In a play by Claire F. Martin there are no easy choices. And like the title of her source material, this goes double: neither the characters nor the author herself ever choose to take the easy way out. It would be perfectly simple for a widely-and-well-read, truly skillful, and dazzlingly prolific writer such as she to produce literary adaptations for the stage without too much time taken out of the rest of her day, but Miss Martin rejects the very premise, seeking instead to craft work worthy of the time, attention, and passion of her fellow theatre-makers, from actors to designers to you, the audience, who are in many ways the most crucial component of any play. In creating any of her adaptations, Miss Martin always constructs what she coins as "One Fateful Adjustment": an emendation from the source material which, by her own description, "cracks the story wide open", allowing the light of her own modern perspective to pour in, imbuing classical texts with meaning as fresh and familiar to a 21st century audience as any piece of modern media.
Often, contending as she does with source material published shortly after Mary Wollstonecraft and long before Kimberlé Crenshaw, Miss Martin’s OFA is often "What if the women in this story were people?" This is particularly true in the case of A Tale of Two Cities’s Lucie Manette, who in Dickens’s original book occupies a pedestal not unlike Shakespeare’s intriguingly named Hero: the story swirls around her, but it is not about her. The inner life of Dickens’s Lucie is not important to his story because it’s not important to his characters, but nothing could be further from the truth in Miss Martin’s adaptation. Her Lucie—both on the page and in her performance thereof—is a completely new creation, for whom the appellation “chaos in a corset” is almost too mild. Miss Martin matches the headstrong, witty spirit of a modern leading lady with the emotional depth of a late-Austenite heroine, stirring a final dash of Shakespearean virtue and vice that allows Lucie’s actions and choices as much sway over the plot as any other character.
The One Fateful Adjustment of Lucie’s revealed humanity begets a thousand more; any of Dickens’s most cosmically beleaguered characters could not so easily grapple with the choices Miss Martin places before hers. Sydney Carton, primary protagonist of both novel and play, predicates his fateful, life-altering, character-defining decision upon Lucie, but it is only in this adaptation of both characters, Sydney and Lucie, that we can truly grapple with how much he has to lose, in another deft and daring move from Miss Martin which I would never dream of spoiling. And not to be left out, Charles Darnay, an affable soul in the source, gains his fair share of fatal flaws, playing out the well-meant-but-still-harmful hypocrisy of the wealthy white saviors who in seeking to uplift or honor others run headlong into the problems they made for themselves, at the expense of those they thought to rescue. Not to be left behind, each ensemble player shines through as a unique human, too, caught in media res of their own tale, with our imaginations sparked to consider and continue their stories long after they’ve left the stage.
In preparing this piece to transform from Miss Martin’s initial inspiration to a fully fleshed-out world in which her characters can live and die in the fullness of their humanity, it quickly became our colloquial parlance that Miss Martin’s A Tale of Two Cities is "a tale of two a lot of things." This is a tale of two men who look alike; a tale of two trials; a tale of two empires on either side of decline; a tale of two sisters on either side of life and death; a tale of two parents who were dead to begin with. And following that priceless proverb of Stephen Sondheim that "content dictates form", Miss Martin has purposefully and precisely populated her play with mirrors. Lines are echoed from one character to another, giving new meaning to both the original and the duplicate text. Each actor portrays at least two characters, allowing for a dozen different takes on the motif of "two": doubles such as The Vengeance and Miss Pross are foils rather than mirrors, and The Vengeance herself is two sides of the same coin: pastoral, proletariat Innocence and skillful Wrath, refined in fire.
But for all these pairs, perhaps most importantly, this is also a tale of three things. A tale of three best friends: Sydney, Lucie, and Charles, three orbiting stars in endlessly reconfigured constellations, waltzing delicately across the ever-blurring lines of stalwart friendship and romantic passion, and love and hatred for themselves and each other. They struggle with simple daily choices—to speak to a stranger on the street, to take another drink—with as much deliberate, rhetorically rich gravity as they do in wrestling with their grand ideals of patriotism, family, marriage, and morality.
Tonight, as audience to this first public showing of a new play, we are ourselves in a tale of two stories, a tale of two authors, for this evening plays host to a heated debate between Dickens and Martin for ownership of this narrative. He might have had the long game locked till now; she has the distinct advantage of being still alive, still responsive, just like this play, which lives and breathes with vital significance that only increases with each passing day in our own precarious empire. It is still the best of times and the worst of times, and there’s little doubt that it will remain so well into the future. Just like Dickens’s original novel, a work of historical fiction in its own time, this play invites us to contemplate both the past and the future even as we live in the present moment with the actors and their characters, a choice also reflected in Miss Martin’s directorial aesthetic choices, further highlighting that this is the most timeless of tales…and the most timely.
