo”—pace Professor Tolkien.  And Camelot is already under siege by the evil Morgana played by a snarling, over-the-top Alaska Thunderfuck from RuPaul’s Drag Race, though any student of cinema Arthuriana will recognize her as simply the latest in a long series of snarling, over-the-top Morgana-like figures.  Morgana’s nemesis is Merlin, here played in one of the film’s best in jokes by the popular physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.  And thanks to Mark Twain, time travel and medievalism have long been connected to each other.

Morgana wants Excalibur and the throne of Camelot.  Merlin is intent upon preventing her, and upon helping Fin, whose son Gil was at one point Merlin’s tutor, return to the present.  Morgana’s plans are interrupted by the appearance of another sharknado, and an armor-clad Fin pulls Excalibur from the stone, though the sword’s blade turns into a chain saw, in a nod to Bruce Campbell’s Ash in another apocalyptic Arthurian movie, Army of Darkness. Fin defeats the sharknado using Excalibur and some catapults, and Morgana goes up in flames screaming “I’m melting,” just like the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of OzSharknado is certainly catholic in its nods and references to other films and forms of popular culture.  When Fin and company catapult out of Camelot, they land in George Washington’s embattled camp where they encounter a surly Alexander Hamilton (played by popular television economist Ben Stein), who is the butt of any number of jokes referencing the highly successful Broadway musical that bears his name.

Neil deGrasse Tyson as Merlin


In Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco notes that we are always “messing up” the Middle Ages to meet a variety of agendas.  The Camelot segment in The Last Sharknado is a brilliant example of just that kind of “messing up.”  To a popular culture enthusiast, it is an authentic example of “the medieval.”  It has a castle, a dragon, a group of peasants, an evil Morgana, a wise Merlin, and a brave knight who wields a special, magical sword to save the day.  It even furthers its authenticity by referencing such other authentic examples of “the medieval” as A Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, with a nod to The Wizard of Oz thrown in for good measure.  And it casts as its Merlin and Morgana two “real” television celebrities, from admittedly opposite ends of the celebrity spectrum: the well-known physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is a ubiquitous television and radio talking head on any number of scientific topics, and the truly outrageous Alaska Thunderfuck, from a reality competition television show that has, for ten seasons, turned the outrageous into Emmy award winning high camp.

The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time, directed by Anthony J. Ferrante, written by Thunder Levin and Scotty Mullen, The Asylum and Syfy Films; first broadcast on the Syfy Channel on August 19, 2018.

Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University

August 16, 2018

Sydney Theatre Company: Shaw, Saint Joan



Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw (1923), adapted by director Imara Savage and Emme Hoy for the Sydney Theatre Company (2018).

Reviewed by Ellie Crookes (Macquarie University)

George Bernard Shaw’s Nobel Prize winning play Saint Joan, like most works of medievalism, ultimately functions as an exercise in reception: a theoretical approach devised by Wolfgang Iser (1971, 1978) and Hans Robert Jauss (1982), which argues that a text’s cultural value is not simply shaped by its context of production but also by its uptake, utilisation and adaption in later contexts. Indeed, though Saint Joan is ostensibly a play about wars and warriors of the fifteenth century it is imbued with concerns and preoccupations of Shaw’s own time. The Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Saint Joan acknowledges and builds upon this aspect of Shaw’s play. It does this by utilising artefacts of the past, in this case a medieval French story and an early-twentieth-century British play, to shine a light on political, social and cultural preoccupations of 2018 Australia.

Shaw goes some way to acknowledge the intersection of the medieval past and his twentieth-century present in a retrospective essay ‘Saint Joan: an Epilogue’, published in 1924. Here, Shaw discusses the seeming immutability of Joan’s story in regard to English imperialism, militarism, sectarianism, clericalism, and the ‘woman question.’ Shaw’s discussion on the nature of womanhood, particularly his treatise in support of rebellious women, is especially arresting, with Shaw celebrating Joan as an archetype of powerful subversive womanhood in regard to the clothes she wears (calling her a ‘pioneer of rational dressing[1] for women’ p.7), and the actions she takes (he venerates her military prowess and calls her the ‘first practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare’ p.7). Furthermore, Shaw locates Joan within a long history of maverick women, including those of his own era such as George Sand, Rosa Bonheur, and Sylvia Pankhurst.

