As the Crow Flies Blog

Katherine Dubois Reed is a founding member of The Upstart Crow. She is also a playwright, actor, and tea enthusiast. Here she talks about one of her original plays The Upstart Crow produced in 1985: York 8 Lancaster 6.

Vain Flourish of my Fortune: Margaret of Anjou was the play that led to the founding of the Upstart Crow (or the re-founding of TUC, depending on how much of a stickler you want to be).

It also led to the writing of my play York 8 Lancaster 6.

I played Lady Anne in Vain Flourish, the woman who lets Richard woo her over the body of her dead father-in-law (from spitting to kissing in a few short minutes). It got me wondering what we know about both Anne and Richard as real people. Book led to book and before long I knew more about the Wars of the Roses than most Americans. Perhaps more than most historians.

I tend to see the comic possibilities in almost any situation. This isn’t always a good thing, but laughing at people who’ve been dead for five hundred years is pretty safe. More than anything, what struck me as comic about the Wars of the Roses was the number of people who changed sides, and the reasons they had for doing it. Another thing that struck me was how much less the common people of England were affected by this war (essentially a family squabble/power struggle in the extended royal family) than by almost any other war you can name.

Over the course of about a year I jotted down notes and ideas, and then one weekend I sat down and wrote the rough draft of York 8 in three days (and this was back in the days when I wrote my rough drafts longhand because it was faster than typing).

The play is a bedroom farce set in a peasant hovel just outside Tewkesbury (the site of the final and definitive battle of the war). The members of the peasant family follow the war the way people today might follow rival football teams. The mom’s a Lancastrian, the dad’s a Yorkist, and the son and daughter keep changing sides. And after a battle, everyone—whether fleeing the country or returning to London in triumph—passes through Tewkesbury (don’t look too closely at a map).

York 8 was premiered in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1984. The Upstart Crow produced it in September 1985. Tim and I were married that summer, so we auditioned before we left on our honeymoon. The night we spent at a bed and breakfast just outside Tewkesbury, I got up early in the morning to call Boulder long-distance—to talk to the folks at the Bells’ house after auditions, and to find out what roles we’d be playing.

Tim, the smartest man I know, played Lord Grey, whose idiocy steals the only scene in which he appears. I played Isabella, the irritable and talkative elder daughter of the Earl of Warwick (Lady Anne’s big sister).

There’s an artistic myth that writers can remember every word they ever wrote. You’ve probably read or seen a novel, movie, or play, where the character who’s an author or poet suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, recites a paragraph or poem he wrote years earlier. This does not happen in real life.

One night, during a performance of York 8, I went up. (That’s actor-speak for forgetting your lines.) My fellow actors greeted me backstage with, “How could you possibly have gone up on that speech? You wrote it!”

Now, I ask you, can you quote, word for word, a conversation you had last week, let alone anything (a letter, perhaps) you wrote three and a half years ago?

I’ll bet even Shakespeare had to study his lines.