Two Plays About Women Being Treated Badly

Engelstad Theater Beverley Center for the Arts — The Engelstad Theater in Cedar City back when it was new and its grass was still pretty pathetic.
(Photograph by my wife)

Somewhat spontaneously — we didn’t make the decision until last night — we drove down to Cedar City today to catch as much as we’re able to catch of this year’s Utah Shakespeare Festival. Owing to our crammed travel schedule last season, we were unable to attend. Prior to that, though, we hadn’t missed the Shakespeare Festival since, I think, sometime in the first half of the 1990s. It had become our end-of-summer ritual. And we didn’t want to miss it yet again.

This afternoon, we caught a performance of Silent Sky, based on the inspiring but rather sad story of the pioneering female astronomer Henrietta Leavitt. She was the first person to notice a pattern among Cepheid variable stars that enabled astronomers to scientifically estimate celestial distances for the very first time. Here’s something I wrote about the play here back when I first saw it in 2022:

One quibble: The play, written by Lauren Gunderson and dating to 2015, depicts Henrietta Swan Leavitt as agnostic or indifferent toward religion. I would need to return to the two books mentioned above in order to check what they might have to say about the issue. But she was, as the play itself depicts her, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister and, much more to the point, the Wikipedia article about her says that “Henrietta Leavitt remained deeply religious and committed to her church throughout her life.”

And here’s at least one clue suggesting that her family as a whole may not have been exactly anti-scientific fundamentalists: Near her grave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that of her uncle, a prominent engineer who was named Erasmus Darwin Leavitt. The name is interesting.

This evening, we saw a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Afterwards, I asked my wife if she didn’t, honestly, think me rather a better husband than that Tudor monarch. After giving it a great deal of thought, she allowed that, on balance and all in all, I probably am somewhat to be preferred over him. It’s a small victory, to be sure. But I’ll take it.

Both of us were most impressed with Cassandra Bissell as Queen Katherine (Katherine of Aragon). She was funny in the prologue and epilogue, and very affecting in the scene that is set just prior to her character’s death. Both of us are almost certain that we must surely have seen the play before — by now, it would be almost impossible that we haven’t seen the entire Shakespearean canon — but it certainly rang no bells with either of us.

It was fun, too, to run into several old friends and acquaintances at this evening’s play. But I want to mention a scene that caught my attention. It is a “deathbed vision” granted to Queen Katherine in Act 4, Scene 2, as, divorced and exiled and surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, she nears her end:

GRIFFITH
She is asleep. Good wench, let’s sit down quiet,
For fear we wake her. Softly, gentle Patience.
⌜They sit.⌝

The Vision.
Enter, solemnly tripping one after another, six Personages clad in white robes, wearing on their heads garlands of bays, and golden vizards on their faces, branches of bays or palm in their hands. They first congee unto her, then dance; and, at certain changes, the first two hold a spare garland over her head, at which the other four make reverent curtsies. Then the two that held the garland deliver the same to the other next two, who observe the same order in their changes and holding the garland over her head; which done, they deliver the same garland to the last two, who likewise observe the same order. At which, as it were by inspiration, she makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing and holdeth up her hands to heaven; and so, in their dancing, vanish, carrying the garland with them.
The music continues.

KATHERINE, ⌜waking⌝
Spirits of peace, where are you? Are you all gone,
And leave me here in wretchedness behind you?
GRIFFITH
Madam, we are here.
KATHERINE It is not you I call for.
Saw you none enter since I slept?
GRIFFITH None, madam.
KATHERINE
No? Saw you not, even now, a blessed troop
Invite me to a banquet, whose bright faces
Cast thousand beams upon me, like the sun?
They promised me eternal happiness
And brought me garlands, Griffith, which I feel
I am not worthy yet to wear. I shall, assuredly.

To me, although I’m aware of no account of a deathbed vision that takes exactly such a form, elements of this scene ring true to me from accounts that I’ve read. In tonight’s staging, the “Personages” who come to Katherine in her dream are people who have died sadly, tragically, and/or unjustly earlier in the play (e.g., the Duke of Buckingham and Cardinal Wolsey.