Shaw’s characterisation of Joan as a model of progressive womanhood, in both his play and essay, is set against the backdrop of Joan’s persecution. This juxtaposition forms a tension that, as expertly delineated by Karma Waltonen in her article ‘Saint Joan: From Renaissance Witch to New Woman,’ aims to ‘showcase a picture of the modern woman caught in a patriarchal society—a woman labelled a witch because she violated the rules of an oppressive sex-gender system’ (2004, 196). Shaw’s ultimate aim seems to have been to position Joan as the personification of ‘modern’ womanhood and as a figure of progressivity within a comparatively antiquated world. This comparison was done, I contend, to align Joan’s ‘backwards’ medieval era with Shaw’s understanding of the regressive notions, especially in regard to womanhood, that were pervasive in his own time and which he openly denigrated.[2]

The Sydney Theatre Company’s 2018 adaptation of Shaw’s play takes up the mantle set down by Shaw of utilising art and stories of the past as a means to put forth progressive, contemporary commentary. The STC’s adaptation of the play, however, takes this focus on reception a step further by having the ‘medievalness’ of Shaw’s play take a back seat to its potential for universality. In respect to this, the STC erases almost all physical reference to the Middle Ages, a directorial decision that sits in direct contrast to Shaw’s original production, which sought to recreate the medieval past on stage through costume, scenery and props[3]. The only exception to this rule of underplaying ‘medievalness’ is the STC’s inclusion of a tableau of Joan (played by Sarah Snook) in silver armour at the beginning of the play, which serves as a nod to the medievalness of the action about to take place. The armour is then removed after the first Act and whisked off stage, which works as a powerful symbol of the play being stripped of its medieval context. From this point forward the play is set in a minimalist space of no discernable time or place. The actors wear vaguely ‘modern’ clothing, with Joan garbed throughout in the uniform of teenagers (a tee-shirt and shorts) and the stage is for the most part almost completely bare of props. One of the only props used is a petrol can, introduced in the final scene. The can is filled with iridescent silver paint that Joan pours over herself, mimicking a modern image of martyrdom, that of religious devotees performing self-immolation.
This scene, a potently visceral addition by the director and played with arresting fragility by Snook, adds a rather modern twist to the story of Joan’s sacrificial death – no longer is the Maid bound to a stake in the vein of distinctly medieval/early modern images of witch burnings, but instead she kneels, alone and armed with a petrol can, in the manner of political protests of twentieth-century martyrs.

The absence of the visually ‘medieval’ in the STC’s production is, I contend, thoughtful and deliberate and not just a product of the popularity of minimalist productions in modern Australian theatre. In the case of this production of Saint Joan the stark stage functions as a blank canvas, inviting connections to be made between what is happening in the play and what is occurring in the audience’s world. Furthermore, what is happening in 2018 is quite strikingly relevant to the concerns of Shaw’s twentieth-century play about a fifteenth-century woman.

Religiosity is one such issue. Religion is, of course, integral to the medieval story of Joan, and is also central to Shaw’s play, where it is positioned as inherently dichotomous, as something to be simultaneously revered and reviled. The religious piety and resoluteness of Joan is venerated by Shaw, while the hypocrisy and corruption of the Church that seeks to condemn her is criticised. Shaw was raised a Protestant, a fact that he directly references in his essay on Joan, and this most certainly had an impact on his version of Joan’s story. Indeed, Shaw paints a particularly scathing picture of the medieval Church, which ostensibly stands in for his modern Catholic Church.

