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Sophia Peabody Hawthorne
Note: This has been cross-posted on the Margaret Ghost Producer's Blog, where there are a lot of new entries and you should go browse them if you take an interest in this production.
Note the second: The play opens THIS THURSDAY! Through Sunday only -- four shows! You should come! Belmont is pretty easily accessible even by public transit, and odds are I can give (or arrange) you a ride back to the Red Line afterwards :-)
So I'm playing Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel.
When we did this play the first time, I didn't do a whole lot of research into the historical Sophia, beyond a cursory glance at Wikipedia and assorted other website summaries. I knew that she was well-known in her own right as an artist, and from an intellectual family.
But what I picked up from the internal cues in the text was that, as written, her character was... well, in the same way that Anna Ward serves as a foil for Margaret physically, Sophia is a foil for her intellectually: demure, delicate, domestic, and ditzy. A couple of her lines have the clear sense that she's a little too simple (or at least naive) to get what's being said around her. And Margaret makes at least one rather scathing reference to her in her absence: "I don't mind your insults, Mr. Hawthorne, if only you would keep them simple enough that Sophia doesn't have to have them constantly explained." Even if this is Margaret's flair for hyperbole, it's clear that this version of Sophia is not meant to be the sharpest crayon in the box.
I'm not sure exactly who it is that I heard in my head when initially reading over her lines, but the closest mental picture I seem to be able to get is Georgette Franklin on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So I definitely started out with a squeaky sort of little-girl tone to her voice. Elizabeth had me tone that part down considerably over the rehearsal period; by the time of performing the first show, we had gotten pretty well away from it, but I still wasn't completely sure where that left me.
In preparing for this revival, Andrea (Margaret) lent me a book several months ago, Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. Besides the artist of the family, Sophia was also the invalid of the family, suffering from chronic ill health and debilitating migraine -- due possibly to being dosed with mercury as an infant. Amusingly, she was also tiny: barely five feet tall and 98 pounds. I'm 5'10" and, well, not quite twice that. Plus, the boots we got for my costume have 3" heels, putting me nearly at eye level with our already-tall Nathaniel: "The Hawthornes are here! Looming over everybody!"
Note that Sophia-in-the-play is also held up as a particularly prim example of feminine chastity (Margaret: "It is very hard to think of her as married, isn't it?"). Yet it's equally clear from all accounts that the Hawthornes had a very passionate and devoted relationship that produced, among their other artistic achievements, three children. They married in their early 30s -- relatively late in life, especially in that time. I still haven't gotten up to the part of their love story, but I'm excitedly working up to it as opening night draws near.
When we started meeting with Elizabeth about our characters this spring, she asked me to bring Sophia's vocal register down still a bit further, in hopes that that might lend her some more (literal, physical) depth. The other, mental shift she suggested was to focus less on Sophia's concern with propriety -- that comes through easily enough in the surface text -- but rather on her compassion, not just for all the oppressed and less fortunate under discussion in Act 1, but for Margaret herself in a variety of ways throughout the play. Every time Sophia turns a beseeching look on Nathaniel in return for one of his withering remarks, or every well-meaning effort she makes to determine what course is safest and wisest for Margaret... it's this aspect that I have been trying to keep foremost in my mind.
P.S. I've also started reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, which figures heavily into the dialogue (if not exactly the plot) of our play. First off, it's clear that whole chunks of Hawthorne's dialogue here are lifted right out of there ("Such men will smite and slay you and trample your dead corpse!"). But more interestingly, if you come to it after you get personally acquainted with the characters in the play -- the way our characters themselves theoretically would have -- it's absolutely hilarious to see some of the parallels. Now, for Sophia to stand there with Nathaniel and baldly assert that there's no resemblance between Margaret and Zenobia... suddenly I have to put in whole layers of internal subtext to rationalize how Sophia can possibly fail to see the connections!
Note the second: The play opens THIS THURSDAY! Through Sunday only -- four shows! You should come! Belmont is pretty easily accessible even by public transit, and odds are I can give (or arrange) you a ride back to the Red Line afterwards :-)
So I'm playing Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel.
When we did this play the first time, I didn't do a whole lot of research into the historical Sophia, beyond a cursory glance at Wikipedia and assorted other website summaries. I knew that she was well-known in her own right as an artist, and from an intellectual family.
But what I picked up from the internal cues in the text was that, as written, her character was... well, in the same way that Anna Ward serves as a foil for Margaret physically, Sophia is a foil for her intellectually: demure, delicate, domestic, and ditzy. A couple of her lines have the clear sense that she's a little too simple (or at least naive) to get what's being said around her. And Margaret makes at least one rather scathing reference to her in her absence: "I don't mind your insults, Mr. Hawthorne, if only you would keep them simple enough that Sophia doesn't have to have them constantly explained." Even if this is Margaret's flair for hyperbole, it's clear that this version of Sophia is not meant to be the sharpest crayon in the box.
I'm not sure exactly who it is that I heard in my head when initially reading over her lines, but the closest mental picture I seem to be able to get is Georgette Franklin on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So I definitely started out with a squeaky sort of little-girl tone to her voice. Elizabeth had me tone that part down considerably over the rehearsal period; by the time of performing the first show, we had gotten pretty well away from it, but I still wasn't completely sure where that left me.
In preparing for this revival, Andrea (Margaret) lent me a book several months ago, Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. Besides the artist of the family, Sophia was also the invalid of the family, suffering from chronic ill health and debilitating migraine -- due possibly to being dosed with mercury as an infant. Amusingly, she was also tiny: barely five feet tall and 98 pounds. I'm 5'10" and, well, not quite twice that. Plus, the boots we got for my costume have 3" heels, putting me nearly at eye level with our already-tall Nathaniel: "The Hawthornes are here! Looming over everybody!"
Note that Sophia-in-the-play is also held up as a particularly prim example of feminine chastity (Margaret: "It is very hard to think of her as married, isn't it?"). Yet it's equally clear from all accounts that the Hawthornes had a very passionate and devoted relationship that produced, among their other artistic achievements, three children. They married in their early 30s -- relatively late in life, especially in that time. I still haven't gotten up to the part of their love story, but I'm excitedly working up to it as opening night draws near.
When we started meeting with Elizabeth about our characters this spring, she asked me to bring Sophia's vocal register down still a bit further, in hopes that that might lend her some more (literal, physical) depth. The other, mental shift she suggested was to focus less on Sophia's concern with propriety -- that comes through easily enough in the surface text -- but rather on her compassion, not just for all the oppressed and less fortunate under discussion in Act 1, but for Margaret herself in a variety of ways throughout the play. Every time Sophia turns a beseeching look on Nathaniel in return for one of his withering remarks, or every well-meaning effort she makes to determine what course is safest and wisest for Margaret... it's this aspect that I have been trying to keep foremost in my mind.
P.S. I've also started reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, which figures heavily into the dialogue (if not exactly the plot) of our play. First off, it's clear that whole chunks of Hawthorne's dialogue here are lifted right out of there ("Such men will smite and slay you and trample your dead corpse!"). But more interestingly, if you come to it after you get personally acquainted with the characters in the play -- the way our characters themselves theoretically would have -- it's absolutely hilarious to see some of the parallels. Now, for Sophia to stand there with Nathaniel and baldly assert that there's no resemblance between Margaret and Zenobia... suddenly I have to put in whole layers of internal subtext to rationalize how Sophia can possibly fail to see the connections!
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