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Trapezium – A Knightly Farce
(World Premiere)

By Henry Rathvon
January 14 through February 6
Previews January 12 and 13
Margeson Theater

A Medieval Screwball Comedy!

A World Premiere!  Trapezium will be the featured production during this year’s PlayFest! Knights and Kings and Damsels, oh my!  This hilarious, whimsical farce, based on the Tristan and Iseult mythology is more fun that a Sunday crossword. And that's exactly what its author creates for major newspapers when he's not writing soon-to-be hit plays!  Come join us for 90 minutes of pure hilarity!

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Reviews

Captivating on Every Side!

The Orlando Sentinel
Excerpts from the review by Elizabeth Maupin
Posted 1/18/05

Sir Mullet of Cornwall doesn't have a lot of virtues, but here they are: He can tell when it's going to rain. He writes decent poetry. He knits. Sir Mullet is no ordinary knight. He's a creature of the flamboisterous imagination of Henry Rathvon, whose new comedy Trapezium sets aside all notions of what the characters of legend  and the words they use  are supposed to be.

Rathvon writes in a manner befitting the most fantastical conquests of his medieval characters' imaginations: the manticore, the basilisk, the dragon. And with Trapezium, the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival has made a conquest of its own  a bright, exhilarating new comedy, gorgeously presented and performed with all the derring-do that imagination allows.

Trapezium is the first full-fledged child of PlayFest, the Orlando Festival of New Plays, which grew out of the play-development process the Shakespeare Festival has been shepherding for years. Rathvon's comedy rose to the top of a mass of scripts submitted a couple of years ago for the festival's play-reading series, and the work that both theater company and playwright have done since then has made this little buffoonery a gem.

Rathvon may be a fledgling playwright, but he's also a noted constructor of crossword puzzles (for The New York Times, The Boston Globe and others), and here his puzzle prowess shows. He has based Trapezium (the word means a four-sided figure) on the old English tale of Tristan and Iseult, the legendary lovers who are said to have lived around the time of King Arthur. Their story is that of a love triangle, but Trapezium turns it into a love quadrilateral, or maybe even a pentagon  a love triangle with plenty of conniving from a fourth party and lots of carping from a fifth.

In the medieval story, King Mark of Cornwall sends his nephew Tristan off to Ireland to bring the king a bride, the fair Iseult. The two young people accidentally drink a love potion on the voyage back, and they embark on a tragic romance.

But there's no tragedy anywhere in Rathvon's exceedingly silly tale, in which knights are hapless, kings are vulgar and maidens are shrewd. King Mark, for instance, is "large, lumpy, unwashed Mark": Iseult calls him "poetry-spewing but in the same breath beer-burping and leg-of-lamb-gnawing Mark"  and this on the morning after their wedding night.

And these are Arthurian figures with Monty Python overtones: They boast about all the fabulous beasts of prey they haven't quite seen, and they never start fighting without first clanging their swords together and crying "Hoo! Ha! Hee!"

The Shakespeare Festival has given all of this a glorious production, with a gorgeous set by Bob Phillips (a series of angled platforms, all in delicate teal, purple, rose and gold), funny Wagnerian costumes by Lisa Cody-Rapport and Mike Silvestro's warm lighting throughout. And director Russell Treyz, a festival veteran, has led his five actors to indulge their natural inclinations  to make as much of these comic-book characters as they can.

So there's hearty King Mark (Kristian Truelsen), a little less than astute but benefiting always from Truelsen's mellifluous voice, which turns the foolish king into a fool with warmth and weight. There's sweet, swaggering Tristan (David Hardie), who walks as if he just got off a horse in a John Wayne movie, and there's disenchanted Iseult (Mindy Anders), who has had it up to here with this marriage business and with the prattle of all these men.

Then there are the triangle's two interlopers, who turn both court and theater upside down. Heather Leonardi makes the Irish maid Bridget hilariously strange  blunt, earthy and excitable, but with so many winks and tics that she's either brilliant or a boob. And Jason Flora capitalizes on the knight named Mullet, from his swanky patterned tights and his one-of-a-kind hairstyle (Billy Ray Cyrus had nothing on this guy) to his flabbergasted reactions to all the court intrigue.

Those five make splendiferous work of Rathvon's language, which sets fabulous words of his own invention  rumbustuous, influmbibulous, splentacular and the like  into a lovely modern iambic pentameter, a blank verse that sounds completely contemporary and utterly right.

It's a tribute to both writer and actors that you barely notice the meter: You're too busy listening and laughing to care. Rathvon may have set about to update Shakespeare, but he's done something else besides: He's created a rumbustuous little world where you long to linger. "What a sorry lot of passion-pixillated saps we are," King Mark says, but he's wrong about only one thing. There's nothing sorry about this lot  nothing at all. 

A Marvelously Funny Play,  Virtuosic Verbal Nimbleness, Frolicsome Theatricality

The Orlando Weekly
Excerpted from the review by Al Krulick
Published 1/20/2005

I always do my crossword puzzles in pencil. I want the opportunity to erase the words that don't fit. With a little more time and luck, I'll eventually get to inscribe the correct answers.