Due to certain recent scandals within the Australian Catholic Church and other religious organisations, a level of mistrust for organised religion resonates particularly strongly with Australian audiences in 2018. The STC’s production acknowledges this relevance by leaning into the parts of Shaw’s dialogue that critique the deceptiveness and duplicity of Joan’s clerical accusers. Most noticeably, the ‘Bishops’ at times all but wink at the audience in complicit mockery of their spiteful and devious actions and arguments.

This undercurrent of religious critique within the STC’s Saint Joan came to a conspicuous head during a ‘question hour’ held with the actors after the production that I attended. At one point, an audience member asked the players about the reaction of the Australian Catholic Church[4] to such an unflattering depiction. Acclaimed Australian actor John Garden (playing the roles of Inquisitor and Archbishop) responded that the STC hadn’t received any kind of response from the Church, but that this wasn’t surprising considering that “they (the Church) are quite busy with other things.” This remark, which was met with snickers from the audience, was unquestionably in reference to the ongoing Royal Commission into child sex abuse and alleged cover-ups by members of the Australian Catholic Church and others, and this interaction drove home the relevance of Shaw’s play to such a potent atmosphere of religious scepticism and suspicion in Australia at this moment.

The issue of Nationalism, specifically Joan’s fight for French deliverance from English invasion, is also central to Shaw’s Saint Joan. This is so, even though the historical Joan of Arc lived before modern conceptions of nationhood, with her fight being over feudal lands not nation states. Shaw acknowledges this anachronism in his essay, but he clearly saw the potential for Joan’s story to work as a facsimile for modern Irish/British tensions, particularly the issue of Home Rule. Shaw, an Irishman himself, was sympathetic to the Irish plight and this empathy for a nation occupied by English/British sovereignty is ever-present in Saint Joan.

Saint Joan’s’ focus on nationalism is certainly relevant today, internationally with Brexit and Trump’s border wall, and in Australia where we have a policy of ‘turning back the boats’ of asylum seekers, and imprisoning refugees offshore for indiscriminate amounts of time. The way that the STC responds to this issue, however, is rather to hide from it instead of examining it, as it did religiosity.
Nationalistic politics are justifiably controversial and as such the STC, whose overall aim for the play is seemingly to present Joan as modern feminist role model (more on this later), needed to manipulate the nationalistic message of Shaw’s play. Thus, the STC production strives to make plain the difference between Joan’s nationalism as a reasonable reaction to invasion, and the less justifiable nationalistic impulse of isolationism. The 2018 production achieves this distinction through the alteration and sometimes complete exclusion of some of the more controversial nationalistic portions of Shaw’s original play, most notably the omission of the line:

JOAN: ‘He (God) gave them (England) their own country and their own language and it is not His will they should come into our country and try to speak our language’ (Act I).

By removing sections such as this, the STC dulls the edges of what in 2018 could rightfully be perceived as overt xenophobia. This directorial decision was undoubtedly made so as to make the play more palatable to modern Australian audiences, though of course Shaw’s original isolationist sentiment would certainly ring true of current Australian immigration policies. As such, perhaps a different production of the play could have combatted this issue of nationalism as it is presented by Shaw head on, instead of hiding from it. However, this would have made for a very different play.

It is easy to understand why the play moderates the nationalistic elements of Shaw’s rendering of Joan’s story, as this would have complicated the self-professed (by both the artistic director Kip Williams and the director Imara Savage) ‘main message’ of the production: to present a powerful female role model for modern Australian audiences. Obviously, overt xenophobia on the part of the heroine would have complicated matters. Savage, in her director’s notes, suggests that her desire to direct Saint Joan stemmed from the play’s relevance to recent feminist movements, particularly #metoo[5], and to the rise of powerful and passionate young female visionaries like Malala Yousafzai, Pussy Riot and Emma Gonzalez. The STC’s assertion, in their advertising materials and in their production program, seems to be that Shaw’s Saint Joan is an effective vehicle with which to speak to the struggles and triumphs of these young women and to show the universality of this type of womanhood in the present day.

