THEATER REVIEW: Revels and Revelations at Ventfort Hall
Theater
Revels and Revelations
Written and directed by Juliane Hiam
(Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum, Lenox, Mass., $25)
A Ventfort Hall production of a play in one act, in cooperation with Shakespeare & Company
Belle da Costa Greene played by Andi Bohs
Reviewed by Lesley Ann Beck
The enigmatic Belle da Costa Greene, the first director of the great Morgan Library, is the subject of Revels and Revelations, a new, one-woman play performed through September 5 at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum. Written and directed by Juliane Hiam, this world premiere is part of the special programming marking Ventfort Hall’s tenth anniversary as a museum.
Ventfort Hall has offered plays every summer since 2002, allowing audiences to meet fascinating women the likes of Fanny Kemble, Annie Kneeland Haggerty Shaw, and O-Yuki Morgan, the geisha who married into the Morgan family, for whom Ventfort Hall was built. Belle da Costa Greene, while she never visited Ventfort Hall, knew several generations of the Morgans through her work for the library, and certainly qualifies as one of the most captivating women to be portrayed at Ventfort.
J.P. Morgan hired Belle in 1905 to assist him with his private library; she was just twenty and had been working at Princeton University. Belle became an expert in ancient manuscripts and documents, as well as works of art, and when the Morgan Library became a public institution after J.P.’s death, she was appointed the first director, a post she held until her retirement in 1948.
As the play opens, the audience sees the librarian’s office in the Morgan Library, sometime in the early years of the twentieth century. The set by Carl Sprague and the costumes by Arthur Oliver are handsomely done. Belle da Costa Greene enters from the top of the grand staircase, still in corset and petticoats, unaware she is being observed. She sings to herself until, startled, she sees the audience members. She begins recounting a dream she was having, moving behind a screen to dress, continuing her narrative, until she emerges in a stunning white lace gown. Andi Bohs, a luminous beauty with marvelous stage presence and a lovely voice, portrays Belle.
Bohs as Belle shares passages from dreams, stories of her past, and anecdotes about her work collecting the valuable manuscripts for the Morgan Library. But as a woman who appreciates the power of the written word, she insists her own stories will not be preserved in writing. “Words on paper have power,” she says. “They not only record truth, they create truth.”
The real-life Belle was remarkably successful for a woman of her time, running the library for forty-three years and becoming a respected expert in the world of manuscripts and art. But she had a secret, and she had all her personal papers destroyed to keep that secret. Her career was spent acquiring valuable, genuine manuscripts, but in Revels and Revelations, she calls herself a fake, a counterfeit. Belle chose to disguise her background by adopting a Portuguese name and the heritage to go with it. In Hiam’s script, Belle says that she did what she had to do to “rise above the nonsense.”
Hiam employs her skill as a playwright to create an impression of Belle’s life, from her years at the library, to the end of her life, and back again to her relationship with J.P. Morgan. Hiam also makes interesting use of the numbers 1:19, musing on the corresponding chapter and verse in the Bible book of Revelation: “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.” It’s an apt passage for a play about a woman so taken with the importance of written words.
The contradictions in Belle’s life are fascinating. For a woman who made a life’s work out of collecting and preserving books and manuscripts, it’s tragic that she had to make sure her own remarkable life story would remain guarded. Revels and Revelations offers an intriguing portrait of this exceptional woman.
Set design, Carl Sprague; Costume design, Arthur Oliver; Original score by Commander Pants; Projection design by David Edwards; Stage management, Sasha Rivera and Heather Hubble; choreography, Ruslan Sprague
(Through September 5; running time one hour, no intermission)
Photos by Kevin Sprague
Berkshire Living managing editor Lesley Ann Beck reviews theater and music for www.BerkshireLiving.com.
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