The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of King Edward II, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer Chicago Shakespeare Theater
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To create his thrill ride, Graney alters the text’s fundamental dynamics. Marlowe’s script tells the parallel stories of King Edward II, who reigned from 1307 to 1327, and Roger Mortimer, Earl of March—a pair of men with diametrically opposed relationships to power. Edward possesses it as a birthright, yet his weak nature—he’s utterly lacking in the sort of strategic acumen Elizabethans called “policy”—renders him unfit to govern. Patriotic Mortimer is a master of policy, yet wielding it against an inept king, even for the good of his country, is treason. As the play opens, the conflict between the two men is about to boil over. Edward revokes the banishment of his beloved minion Gaveston, a commoner upon whom he dotes like an infatuated teenage girl. Mortimer decides that if Edward won’t break with Gaveston, he must depose his king to save England.
In the first few scenes, Mortimer and various nobles aligned with him heap vitriolic scorn on Gaveston. Why is he such a problem? To a contemporary mind, the court is full of homophobes—a notion Graney underscores by making Gaveston a hot tranny mess, prancing around the court in a purple corset, full-length white mink, and diamond tiara. But during the Elizabethan Renaissance, a devoted, romantic friendship between two men was commonplace. For Marlowe the problem isn’t that Gaveston and Edward are queer (a social construct that didn’t exist for his audience) but that Edward’s devotion to Gaveston supersedes any concern for his queen, his court, or his nation, even as France prepares to invade.
Audience members are free to go anywhere, no matter how potentially disruptive to the show. In one pivotal scene, as Edward was being dressed down by Mortimer and his crony Lancaster, I ended up about eight inches from the king, pinned between him and his tormenters, feeling his discomfort viscerally and mesmerized by the electric blue gum he chewed desperately, as though it were a gag he couldn’t spit out.
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