A TALE OF TWO CITIES
A Staged Reading
August 23, 2023
Atlanta Shakespeare Company
~•~•~•~
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
In Paris, the people are calling for a revolution. In London, they are clinging to the past. But for Sydney Carton—a profligate English lawyer with a drinking problem—the fate of these two cities means nothing at all. That is, until a seemingly routine court case introduces Sydney to Lucie Manette, a beautiful expatriate, and Charles Darnay, a French émigré who—inexplicably—looks just like him.
Part-love story, part-tragedy, part-courtroom drama, A TALE OF TWO CITIES vividly reimagines Charles Dickens’s epic 1859 novel as an allegory for our time.
A Staged Reading
August 23, 2023
Atlanta Shakespeare Company
~•~•~•~
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
In Paris, the people are calling for a revolution. In London, they are clinging to the past. But for Sydney Carton—a profligate English lawyer with a drinking problem—the fate of these two cities means nothing at all. That is, until a seemingly routine court case introduces Sydney to Lucie Manette, a beautiful expatriate, and Charles Darnay, a French émigré who—inexplicably—looks just like him.
Part-love story, part-tragedy, part-courtroom drama, A TALE OF TWO CITIES vividly reimagines Charles Dickens’s epic 1859 novel as an allegory for our time.
"The Bastille has fallen, mes amis.
Liberty is ours!"
Liberty is ours!"
Cast & Creatives
Claire F. Martin (she/her)
Director • Playwright • Jacques 1 • Lucie Claire is a multi-hyphenate artist, specializing in classical theater and literary adaptation. She was last seen as Arabella in Belle Esprit's inaugural production of Arabella, a play she also wrote and directed. Recent credits include: Christmas at Pemberley (Shakespeare & Company), Much Ado About Nothing (Fall Festival, Shake & Co), Romeo and Juliet (Sweet Tea Shakespeare), and the Digital Restoration Series, a 12-month COVID project in which she adapted and directed radio-play adaptations of Restoration and 18th comedies with a repertory cast of 60 actors across North America. Original adaptations include: Pride and Prejudice, [middle]march, The Count of Monte Cristo, Persuasion, Arabella, The Declaration of Evelina, Sense and Sensibility, Belinda, Emma, & War and Peace. Claire holds a Master's in Theatre Directing from the Royal Holloway, University of London. SDC Associate, LMDA, SAA. Upcoming credits include: Troilus and Cressida (Atlanta Shakespeare Company), Love's Labor's Lost (University of Washington), and Measure for Measure (University of Puget Sound). Nicholas Tycho Reed (he/him)
Jacques 3 • Syndey Tycho is so excited to be part of the company of A Tale of Two Cities. He was last seen as Edward/Sir George in Arabella for Belle Esprit and Cassius in Julius Caesar for Scrap Paper Shakespeare. He began acting in 2012 and fell in love with the art. He obtained his Bachelor's in Theatre from UNCW, wrote a short film that won Best Short Film at the Tryon International Film Festival, and loves to do photography of live theater that show off the unique aspects of each production. A recent transplant to Atlanta, Tycho is thrilled to be playing Sydney in Two Cities, and even more thrilled to be working with a great cast, crew, director, and company. Megan Zhang (she/all)
Marie • Miss Pross • Judge 1 • Wench • Prosecutor 2 Megan Zhang is excited to join the cast of A Tale of Two Cities. Recent credits include Wendla in Spring Awakening (Jennie T Anderson Theatre), Storyteller in A Christmas Carol (Atlanta Shakespeare Company), Alice in Lizzie (Actors Express), and Gloria in Pretty Pants Bandit (Georgia Ensemble Theatre). Kelly Johnston (he/all)
Marquis • Manette • Barsad After earning his Bachelor’s degree at UNC at Chapel Hill in Theatre and his Master’s degree in Directing at the California Institute of the Arts, Kelly now works as a freelance director. He co-founded and ran two different theatre companies: Sirius Theatre in Los Angeles and the Arizona Shakespeare Festival, where he was the Artistic Director for its first twelve seasons. He is also one of the Founding Partners for Reign Or Shine Productions, based in New York City. He is delighted to be working with Belle Espirit. Samantha Lancaster (they/she)
Fight Director Samantha Lancaster is an actor and movement artist hailing from the Pacific Northwest. Sam is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a Producer and Aerial Director for Havoc Movement Company. Recent credits include Meridian in Just Another Play About Rainbows (Havoc Movement Company), Juliet in Romeo & Juliet 60 (Atlanta Shakespeare Company), Lucy/Van Helsing Swing in Dracula: The Failings of Men (Havoc Movement Company), and White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (Havoc Movement Company). Upcoming credits include Troilus and Cressida with Atlanta Shakespeare Company. |
Kenneth Wigley (he/him)
Jacques 2 • Charles Originally from McDonough, Kenneth graduated from Georgia Southern University before joining the Atlanta Shakespeare Apprentice Company. Kenneth serves as a Resident Company Member and Props Master for the Atlanta Shakespeare Company. He has performed in the Midwest, the West Coast, and throughout Metro Atlanta. Patty de la Garza (she/her)