This claim of female empowerment as a defining factor behind the STC’s choice to produce this play is commendable but it is, in both intention and execution, not fully realised. The STC’s goal of producing Shaw’s play as a means to celebrate Joan as a powerful and progressive role model is complicated by the fact that Joan, in Shaw’s original version of the play, has very little stage time. Savage, in her notes, acknowledges this and states that Shaw’s play feels like it shows Joan performing ‘a cameo in her own life story.’ Indeed, in the original three-hour version of the play Joan is only onstage for one quarter of the time, with most of the action occurring through descriptions by men, of Joan and her exploits. This absence of Joan from her own story is rectified somewhat by Savage’s restaging of the play, where Joan (and indeed all of the actors) are onstage throughout the production. Furthermore, and perhaps most effectively, is the inclusion of new dialogue in the form of soliloquies performed by Joan, which the director along with writer Emme Hoy fashioned from Joan’s historical Condemnation and Rehabilitation trial documents.[6] These changes centralise Joan within her own story through the very practical fact that she is given more lines, and the writer/director team cleverly include new sections which give more insight into the psyche and motivations of Joan. These new additions flesh out Joan’s character so that the play is less a retelling of Joan’s impact on the lives of kings and soldiers, and more of a story of personal angst and bravery. 

These changes are effective and commendable but Savage’s and the STC’s claim to have chosen the play in reaction to an international atmosphere of powerful women and the #metoo movement is still complicated by the fact that the it had to be so heavily edited that at times it bears little resemblance to the original.[7]

Furthermore, Saint Joan is still a play that calls for one female actor to be surrounded by a troupe of fourteen men.[8] On the one hand, the image of a woman enclosed by a circle of men, which is how the staging is set for most of STC’s production, is powerful in its representative potential for depictions of gendered inequality, and also for its illustration of Joan as a powerful, impressive figure in the face of this imbalance. However, the presence of only one woman onstage for the entire retelling of Joan’s story also plays into the rather pernicious idea, often associated with the valorisation of Joan of Arc, of female exceptionalism. Arianne Chernock (2013), Mary D. Sheriff (1996, 2003) and Jane Tolmie (2006) have all examined the matter of female exceptionality in detail, in both visual art and in written works, and assert that though idealised women are often used as inspirational models, they are also utilised (intentionally or inadvertently) as a means to make a mockery of the majority of women who do not transcend the limitations of their gender or their circumstances. The total absence of any other female character/actor onstage besides Joan feels like a validation, though undoubtedly unintentional, of this notion of female exceptionality, and this complicates the STC’s claims of progressive, feminist intent behind their production.

The biggest takeaway for me from the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Saint Joan is a fresh appreciation for just how malleable works of medievalism are, and how far they can be stretched from their original forms whilst still retaining the essence of their medievalist roots. This fact is a testament to the powerful impact of the Middle Ages on the modern world, and also to the inextricability of modern ideas and concerns from our renderings of the medieval past.

Works cited
Chernock, A. (2013). "Gender and the Politics of Exceptionalism in the Writing of British Women's Histories." Making Women's Histories. P. S. Nadell and K. Haulman. New York, NYU Press.

Iser, W. (1971). "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction." Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute. J. H. Miller. New York.

Iser, W. (1978). The Act of Reading: a theory of aesthetic response. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Jauss, H. R. and T. Bahti (1982). Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Shaw, G. B. (1962). Platform and Puplit. London, Rupert Hart-Davis.

Shaw, G. B. (1962). Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue. Middlesex, New York, London, Penguin Books.

Sheriff, M. D. (1996). The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Sheriff, M. D. (2003). "'So what are you working on?': Categorising the Exceptional Woman." Singular Women: Writing the Artists. K. Frederickson and S. E. Webb. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Tolmie, J. (2006). "Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine." Journal of Gender Studies 15(2): 145–158.

