"Placing" One Flea Spare

It takes a good deal of research to write a historical piece that rings as true as One Flea Spare, and playwright Naomi Wallace did some real research.  At the end of the text of her play is a 'Select Bibliography' where she cites among other books, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe and The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary.  These two books I highlight because I've read selections from each in a couple classes I took in college, and they both illustrate vividly the way things were in the time, though one is fiction (Defoe's Plague Year).  

At the beginning of the play (and written in our playbill) it states the time, place, and setting* of the action in the play. It's 1665 in "a comfortable house in Axe Yard, off King Street, Westminster, London."  Curious to know whether this was a real street, I went to the internet and immediately checked out Google Maps.  (I had done this once before with the latitude and longitude given by the Stage Manager in Our Town, and found that Grover's Corners was much like Atlantis, as its coordinates placed it in the ocean, not in New Hampshire at all.)  To my delight, I found a resource that had the historical placement of where the Snelgraves' home might have been! 

See the little red A? Yeah, that's about where the Snelgraves' house would've been.

"Axe Yard was a cul-de-sac right in the heart of Westminster. There were 25 houses along the length of the Yard and the larger ones were owned by wealthy well connected families, it had a narrow entrance into King Street next to the Axe Tavern, and was only a short walk away from King Street gate into Whitehall Palace [...] If you turned right on leaving Axe Yard, a short walk would bring you to Westminster Palace, Parliament and the offices of the Exchequer where [Samuel Pepys] then worked under George Downing." -- from: http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/102.php#discussion

I found this information fascinating as it not only connected the fictional Snelgraves socially to the real Pepys in my head, but it also gave me a nice visual as to where geographically they fit in the city.  Having looked back at that, it made Snelgrave's line really click into context for me, as Samuel Pepys had indeed worked for the Navy Board. Says Snelgrave, "I know a bit about the waters myself. I work for the Navy Board, just down the lane, on Seething. My friend Samuel and I, we control the largest commercial venture in the country, hmm. The Royal Dockyards."  According to Wikipedia, "On the Navy Board, Pepys proved to be a more able and efficient worker than colleagues in higher positions: a fact that often annoyed Pepys, and provoked much harsh criticism in his diary."

And while we're talking about similarities between Mr. Snelgrave and Samuel Pepys, here's another: having their way with the servants.  From Wikipedia: "The most dramatic of these encounters was with Deborah Willet, a young woman engaged as a companion for Elisabeth Pepys [his wife]. On 25 October 1668 Pepys was surprised by his wife whilst embracing Deborah Willet: he writes that his wife 'coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl con my hand sub su coats; and endeed I was with my main in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also....'"  I imagine you got the gist of what Mr. Pepys was saying, but in case you didn't, here's why: "these [liaisons] were chronicled in his diary, often in some detail, and generally using a cocktail of languages (English, French, Spanish and Latin) when relating the intimate details."

If you want more of Pepys' Diary in blog form, check out pepysdiary.com, a blog started in January 2003 by Phil Gyford "that serialised the diary one day each evening together with annotations from public and experts alike.  In December 2003, the blog won the best specialist blog award in The Guardian's Best of British Blogs."   

Neat, right?  I thought so.  What are your thoughts? Do share!

*Next up: Setting One Flea Spare - A series of photos and commentary on bringing the Snelgraves' home into our theatre.

It's the Apocalypse!: Suggested Reading

While no, it is not really the apocalypse, that was the general consensus when the Great Plague was ravaging London in 1665, so I've collected some appropriate songs, movies, and books for you to check out (potentially at your local library) in the spirit of such an existential panic. I've gleaned some of the selections from NC Stage staff, but others come from lists and collections found on the world wide web.  I'll be sharing them on the blog over the course of the run of One Flea Spare with a focus on books today... and one video, too.  Enjoy!

To kick things off, a quintessential apocalyptic song (in video form): R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World (As We Know It)." For a fun nugget of trivia, here's an article about the boy in the video.

 

So, to books!  First, a shout-out and thank-you to our neighbors and collaborators, Malaprop's Bookstore, for being our script purveyor this season and also for a One Flea Spare-focused display up at the store as well as in our lobby.  