Madame Defarge • Cruncher • Prosecutor 1 Patty is thrilled and humbled to be able to tell the story of Two Cities with this amazing cast! Some Previous regional credits include: Lizard y el Sol at The Alliance Theater, Urinetown at Actor's Express, El Guayabo/The Guava Tree at Creede Repertory Theater, Othello at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern, and Tuck Everlasting and Schoolhouse Rock Live at Georgia Ensemble Theater. All my love to my family and my partner. Un beso más. @pattyndelagarza Brewer Kunnemann (he/him)
Defarge • Stryver • Gabelle • Judge 2 Brewer Kunnemann is thrilled to make his debut with the Belle Esprit theatre company. An actor local to the Atlanta area, you may have seen him most recently as "Don/Franklin/et al." in Stage Door Theatre's production of Completeness. He wants to thank his friends, his family, and his partner for their enduring support and love throughout this process. Rachel Frawley (she/her)
Intimacy Director Rachel Frawley is an Atlanta-based actor, writer, director, producer and intimacy professional. An apprentice company graduate of the Atlanta Shakespeare Co., she has performed steadily in Atlanta's theatre scene, as well as working in indie film, commercial and voice over. She has narrated over 35 audiobook titles, and produced for the Weird Sisters Theatre Project for their 2017 and 2018 seasons and is currently the artistic director of Piccadilly Puppets. She is a current writer, producer, and actor for Tipsy Tales: Robin Hood. Recent intimacy choreographer credits: Romeo and Juliet: 60 (2022 & 2023), Twas the Night Before Christmas, and Peter and the Starcatcher. She is certified in Mental Health First Aid and is a certified Artistic Mental Health Practitioner. Recently she wrote, directed, and produced The Mad Hatterpillar and Her Many Heads, a new children’s puppet musical for Synchronicity Theatre’s Stripped Bare series (music by Sarah Beth Hester). They continue to develop that project with local theatres. Claire Wittman (she/her)
Production Dramaturg Claire Wittman is a playwright, dramaturg, and educator based in Virginia. You can learn more about her work at clairewittman.com |
"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." |
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!
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!
"I cannot wait to be married.
To be a wife!"
ARABELLA
April 16-19, 2023
Porpentine Theater
Atlanta Shakespeare Company
~•~•~•~
What does it mean to be a heroine?
Deep in the Northumbrian marshes, a spoiled heiress named Arabella imagines herself an enchanted princess like the ones she reads about in her favorite romances. But when her father unexpectedly dies, Arabella's fairytale comes crashing to the ground. Now, armed with nothing but her wits, Arabella will have to grow up in more ways than one to earn her happy ending.
Loosely based on Charlotte Lennox's 1752 novel, The Female Quixote, ARABELLA is a rollicking exploration of gender, sex, and privilege, set against the scandalous backdrop of 18th century England.
April 16-19, 2023
Porpentine Theater
Atlanta Shakespeare Company
~•~•~•~
What does it mean to be a heroine?
Deep in the Northumbrian marshes, a spoiled heiress named Arabella imagines herself an enchanted princess like the ones she reads about in her favorite romances. But when her father unexpectedly dies, Arabella's fairytale comes crashing to the ground. Now, armed with nothing but her wits, Arabella will have to grow up in more ways than one to earn her happy ending.
Loosely based on Charlotte Lennox's 1752 novel, The Female Quixote, ARABELLA is a rollicking exploration of gender, sex, and privilege, set against the scandalous backdrop of 18th century England.
Cast & Creatives
Rachel Frawley (she/her)
Intimacy Director Rachel Frawley is an Atlanta-based actor, writer, director, producer and intimacy professional. An apprentice company graduate of the Atlanta Shakespeare Co., she has performed steadily in Atlanta's theatre scene, as well as working in indie film, commercial and voice over. She has narrated over 35 audiobook titles, and produced for the Weird Sisters Theatre Project for their 2017 and 2018 seasons and is currently the artistic director of Piccadilly Puppets. She is a current writer, producer, and actor for Tipsy Tales: Robin Hood. Recent intimacy choreographer credits: Romeo and Juliet: 60 (2022 and 2023), Twas the Night Before Christmas, and Peter and the Starcatcher (upcoming). She is certified in Mental Health First Aid and is a certified Artistic Mental Health Practitioner. Recently she wrote, directed and produced The Mad Hatterpillar and Her Many Heads, a new children’s puppet musical for Synchronicity Theatre’s Stripped Bare series (music by Sarah Beth Hester). They continue to develop that project with local theatres. |
Claire Wittman (she/her)
Dramaturg Claire Wittman is a playwright, dramaturg, and educator based in Virginia. You can learn more about her work at clairewittman.com |
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