Henry Rathvon, one of the country's most famous cruciverbalists (crossword puzzle creators), obviously understands this dynamic. He has penciled his first play, Trapezium – A Knightly Farce, in such an equivocal fashion that he allows himself the liberty of erasing whole sections of it and starting over – each time one of his characters discovers that the storyline is overrunning the available spaces on the "puzzleboard."

Now enjoying its world premiere at the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's Margeson Theater, Trapezium gets its name from a four-sided form with no parallel sides. True to the title, the play is told from four distinctly separate points of view; as each plotline stumbles into an unsatisfactory trajectory, the next character in line begins it again. From any perspective, though, the play remains a zany, verbally precocious retelling of the medieval romantic legend of Tristan and Iseult. In the hands of director Russell Treyz and a quintet of ferociously funny performers, all of the tale's bawdiness, treachery, violence and superstition become fodder for some of the "noggincrackingest" physical and vocal comedy ever to grace a modern stage.

The play is written completely in iambic pentameter, the classic poetic form that Shakespeare used to move his language along. But Rathvon is not content to merely follow in the master's footsteps. In Trapezium, he has ratcheted up the speed of the verbiage tenfold, added a gaggle of made-up words, thrown in a contemporary sensibility and scheduled a Monty Python moment every 20 seconds. The result is less like Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and more like Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur on steroids. ("Say, did you know that there is no point … to a Round Table?" Nyuk, nyuk!)

Again performed by the same troupe of thespians who workshopped the piece at the 2003 PlayFest new-play festival, Trapezium has become something akin to the Keystone Kops meeting the Sunday New York Times. Kristian Truelsen reigns once more as King Mark, the "large, lumpy, unwashed" Cornwall sovereign whose claim to fame is constantly hunting down all manner of mythical savage beasts – smiladons, piscapods and the odd spitting basilisk – while forbidding swordplay in the castle, lest the palace drapes become askew. Mindy Anders plays Iseult, Mark's down-to-earth and somewhat cynical new bride. Because she supposedly swallowed a magic potion en route from Ireland to her connubial destiny, Iseult falls in love with David Hardie's Tristan, a rather bumbling knight whose allegiance to the medieval virtues of truth and chivalry largely depends on the strength and efficacy of his horse's withers.

Also in the cast is Heather Leonardi as Bridget, a saucy Irish wench and servant to Iseult. It is through her connivance and chicanery that the two star-crossed lovers manage their clandestine affair – that is, in at least one version of the story. Leonardi uses her saucer-shaped eyes and kewpie-doll looks to great comedic advantage, masking her character's innate, manipulative intelligence until the play's final moments.

Most enjoyable throughout the evening's romp is the remarkably plastic Jason Flora as Mullet, a foppish villain whose tongue is always aflame with "spicy slander" and "irksome tidings" of "dark and treasonous alliances." As each version of the story is presented, Flora becomes more and more pixyish and bizarre, garnering the show's heartiest laughter.

Trapezium is a marvelously funny play that blends its virtuosic verbal nimbleness with a frolicsome theatricality. Its characters are lovable and charmingly idiosyncratic. Apparently, playwright Rathvon has begun a new and promising career, trading in the cryptograms for the limelight and applause. I enjoyed his maiden venture as much as I did last Sunday's crossword – which I did in pencil.

Fast Paced and Drizzled with Iambic Pentameter Sauce

INK 19 Magazine
Excerpts from the reviews by Carl F. Gauze
Posted 1/18/04

You'd think by now that most people would be smart enough to do their own wooing, and not have some underling fetch their Lady Love. King Mark (Kristian Truelsen) hasn’t figured it out, and sends his dashing nephew Tristan (David Hardie) from rocky Cornwall to lush Ireland to fetch fetching Iseult (Mindy Anders) .The voyage is long and rough, and either a mis-mixed potion from Iseult's maid Bridget (Heather Leonardi) or raw teen hormones has caused the two to fall in love. If you have a degree in English lit, you know the story, and if you don’t, no matter, it's crossed yet mismatched love. King Mark gets it quick enough, and takes the misplaced affections of his new bride better than you'd expect. He's open mined enough to encourage a young man's fancy, and is nice enough to leave the two lovers alone with time on their hands.

Fast paced and drizzled with iambic pentameter sauce, author Rathvon takes a classic and copyright free story and runs it repeatedly, each time from a slightly different view point and ending in a radically different conclusion,. None of the conclusions suit the cast until the last one, by which time everyone has a true love and it's safe to stop the merry go round and let everyone off.

With a simple yet color coordinated set, Trapezium dotes on fast paced word play, and adds more words to the English language than Ned Flanders. Truelsen plays a solid and imperturbable King Mark, encouraging wenching when ever possible, and if that wench is his wife, well, so be it. Comic narration comes from pompous Sir Mullet of the Scrawny Legs (Jason Flora) who strives to unseat or upset the good looking but no better than he needs be Tristan. Anders is cute and lusty, so you know eventually someone will get her in bed. It's Bridget who drives plot, cursed with bad eye sight when it comes to toe of newt or wing of fly. It's a whirlwind of unlikely coincidence, timed to fit exactly between the opening curtain and closing bows.

                                                                 Last Updated: 05/06/2007                    Copyright Orlando Shakespeare Theater