The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Imogen’s cut out for own story
colleges are littered with women drama majors, they decided to add in Imogen because we needed another role. I was cast as Imogen.
“There’s a moment that particularly stuck with me — a line that Beatrice says during the masked ball,” Kapil said. “She compares Don John and Benedict and says: ‘the one is like an image and says nothing.’ I thought she said ‘the one is Imogen, says nothing.’
“When I got the offer, I had been thinking of this exact story on the plane to New Haven two days earlier,” she said. “So when Jen said ‘do you have any ideas?’ I actually said, ‘I’d like to write a play called ‘Imogen Says Nothing.’”
According to Kapil, she steeps her play in Elizabethan history and culture. The cast — Ashlie Atkinson, Richardo Dávila, Christopher Geary, Christopher Grant, Ben Horner, Hubert Pont-du-Jour, Thom Sesma, Daisuke Tsuji and Zenzi Williams — primarily play Shakespeare’s actors, though some double as very human nonhomo sapiens (Kapil’s script describes Imogen as “a bear passing as a human”).
“There are a lot of things in the script that are actually true — like if you were to go try to find certain things in the script, you would find them,” Kapil said. “In the Quarto and the two first Folios of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ that were printed in, I don’t know, 1623, there is a character named Imogen who is in the stage directions. She enters with Leonato as his wife in the first scene, and then in the masked ball. And she doesn’t have a single word in the entire play.
“A lot of people think that Shakespeare was going to write a character named Imogen but never got around to it,” she said. “So it’s like this typo, this cut, that made it into print. But there’s no actual character named Imogen in ‘Much Ado.’”
“I used that as a springboard,” Kapil said.
Kapil took full advantage of the university’s rich resources — its libraries, scholars, museums — to flesh out her play. While cruising the Yale Center For British Art, she discovered ancient Saxon maps listing a town mislabeled as ‘Queerer’ for 145 years and, now, it no longer exists.
Kapil said that she now had her theme and metaphor.
“The play examines what happens when entire voices, entire people are systematically cut from history and the canon of literature,” she said. “It’s about the responsibility of erasure. “My organizing principle,” she
said, “was that anything that had been erased or marginalized or fragmented in our recorded history seemed like it might have a home in this play — at least metaphorically … not knowing the depths that this would lead me to.”
Yale Rep Artistic Director James Bundy says “it’s exciting to provide an artist with support for that next thing that they want to try or say.
“In this particular instance, it was exciting to see how much of her energy around the project took shape because of the research opportunities that were available to her here at Yale,” he said.
Having the playwright on hand for rehearsal and research proves invaluable.
“It’s always great to be working with the playwright here with us,” he said, “because it’s a wonderful way to use the rehearsal process, both to explore what it feels to interpret the work and to be able to have a conversation with the person who imagined it.
“One of the exciting things about the play is that it’s sort of a fantastic take on Elizabethan England,” Bundy said. “It re-imagines the culture with some profound differences in it, some of which are theatrically quite magical and depend on the transformative abilities of the actors.
“So, it’s full of surprises,” he said. “It’s not a conventionally realistic play, but it evokes and captures a lot of the spirit of the Elizabethan Age and the artists who were working in it.”
“It’s the most sprawling, ambitious thought I’ve had,” said Kapil, whose “Love Person” was written partly in Sanskrit and American Sign Language.
“But it’s Yale,” she added. “If any audience can handle a Shakespeare mash-up, it’s gotta be this one.”