Thank you for supporting new work and this evening’s artists, and please enjoy Claire F. Martin’s A Tale of Two Cities!
-Claire Wittman,
Production Dramaturg
Often, contending as she does with source material published shortly after Mary Wollstonecraft and long before Kimberlé Crenshaw, Miss Martin’s OFA is often "What if the women in this story were people?" This is particularly true in the case of A Tale of Two Cities’s Lucie Manette, who in Dickens’s original book occupies a pedestal not unlike Shakespeare’s intriguingly named Hero: the story swirls around her, but it is not about her. The inner life of Dickens’s Lucie is not important to his story because it’s not important to his characters, but nothing could be further from the truth in Miss Martin’s adaptation. Her Lucie—both on the page and in her performance thereof—is a completely new creation, for whom the appellation “chaos in a corset” is almost too mild. Miss Martin matches the headstrong, witty spirit of a modern leading lady with the emotional depth of a late-Austenite heroine, stirring a final dash of Shakespearean virtue and vice that allows Lucie’s actions and choices as much sway over the plot as any other character.
The One Fateful Adjustment of Lucie’s revealed humanity begets a thousand more; any of Dickens’s most cosmically beleaguered characters could not so easily grapple with the choices Miss Martin places before hers. Sydney Carton, primary protagonist of both novel and play, predicates his fateful, life-altering, character-defining decision upon Lucie, but it is only in this adaptation of both characters, Sydney and Lucie, that we can truly grapple with how much he has to lose, in another deft and daring move from Miss Martin which I would never dream of spoiling. And not to be left out, Charles Darnay, an affable soul in the source, gains his fair share of fatal flaws, playing out the well-meant-but-still-harmful hypocrisy of the wealthy white saviors who in seeking to uplift or honor others run headlong into the problems they made for themselves, at the expense of those they thought to rescue. Not to be left behind, each ensemble player shines through as a unique human, too, caught in media res of their own tale, with our imaginations sparked to consider and continue their stories long after they’ve left the stage.
In preparing this piece to transform from Miss Martin’s initial inspiration to a fully fleshed-out world in which her characters can live and die in the fullness of their humanity, it quickly became our colloquial parlance that Miss Martin’s A Tale of Two Cities is "a tale of two a lot of things." This is a tale of two men who look alike; a tale of two trials; a tale of two empires on either side of decline; a tale of two sisters on either side of life and death; a tale of two parents who were dead to begin with. And following that priceless proverb of Stephen Sondheim that "content dictates form", Miss Martin has purposefully and precisely populated her play with mirrors. Lines are echoed from one character to another, giving new meaning to both the original and the duplicate text. Each actor portrays at least two characters, allowing for a dozen different takes on the motif of "two": doubles such as The Vengeance and Miss Pross are foils rather than mirrors, and The Vengeance herself is two sides of the same coin: pastoral, proletariat Innocence and skillful Wrath, refined in fire.
But for all these pairs, perhaps most importantly, this is also a tale of three things. A tale of three best friends: Sydney, Lucie, and Charles, three orbiting stars in endlessly reconfigured constellations, waltzing delicately across the ever-blurring lines of stalwart friendship and romantic passion, and love and hatred for themselves and each other. They struggle with simple daily choices—to speak to a stranger on the street, to take another drink—with as much deliberate, rhetorically rich gravity as they do in wrestling with their grand ideals of patriotism, family, marriage, and morality.
Tonight, as audience to this first public showing of a new play, we are ourselves in a tale of two stories, a tale of two authors, for this evening plays host to a heated debate between Dickens and Martin for ownership of this narrative. He might have had the long game locked till now; she has the distinct advantage of being still alive, still responsive, just like this play, which lives and breathes with vital significance that only increases with each passing day in our own precarious empire. It is still the best of times and the worst of times, and there’s little doubt that it will remain so well into the future. Just like Dickens’s original novel, a work of historical fiction in its own time, this play invites us to contemplate both the past and the future even as we live in the present moment with the actors and their characters, a choice also reflected in Miss Martin’s directorial aesthetic choices, further highlighting that this is the most timeless of tales…and the most timely.
Thank you for supporting new work and this evening’s artists, and please enjoy Claire F. Martin’s A Tale of Two Cities!
-Claire Wittman,
Production Dramaturg
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