Check out lobby display next to the box office!

We've got a collection of Naomi Wallace's plays entitled In the Heart of America and Other Plays that includes One Flea Spare, so if you find yourself drawn in by Ms. Wallace's writing, this is a book you'll want to pick up.

We also have Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. Although a fictional account of the Great Plague in 1665 London, "Many critics over the years have judged it to be a more inciteful account of the awful events of 1665 than the eyewitness account written by Samuel Pepys."

Our book selection doesn't focus solely around the bubonic plague, the 1660s, and England, though. We have two books about more recent 'plagues' in the United States.  

POX: An American History by Michael Willrich "offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continentwide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the twentieth century.  At the dawn of the activist Progressive era and during a moment of great optimism about modern medicine, the government responded to the deadly epidemic by calling for universal compulsory vaccination." Recently featured on NPR!

The other 'plague' book set in America is My Own Country: A Doctor's Story by Abraham Verghese.  This true story took place not far from Asheville -- Johnson City, Tennessee -- and tells how the small town grapples with AIDS in the 1980s and how Dr. Verghese, an infectious disease specialist, by necessity becomes the AIDS expert. This book, according to wikipedia, "is used in colleges and medical schools throughout North America and across the world because of the way it communicates the sense of empathy and compassion so often missing in medical school education in an era of high technology and reliance on computers as primary diagnostic tools." 

So how 'bout some others?  

"Surely there are lots more than those they're selling in the lobby," you're thinking.  Well, you're right!  Congratulations.  

Read on for more suggestions...

- The Road by Cormac McCarthy -- Set after some unnamed disaster, a father and son journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape.  Don't know much else than that since I haven't read it myself, but one of my college roommates loved the book, and I recently picked up the book on CD version from the library, so I'm psyched to listen. It also won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so obviously, it's quality stuff.

- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond -- A non-fiction book that's been on my list for a while now (still haven't acquired it yet), Bill Gates says of Guns, Germs, and Steel, "Fascinating... Lays a foundation for understanding human history." While not necessarily apocalyptic, from what I understand, it gives some insight into why certain societies are no longer around today. You know, evolutionary biology.

- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks -- For those who take the more horror/sci-fi perspective to the apocalypse, this one's for you. "The end was near. Zombies were taking over. They were infiltrating every corner the world. No neutral ground existed, no nation was secure, and we were in serious danger of becoming extinct - overrun by hordes of the living dead."

- Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks -- Recommended by our props mistress, Jessica, this novel is set during the same time as the play (1660s), but in a rural setting.  From a blurb: "Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, [the village's] inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster. The narrator, the young widow Anna Frith, is one of the few who succeeds."

Still want more? Here's a link to a long list of suggested 'Apocalypse Books'.

Do you have some favorites or other recommendations? Please share! 

In your 'flea' time, some poems.

One. Flea. Spare.  
I break it down like that so that you get each word.  Trust me, it's much easier when you see the words than simply hearing them.  When someone first told me what the season line up of plays was, I thought the play was called "One Fleece Bear."  In taking ticket orders, we've gotten orders for "One Flea Square," "One Tree Square," and "One Flea Space."  To clarify things, let me share with you the origin of the title: John Donne's poem "The Flea." 

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   

How little that which thou deniest me is;   

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,

    Yet this enjoys before it woo,

    And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

    And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.   

This flea is you and I, and this

Our mariage bed and mariage temple is;   

Though parents grudge, and you, we are met,   

And cloisterd in these living walls of jet.

    Though use make you apt to kill me,

    Let not to that, self-murder added be,

    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?   

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou   

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

    ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

    Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

    Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

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And since we're on the topic of fleas, I would like to share a poem I first encountered on the wall of my sixth grade team teacher's classroom and found again recently thanks to the world wide web.  It has to do with a flea, so if you were curious about the connection, there you go.  It exemplifies homophones and alliteration, both things I love.

A fly and a flea flew up in a flue.

Said the fly to the flea, "What shall we do?"

"Let's fly," said the flea.

"Let's flee," said the fly.

So they fluttered and flew up the flaw in the flue.

If only the characters of One Flea Spare could escape their confinement so easily...

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