What's Going on Here?

I was a drama camp kid, and my first exposure to commedia dell’arte came at around age 7. Most individual plays don’t boast cast lists large enough to occupy a whole camp full of kids, so different groups of us were assigned to different plays. I was not assigned as a performer in Bamboozled!, but it was clear from watching that it was the best play of the bunch that year. It was written in what I didn’t know at the time was a commedia style. Jokes like the Inamorata causing birds (the off-stage actors) to tweet every time she spoke the name of her beloved stuck with me for years. 

Quite some time later, probably in my late teens, I came across the script again. When I got to the end of it, the author explained in a note that it was a commedia dell’arte show, and he mentioned that Duchartre’s Italian Comedy had been informative to his writing of the style. I picked up a copy of this book the next time I was at Borders Bookstore (remember those?).

By this point in time I was already a dedicated opera fan, and the libretto for The Marriage of Figaro was probably the best thing I’d ever read, with the original play by Beaumarchais providing fine supplementary material (though I will argue that da Ponte’s version is a little better for having removed several unnecessary subplots.) Duchartre specifically mentioned Figaro as a variant on the Brighella character (who had also figured in Bamboozled!) and it fast became apparent to me that most comic operas were using these commedia types of stories and characters. So it looked like this commedia stuff was something I should get into.

It also made perfect sense to me with the kind of theatre and literary training I’d had. My parents had met as actors and dabbled in film and theatre for much of my youth. Take Your Daughter to Work Day consisted of me being taught Hollywood plot structure, which is the same for basically every film, and thus very like the commedia’s set structure for basically every story. I also dabble in fanfiction, and in the late 90s/early 2000s was part of a movement that was attempting to elevate it to a more legitimate type of writing (Godawful Fan Fiction taught me so much about what NOT to do in a story) — but the same rules one must apply for good fanfiction, of maintaining character no matter what storyline you stick them in, made sense in the rules of commedia stock characters, too. 

Somewhere around this time I also came across the now-long-defunct website of the Austin Commedia Society (Wayback Machine preserves some of it), which offered extremely helpful material in the form of scenari, lazzi, and transcriptions of how their troupe had performed some of the shows. The latter provided an especially helpful tip — the actors had figured out what worked in their shows and were making sure to use the same successful lines and jokes over and over as far as possible, even if wasn’t specified in the scenario. (And it’s an excellent tip. I’ve had some serious nightmare experiences with people’s modern understanding of improvisation as meaning freedom to do something totally new each time, conflicting with commedia’s original intention of providing illiterate actors with strict rules so they could to always create a consistent show.)

In the midst of this, also, I was a general fan of historical theatre. Google Books didn’t exist yet, so discovering old stageplays was a bit more work than it is today. Project Gutenberg had some offerings, but often I was making photocopies out of old books or tracking down second hand original copies, at that time just keeping the material for my own purposes. I was often surprised, and a little frustrated, by how many great old plays there are that no one performs anymore. I would often pitch productions to my local community theatre, but they never were interested, preferring instead the same rotation of Importance of Being Earnest and Midsummer Nights Dream and “socially relevant” modern plays; in the meantime I was associated with a group of young artists in Santa Fe that went on to eventually form Meow Wolf due to similar issues with the snootiness of the local art scene, via an old teen art center called Warehouse 21. This long gone place understood that teens haven’t got much money to spend on art, and was usually willing to provide things like free theatre space to enable projects they had in mind. So, with this access, and still being young and harboring dreams of being an actress, I started putting together materials for shows I might like to do.

The scenario for Sleepless in Siena has a date of 2003, which would make me around 19 or 20 when I wrote it. That matches a span of a few years at which I was deepest in my study and creation of commedia dell’arte plays. I never succeeded, then, in getting a production staged — in Santa Fe it’s hard to find a whole cast of actors, and even more trouble to get them to show up to the rehearsals once cast. The local paper’s consistent misprinting of my casting calls never helped, either. But, this meant I amassed a fair bit of material, both original and public domain, intended for someone who was performing commedia dell’arte plays.

I don’t remember when the Austin Commedia site went away. But somewhere around 2009, it occurred to me I could make a similar website from all these materials I had — including original plays I’d written — that were sitting around doing nothing of any use. Moreover, I was sensitive to the fact that, one reason you never see these shows performed, is many of the classics are from non-English originals and the royalties on the translations are prohibitive for smaller companies. I decided I would put online my collection of public domain and original materials so that other people interested in commedia could use them, and I decided I would make all the original plays royalty-free for performance. When it came to something like commedia dell’arte, which already is so much about copying old characters and jokes and plotlines over and over, it felt icky to ask for royalties as if I’d done anything particularly original, anyway.

The setup of this commedia site was very much influenced by Joseph Peterson’s Esoteric Archives, being a collection of original and public domain educational texts, and (originally) trying to earn money by selling supplementary materials. At first I had a domain name for the commedia site, but by the time its expiration came up I had never managed to earn enough from donations or sales to pay the hosting fees, so I let that slide and have just kept it as a free Google Site ever since.

So that was really the origin of it all. From time to time I’d learn something new or come across another play, and I’d add it to the collection. Script formats are always difficult to post on the internet, and when Google Sites insisted on a change to mobile-friendly pages, a lot of the formatting was massively buggered. (I’m still cleaning up remnants of the forced change to this day — dead links, empty spots where old links should have been, and formatting that turned to scrambled eggs. So sorry if you come upon another relic!) Plays like The Two Harlequins and Doctor Dodypoll were hand typed by me. I remember being so excited when I found an original Italian text for La Fortunata Isabella so that I was able to create an exclusive translation to share, despite that I don’t speak Italian very well — it was many weeks of work, translating it a word at a time. 

Since the time of making the site, I have managed to perform in a couple of commedia shows. In 2011 I put together a production of my Haunted House scenario, in which I played the inamorata. I was also cast a year or so later as Lucinda in The Captain’s Treasure.

It's been odd for me, coming at commedia the way that I did, to see how it's interpreted by others. I think of it as primarily a genre; but it's often perceived entirely as a performance technique. 

My initial imagining was that the main users of this commedia material would be professional or semi-professional actors from small troupes who couldn’t afford royalties on a play like Bamboozled! but deserved something comparable. I’ve since been surprised to discover a lot of the users are amateurs and schools (who sometimes make very weird unauthorized changes to the text.) I’ve also been dismayed that folks have copied my plays onto other websites without properly crediting me as the author or depicting the correct licensing terms, with the result that more than once my plays have been mistaken for historical scenari and listed as such. This is why I’ve been forced to crack down on the copyright violations — it’s creating misinformation when you copy my work onto other sites, and so I must implore you not to do it. Redistributing the texts on other sites without credit also creates embarrassment and problems for others who then mistake the material for public domain and don’t learn otherwise till after they’ve already done something inappropriate with it.  

If you want to share the work, please, I beg, link people to this site so that they can see it in its intended context and also be given opportunities to support the author and compiler. 

— Talia Felix