The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: A Taste of Evermead

 

A Taste of Evermead 

Very much a departure from Marlowe’s usual work, this bittersweet, semi-autobiographical drama explores the challenges of growing up between two worlds, elven and human. It’s a theme that many other artists have tackled in the past, but rarely from as personal a perspective as this. Marlowe’s willingness to let her own heartache bleed into the script gives her always-sharp dialogue a depth and a resonance never seen in her romantic comedies or political thrillers.  Its success was probably doomed by the choice of a theater in the rough-and-tumble northeast of Baldur's Gate as its first venue. Without the slapstick and bawdiness that audiences in that neighborhood demanded from their entertainment, A Taste of Evermead died slowly, after a week and a half, under a barrage of rotten fruit and catcalls. There remains hope, however, that a new production might be mounted in more suitable climes, for the play's obvious personal significance might well help it survive its author's notoriously short attention span. 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: Purple Reign

 

Purple Reign: A Patriotic Spectacle

This foray into the revue genre showcases Marlowe’s signature witty dialogue and clever songwriting—exceedingly clever, as it turns out, for the city magistrates of Suzail suppressed Purple Reign after only two performances. Though Marlowe had been careful not to promote the show as satire, word of its subtle barbs at the Cormyrean government spread quickly to the wrong ears. A timely warning allowed the playwright to flee the capital just ahead of the Purple Dragons, and the ministerial wrath burned out almost as quickly as it had ignited. 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: Szassy!

 

 

Szassy! A Musical of Thay

In a career marked by startling lapses of judgement, the attempt to stage a musical satire of one of Faerun’s most reviled despots in the capital of its most-threatened neighbor nonetheless stands out. If one ignores the context, Szassy! has a lot to offer: catchy, clever songs; perceptive caricatures of the politically significant; and enough well-crafted jokes to burst a Bag of Holding. All of which, one hastens to say, are wasted in making light of atrocity. If the Aglarondan authorities did not act to suppress the production, it is only because the citizens of the capital beat them to it. Loud protests and an attempt to burn down the theater dropped the curtain on Szassy! right after its premiere.

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: Too Sune?

 

 

Too Sune? A Comedy of Mourning ... and Evenings

Elturgard is one of the last places anyone would think to produce a sex comedy, and so of course Elturel’s Skylight Theater was the opening venue Marlowe chose for her merry-widow farce Too Sune? The heroine’s attempts to juggle her lovers and her bereaved in-laws as she arranges her husband’s funeral reveal Marlowe as a master of double entendre and perfectly timed entrances, and it is a great pity that the paladins of Torm not only shut down the production but burned the script in the public square.

 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: Grassy Gnoll

 

 

Grassy Gnoll: A Political Thriller

Buoyed by the success (and the income) from the "Castaways" plays, Marlowe next embarked upon this rather convoluted and abstract work, which treats the assassination of a conquering general as a vehicle to explore the limits and workings of political power. It also—apparently inadvertently—revealed more about the Cormyrean security services than the Crown considered safe. After the production was shut down, Marlowe was held without charge for several days and then quietly released. No further information about the incident is available, and the script of Grassy Gnoll was subjected to considerable editing, with several details altered before the distribution of copies was permitted.

 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: The Castaways series

 

The Castaways marks the beginning of Marlowe’s commercially successful experiment with short-form comedies featuring a recurring cast of characters. In the “Castaways” series, these are a group of social archetypes (or stereotypes, to the less charitable critic) stranded on a desert island and forced to build a functioning society-in-miniature to sustain themselves until help may arrive. 

 

 

In the early installments, Marlowe wrings great comic effect from this close-quarters class conflict; however, every well eventually runs dry, and increasingly she resorts to gimmicks such as “celebrities” (thinly disguised for legal reasons) becoming temporarily stranded with her regular cast. The last of these is a strained caricature of the adventurer Drizzt Do’Urden, whom a belatedly self-aware Marlowe uses to deliver the message “quit while you’re ahead.”

