In Daniel McCoy’s script, these fables are told through a wide variety of methods, including puppets, actors, and animation.

In that spirit, we here present a few versions of one of Marie’s stories, Bisclavret. Now, don’t worry, this story doesn’t appear in EPIMYTHIUM, so no spoilers here. But it’s a phenomenal story that we want to share with you.

Click here to read the full text of Marie’s fable, translated into English. You’ll notice that Marie introduces the story by saying she heard it from someone else, a claim that begs the question of where she heard all of her wonderful stories.

This short Belgian film by Emilie Mercier was made in 2011. It tells Marie’s fable through an animation style that looks like stained-glass windows come to life.

Storyteller John Edgar performs the story in 2010.

Check out this comic book version of Bisclavret by Kel McDonald.

And don’t forget to come to the reading to hear more stories from Marie de France.

EPIMYTHIUM

FREE STAGED READING
August 24, 2014 @ 4PM

Charlestown Working Theater
442 Bunker Hill St., Charlestown, MA

RSVP

After shuffling the new pages into place in their scripts, the actors pick up following one of the many plots in this sprawling story, that of a crippled old woman who has come to Marie’s abbey looking for a miracle. The old woman’s faith is incredibly strong, and it challenges Marie to examine her own. For Marie, faith is a persistent daily question that remains parallel but distinct from her duties as the Abbess of Shaftsbury and custodian of the Shrine to St. Edward.

We move on to one of Marie’s stories that the play returns to again and again. It tells of a maiden in a tower, married to a cruel and jealous old man. When she sings a song of hope and adventure, it summons a prince from a magical kingdom. The prince takes the shape of a hawk and visits the maiden time and again in her tower. Predictably, their love does not go smoothly. More surprisingly, the story links back to Marie’s life in some unexpected ways.

The fables and poems featured in Epimythium are Daniel’s reinterpretations of the works of the real Marie de France. While the play doesn’t change the content of these stories, it does play with how these stories are told. What’s the best way to tell this story to connect to a modern audience? Or to connect to the story of Marie? From illuminated text in the middle ages to video games in the 21st century, there’s no storytelling opportunity that’s not on the table.

Much of the evening is spent on the last dozen or so pages of the script. I won’t give anything away here, but I will say that things have changed a lot for Marie by the end of the play. There are surprising reunions and bittersweet separations, and Marie is left with an opportunity to redefine who she is. She has the opportunity, at long last, to write her own story.

An epimythium is a short epilogue, a lesson or a moral. Marie de France included one in most of her fables, but not all. Perhaps, in those instances, she didn’t want to give her readers an easy answer. Or perhaps she didn’t want to give her stories an ending, preferring to let them continue in our imaginations.

For now, we take a break for the next two weeks. Daniel will continue working on the script, and then we begin another round of workshops and rehearsals, culminating in a public reading on August 24th. We hope you’ll join us to hear the latest version of the play, and to celebrate Marie and the eternal power of storytelling.

EPIMYTHIUM

FREE STAGED READING
August 24, 2014 @ 4PM

Charlestown Working Theater
442 Bunker Hill St., Charlestown, MA

RSVP

Today was a productive day for playwright Daniel McCoy. Between our first and second rehearsal, we have 50 new pages to play with. Epimythium combines threads of multiple different stories, overlapping the life of Marie de France as the Abbess of Shaftsbury with the tales she wrote of imprisoned maidens, shape-shifting princes, betrayed lovers, birds, bees, bears, foxes, flies, flowers, and a rooster rooting through a pile of dung. The first two days have focused on Marie’s life, as she navigates the politics of the medieval church and balances her mysterious past with her hopes for her future.

It’s that very mystery we’re trying to get a better hold of. What was Marie’s life before her time as a nun? Where did she gain her gift and her passion for storytelling? And what is the nature of her relationships within the Abbey that has served as her home, her refuge, and her prison?

Part of the process is fleshing out and giving depth to backgrounds, and part of the process is paring away the superfluous. We say goodbye to some favorite lines and hello to some new ones. It’s an exciting thing to see a script as a fluid, growing organism. The dialogue shapes the actors’ performances, which influence the next round of edits. Intentions become sharper, stories become richer, and a whole new play starts to come into focus.

Director Hondo Weiss-Richmond has known Daniel and Epimythium for a long time. He directed a reading of the play last year and has been a key part of bringing about this second workshop and reading with Simple Machine. The workshop has been unfolding like a table read, with Hondo encouraging the actors to try different tactics in their readings of the lines. He’s very careful to give every scene and every beat a lot of time and consideration so Daniel can get a real sense of how they land before he makes any changes.

One of the truly phenomenal things about this script is the way it makes use of different storytelling modes to bring Marie’s fables and poems to life. The action of the play might be interrupted by projected animation, shadow puppets, or a silent film. It means that sometimes in the middle of rehearsal, we’re singing as insects to the tune of “Sandra Dee.” But soon, we shift to a lonely gravesite by the side of the road on the way to an unnamed pagan village. We travel across kingdoms and through time at a moment’s notice to visit whole new worlds in Marie’s imagination.

These fables and stories collide with the events of Marie’s life in unexpected ways. By the end of the play, the fantasy becomes truer than the reality. We won’t spoil the story here, except to say that it’s an ending that honors and celebrates what theatre, what art, can do. It answers some questions for the characters, but raises more questions for the audience. Questions that can never be definitively answered. But it is in the asking of these kinds of questions that we learn most about ourselves.

“There are so many greater things than miracles.”

Marie, Epimythium

EPIMYTHIUM

FREE STAGED READING
August 24, 2014 @ 4PM

Charlestown Working Theater
442 Bunker Hill St., Charlestown, MA

RSVP