| Jeffery Sneed and Cassie Guion in ‘Bloody Poetry’ at BGSU (Photo: Andrew Weber/Sentinel-Tribune) |
Hard as it is to imagine, there was a time when poets were celebrities.
They were as famous as movie stars are now, and enjoyed the same scrutiny and notoriety.
"Bloody Poetry," which opens tonight in Bowling Green State University’s Joe E. Brown Theatre
and continues through Saturday, takes its contemporary audience to that time almost two centuries ago,
when tongues were wagging about the exploits and foibles of poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord
Byron, and their wives and mistresses.
They were oversized characters and knew it. I can’t help but see echoes of all this in our own time, and
not just because their writing lives on.
"Bloody Poetry," directed by Jonathan Chambers, brings Shelley (Jeffery Sneed) , Byron (Brent
Winzek) and their lovers Mary Shelley (Cassie Guion) and Claire Clairemont (Kendra Jo Brook) to the
stage.
The play begins and ends on the beach, and spends much of its time between on the water.
We meet Shelley and the two women on Lake Geneva in Switzerland awaiting Byron’s arrival. They are
awaiting history – the meeting of these two titans of the era, and they are well aware of its import.
They are aware as well of the opprobrium over their work and lives back in England. They are Shelley
declares atheists, free thinkers, free lovers, "poeticals."
Mary Shelley notes many back in England would love to see them hanged.
They self-aware to a fault, and declare their beliefs in ringing rhyme and high toned turns of phrase.
The play is packed with soliloquies about love and poetry and freedom proclaimed at top volume – so loud
at times the diction suffers, reducing some passages to half understood fulmination.
Yet for all the fancy verse, this odd menage cannot keep the world or the consequences of their own
frailties at bay.
Claire images on that Lake Geneva beach that the event would be rendered as a statue, but they are not
polished stone. While the talk soars, it is the women, and off-stage children, who bear the brunt of the
suffering.
Byron and Shelley leave in their wake despondent concubines. Three of Shelley’s lovers commit suicide – a
drowning, overdose and hanging. And children die, being too fragile for the heat and turmoil of their
parents’ lives.
Sneed does well bringing to life Shelley’s passion, and better his frailty, both physical and emotional.
Winzek’s Byron is his opposite, robust in his appetites, loud and arrogant in his views, oblivious of
the wreckage in his wake.
Brook’s Claire is ever the idealist who is weakened and disheartened in the end.
Guion’s Mary Shelley is as close to a maternal figure as exist her. Sharp of intellect, the equal of the
men, but relegated even by these free thinkers to be the one concerned about the children and the bills
and lawsuits over child custody.
Kerbie Minor’s ethereal Harriet, Shelley’s dead first wife, haunts the second half.
JD Caudill plays Dr. Polidori, an old literary version of the paparazzi, always on the edge of the bright
circle, kept at a disdainful arm’s length, but close enough to record all the scandal his readers back
home devour. He is in a way a monster, but a minor monster among other monsters, albeit beautiful
monsters.
The poets’ verse is still read and studied, but ironically it is the monster of Mary Shelley’s
imagination, who stalks the margins of the play, who resonates most with our time. That monster, of
course, is Frankenstein.
