Suitors
Translated and freely adapted by Harley Erdman from Ana Caro’s Count Partinuplés and Feliciana Enríquez’s The Moldy Graces
Cast: 7m, 3w as given (cross-gender casting encouraged)
Run time: approximately 100 minutes with Moldy Graces, 80 minutes without Moldy Graces.
Suitors is an adaptation of Count Partinuplés, a remarkable play by Ana Caro, a playwright who lived in early 17th-century Spain. Recently rediscovered and made available to Spanish readers, it has never before been translated before into English or any other language.
Rosaura, empress of Constantinople, refuses to marry the many dubious suitors her advisors parade before her. She wants, instead, the world’s most faithful and loyal man. With the help of her cousin and confidante, Aldora, she enchants a French nobleman named Count Partinuplés, bringing him to a magic castle where she puts him through tests of loyalty and enjoys his sexual favors – all the while remaining invisible to him. When Partinuplés takes advantage of an opportunity to gaze upon his invisible lady, Rosaura becomes enraged and banishes him – only to immediately be filled with regret and a desire to win him back.
Ahead of its time by hundreds of years, the play shows a female subject, expected to be the passive prize competed over by suitors, becoming an active agent in pursuing the suitor of her dreams. It shows complicated that pursuit can be, even when the woman is wealthy and powerful.
The Count Partinuplés portion of Suitors stands on its own as a full-length play. The script offers the possibility of staging it with the farce, The Moldy Graces, by Feliciana Enríquez, another female playwright from Golden Age Spain whose work has recently been rediscovered. In these plays, six grotesque suitors ineptly woe three horny sisters. The sisters refuse to choose. The result: all three sisters marry all six suitors, in an orgiastic feast of eighteen weddings.
The Moldy Graces calls for ten characters, and thus is perfectly double cast with Count Partinuplés. It can work as an interlude to Partinuplés or as an afterpiece, as it was when Suitors debuted at the University of Massachusetts in February 2013.
Photos from 2013 UMass production by Jon Crispin. Director: Kara-Lynn Vaeni.
Cast: 7m, 3w as given (cross-gender casting encouraged)
Run time: approximately 100 minutes with Moldy Graces, 80 minutes without Moldy Graces.
Suitors is an adaptation of Count Partinuplés, a remarkable play by Ana Caro, a playwright who lived in early 17th-century Spain. Recently rediscovered and made available to Spanish readers, it has never before been translated before into English or any other language.
Rosaura, empress of Constantinople, refuses to marry the many dubious suitors her advisors parade before her. She wants, instead, the world’s most faithful and loyal man. With the help of her cousin and confidante, Aldora, she enchants a French nobleman named Count Partinuplés, bringing him to a magic castle where she puts him through tests of loyalty and enjoys his sexual favors – all the while remaining invisible to him. When Partinuplés takes advantage of an opportunity to gaze upon his invisible lady, Rosaura becomes enraged and banishes him – only to immediately be filled with regret and a desire to win him back.
Ahead of its time by hundreds of years, the play shows a female subject, expected to be the passive prize competed over by suitors, becoming an active agent in pursuing the suitor of her dreams. It shows complicated that pursuit can be, even when the woman is wealthy and powerful.
The Count Partinuplés portion of Suitors stands on its own as a full-length play. The script offers the possibility of staging it with the farce, The Moldy Graces, by Feliciana Enríquez, another female playwright from Golden Age Spain whose work has recently been rediscovered. In these plays, six grotesque suitors ineptly woe three horny sisters. The sisters refuse to choose. The result: all three sisters marry all six suitors, in an orgiastic feast of eighteen weddings.
The Moldy Graces calls for ten characters, and thus is perfectly double cast with Count Partinuplés. It can work as an interlude to Partinuplés or as an afterpiece, as it was when Suitors debuted at the University of Massachusetts in February 2013.
Photos from 2013 UMass production by Jon Crispin. Director: Kara-Lynn Vaeni.