Portsmouth, our sister city just across the Piscataqua, seems to get tonier and more charming by the visit — its boutiques, outlets, and upscale yuppie eateries seem to be cultivated with the same care as the begonias in Prescott Park. But this was not always so. Back in the early 1600s, explains the cast of a new original play, Portsmouth was the destination of those who hankered after a rather grittier good time.
Rife with prostitution, espionage, booze, and murder, Portsmouth once supported a rich red-light culture in the shadows of its refinery. “Like most mistresses,” the play informs us, “it has an underbelly.” In Vatican Productions’ The Underbelly Play, conceived by Laura Pope and written and directed by George Hosker Jr. (with help from Norm Smith), we’re treated to a rambunctious theatrical tour of the seamier side of Portsmouth’s bad old days.
Inspired by the actual Underbelly Tours of Portsmouth, led by period-costumed guides (they start up again on June 18, at the Rusty Hammer), The Underbelly Play lures local history into bed with comedy, and comes up with a few compromising positions. This is not a dry bout of historical dramatization, by any means. Headed loosely by the engaging Hosker as the effete underground insider Silas Deane, and the wonderfully buxom, take-no-prisoners Kathleen Horrigan as whore Sarah Snickit, the lively cast includes a large percentage of crass-talking women and men of the night.
Vatican wants you to know that history need not be boring. This history is told mainly by those who walked the red-light depravity of what was once Water Street, back before the pious Prescott sisters got their horticultural hands on it and turned it into Prescott Park. From these debauchers, you’ll hear about not just the Smuttynose murderer, New Hampshire’s pirate governor, and poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich, but also genitalia jokes, blow-job allusions, and lots of bad, bad girls in need of punishing. There’s also some audience interaction: if you’re comely and/or handsomely endowed, Sarah may well come around to recruit you for her team. This theatrical swoon of history includes slapstick, simulated comic coitus, and racy epithets pronounced from atop a real soapbox.
There are a few moments of gravity in here, too. When young, unmarried Ruth Blay (Erin Lemire) is wrongly sentenced to hang for killing her newborn child, the officiating Sheriff Packer (Dennis Purdie) moves the hanging up so that the governor’s pardon comes too late. The ensemble seems a bit less sure in striking the tragic tone; the dead girl is waltzed away from the gallows — to a Sarah McLachlan song — with a sentimentality that seems out of place amidst all the ribald ribbing elsewhere.
That she dances away to a modern song is an example of a directorial decision to suffuse these stories of the under-city with creative anachronisms. These include references to the Three Stooges, a comparison of shipbuilder-businessman Governor John Langdon to Donald Trump, and a slew of snippets of contemporary pop songs. The allusions certainly keep things light, and let us maintain a sturdy straddle between the present and the historical, but their frequency and duration sometimes feel a little gratuitous. To preface the trial of an accused spy, the ensemble performs an extended series of homages to Bond movies. After a full five minutes or so of this, the joke seems to have long since played out its purpose.
