Write your abstract
here.
THE BEWITCHED I'd guess would run about four hours
on
stage, it has a cast of thirty-five and innumerable
rich
subplots, but if you keep to basic information only
it's
easy enough to sum up what it's about: the efforts of
the
whole secular and religious nobility of monarchical
Spain
to stiffen the prick of the drooling, pants-wetting,
quasi-
idiot epileptic King Carlos II (a product of only the
highest-grade inbreeding) long enough for him to
impregnate
his cousin-wife
Ana of Neuberg, producing a Spanish
heir
and forestalling a Europe-wide war of factions backing
this
or that Hapsburg monarch's claim to the throne.
Within this overall scheme, plots, counter-plots
and
private agendas abound---Queen Mariana, Carlos' mother,
hates Ana and wants to prevent her bearing a royal
child
for Spain; Bishop Pontocarrero and Father Motilla duel
to
the death over whose
faith is better suited to remove
the
enchantment that keeps Carlos' cock from doodle doing;
and
all the time (in case of failure) rival claimants are
being
considered in terms of whose claim is less likely to
offend
the crowned heads of Europe and their armies, should it
come to that. But essentially all the actions of the
court--
-including an auto da fe organized exclusively to give
Carlos an erection (violence as pornorgraphy, an idea
familiar enough from Hollywood action flicks)---every
motion of a remarkably vigorous,
creative and robust
dramatis personae is directed, impotently, to curing
Carlos' impotence (or at need, susbstituting the cuckoo
service of a courtier, Duque de Almirante, chivalrously
dedicated to the interests of Queen Ana---this is the
frigid, anti-sexual Father Motilla's favourite scheme).
All
the efforts of the court, because they are dedicated to
the
hollow idol of hereditary privilege with empty,
pitilessly
stupid authority at its core, achieve nothing---with
extreme prejudice: no good, no creative end, many
deaths at
court and by play's end, a war that will murder a
million
waiting in the wings, a war which every effort, far
from
forestalling, has only made more inevitable. All this
and
great musical numbers too:
The liar who is thrown on the pyre
By the priest who will make him deceased
F' the faith o' the whole Christian race
Lord
thy world is a
stage Thy stage is a world o' entertainment.
More summaries about the The Bewitched