O’, she’s warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating,
– The Winter’s Tale

I.

Having already experienced plague-related closures of all London theaters during the first ten years of his career, Shakespeare endured far worse during its concluding decade. Theaters closed for more than a year in 1603-04, and closed again for additional portions of 1604 as well as 1606, 1607, 1609 (six months), 1610, 1611, 1612, and 1613.

“Throughout the ten years or so of Shakespeare’s Jacobean playwrighting life, write Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane, “actual or threatened closure was an almost constant feature of [Shakespeare’s] company’s planning.”

This is the reality within which playwright Bill Cain has set God’s Spies. Under David Cecsarini’s direction, it’s currently in the middle of its world premiere production at Next Act Theatre as part of the World Premiere Wisconsin festival.

Himself under lockdown in New York during the early days of our own pandemic, Cain wrote his play in just seven days. What was he thinking, as he did? What about our world inspired him to revisit the plague-ridden London in which his play is set?

II.

The conceit in God’s Spies is straightforward: As plague rages in London, “Shax” (Mark Ulrich) finds himself stuck in an otherwise deserted brothel with a tightly wound Scottish lawyer named Edgar (Zach Thomas Woods) and with Ruth (Eva Nimmer), one of the brothel’s sex workers.

With nothing better to do, Shax writes King Lear – representative in Cain’s play of the dark turn Shakespeare’s writing took, during a period when he left comedy behind and wrote the problem plays as well as Othello and Timon of Athens, King Lear and Macbeth, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra.

Shakespeare entered this period with more money than he’d ever had (and he’d grow richer still in the years to come). The newly installed King James had tapped Shakespeare’s company of players as the official royal ensemble, which had its own new and thriving theater.

“I have devoted my entire life to acquiring things,” Shax reflects, midway through Cain’s play. “Money. Job. House. Houses. Real estate. That’s what my life is about. That’s what I can write.”

III.

Although Shax has been writing about death throughout his career – he describes it as theater’s “bread and butter” – it’s telling that he’s most proud of his Mercutio, whose death is stupid but also pretty, involving a charismatic player cut down in his prime, before age has withered his body and experience has tested his soul.

What had such writing left out? And before our own pandemic, had we – like King Lear – failed to fully notice what was happening all around us? Why are there so few American plays that grapple with what it means to be poor? And why did it take a plague – and the murder of yet another Black man by the police – for American theater to wake up and pay better attention to the rest of the story?

“O, I have ta’en too little care of this,” a chagrined Lear realizes, as a raging storm batters the “poor naked wretches,” the “houseless heads and unfed sides” of those enduring the storm alongside him.

“Crystal spent nights in shelters,” writes Matthew Desmond of a Milwaukee sex worker, in his recently released Poverty, By America, a searing, unforgettable indictment of the way we live now.

“She learned how to live on the streets, walking them at night and sleeping on the bus or in hospital waiting rooms during the day,” Desmond continues. The persistence of poverty in American life, Desmond notes, “means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.”

“I have seen so many of these mad men and women in the street,” Ruth says to Shax. Why does no one write about them?”

“They are invisible,” Shax replies. “Like you.”

IV.

Both Shax and Edgar consistently fail to see and understand Ruth, even though she comprehends more of the world than the two of them put together.

While learned, both men are ignorant of those life’s lessons that Ruth intuitively knows – not just about how to procure food and protect themselves from the plague, but also about what such practical skills reveal of what it means to be human. Ruth understands that life isn’t just lived in the mind but also through the body and in the heart.

Cain suggests that Ruth therefore grasps the structure and meaning of Shax’s plays better than Shax himself does. “You write about life but you don’t feel it within you,” she tells him, having urged him to write about everyday people living their ordinary lives.

Shax has insisted that the streets are empty and that he can’t write what happens to characters in such a void. “You need things” to write a play, he insists. “Documents, deeds, treaties, maps, balconies.”

Ruth knows better.

“Go out there – into the empty streets,” and “take it in,” she insists. “The madmen in the street. The doors painted with red crosses. The naked beggars. The corpses. See the void and how full it is. The void is crowded and getting more crowded every day.”

V.

Part of why it takes Shax so long to see what Ruth has lived is because she’s a woman and because she’s a sex worker. “Why should I listen to you?” Shax says to her at one point. “You’re a whore.”

That’s not far removed from what young Orestes says of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ The Eumenides, adapted by Milwaukee-based playwright Alice Austen as The Gracious Sisters. It’s currently being staged as a WPW production by First Stage’s Young Company under Matt Daniels’ direction; I caught the opening this past Friday, one night before watching God’s Spies.

The Gracious Sisters and God’s Spies share a great deal more than their status as smart riffs on classic texts.

Both unfold at moments of modernizing governmental transition: from a world of god-ruled mythology to democracy in The Gracious Sisters and from a quasi-medieval Tudor England to a proto-modern Stuart Britain in God’s Spies.

Both are highly critical of patriarchal structures and the fundamentalist, phallocentric religions that bolster them.

Both insist that attention be paid to those who’ve been left out and behind, marginalized and rendered voiceless by the winners’ version of history.

Both insist that the old be incorporated into the new rather than shunted aside. In The Gracious Sisters this is baked into the text, through Austen’s masterful blending of American spirituals and folk songs with Aeschylus’ lines; in God’s Spies, this is reflected through Cain’s sustained meditation on the relationship between Shakespeare’s brighter, more flashy Elizabethan work and the darker, chewier Jacobean plays.

VI.

