Syndrome

PROFILE THEATRE

THE CROWN: The cast of Las Meninas treats the play not as a period piece but as a multifaceted spoof of a period piece.

Chaos in the French Court

Mischief, misogyny and racism collide in Profi le Theatre’s Las Meninas.

BY BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON

A little person, a nun and a princess are among the stars of Diego Velázquez’s 1656 painting Las Meninas, which also features a likeness of the artist himself. It’s a work of art that has been a subject of scholarly obsession for so long that in 2014, art historian Jonathan Brown cracked a joke about “Las Meninas Fatigue Syndrome.” Anyone su ering from that particular disorder should try Profile Theatre’s audio play Las Meninas. Written by Lynn Nottage and originally published in 2001, the script borrows its title and some pieces of its plot from Velázquez’s painting, but it is anything but fatiguing. It is an angry, romantic, playful and political dramedy that takes aim at racism and misogyny with a smile that suggests laughter is the best revenge on the ruling class.

Las Meninas stars Crystal Ann Muñoz as MarieTherese, queen of France and wife of King Louis XIV (Chris Murray). Marie-Therese, a Spaniard, is something of a pariah among 17th century French elites (“It’s no secret—the queen is the ugliest woman in all of this court,” a character claims), and even Louis barely tolerates her. He speaks her name with a venomousness most human beings reserve for skunks and rattlesnakes. In the midst of her misery, Marie-Therese discovers an unlikely ally in Nabo Sensugali (Rance Nix), a little person from the African kingdom of Dahomey who has been enslaved and forced to serve as her fool. Marie-Therese initially treats Nabo with cruel condescension, but their relationship evolves into a romance built on their shared status as outsiders. By the time Marie-Therese says, “Sometimes I fear that we are in love,” you know they already are. While there’s a hazy precedent for this story—it has been speculated that the real Marie-Therese gave birth to a biracial daughter who was raised in a convent—Las Meninas is no dry slab of historical fiction. Even after Marie-Therese and Nabo fall in love, they trade crude and cringe-worthy insults (“Fatty!” “Little man!” “Ugly cow!”). In fact, the entire play pulses with an anarchic energy that repeatedly and thrillingly upends expectations. Director Dawn Monique Williams and her cast and crew stay on Nottage’s prankish wavelength by treating Las Meninas not as a period piece, but as a multifaceted spoof of a period piece. The dainty opening notes of Matt Wiens’ score play as a knowingly clichéd tribute to Baroque-era music, and the gleefully anachronistic performances seem engineered to rib audiences expecting realism—when Louis declares, “Tomorrow I have a full day of pageantry and whatnot,” he sounds like the most American sovereign ever to strut through Versailles.

Las Meninas is mischievous enough that by the end of Act 1, listeners may wonder if the play is headed for a hopeful ending—the Nottage equivalent of Hitler being assassinated in Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist World War II film Inglourious Basterds. Nottage ultimately chooses a more painful and believable route, and the play is not necessarily better for it. There’s something irresistible about the idea of Marie-Therese and Nabo defying history by fl eeing France together and leaving the vile Louis and his mistress, La Valliere (Claire Rigsby), to fume in their wake. Yet in a year of good, bad and maddeningly mediocre audio plays, Las Meninas stands out. While many theater artists have responded to the pandemic with relentlessly sober and serious tales, Profile has created a production that dares to entertain and enlighten in equal measure. It’s a miracle that one play can include both an uproarious gag about a wig and a wrenching scene where MarieTherese tells Nabo, “You were shipped in a box and I [in] a carriage.” That line isn’t meant to suggest that their struggles are equal—Nabo has endured su ering that his queen can’t comprehend. It’s there to remind us of the beauty of two outcasts fi nding solace with one another, even if their bliss will be trampled beneath the arc of history.

BOOKS

Written by: Scout Brobst Contact: sbrobst@wweek.com

FIVE GREAT WINTRY READS

The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey

Eowyn Ivey’s beloved debut novel, The Snow Child, sets magical realism in the harshness of winter. Born out of a Russian fairy tale, a drifting couple is brought together by a strange child who appears the day after a snow replica is built in a moment of joy. Neither the couple nor the reader knows if the child is real or imagined, only that she bears the weight of the mythology projected onto her.

Weather, Jenny Offi ll

Even if Jenny O ll’s Weather reads like dry dread—it is, after all, about an impending climate apocalypse—it is only 200 pages, so the foreboding lasts for only so long. Her narrator, Lizzie, is wry and sardonic, breaking down climate anxiety to its most basic parts. For the subject matter, the book is conversational and charming, declining to virtue signal and instead easing into its grim reality feet fi rst.

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold

People tend to read A Sand County Almanac around Earth Day, and for good reason. Aldo Leopold is a conservationist in all the senses that matter, calling for personal responsibility to the natural world with prose that stands in for an ecological valentine. The chapters move seasonally, beginning with the new year thaw that comes after midwinter blizzards: “January observation can be almost as simple and peaceful as snow, and almost as continuous as cold,” he writes. “There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.”

Winter, Ali Smith

The winter installment of Ali Smith’s quartet of seasonal novels begins with the holidays, but warns that holiday fuzz is absent. As with all of Smith’s writing, the things that are bleak are always more interesting than the things that are shiny: At Christmastime, four people travel to a baronial mansion in Cornwall, split along lines of politics, memory and familial spite. “That’s what winter is,” Smith writes. “An exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.”

Daisy Johnson, Sisters

Sororal ties are at the fore of Daisy Johnson’s debut novel, a gothic pressure cooker that begins in exile. Two sisters, September and July, are brought to a cottage at the edge of the North York Moors, left in isolation on the barren coast. The great reveal of what would place the pair in such a situation comes to the patient reader who is willing to muscle through sparse dialogue and atmospheric discomfort.