Word: gurton
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...play needs to be manhandled. But on the other hand, if it can't be produced as an authentic, academic staging (which would be disastrous), there's little reason to do it at all. Gammer Gurton's Needle is not even a vehicle for Kaplan's production, it is an excuse. Don't see the play, but do see the production and dream about the marvelous things that might happen if this company got its hands on a real bawdy Elizabethan farce...
They're not really sure if Gammer Gurton's Needle is a bawdy Elizabethan farce like the posters say. It's date of composition (c. 1555) by an unknown Mr. S, Master of Art at Cambridge might make it Edwardian. And its bawdiness never makes it out of the anal stage and into the genital, which really means it's not bawdy...
...Steve Kaplan's Loeb production, Gammer Gurton's Needle is a funny play, though what play it is that's funny is often unclear. Kaplan has staged a brilliantly colorful, broadly comic, visually and musically inventive production which attaches itself only loosely to what in a modernized version, is still a crude and dull play...
...plot, as much as one cares, is about the strange disappearance of Dame Gurton's sewing needle (Raye Bush is Gammer, not the needle). We eventually find it in the britches of her man Hodge (Dan Chumley), an acrobatic archetypal simpleton, but not until Diccon the Bedlam (Dan Deitch) has thrown everyone at each other's throats and chickens...
...first of the Fall plays will be Gammer Gurton's Needle, a farcical Tudor comedy by the anonymous Mr. S. Master of Arts. Steven H. Kaplan '68 will direct this--and possibly The Friar and the Pardoner, a short interlude by Thomas Heywood--in mid-October...