“My stage manager happily calls it ‘the Elizabethan lesbian play,’” Francesca Amendolia says, describing her upcoming production as director of “Gallathea,” a court play and early modern comedy by John Lyly. This month, Amendolia’s production will be performed by Gamut Theatre Group’s supplementary producing ensemble, “The Stage Door Series.”
Gamut’s Stage Door Series seeks to complement Gamut’s Main Stage productions, with shows that meet the theatrical standard of the overarching company mission, but are produced by a community of volunteers who simply love theater. This play is a particularly good choice for the Stage Door Series, being a fringe play—not often performed—that is worthy of production and touches on modern societal questions like same-sex love and gender roles.
“Gallathea,” as a play, fits in with many early modern comedies, and the influence that Lyly’s play had on Shakespeare’s own work is palpable. Characters from the play are, as Amendolia puts it, “prototypes” to future Shakespearean characters in plays like “As You Like It” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Being that it was performed in court for Queen Elizabeth I in 1588, there are thematic similarities to other comedies of the time.
Amendolia accurately describes Elizabethan comedies as plays in which “nobody dies and there is a marriage at the end.” However, “Gallathea” switches the expectations slightly, with the presence of death looming largely over the play, arguably more than other comedies, and the end-of-play marriage being that of a same-sex couple.
The play explores what defines love, and Amendolia is impressed and surprised at the relevance and persistence of this question, more than 400 years after Lyly’s play was performed in court.
The play’s primary storyline follows two girls, Gallathea (played by Sarah Dugan) and Phillida (played by Emily Hofstaedter), as they both hide, on direction from their fathers, so that they will not be chosen as a sacrifice to the god Neptune. Every five years, the village must choose the most beautiful virgin in the town to sacrifice to Neptune and his sea monster, as retribution for their destruction of a temple long ago. Disguising the top two choices for sacrifice as men, their fathers send the girls into the forest until after the sacrifice is over to ensure they will not be chosen.
Upon meeting, the disguised Gallathea and Phillida fall in love as boys, although both suspecting the other is truly a girl. Mistaken identities, meddling from the gods and from forest nymphs, and confusion in the town are what make the play a comedy, but the undertones of exploring same-sex love and acceptance are what make the play both ahead of its time and worthy of producing today. This is the driving force behind the production, says Amendolia.
“We talk a lot, in the theater, about the importance of representation, and that can be a tricky thing to achieve in classic theater,” she says. “Gallathea goes a tiny way toward redressing that balance. It has nods of hetero-normativity, but it also explicitly allows there to be same-sex attraction, desire and love.”
She explains that performance and drama exist in order to challenge the boxes built by society. The theater is a place where people can watch societal questions be explored in a non-threatening way and where people can think critically about their world through the lens of a fictional—in this case, fantastical—setting.
The fact that this Elizabethan play bravely explores same-sex relationships is not the only driving force for Amendolia in producing this play, however. Lyly wrote this specific play for an all-boy company called “The Children of Pauls.” The significance of this is that boys often played women in Elizabethan theater because they were petite and their features still considered “feminine.” Women did not typically act in early modern theater, and there is a perpetual misunderstanding that it was illegal for them to do so.
Amendolia states that the fact that this story was written for a boy’s company means that it has “that wondrous thing in early modern theater: parts for women.” She continues by stating that, even though some directors are willing to swap gender roles, “excellent and deserving female actors often have to scramble for the few Shakespearean roles available to them.” Amendolia feels compelled to produce her play with 11 of 15 roles played by women.
The complex understanding of gender that is present in modern society would have been lost on Elizabethan audiences. However, it is clear that Lyly, and as a result, Amendolia, are interested in questioning what role a structured gender system has in shaping individual happiness and feelings of love. The play affords an opportunity to show how desire and affection between two people defy social constructs. While the play speaks to its audience’s potential discomfort by suggesting that one of the women is changed into a man before their marriage, the fact that this action happens off stage allows us to consider the possibility that it is not so important to the story after all.
Through “Gallathea,” theater has a chance to be both ambiguous and explorative, encouraging audiences to see the relevance of classic theater in ways that show how these stories are incredibly worthy of being told.
“Gallathea” will be performed Jan. 12 to 21 at Gamut Theatre, 15. N. 4th St., Harrisburg. For more information, call 717-238-4111 or visit www.gamuttheatre.org.
