“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.”
Samuel Johnson
by Jeff Grygny
During the curtain call of a recent performance of Boswell, the charming historical fantasy currently playing at Next Act Theatre, Brian Mani, who plays the rumbustuous Samuel Johnson, was noticed wiping a tear from his eye. Could it be that his immersion in the writer’s emotions as he gazes across the great ocean at the ends of the Hebrides, brought him to tears? To paraphrase Hamlet, what’s Johnson to him, or he to Johnson, that he should weep?
Chances are you haven’t thought about Samuel Johnson recently, possibly for the same reasons that he was once regarded as the greatest writer of his time: he so much embodied the spirit of his age—the turbulent, passionate 18th century enlightenment—that he seems to us now so remote, fusty even, admirable only for such pithy quotes as “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” We might have heard that he wrote the first dictionary of the English language. (“Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”)
That we know anything at all about him is largely because James Boswell, a minor Scottish aristocrat and party boy, followed him around like a puppy, chronicling just about everything he did and said, in what has been often called one of the greatest biographies in the English language. Boswell was a compulsive journaller, who recorded life in the Age of Revolutions as few others had. He seems to have gone everywhere and met everyone: the actor David Garrick, the philosopher David Hume, the painter Joshua Reynolds—he had a fling with the philosopher Rousseau’s mistress, for heaven’s sake!
And he left very little out—including his many whoring exploits (he enumerated his climaxes) and his subsequent treatments for the clap. He reports cheating on his wife with a comely lass while Johnson was visiting, and the stern rebuke he got from him afterwards. Yet the two remained best buddies, bonded maybe as much by their mutual melancholic tendencies as their love of letters.
We know this, not only for the records he published in his time, but also because vast troves of his journals and notes, preserved and sometimes expurgated by his descendants, were discovered in the 1930s in an Irish castle by a former army captain named Ralph Heyward Isham, and more later in a Scottish manor by the poet Claude Colleer Abbott—including the original notes for Boswell and Johnson’s long trip through Scotland. Finally edited and published in 1950, Boswell’s notes became a best seller for their incomparably vivid and racy pictures of 18th century life (his notoriety even granted him a treatment by the underground comic artist R. Crumb).
These two journeys, the tour and the discovery, are the stories that playwright Marie Kohler has interwoven in the play.
Kohler (yes, from that family) has long been devoted to the arts, co-founding Renaissance Theaterworks in 1993 to “create more opportunities for women in theater.” This play (reworking her 2005 script Boswell’s Dreams) asks what if the discovery of the manuscripts had been made by a minority woman scholar in 1950? And what if she was encouraged and inspired by the earthy wisdom of the lady of the manor to stand up against her pompous faculty advisor? Thus the play we can now see: juxtaposing the travels of the two historical men with the conversations of the two fictional women. If it sounds a bit like a Masterpiece Theater episode, that’s exactly what it is like: an intelligent highbrow comic drama with a dash of empowerment. A textured antiquarian set by Jody Sekas and atmospheric music from Josh Schmidt, lend the production a Dickensian vibe that makes it, if not a holiday play, then holiday-adjacent.
Director Laura Gordon, revisiting the play after directing successful runs in Scotland and off-Broadway, evokes the dynamism of the 18th century with breezy action and charismatic performances, led by Josh Krause, who brings a certain manic restlessness to the title role. As Johnson, Brian Mani lumbers and rumbles with gusto, scattering witty aperçus like so many pearls. In the 20th century, Madeline Calais-King is a gentle, thoughtful anchor, manifesting her outsider status in a bookish reserve, while Heidi Armbruster displays a true Scot’s zest and canny humor as the cash-poor lady of the estate.
Apart from its layered-in identity politics, Boswell is a play very much not of our moment— unapologetically so; in fact, it derives much of it’s strength from this remoteness. It reminds us that the burning issues of our time are but the latest page in the journal of history, that people whose concerns are far from ours still enjoyed food, conversation and other pleasures of life, perhaps even more than we do in our hyper-mediated age. Our concepts of individual rights were still in the oven, so to speak, and yet it was an age of great passions, intellectual as well as sensual. In our age, when bodies and minds are digitized, when humanities departments are shutting down, and even the idea of literacy is beginning to seem quaint, it’s hard not to envy them a bit.
Boswell’s journals were a labor of love; so were the labors of the people who rediscovered them. And so is this play an act of love: from the hard-working artists who, for an hour or so, let us sit in the Cheshire Cheese Tavern and eavesdrop on Johnson dropping his gems of wit, hear Garrick describing his latest performance as Hamlet, with Boswell as our eyes and ears. And we can understand why that’s valuable; lovable, even.
Next Act Theatre
presents
BOSWELL
by Marie Kohler
Directed by Laura Gordon
playing through December 14
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