For the record: Two Headed Rep is presenting two quasi-related one-acts at 59E59 Theaters. The first is The Collision and What Came After, or, GUNCH!, written by Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, and directed by Lily Riopelle.
In it nuns Anise (Lizzie Fox), Gudrun (Emma Ramos) and Gunch (Layla Khoshnoudi) are the only convent inhabitants serving under Abbess Helga. Anise and Gudrun have different attitudes towards slow-to-learn Gunch. When a meteor hits convent grounds, killing the Abbess, and when a subsequent smaller meteor fragment knocks Gunch out, their attitudes begin to shift.
The cause for their change, almost immediately revealed, is that the shard has struck Gunch in the head and is now revealed in a portion of Gunch’s exposed brain. (Nicole Slaven is the costumer and perhaps designed the attention-getting headpiece.) As a result of the injury, Gunch now reads the Bible like a whippersnapper and has ideas of her own regarding religious practice.
Several troubled incidents follow. Among them, Gunch burns the 69 Bibles the nuns have copied as a gift to a visiting bishop (Halima Henderson). The unforgiving cleric is relying on the gift for helping him attain the rank of cardinal. Simultaneously, Gunch begins to formulate her own take on religion. The Collision point being made is how religions form as a result of random incidents. Or maybe that isn’t the point. Nothing is especially clear in the playwriting.
Throughout The Collision and What Came After, or, GUNCH!, the nuns (or canonesses, as they might have been regarded in the 10th century,) indulge in obscenities. These seem to be how Leonhard-Hooper hopes to elicit the better part of her laughs. “Shit,” “fuck,” “fart,” “pussy” abound and did find favor with some members of the audience at the performance this reviewer attended.
It’s unlikely that Hrotsvitha, the first recognized woman playwright in recognition of whom The Collision is crafted, would have deemed this approach amusing or necessary. That’s even if she was familiar with the words or that century’s equivalent. Never mind. They hardly seem germane or render the play lucid.
The second one-act is The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Agape, Clionta, and Irena, by Hrotsvitha the Nun of Gandersheim, as Told Throughout the Last Millennium by the Men, Women, Scholars, Monastics, Puppets, and Theater Companies (Like This One) Who Loved Her, or: Dulcitius. The long-windedly-titled piece has a new text by Amanda Keating, a translation by Lizzie Fox, and is directed by Molly Clifford.
In it the Two Headed Rep team imagine how Hrotsvitha’s play, under the obscure circumstances of the lost work’s preparation, might have been mined for illumination by succeeding generations. Along the way, the first few centuries following 1000-1100 AD skip by. The last couple are sequentially dealt with as Fox, Henderson, Khoshnoudi, and Ramos get into and out of fashions from France, England and the United States up to the current day.
During much of the century hopscotch, the four Two Headed Rep actors are rehearsing a current revamp of the play. Often, they’re asked by the various directors how they assess their characters or how they feel the just-concluded scene went. In the France segment, accents are called for. In the England segment, Henderson gets to impersonate the great English actor Ellen Terry(!). In the contemporary American segment, inadequate rehearsal thesping is focused on to elicit more of the troupe’s laughs. As to the Two Headed Rep acting and directing throughout: no further comment.
Incidentally, the name Dulcitius polishing off the Martyrdom title like one last raindrop hitting a puddle refers to a Macedonian governor circa 700-800 A.D. who assigned an unctuous subordinate to martyr three virgins. Hrotsvitha apparently knew of the episode and seized it as an example of how effectively women frequently outfox men, a view with which this reviewer heartily concurs.
Instances like that are not, needless to mention, alone in the history of recorded time. (William Shakespeare frequently drew on it.) Hrotsvitha’s heated righting of long patriarchal behaviors is certainly the appeal for an all-women troupe like Two Headed Rep as led by Lily Riopelle and Molly Clifford.
Their hearts may be in the right place, but their creative minds are not. The two-part bill runs for no less than 160 minutes. Towards the end of Martyr, a contemporary character holding a cellphone says something that sounds very much like “I don’t have any idea what I’m looking at.” You can say that again.
The Collision/The Martyrdom opened January 22, 2022, at 59E59 and runs through February 5. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
