Chaos, misunderstanding, sneaking around, flirting — all familiar to both college life and 18th century British theater.
Clarence Brown Theatre will open “The Busy Body” Friday, Feb. 24. This Restoration-era British play centers around two women who want to escape the wishes of their guardians, find love and keep their inheritances in the process.
It’s been 25 years since Clarence Brown produced a play from this era that was written in English. Misty Anderson, professor of English and Restoration-era literature scholar, lobbied to get a Restoration play on the stage this semester, especially one with a woman writer since women were instrumental playwrights for the time.
With the current MFA acting class, this play seemed like the best fit, and Anderson has advised the cast and crew on this production. She, along with director John Snipes, adapted the script, creating a length they felt would fit a modern audience as well as clarifying some of the language.
“The language is much more modern than Shakespearean English, but it’s also older,” Anderson said. “We worked hard to trim it and make sure the heart of the play was this comic farce and ensure this female playwright takes on this old form of comedy. It really tends to the ways that women can find authority and power even when the culture doesn’t want to give it to them.”
This theme of women’s empowerment is one that actress Charlotte Munson, second-year MFA acting student who plays Miranda, sees as central to the plot.
“I hope people come see the show and then think, ‘Wow, these women are really smart. They had to deal with a lot just to get what they want.’ Then think, ‘I wonder what it’s like for women today’ in that way, like how it’s still similar, still difficult. That would be an important aspect that we could touch upon,” Munson said.
It’s also a theme that was central to playwright Susanna Centlivre in 18th century Britain, an early female success in her field. “The Busy Body” was one of the first plays performed in the American colonies, in places such as Charleston, South Carolina and Williamsburg, Virginia.
“She was kind of the Tina Fey of the 18th century. She started out as an actress, she was very successful at comedies, and then she started writing comedies,” Anderson said. “They became some of the most popular plays in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
Anderson and Marianne Custer, head of the MFA design program and Clarence Brown resident designer, also worked to make the costumes as well-research and historically accurate as possible. The department received a Serif grant to purchase an embroidery machine, allowing the crew to genuinely make the costumes and the cast to feel as they would have in the 18th century.
“We’ve been wearing corsets almost every rehearsal, which are uncomfortable, but very helpful to figure out how to move and how they are so constricting and restricted in that society and how they manipulate their bodies,” Munson said.
Overall, the cast wants the audience to walk away struck by the comedy of the play.
“Reading it, it was difficult to see how it would be funny, but since the first read-through, it’s just been ridiculous how much we’ve been laughing every single time,” Munson said. “And we’ve seen these scenes 20 times or more, and still, every time, it’s so funny. It’s a testament to the writer, who was a woman.”