Most important, both of these plays showcase strong women – Nimmer’s Ruth and Angel Rivera’s Alice – insisting that history can’t be credible without herstory. Much as Edgar and Shax frequently ignore and consistently underestimate Ruth, the men in Austen’s play routinely diss Alice and the Furies.

Apollo may order the Furies “out of my house,” but neither they nor Alice – whom Apollo continually tries to silence – are going anywhere until their grievances are heard and redressed, just as Ruth insists that her voice and concerns be written into Shax’s new play.

That means telling the whole story about Clytemnestra – less adulterous shrew than repeatedly wronged woman – and about Lear’s daughters, who’ve grown sharper than a serpent’s tooth because their father never learned how to value or respect or love them.

It means giving the Furies themselves their props; they’re not winged harpies but justifiably aggrieved and ultimately indispensable household gods, enmeshed in all those quotidian details of everyday life that Ruth intuitively understands and Shax does not.

Austen and Alice envision a world in which democracy is actually democratic. In which truth isn’t confused with Fox News. And in which the rule of law isn’t confused with the egregiously political miscarriage of justice that calls itself the Dobbs decision.

Cain and Ruth envision a world that’s less about things than people – poor as well as rich, women as well as men, bodies as well as ideas, death as well as life, tears as well as laughs. It is winters of discontent that yield glorious summers. Is it any wonder that Athens’ Dionysian festival – where Aeschylus’ great play was first seen – took place in the Spring?

VII.

Pundits and not a few theater companies’ artistic directors tell us that what audiences want right now are comedies. I’m not so sure that’s entirely right.

Yes: All of us can always use a good laugh, and both Austen and Cain’s plays deliver plenty of them. But what these two plays also suggest is that what we might most need right now, from theater and from life, is hope – most credibly delivered, it seems to me, in plays that forthrightly and truthfully acknowledge our many reasons for despair.

Both The Gracious Sisters and God’s Spies begin in darkness; both travel a long and arduous path toward redemption and concluding celebration. I appreciated their final moments all the more because they are earned, in plays that don’t try to escape the world’s woes through laughter but instead courageously confront them before deliberately choosing life over death.

In Austen’s play, that means invoking Woody Guthrie’s triumphant “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” while Alice joins the Furies and Athena – the men have all left the building – to sing of a “sister train” that “don’t carry no ego, no fury, no chains” because it has “no space for men who fight and complain.”

In Cain’s play, that means Ruth’s riff on an end-play bergomask dance, as a luminous Nimmer dances with increasing energy and joy, even as the lights gradually come down.

It brought me to tears, as Nimmer had five years ago on the very same stage, playing Shakespeare’s daughter Judith in Next Act’s production of Bill Cain’s Equivocation, as directed by World Premiere Wisconsin Festival Producer Michael Cotey.

Having just told us in the final scene of Equivocation that she’d buried her father as well as her mother and brother, the lonely and often overlooked Judith describes Shakespeare’s late, great romances as both “completely unbelievable” and entirely true, because they dare to imagine rebirth in a world gone dark and dead.

“I believed them,” Judith tells us of these late masterpieces, as she kisses her father goodbye. Equivocation – a play about how to speak truth to power while hanging onto love and beauty in a country sliding toward fascism – makes clear why.

Much like Equivocation itself – and much like the two WPW plays I saw this past weekend – Shakespeare’s final plays give hope precisely because they’re wrestled so hard with what it means to be hopeless.

VIII.

Sure, you can dismiss such endings – the wondrous magic in Shakespeare’s romances, the rousing sister train in Austen’s The Gracious Sisters, and Ruth’s life-affirming dance in God’s Spies – as indulgent fantasy.

But you’d do so at your peril; one might, after all, have similarly dismissed World Premiere Wisconsin as an impossible dream that could never be achieved, especially in a post-pandemic world that’s closed theater companies from coast to coast.

And yet here we are. As I write these words, we’re midway through a festival that’s exceeded my wildest expectations. And I’m an unreconstructed optimist.

We’ve just concluded an inspiring Wisconsin playwrights’ retreat at Ten Chimneys, about which I’ll have much more to say in posts to come.

And we’re just over one week away from a weekend in which six – yes, six – festival events open, in venues stretching from Kenosha to Kewaunee as well as from Madison to Milwaukee. My busiest days as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel theater critic, seeing more than 200 shows every year in theaters stretching from New York to Oregon, weren’t as challenging as my current effort to build a schedule allowing me to see all of this exciting new work right here in Wisconsin.

Playwright Sam Hunter nailed, it, when talking with the Wisconsin playwrights gathered at Ten Chimneys this past Saturday: “What you’re making here is on the frontier of what American theater should look like.”

“The way that we work together is special,” Northern Sky’s Molly Rhode told the same group one day later. “I celebrate that and am proud to be part of that.”

Having herself devoted her entire fabulous career to making theater in Wisconsin, Rhode knows that she’s talking about, and she has reason to be proud.

We may still be wrestling with the fallout of a three-year winter, in the state that ranks dead last in the nation in public arts spending (thank you, gerrymandered Republican legislature).

But gathered within the walls where Lunt and Fontanne did so much to put American theater on the map and foster its future, how could one fail to feel what Rhode had enthusiastically expressed? And who could gainsay Hunter’s inspired prediction involving the role Wisconsin might once again play in moving American theater forward?

The Gracious Sisters runs through May 21 at the Milwaukee Youth Art Center, 325 W. Walnut St., Milwaukee. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/all-shows/.

God’s Spies runs through May 21 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St., Milwaukee. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/gods-spies-2/.