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Irish Myth and Tragedy in Three By Yeats

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The verse of Irish poet William Butler Yeats is known on these shores, but his plays are performed less often. Yet as a founding member of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, he was no mere dabbler. Yeats, an Irish nationalist, did not just aim to write on Irish themes but to create new theatrical forms distinct from the melodrama and naturalism of the English stage that were also in fashion in America. Scena Theatre and artistic director Robert McNamara have long specialized in staging classics of European modernism. In their latest endeavor, they present the anthology Three by Yeats, a triptych of tragedies.

As the house opens and the audience takes their seats, they see musician David Johnson sitting cross-legged on a mat to stage right, still and silent, a great many small instruments laid out before him: a penny whistle, a zither, percussion mallets, hand drums, all ready to be taken up and sounded. Johnson lifts the penny whistle to his lips and blows the first notes, beginning At the Hawk’s Well

Three singers (Danielle Davy, Aniko Olah, and Melissa Robinson) dance onto the stage, their backs elegantly extended and curved as their arms cross over their torsos, circling a metal cylinder reflecting the stage lights. Yeats first published this play in his book Four Plays for Dancers and while frequent Scena company member Kim Curtis, a ballet dancer, doesn’t appear in this production, he does serve as choreographer for the show.

The singers serve as an oracular chorus introducing the mythical forest setting and the next character, an Old Man (Ron Litman). Litman is a skilled mime and has tensed his musculature into the gnarled form of a man who has waited half a century for a dry well to flow again, for a legend says that whomever would drink from the well will not die. Ominously perched in the aisles like a bird of prey is the well’s Guardian (Ellie Nicoll). Then the final player appears: Cuchulain (Lee Ordeman), the hero of Irish legend, dressed like a 1980s action hero. The young warrior and demigod also seeks the well’s immortality-giving waters. Ordeman has studied the movement art of Shintaido and his physicality is well suited for the role of Cuchulain as he challenges the guardian of the well through movement.

Yeats wrote At the Hawk’s Well as a political act. Like many Irish artists with similar political leanings, he had long been interested in The Ulster Cycle, a medieval collection of heroic legends purported to be from pre-Christian Ireland. In 1904, Yeats wrote his first play based on the Ulster Cycle, On Baile’s Strand. A decade later, Yeats’ personal secretary, the poet Ezra Pound, published his poetic translation of the Noh play Hagoromo. Yeats became fascinated with the idea that Noh offered an alternative to the naturalism and melodrama of the London stage, one that captured the mythic, metaphysical, and tragic themes he wished to explore. Meanwhile, both poets came into contact with the Japanese classical dancer Michio Itō. The three artists began to work together, and Yeats created At the Hawk’s Well, relying on Itō’s expertise in adapting Noh aesthetics. (Itō would play Cuchulain in the 1916 premiere and introduce the play to a Japanese audience, leading to its inclusion in the modern Noh repertoire.) The story of this and other similar collaborations is chronicled in Carrie J. Preston’s Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching.

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