Reading: "Botticelli in the Fire" at Shotgun Players

Busy times since we got back from New York City a couple of weeks ago. It took me most of that time to catch up on blogging all the shows we'd seen there, but meanwhile I was seeing a bunch more stuff at home, which I now need to catch up on quickly because we're headed off to our annual trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival tomorrow, and there will be lots, lots more.

So, let's see if we can't get some of the backlog trimmed, starting with the second of Shotgun's Champagne Staged Reading Series for the year, Botticelli in the Fire by Jordan Tannahill. This show is apparently having (or just had) a very successful run at DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Shotgun snagged the rights to do a staged reading, and I caught the second of two performances. As usual, it's four days of rehearsal with a little technical support in the way of lights, sounds, etc.

The Play

I have to start by saying that this show was interesting, but didn't totally grab me. We have the story of Sandro Botticelli, artist, courtier, and man-about-town. He's currently working on a radical masterpiece, a portrait of his patron's wife in the form of Venus rising, naked on a huge shell. It gets a little complicated, because he's also carrying on a rather torrid affair with the wife while she "poses" for him. This is particularly problematic because a) his patron is the notoriously ill-tempered Lorenzo de Medici, b) his libertine lifestyle provides lots of leverage for an angry patron to use against him, and c) he is particularly fond of his young protege/boyfriend, Leonardo. The atmosphere is ripe, too, because of the religious purges led by Friar Savonarola, the bonfires of the vanities.

So Botticelli finds himself literally caught between his desires and the fires. The volatile Medici certainly has echoes of some current cultural figures, not least of which is a certain wealthy reality-TV-star-turned-politician. I suspect that a more developed production of the play might manage to highlight some of the larger themes, where the reading was dominated by the personal relationships.

The Production

In addition to my usual awe at seeing what these artists can produce in so little time, I was delighted to see the return of local favorite Patrick Kelly Jones to the stage after a hiatus of a couple of years, and also an appearance by Marilet Martinez, who I thought had relocated out of town. So that was extra fun for me.

The production itself was somewhat hampered by having to work on the set of the current mainstage play, Dry Land. Although the lockers in the locker room were shrouded, it was definitely not the right setting for a renaissance artist's workshop. The play is written as contemporary, however, so it can't really be authentic renaissance, but it still shouldn't be a locker room.

And for whatever reason, the whole production seemed less polished than some of the other recent readings at Shotgun.

Bottom Line

There is a lot of interesting material here, but I didn't feel like the reading gave us a clear picture of all this play could be. That said, the conflict of classes, of patron and artist, and of the artist against some of his base desires, should be ripe for exploration on stage. The language seemed interesting and some of the peripheral characters probably have more to offer than we could get from the reading.

All in all, I'd be interested in seeing more of this play, though I can't say with full clarity that I see all it ought to be. I'll be intrigued to see whether this shows up as a full staged production somewhere nearby.