Who: Magis Theatre Company
What: Covid-delayed production of Thornton Wilder’s The Alcestiad
Where: Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park
When: June 18-20, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: Thornton Wilder’s lesser-known The Alcestiad followed the most productive period of his career, arriving after 1938’s Pulitzer Prize winner Our Town and The Merchant of Yonkers, the 1942 Pulitzer winner The Skin of Our Teeth, and the 1954 Yonkers revision The Matchmaker, the inspiration for the 1964 musical Hello, Dolly! Wilder, who would have turned 125 next year, wrote about The Alcestiad, a tale of tyranny and plague from Greek mythology that involves Princess Alcestis and her husband, Admetus, King of Thessaly, along with Apollo and Hercules: “On one level, my play recounts the life of a woman – of many women – from bewildered bride to sorely tested wife to overburdened old age. On another level it is a wildly romantic story of gods and men, of death and hell and resurrection, of great loves and great trials, of usurpation and revenge. On another level, however, it is a comedy about a very serious matter. . . . Yet I am aware of other levels, and perhaps deeper ones that will only become apparent to me later.”
In 1938, Wilder started working on the play, which was inspired by Euripides’s 438 BCE Alcestis; it premiered at Assembly Hall at the Edinburgh Festival in 1955 as A Life in the Sun, with Irene Worth starring as Alcestis, directed by Tyrone Guthrie. The Brooklyn-based nonprofit Magis Theatre Company, which specializes in bringing back neglected texts, is presenting the rarely performed play during the summer solstice, June 18-20, at 7:00 outdoors in Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, in the shadow of the landmarked remains of the James Renwick Jr.—designed Smallpox Hospital, which treated about seven thousand men, women, and children a year suffering from the dread disease between 1865 and 1875, after which it became a nurses’ dormitory. The cast features Jeanne Castagnaro, Russ Cusick, Margi Sharp Douglas, George Drance, Jack Fadner, Kimbirdlee Fadner, Jacqueline Lucid, Tony Macht, Rachel Benbow Murdy, Gabriel Portuondo, Mae Roney, Diego Tapia, and Jenna Wyman, with music by Sara Gallassini and production design by GianMarco Lo Forte and Mark Tambella. “This has been a very long and trying year for all of us, and although we continued to meet online as a company, we are beyond thrilled to announce that we will be performing live this summer,” director George Drance said in a statement. “We chose The Alcestiad long before the pandemic, and the plague it deals with speaks to our present reality. Performing at Four Freedoms Park reminds us that there is still work to be done on ‘the freedom from fear.’ The ruins of the Smallpox Hospital remind us of how we have made it through all this before.”
In a January 1941 speech to Congress, FDR outlined the four freedoms: “The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.” Tickets for the three performances, which follow all Covid-19 regulations, are free but must be reserved in advance.