Waltonen, K. (2004). "Saint Joan: From Renaissance Witch to New Woman." SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24(1): 186-203.

Ellie Crookes
Macquarie University



[1] Rational Dress, also known as ‘Victorian Dress Reform,’ was a movement of the late nineteenth century that called for ‘healthier’ and ‘safer’ styles of dress for women, in reaction to the corseted  and cushioned designs that were popular at the time.

[2] As demonstrated in his pro-feminist writings, such as his speeches: ‘The Menace of the Leisured
Woman’ (1927) and ‘Women-Man in Petticoats’ (1927).

[3] A number of photographs from early twentieth-century productions of the play can be found online, particularly of the actress Sybil Thorndike who performed in the role of Joan over 450 times. These images attest to the visually ‘medieval’ flavour of the original productions.

[4] It is quite telling that this audience member named the Catholic Church specifically, not Christianity or religious organisations more generally.

[5] It is interesting to note that one of the accused predators ousted by the #metoo movement was the
actor Geoffrey Rush, whose alleged misbehavior while performing in the STC’s production of King
Lear in the 2015-2016 season was the catalyst for his public reprobation. Thus, Savage’s reference to
the movement feels quite pointed.

[6] This directorial decision, according to Savage, was enabled by somewhat lax Australian copyright
laws, which allow Australian productions of plays to be hugely altered by modern writers and
directors.

[7] A fact that Shaw would have reviled, having in his essay on Saint Joan professed that critics (whom he calls ‘knights of the blue pencil’) that suggest that the script be shortened, never mind
substantially altered, are effectively ‘disemboweling’ his play.

[8] The STC’s production, however, has its actors play two and even three roles, bringing their number of male actors down to eight.

August 13, 2018

Wulp, The Saintliness of Margery Kempe



The Saintliness of Margery Kempe, by John Wulp
Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty harty@lasalle.edu

To paraphrase a question once posed by Virginia Woolf, what if Geoffrey Chaucer had had a sister?  Would she have been like Margery Kempe?  While their lives partially overlapped, Chaucer was dead by the time Margery undertook the more extraordinary parts of her life.  Her father, John Burnham, was mayor of Bishop’s Lynn and a Member of Parliament, and conceivably could have crossed paths with Chaucer.  Her husband too was the town mayor, and Margery appears to have been destined to lead an unremarkable but comfortable bourgeois life.  But she gave birth to fourteen children, proved a failure as a brewer, negotiated a celibate separation from her husband, went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and to Rome, and she was also “in Galice at Seint-Jame, and at Coloigne” like the Wife of Bath, a Chaucerian character with whom she shared a number of traits, including an early fondness for ostentatious styles of dress.  At first, Margery travelled on her own relying upon the kindness of strangers, but she seems to have undertaken her later travels in the company of her son, who may have been the first to transcribe parts of what we today call The Book of Margery Kempe.
 
Illiterate, Margery nonetheless knew of the writings of St. Bridget of Sweden, who was canonized during Margery’s lifetime—Wulp’s play has her actually in Rome during Bridget’s 1391 canonization ceremony—and consulted with Julian of Norwich, several years before the latter died: Julian assured Margery of the truth of her visions.  At one point, Margery returned home to nurse her husband through his last illness.  Her constant public weeping—out of spiritual joy—her unorthodox lifestyle—she often wore white in public against the prohibitions of the Church—and her tendency to preach in public brought her to the attention of the local clergy any number of times.  She was accused of heresy—specifically of being a Lollard—but she was in each case exonerated of all charges.

While Margery and Julian have today belatedly earned a place in the literary and religious canons as mystics, John Wulp wrote his play and had it first produced in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1958.  In the following year, a much revised version of the play opened off Broadway in New York with Frances Sternhagen as Margery, Gene Hackman as her long-suffering husband, and Charles Nelson Reilly in the supporting cast.  Hope Emily Allen only discovered the sole surviving manuscript of Margery’s book in 1934, and her edition for the Early English Text Society did not appear until 1940.  John Wulp is, therefore, a true pioneer in Kempe studies. The current New York revival, directed by Austin Pendleton, uses the original 1958 script.  As Wulp notes in the program for this production, the play “tells the story of a woman who did not want her life to be defined either by men or by the strictures of her society.  The gap between her ambitions and her ability embodies the entire human condition.”

