Four centuries ago, a Spanish play about a famous Bible story got its author thrown in jail for heresy. Later this month, a local playwright will help give the play justice by telling it in an uncommon form of theater.
Harley Erdman, a playwright, translator, dramaturg and professor of theater at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will present an “illuminated lecture” that draws from his research about the 1613 play “Queen Esther” (“La reina Ester”), written by Felipe Godínez, on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 4:30 p.m. at the Rand Theater inside the Bromery Center for the Arts. The lecture runs approximately 45 to 60 minutes.
An “illuminated lecture,” a format developed by the Los Angeles theater company theater dybbuk, is essentially an academic lecture set up as a theatrical staged reading with music. In this one, five actors will read excerpts from the play (in the original Spanish and in Erdman’s English translation) and related scholarship.
The cast includes UMass students Eliza Epstein, Willie E. Jones III, Abbi Andrews, Maya Quiñones, and Robinson Alvarado-Vargas. Brian Repeta will play live music to accompany the story.
The play “Queen Esther” is an adaptation of the Biblical story of Esther, a young Jewish woman chosen to marry the Persian king Ahasuerus. Esther kept her identity a secret until she found out that the advisor Haman was plotting to kill the Jewish people, after which she revealed her identity to the king at a feast and thus prevented a genocide. Jews celebrate Esther every year on the holiday Purim, which usually falls in March.
Godínez, a playwright in the Spanish Golden Age, was a “converso,” a term used to refer to people who had Jewish heritage (whether or not they actually practiced the religion themselves) but converted to Catholicism for safety. To conversos, Esther herself was worshipped — “almost like a patron saint,” Erdman said. Conversos celebrated her with holidays and secret rituals because she was “the quintessence or prototype of someone who had to keep their religion secret or closeted.”
Erdman’s “illuminated lecture” will discuss the play itself as well as what it meant at a time when being Jewish was dangerous.
As the Spanish Inquisition saw it, the problem with “Queen Esther” was not only that the play was, as Erdman says in the show, “a sensational play that endeavors to please its audience,” one “full of comic relief, spectacle, musical numbers, not to mention three romantic subplots.”It also conflated the Old Testament story of Esther with the New Testament story of the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary to tell her that she would give birth to Jesus.
In the play, the angel Gabriel visits Esther and tells her that the Virgin Mary, and therefore Jesus, will be her descendants: “You need not fear your people’s destruction,” he says. “You shall be their liberation, for you embody she who shall give birth to God himself.”
“In Christian theology at the time, and to this day, that’s something that’s totally privileged for the Virgin Mary, and the idea that Esther would get this news before the Virgin Mary is really a slap in the face,” Erdman said.
Godínez, too, got a (figurative) slap in the face — the Inquisition threw him in jail for this play and seized his property, leaving him penniless. As Erdman says in the show, the play “dramatizes a faithful woman’s struggle with obedience, and her decision to stand up and be disobediently obedient, or obediently disobedient, when destiny, in the form of religious prophecy, calls. Not quite obedient enough, Godínez crossed lines in his public life, exemplified in this daring play, that ultimately cost him dearly.”
Still, he says, the show itself served as “a delicious kind of converso wish fulfillment that this play reaches its happy ending at a meal where a secret identity is triumphantly made fully public, due to the courage of a woman.”
Erdman first learned about Spanish Golden Age theater when he was in graduate school more than 30 years ago.
“I was amazed that there was this canon of thousands upon thousands of plays from the time of Shakespeare that were in Spain, that are completely unknown and mostly not translated, and they were really wonderful,” he said. “They’re juicy; they have all of the good things of Shakespeare, and maybe even some other, better things, because they move really fast, they’re very funny, they have very strong female characters. … Those are things that you don’t always see in Shakespeare,” he said.
The more he studied that era of theater, the more he found that the plays were “really stage-worthy,” he said. Now, he’s bringing one to UMass, albeit in a unique way.
“I think they’re good plays and that students appreciate them,” he said, “and they open up a whole new aspect to early modern theater, [which] we mostly think of in terms of Shakespeare, but there’s so much other great stuff going on. … I love it.”
The event is free and open to the public.
