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jducoeurSCAdians in particular, and more generally anybody who enjoys funny theater, may want to check out the viewing party that Alexx is running on November 16.
The show is "The Knight of the Burning Pestle", the only full-length non-Shakespeare period scripted play that Carolingia has ever put on. The production was directed by Alexx and produced by me, and grew out of our Elizabethan Theater class in college. The professor asserted that KotBP was the funniest play ever written, which kind of mystified us -- when you just read it on paper, that's not at all obvious. Eventually, Alexx threw himself into it, spent a fair while understanding the language and jokes well enough to grok *why* it is so funny, and wound up figuring out how to produce it properly.
It's quite a bit of fun, and much more modern than you might think. The fourth wall gets not just broken but stomped all over (within the first minute of the play), as the play gets warped and reshaped by the audience. It involves monstrous barbers, a magnificently ridiculous death soliloquy, a gratuitous maypole dance, the first known instance of the arrow-through-the-head gag, and the only Grocer Errant in theatrical history.
The recording is homebrew, and I'll warn that the sound quality isn't always the best, but it's reasonably followable. Recommended, both as a good play and as a neat piece of Baronial history -- y'all come by...
The show is "The Knight of the Burning Pestle", the only full-length non-Shakespeare period scripted play that Carolingia has ever put on. The production was directed by Alexx and produced by me, and grew out of our Elizabethan Theater class in college. The professor asserted that KotBP was the funniest play ever written, which kind of mystified us -- when you just read it on paper, that's not at all obvious. Eventually, Alexx threw himself into it, spent a fair while understanding the language and jokes well enough to grok *why* it is so funny, and wound up figuring out how to produce it properly.
It's quite a bit of fun, and much more modern than you might think. The fourth wall gets not just broken but stomped all over (within the first minute of the play), as the play gets warped and reshaped by the audience. It involves monstrous barbers, a magnificently ridiculous death soliloquy, a gratuitous maypole dance, the first known instance of the arrow-through-the-head gag, and the only Grocer Errant in theatrical history.
The recording is homebrew, and I'll warn that the sound quality isn't always the best, but it's reasonably followable. Recommended, both as a good play and as a neat piece of Baronial history -- y'all come by...
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What about Mandragola?
Date: 2013-10-27 05:13 pm (UTC)Re: What about Mandragola?
Date: 2013-10-27 05:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-27 06:01 pm (UTC)No question but you should all go watch Pestle; you just know how I twitch when people say "I don't remember it therefore Carolingia has never done it."
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-27 06:09 pm (UTC)I should be clear that by "full-length" I mean over 1.5 hours of text. I'm intentionally omitting a huge number of shorter plays ranging from George a Greene to Wit and Science, and looking for plays that are comparable in size and complexity to a Shakespeare production. At the time, I was certainly under the impression that Pestle was the only one that had been done, and nobody contradicted me at the time, but I could certainly be incorrect.
(Hmm. It would actually be a fascinating history project to try and enumerate all of the plays Carolingia has done over the years...)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-27 07:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-27 09:17 pm (UTC)So if anyone did want to compile such a list at a baronial level, there's places to start. Might be fun for someone.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-28 06:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-28 07:08 pm (UTC)Speak up if anyone wants to actually undertake.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-28 07:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-28 07:47 pm (UTC)