"Mondragola" at Central Works

 

Central Works production photo by Robbie Sweeny

Plays at Central Works are always kind of hit-and-miss. For over thirty years, they have been producing only world-premiere plays, Mondragola being their 70th, written by founder and company co-director Gary Graves and directed by fellow founder and co-director Jan Zvaifler. I'm going to say up front that this is not the best work by the company, by a long shot.

The Play

At a scant 65 minutes, the play seems pretty minimal, considering all it's trying to accomplish. In 1522, playwright Niccolo Machiavelli (yes, that guy) is in Florence, delivering a play to be performed before Cardinal Medici. The play is a silly farce called "La Mondragola", which means "the mandrake root", a supposed aphrodisiac. Although they spend a fair amount of the start of the show explaining this little play, neither the play nor its subject matter ends up being important to the plot of Graves' play, which seems odd.

Mostly what we get is a lot of fussing over the fact that the hired actors have run off with their fees, so there is no one to perform, so Battista, the guy who hired them, Luigi, the loopy guy who seems to have no actual job, and Zenobia, whose presence never makes any sense, will somehow learn and perform the play in one day.

All of this is merely a front for political machinations (hey, it's Machiavelli, after all) by Battista and Zenobia. Given some more time and attention to the writing, I think this premise could perhaps have turned into a decent play, but this isn't it. It definitely feels like it wasn't thought through, and then wasn't very thoroughly written.

The Performance

Given that they don't have much to work with in the script, the actors try to pull something together, but there is really no depth here, and they mostly end up kind of flailing. I wish there were some ray of hope I could glean from this, but really, just no.

The Bottom Line

I'm not sure what they were thinking here. I've seen much better work from all the people involved here: Graves, Zveifler, and some of the actors. I have to believe that something went wrong in the process, and they were committed to putting this on stage. But really, it wasn't ready, and wasn't up to the standards I expect from Central Works.

The production has finished its run, so this mostly serves to remind me what I saw here. Overall, a forgettable effort, and I hope it's just a one-time glitch in the Central Works story.