Author: The Upstart Crow

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.

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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.

 

When I first moved to Boulder in August 2012, I was fresh out of undergraduate school, my BA in Theatre Arts hot off the presses. I was eager to get started in the professional world but was hesitant and unsure of how to begin. Before I moved, I had been researching local theatre companies and one in particular really caught my eye. The Upstart Crow was performing Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, one of my favorite plays from an even more favorite playwright. When I finally arrived in Boulder, they were auditioning for another challenging yet interesting show, Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. I read the play and although I didn’t have a particular role in mind, I did lean towards playing Hester Worsley. I decided to audition and to my delight I got it! Since then I have played six different roles (one male role included) and designed make-up and masks for six, for a total of ten different shows with The Upstart Crow.

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I had the opportunity to sit down with Joan and Richard Bell, two founding members, and interview them on the beginning of the Upstart Crow ensemble theatre company.

They had been talking about doing The Trojan Women. Richard was working for a program at a free school, which is an institution that no longer exists. Richard says, “After the sixties, you know, after that period, there were free schools all over America; just a bunch of people that would get together. They would find a building, anyone could teach there. They could charge students or not as they chose. They were all wonderfully open and easy.”

There was a federal program that Richard applied for and got a role in. It was actually subsidized theatre. There were many requirements to get in. Richard was a veteran and unemployed at the time. “And it was terrific!” he says. He was payed $25 a week. He was able to perform improv in a number of places: “housing developments and places like that.” While doing that Richard, Joan, and India Cooper (another founding member) started talking about doing a play like The Trojan Women. Joan and Cooper were both a little against because Joan had always wanted to play Andromache. She said she would never be cast because she was “too short and too girlish.” Cooper dreamed of playing Cassandra but claimed she “wasn’t good-enough looking.”

This conversation sparked an idea. Richard said, “Let’s do it, let’s do the casting that way. You know, let’s cast against type.” So they put together a script. No one in the group read Greek, but Richard was able to compile a version by reading seven different translations. He liked other translations but claimed they weren’t human-English speech. He said they were definitely poetic but “most of the scripts are full of expressions of sorrow like “ah me.” No one in grief would ever say “ah me.” You would only say that if you were parodying grief. You know, its simply not human utterance and I found it in all the translations.” So Richard put the translations together and came up with an American-verse adaptation.

They first performed their version of The Trojan Women at the community free school and then were invited to do it at the Longmont dinner theatre, which is now Jester’s Dinner Theatre. Richard recalls it being called The Dickens Opera House at the time. “And so we did The Trojan Women,” Richard says through laughter, “to a dinner audience. And they were stunned.” It was a good production from Richard’s perspective. The cast and crew wanted to keep it going, following that show with Vain Flourish of My Fortune: Margaret of Anjou, a play Joan scripted from cuttings of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays and Richard III.

Vain Flourish featured Queen Margaret of Anjou, a character that, although never a lead, is seen throughout the whole Henry cycle. Richard and Joan say there were some wonderful female roles like Joan of Arc and many duchesses.

And so they cast it. Richard says in many ways he thought it was quite good. He did claim that their cast was too small, they doubled roles too much. After all, while each of the women played a single momentary starring role, Richard played about five different characters, that’s all. He also felt the play was difficult to end. “Margaret’s story is not satisfactorily finished. And we did the best we could to give it a finish but she just stops talking after awhile. We don’t know what happens to her.” But it was fun.

They were drinking one night during the performance (at which point Joan jumped in to point out they were drinking after the performance) and someone had the idea to start a theatre company. Richard was rightfully worried about how to start a company without any money when cast member Paul Ahrens pulled out his checkbook. They decided to do it. With Ahrens donation and $10 from everyone else, they had $600 for their theatre company.

The Upstart Crow’s first official season began with William Congreve’s The Way of the World “in twenties costumes because we could find them in thrift stores.”

It was reasonably well-attended. They charged $2 in advance and $3 at the door. They performed at Boulder’s community free school, a former Baptist church on the corner of Broadway and Balsam. Their stage was the church’s altar, bright blue wall behind them with doors leading off the stage, one on each side that locked from the outside. On one occasion, Richard says cast member Ruth Morel tried to make an exit in J.M. Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows, a show they later did that season (which, incidentally, will be our second show of the 36th season). Morel found she couldn’t get off the stage. She pounded on the door and ended up exiting through the audience and unlocking the door from the other side. “So many interesting things happened in that theatre,” Richard says.

The Upstart Crow has been performing four or five shows every season from then on.

As The Crow Flies will feature history, stories, pictures, and anything else we may come up with highlighting the 35 years of Boulder’s The Upstart Crow. We hope you enjoy!