Judy Sirota Rosenthal Photos
Alasdair MacRae asks the audience to throw “snow” on cue.
Winter 2010 — the longest, whitest winter Scotland has seen in years — and it’s karaoke night at a pub in Kelso, a quaint and funny town nestled in the Scottish borders where a conference has just taken place.
Center stage, professor Colin Syme is leading the charge on a night of academics gone wild, bumping and grinding with colleagues atop a table as lights pulse in the background and pop music seethes through the speakers. Snowed-in pubgoers laugh and drink and strip on all sides, reveling in this messy, unexpected winter bacchanal.
At the fringes of it, peering miserably into her pint of bitter red ale, is uptight academic Prudencia Hart, feeling every ounce of out of place.
With scenes like this, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart — playing at Gryphon’s Pub at The Graduate and Professional Student Club at Yale (GPSCY) through Sunday — covers the good, the bad, the ugly, and the strange of academia.
Brought to New Haven through the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and performed by a small but powerful troupe from the National Theatre of Scotland, Prudencia adds an ambitious and novel voice to a conversation that has been unfolding for years, but feels especially timely right now: What does it mean to be a scholar — in the humanities no less — channeling some well-researched but misled concept of truth and beauty through one’s own work?
Jessca Hardwick as Prudencia Hart, riding atop Annie Grace’s shoulders.
The play follows Prudencia Hart, enthusiastic if traditional scholar of Scottish balladry, folklore, and the particular topography of hell, through one crazy night in Kelso. There are also several millennia in hell, but we’ll get to that in a second. When audience members make her acquaintance, she is on her way through a snowstorm to present a paper in Kelso, where the night’s debauchery will take place. Beside her, erect atop his motorbike, rides academic nemesis Colin Syme, whose work on Scottish borders breaks with Prudencia’s traditional outlook and — even as it is eaten up by scholars — irks her to the core.
It’s kind of a given that scholarly pettiness ensues. Members of the audience — and given the play’s setting, it would be a shame if some of New Haven’s academic public didn’t come for a good laugh at itself — settled in for the usual: tempered arguments about semiotics over lunch, polite disagreements about Judith Butler and Roland Barthes in the bathroom, a final showdown midway into the afternoon panels, where old-school methodologies, precocious new scholars, and plug-and-play uses of theory all compete for most memorable paper.
An audience member makes “snow.”
But this is where Prudencia surprises, delights, and confounds. That kind of pettiness does happen at the conference, but it’s only the beginning of a series of strange events that include spectral sightings, deals with the Devil, millennia of scholarly work in hell, and once-a-year holes in the time-space continuum. Set before a backdrop of live folk music and twisting, contorting human bodies that run and jump through the space and interact with audience members, it’s a fully immersive, spot-on parody of academia and its practitioners that manages to be very funny throughout, using physical humor and witty language to explore the life of the mind.
If Prudencia stopped there, it would still be worth seeing. But the play also manages to be a thoughtful and surprising meditation on how fully immersed one can become in their life’s work, and how that work, in turn, can become a sort of moral rulebook. With a dogged and thoroughly warped sense of nostalgia, Prudencia clings to the past because she cannot deal with the present. Everything, from poststructuralism to smartphone apps, disturbs her sense of how the world ought to be. Her yearning for a bygone era leads her, literally, to hell’s front door, and her sense of moral superiority brings her to her knees. But her bookish understanding of the world — and an academically mature willingness to embrace being wrong — enables her to find salvation, breaking through a professorial fourth wall before the play’s bawdy culmination.
McKay and Paul McCole play as the audience takes its seats.
David Greig’s inventive script is written to be performed in bars and pubs. National Theatre of Scotland company members Annie Grace and Alasdair MacRae thrill as they take on about 40 roles each, from singing ethereal presences to jargon-spitting grad students to underworldly bookshelves. David McKay transitions from bumbling professor to Lucifer incarnate and back again without the slightest hint of difficulty. Jessica Hardwick is a show-stopping Prudencia, and Paul McCole plays her academic counterpart Syme with a bravado so suited to his character that it’s hard to believe he’s not a secretly sweet academic blowhard by the end of the night, when the show ends and final bows are over.
Grace.
All of which, at the end of two and a half hours, amounts to an academic and professional reality that is as frank as it is funny: Dedicating oneself so wholly to an academic project is going to be complicated, and romantic, and exhausting, and really messy. But it may well be completely worth it, if the challenge is something one can dare to stomach.
Unless, of course, they’re already having second thoughts about that Ph.D.
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart runs through April 3 at Gryphon’s Pub at GPSCY, located at 204 York St. Tickets are available through the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. For more about the National Theatre of Scotland, visit its website.