6/22/2023 0 Comments Da capo ariaIn the middle section of the play Millay emulates a pastoral, specifically a medieval shepherd’s play, using two shepherds as the characters of Thyrsis and Corydon. Modern painters, including Picasso and Cezanne, were depicting these characters in their work, but playwrights and authors in the twentieth century would use these historic characters more after the success of Millay’s play. Completed in November 1918, the play adopted the “harlequinade” tradition to open and close, using the commedia dell’arte characters of Pierrot,(1) the typically lonely melancholic poet, and Columbine, the beautiful girl.(2) Ironically, the main character of a harlequinade, Harlequin the trickster, does not appear. During the late summer and fall, Millay wrote some of her most famous sonnets, including “What lips my lips have kissed,” “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare,” and “Wild Swans.” She also completed Aria da Capo, though she had the idea for the play as early as 1916, told it to Reed in 1918 before he returned to Russia, and Dell knew she was working on it the same year. Spurred on by an eviction of Millay and her family from their Charlton Street apartment early in the year, the poet became driven to earn money writing, even adopting the pseudonym “Nancy Boyd” so she could write fiction and essays without it affecting her reputation as a poet. The play’s oblique approach actually gives its message power and its simplicity of staging was perfect for it to be premiered by the Provincetown Players. The characters are portrayed as being controlled by a script not of their own making, and yet ultimately prove to be powerless to step away from it. The play defies being set in a given time period and the playwright allows juxtapositions within the play to speak louder than the writing of any political statements could have accomplished. An unusual play structurally, a pastoral bookended with a harlequinade, it is unique in that it was perceived by most to be an anti-war statement, and yet can also be seen as an more universal portrayal of the human condition. The play that caught the attention of the critics on this bill, the second bill of the 1919-1920 season, was Aria da Capo by Edna St.
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