Hair of the Dog by Constance Congdon - A Review

So surprise surprise! It turns out I WAS actually able to make it to the warm up laps. Unfortunately I was only able to attend the very first play. So I still feel quite bad for missing the others but I do what I can do.

I will say the set up was extremely strange. The staged readings this year are being performed at the Plaza Theater, but instead of taking advantage of the pre-set and spacious risers already in the space, the organizers decided to have the audience sit in the stage area and have the readers read in the seats. I think it may have been a poor decision, as there were barely enough seats to house the crowd gathered for the festivities. (though there was free food!)

But onto the play! We begin the Boston Theater Marathon with a full length comedy in iambic rhyming verse by Connie Congdon entitled Hair of the Dog. This was a very very interesting play. First a brief synopsis:

The play opens on Shakespeare in his underwear mourning the death of his friend and colleague Christopher Marlowe who, we understand, has just been murdered. But soon he is visited by a very much animated, if not very much alive, Christopher who complains throughout the play of one HELL of a hangover. I hate to use the tired technique of comparing one play to another, but it's a bit of Blithe Spirit by way of Rozencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead.

It is slightly challenging to judge the merits of the play in toto as the play is completely focused on the character of the charming and zombified Marlowe, played by the inimitable Paul Melendy. Paul is a playwright's dream. I watched him last month take a capable but triffling ten minute play written by a local high school student about two cousins trying to go to sleep in the same room, and he turned it into gut busting high farce. He works similar magic here, not that Congdon's script needs it. But his comic instincts are so sharp that he immediately gets at and highlights all of the many many comic moments written in this incredibly dense and witty script.

He also does so in a highly idiosyncratic way. While he was absolutely excellent, I also could not help but wonder how those lines would fall out of the mouth of a different actor. Melendy is so particular (and genius) that I sometimes wondered if his performance eclipsed possibly the text itself.

I will say, both his character and performance proved so magnetic that it became difficult to care much about anything else. Three of Marlowe's "weird" sisters visit Shakespeare: a collection of eccentric and bawdy characters played very capably by Sarah Bedard, Lydia Mulligan, and Katie Elinoff. (Though Elinoff seemed VERY young to be reciting some of her bawdy material, and maybe it's the mid-Western Lutheran in me, but I got a little uncomfortable). Each has a distinct personality and very different objectives, though they cohere into a unified whole by the end of the First Act with a plot to enact revenge on their brother's killer.

This whole revenge/whodunnit plot I found much less gripping than simply watching the banter of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Part of that may be due to the fact that Marlowe himself seems to care not one whit about it. The plot lacks stakes, even when presented with the ticking time bomb of Marlowes increasingly decaying body. At the same time, I didnt' mind that so much, as the banter by itself is so wildly entertaining.

I described Melendy as a playwright's dream, but it should be observed that the dialogue in this play is an actor's dream. Many many times throughout this reading I thought to myself, "Oh God. This would make an amazing audition monologue." or "How much fun would it be to perform this?" I usually try to view the Boston Theater Marathon through the lens of playwright and dramaturg, but the verse in Hair of the Dog could not help but inspire the actor in me.

There is so much clever dialogue. The characters constantly loop back and reference the very conventions in which they speak. Since these characters mostly speak in rhyme, a running gag throughout is when one character wishes to have the last word, they end a line with the word "orange". This is just one example of many. There are so many quotes and call backs, to both works of Marlowe and Shakespeare and then into the future, referencing everything from Robert Frost to The Matrix. It's fiendishly fun and an absolute joy to listen to.

The story itself left me a bit bereft. The reveal at the end, that Marlowe's lover Thomas Walsingham is the one who commissioned his murder is both extremely poignant and provides the first real crack into the glib irreverence of Marlowe's demeanor, a welcome development, welcome all the more in that it comes so late. It almost justifies the convoluted path to that reveal. Almost, that is.

If I had a recommendation, I'd suggest that Congdon played to the strengths of this script: the friendship and rivalry between these two colossal playwrights. I could watch those two characters talk until the sun came down. That said, this was a reading, and unlike the reading of her excellent play last year One Day Earlier, which I feel like I got a complete sense of at the reading, the dense and tricky nature of the verse makes me want to second guess my own feelings about this play. There were several scenes which I'm pretty sure given much more rehearsal time and actual staging, would come across much better than they could at such a spare reading.

In many respects, I loved this play. In fact, so entranced was I by the exuberant cleverness of it all, that it makes me bemoan the faults all the more. Congdon is a deeply assured playwright of whose talents are evident to anyone with ears, and my only wish is that she not be satisfied with the development of this script, until the journey her characters go through matches the majesty of her poetry.