During her oddball life, Margery Kempe (1373-1440) wandered around England and to destinations farther east (Rome, Jerusalem), slowly earning a reputation as a mystic. We know this now largely because, impressed with her travels, the illiterate Kemp eventually decided to dictate her story. The result is sometimes considered the first autobiography ever recorded.
Full disclosure: I’ve never read the volume(s?), but perhaps John Wulp has. The producer-designer-director used Kempe’s story as the basis for The Saintliness of Margery Kempe, a play first presented at Cambridge’s Poets Theatre in 1958 and then—according to Wulp’s program note— in “a vastly revised” 1959 off-Broadway version.
Whether Wulp has again revised it vastly or otherwise, it’s back and championed by Austin Pendleton, who, also according to Wulp’s note, rediscovered the Cambridge script, held an invite-only reading last year, and now presents whatever has satisfied him as viable at The Duke on 42nd Street.
Since I’m not familiar with the original—and still might be interested to read it—I have no way of knowing how closely Wulp has hewed to Kempe’s dictations. All I can say of the Margery Kempe (Andrus Nichols) unleashed on the audience here is that—whether or not these are her exploits as recalled on the (illuminated?) page—she is an impulsive, foolish, tiresome woman with whom two hours is more than anyone sentient would want to spend time.
According to some of the work’s accounts given over the 60 years since Wulp initially reintroduced her, The Saintliness of Margery Kempe has been called a comedy. In one of my first jotted notes, I wrote, “Is this a comedy?” I never laughed, but at the performance I attended there were a few titters. So here’s the benefit of the doubt: Okay, The Saintliness of Margery Kempe is a comedy, but a bad one.
Apparently, the real Margery Kempe had 14 children whom she abandoned to the charge of husband John (Jason O’Connell) because she’d lost her trust in God. Wulp’s Margery has only six offspring, but she also decides she’s fed up with God and quits her humble home to devote herself to the devil.
That’s her first intention, but after thinking she could rouse the deity’s ire and the devil’s regard by buying and running a cart-drawn brewery (a kind of Mother Courage she), she changes her mind. Rowdy customers refuse to pay for the unpalatable concoction, mock her, and that’s all she needs to throw in the medieval towel.
Oingo-boingo, she’s back courting God’s love and convincing herself that the best way to achieve the goal is by becoming a saint. Advised by a sour clergyman (Timothy Doyle) that sainthood requires a miracle, she sets out to make one. Lo and behold, when a church stone falls on her head without killing her, she thinks she’s done it.
Believing she’s sainted, she’s off to the Holy Land on as guided tour, where she’s disabused of the notion. But enough of that—and are you laughing yet? Unsainted Kempe may not get on her own nerves, but she has that effect on the audience. Reviewing the original Manhattan production, The New York Times’ Brooks Atkinson called her “a pain in the neck.” He got that right, though he may have been being polite.
On how to shake out this dust-ridden screed, director Pendleton is at a complete loss. If anything about the revival truly resonates, it would be moments of Timothy Doyle’s various impersonations. (By the way, Pendleton is long recognized as one of Manhattan’s busiest theater toilers. In a few days see him in, and directing, War of the Roses: Henry VI & Richard III at the Bank Street Theatre.)
Soldiering through The Saintliness of Margery Kempe, actors with impressive credits like Pippa Pearthree and Nichols, who co-founded Bedlam and has been outstanding there, look as if they’re striving hard but marching nowhere. Nor are any of the other seven getting much help from the creatives huddled together on this project.
Maybe that’s because the pseudo-poetic lines the nine actors are handed—all but Nichols doubling, tripling, quintupling—prove insurmountable. Perhaps Wulp had William Shakespeare in mind as he was composing.
Pointing that way is a remark the finally fed-up John Kempe makes when the children-forsaking Margery, worn out from unrewarding peregrinations, comes home yet again. I could have sworn he says the year is “1591,” which makes Margery’s prodigal return occurring just as the insufficiently-accounted-for Shakespeare years (1585-92) end. Did Wulp think he might write something that could pass for a lost Bard item? If he did, he hasn’t succeeded.
The Saintliness of Margery Kempe opened July 12, 2018, at the Duke on 42nd Street and runs to August 26. Tickets and information: margerykempe.com
