FACING FEARS: You want to know, too: what's in the bowl? |
It seems that mild young Mary Toft, in a twist on the old idiom, is birthing like a bunny. And not just in terms of quantity. The fruits of Mary’s labors do indeed come in numbers great enough to be called “litters,” but they also bear a disconcerting resemblance to — you guessed it — baby rabbits. Once other people catch wind of this, a variety of interests — medical, religious, financial, and plain old prurient — converge upon her. The vicissitudes of her curious condition, and the many others who observe it, are the subject of Bunnies, Part I, an equally curious recent play by Todd Carlstrom. Now receiving its second-ever production (by director Daniel Burson, as part of Portland Stage Company’s Studio Series) this comic drama brings together a thematic threesome of science, faith, and spectacle.If you’re like me, you’re already assuming that a twenty-first century play about a woman birthing rabbits is probably going to be pretty glib, and willfully filled with po-mo gimmickry. But after sitting in on a recent rehearsal, I’m thrilled to report that Bunnies is astoundingly classical. It turns out that Mary (Ariel Francoeur) is having her bunnies in a small village in 1726 England, and that she, her husband (Keith Anctil), her mother-in-law/midwife (Maggie Gish), the upper-class Dr. Howard they call in to help (Peter Brown), and many others actually speak in blank verse. (There is even the periodic rhymed couplet.) And lest that seem like gimmickry, rest assured the iambic pentameter of Bunnies is not just finely crafted, but also a striking example of form fitting with function: as others learn of Mary’s condition and reflect on what it might mean for science, religion, careers, and purses, Carlstrom’s blank verse gives these timeless meditations and debates an appropriately Shakespearean gravity.
But that’s certainly not to say that Bunnies is either a study in pure formalism or a dry drag of a period piece. Carlstrom’s graceful verse nicely conjures an older age, but he also makes a point to break the wall, and the classical verisimilitude, by way of a few calculated absurdities. It’s not just that the bunnies are played by colorful stuffed animals, although that helps. There are also personifications of things like Good Sense (Chris Fitze), too easily seduced by Unbridled Lust for Power (Michelle Leeman); and the eager Newspaper (Christopher Reiling), who knows exactly how much we like to rubber-neck. These intrusions into genre remind us of our own spectatorship, and force us to compare it to everyone else’s motives for wanting to gawk between Mary’s legs.
There’s also plenty of less allegorical comic relief to be had from Burson’s energetic ensemble, many of which play four or more different roles — there are villagers, mobbing townspeople, doctors, and meddlers. Jay Piscopo projects a fun balance of erudition and quackery in his showy Nathaniel St. Andre, the Royal Anatomist. Anctil gives pitiful but hilarious pathos to a weak regular Joe putting on a good face for his wife, and Sean Demers is excitingly strange and elastic as King George. True to its Shakespearean form, the also show has slapstick (the delivery scenes, which I won’t spoil by describing) and raunch (bestiality quips would have been hard to avoid, given the circumstances). At one point, the audience is even urged to voice, as one, the words “vagina” and “scrotum.”