The production uses no scenery and limited props as it traces Margery’s early determination to be something more than simply a wife and a mother, the male-prescribed virtuous options available to her.  She decides that she will abandon husband and children—the script gives her but six children—and become a brewer, but her talents are less than suited to brewing, and her one chance at success in the trade stems from the distinction that she represents in being a female brewer.  Men will flock to her to ogle at her as a novelty.  Rather than determining her own destiny, she will simply become a victim of the medieval male gaze.  Margery then decides that she will join forces with the devil, and lead a life of sin.  But the devil she encounters only offers her yet another male-prescribed role, whore.  Never one to accept adversity or a setback, Margery sets out instead to become a saint, but the male-dominated church demands a miracle as proof of her sanctity.  Happily, one occurs soon enough in a somewhat unorthodox (very Margery) way when the roof of a chapel collapses on her, and she escapes with only a few scraps and scratches.  Convinced of her own saintliness, and reluctantly blessed by the ecclesiastical authorities, Margery joins a ragtag group of pilgrims as they set out for the Holy Land and then return by way of Rome.  Margery is not an easy travelling companion, but she manages to scrape by, and eventually returns to her husband and children to secure a roof over her head as she begins to dictate the book that would eventually bear her name. 

That book’s significance lies in its being the first autobiography composed in English by a woman.  But Margery would, thanks in part to the Reformation, disappear from both the literary and the theological landscape for centuries.  And while Margery now has a more secure place in the canon, she still suffers from a male-prescribed ecclesiastical prejudice.  Julian of Norwich, the anchorite who abandoned the world and embraced contemplative celibacy, is today venerated as an official saint by both the Anglican and the Evangelical Lutheran communions, and as a popular saint by Roman Catholics.  Worldly Margery, the not quite totally rehabilitated fallen woman, has achieved no such recognition.  Holy recognition and sexism still seem to go hand in hand. A male saint like Augustine could allegedly pray “Lord, make me pure, but not quite yet.”  Women still seem to have fewer options, and less readily receive forgiveness and absolution.

Andrus Nichols as Margery Kempe
           
Andrus Nichols makes a wonderful Margery—lively, self-assured, yet difficult to put up with—the real Margery’s bouts of prolonged public weeping were met with decidedly mixed reactions by those who endured them.  The other members of the cast double and triple up on roles, and do so admirably.  Pendleton’s direction is steady.  John Wulp has had a distinguished career as a producer, scenic designer, director and artist since writing his Margery play, which won him a Rockefeller Grant.  He subsequently would earn an Obie Award, a Tony, a Drama Desk Award, and an Outer Circle Critics Award, among other recognitions for his later work in the theater.  This revival of The Saintliness of Margery Kempe is part of a wave of theatrical medievalism in New York.  This past Spring saw a Broadway production of Shaw’s Saint Joan, and the Fall will bring a production of Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid, with Glenn Close as Joan’s Mother, further downtown at the Public Theater.  That play has been advertised as the “tale of Joan of Arc, as seen through the eyes of her mum who is doing her very best to accept the fact that her daughter is different.”

The Saintliness of Margery Kempe by John Wulp at The Duke Theater on 42nd Street in New York, produced by the Perry Street Theatre Company and Jonathan Demar in association with Frederick M. Zollo and Diane Procter. Directed by Austin Pendleton.  Featuring Vance Barton, Latonya Borsay, Timothy Doyle, Michael Genet, Ginger Grace, Andrus Nichols, Jason O’Connell, Pippa Peartree, and Thomas Sommo.  July 5-August 26, 2018.

Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University