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A one-man version of an Elizabethan tragedy, with a scene set in a gay bar throbbing to disco music? If such experimental deconstructions automatically make your stomach churn, you're definitely not the target audience for "One Edward Two", now playing at Cleveland Public Theatre. But Frank A. Barnhart's 70-minute one-man performance isn't so much a direct adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's "Edward II" as a theatrical meditation on it by a contemporary gay artist.
Using Eastern movement theatre techniques provided by director Joseph Fahey and a mostly effective music/sound collage by composer Don Groner, actor-writer Barnhart narrows the focus of his performance to the not-very-hidden gay subtext of Marlowe's play: the doomed love triangle between King Edward, his scorned queen, Isabella of France, and his favorite Gaveston, and its effect on court politics, which ultimately prompts the deposing and assassination of Britain's unpopular 14th century monarch.
The production design itself, by Fahey and lighting designer Leslie Moynihan, is starkly handsome: three areas in pools of light, each featuring a white mannequin head on a pole, and a medieval wheel of fortune. Costumed in a black and white doublet, with the use of red velvet cape, Barnhart attacks all three roles, plus a chilling cameo as a white-veiled assassin, transforming from one to another with a stylized whoosh of breath and swirling movements.
He is most effective as the haughty, manipulative lover Gaveston, partly because the portrayal is so bitchily unsentimental. You can imagine him conniving and flattering, picking up rough trade, and lording it over the other courtiers enough for them to want him killed. Gaveston's death scene, sprawled over the red cloth like a spreading pool of blood, is one of the evening's best moments.
Barnhart's Edward and Isabella are less gripping, partly because the dialogue is more one-note, particularly Edward's incessant tributes to his "dear Gaveston". The portrayals are intense and ultimately sympathetic, but the production doesn't really make you feel for them -- like many experimental works, the stylized staging and performance style manage to keep us at a distance much of the time. And some of it is simply confusing and hard to follow, especially a scene where Barnhart manipulates the mannequin heads in an odd Punch-and-Judy show. (Do read the dramaturgical notes in the program before the play: they help.)
As for the occasional historical time-bending, some of it works and some falls painfully flat. The insertion of a gay rights chant during a death scene seemed particularly intrusive. However, the transformation of Isabella's plaintive phrase "Alexander had his minions" into a echoing sound collage that invokes historical personages from Plato to Michelangelo to Marlowe himself was effective and moving.
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