 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: The Devil You Know

 

 The Devil You Know: A Comedy of Bad Decisions

The poor choices of desperate people have always been a fertile ground for comedy as well as for tragedy. The Devil You Know gives us Nanton Vellay, a merchant with political ambitions and considerable liabilities who signs conflicting bargains with two separate fiends in order to eliminate both his debts and the rival who is blackmailing him.  In nearly any city the play should have been a great success, but in Neverwinter the story—and some of the names—called unwanted attention to a cult of Asmodeus that had infiltrated the town's government and business elite. In the early hours of a Sunday morning after the second evening show, the Hot Spring Theater mysteriously burned to the ground, and Marlowe claims to have barely averted several attempts on her life before making her way south to the relative safety of Waterdeep.

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: Faces in the Wall

 

Faces in the Wall: A Tragedy of Divine Justice 

Intended to be Marlowe’s masterpiece at New Olamn College, this "avant-garde" work rages against the Wall of the Faithless and calls into question the justice of allegedly good deities that allow it to exist. Reportedly, the original script passed by the faculty board was not the version staged for the public, and the opening performance was shut down before the end of the third, final act. Marlowe barely escaped blasphemy charges and was expelled from the college without receiving her degree. 

Considered purely as a work of drama, Faces in the Wall has many of the flaws of even advanced student plays. Most notably, its structure belies the “tragedy” promised by the subtitle. There is no tragic flaw to seal the central character’s fate; indeed, there is not even a central character. Arguably, there is not even a plot, since most of the play consists of “Faithless” victims telling their (admittedly powerful) stories of abandonment by the gods. Such monologues are often stilted, especially coming from younger poets, but Marlowe’s gift for poetic yet naturalistic expression is evident even in this earliest extant work. 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe: From Netheril With Love

 

From Netheril With Love: A Political Thriller

A competent if mostly forgettable spy story, From Netheril With Love was noteworthy only for the location of its initial production—the Silverstrings Theater in Selgaunt. Sembian authorities shut the play down after its opening weekend—generous bribes seem to have helped it last that long—and Marlowe’s legend as the great “right play, wrong venue” dramatist of her era was born.

The plot of From Netheril With Love is fairly simple by the standards of the genre: a Cormyrean agent is dispatched to Sembia to prevent the murder of an important ally by a mysterious assassin in Netherese pay. The spies alternately seduce and attempt to kill each other, a cycle broken only by the climactic spectacle of the aforementioned assassination attempt. The dialogue is witty, the pacing is breakneck, and the ending leaps high over the roadblocks of plausibility.

 

The Plays of Aphra Marlowe (Prologue): Who the Heck is Aphra Marlowe?

Table card created with MS Publisher and Hero Forge

 

In my first experience with 3rd edition D&D as a player, it was just me and the DM, and I ran a party of four characters. Two of these I'd converted from earlier 2e play: Conrad the farmboy paladin and Julie the irrepressibly curious elf mage/thief. To round out the party, I created two more characters: an athletic halfling cleric called Brother Murphy and a half-elf bard--Julie's cousin--named Aphra. 

Aphra, I'd decided, was an actor and a playwright, drawn more to the vulgar theater of her human father's people than to the sophisticated poetry and music of her elven mother's. Her tag quote was "Of course you don't have any lines. You're a tree." The campaign wasn't particularly heavy on role-play, given that I was juggling four characters, but somehow Aphra stuck with me after we left D&D3 behind for other games. She had that aura of trouble, fun trouble, that clings to great RPG characters.  She made a brief appearance in my 4e play (game-store Living Forgotten Realms), but didn't quite click with the system or the venue. 

And then I found an opening in a 5e mini-campaign. This was also public play, but we'd left the strictures of Living Forgotten Realms and Adventurers' League behind and just doing whatever the DM wanted to run. This is the period when Aphra got her last name (Kit Marlowe's rough-and-tumble life being closer to the D&D archetype than Aphra Behn's), her extensive collection of wigs (stored on a rack in her bag of holding), and her bibliography, which started as a list of titles illustrated by Playbill covers designed in MS Publisher.

So, anyway, the point of all that was to introduce the character who'll be the subject of the next several posts: Aphra Marlowe, enfant terrible of the Faerun theatrical world. (I used Forgotten Realms material out of convenience; most of the games I've used Aphra in didn't take place in the Realms, but it's a popular kitchen-sink setting and I've played and run a lot of D&D games that used it as a backdrop, so it was easier than making up cities and theaters and local politics out of whole cloth.)