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    Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom
    Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom
    Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom
    Ebook258 pages1 hour

    Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom

    By Jordan Tannahill and Kirsten Bowen

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    About this ebook

    Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom presents wildly apocryphal retellings of two events—one historic, one mythic—that reconsider the official record through decidedly queer and feminist lenses.

    Painter Sandro Botticelli is an irrepressible libertine, renowned for his weekend-long orgies as much as he is for his great masterpieces of the early Renaissance. But things get complicated when Lorenzo de’ Medici commissions Botticelli to paint a portrait of his wife, Clarice. What emerges is the famed The Birth of Venus and a love triangle involving Botticelli’s young assistant Leonardo that risks setting their world alight. For while Florence of 1497 is a liberal city, civil unrest is stoked by the charismatic friar Girolamo Savonarola who begins calling for sodomites to be burned at the pyre.

    In the Bible she is unnamed, referred to simply as “Lot’s wife.” In Sunday in Sodom, Edith recounts how her husband welcomed two American soldiers into their house, the fury this sparked in their village, and the chain of events that led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But most importantly, Edith sets the record straight as to why, after being told not to, she looked back upon the destruction of her hometown and turned into a pillar of salt.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateSep 17, 2018
    ISBN9781770919198
    Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom
    Author

    Jordan Tannahill

    JORDAN TANNAHILL is an internationally acclaimed playwright who was born in Ottawa and is currently based in London. Two of his plays have won a Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. He has written one previous novel, Liminal, which was published to much acclaim and named one of the best Canadian novels of 2018 by CBC Books. CBC Arts named him as “one of sixty-nine LGBTQ Canadians, living or deceased, who has shaped the country’s history.” He is a regular columnist on CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter. 

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      Book preview

      Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom - Jordan Tannahill

      9781770919174.jpg

      Also by Jordan Tannahill

      Plays

      Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays

      Late Company

      Concord Floral

      Declarations

      Fiction

      Liminal

      Non-Fiction

      Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama

      The Videofag Book (edited with William Ellis)

      Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom

      by Jordan Tannahill

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom © Copyright 2018 by Jordan Tannahill

      First edition: September 2018

      Jacket design by James March

      Jacket art, a detail of The Birth of Venus, by Sandro Botticelli

      Author photo © Alejandro Santiago

      Playwrights Canada Press

      202-269 Richmond St. W.

      Toronto, ON

      M5V 1X1

      416.703.0013

      info@playwrightscanada.com

      www.playwrightscanada.com

      @playcanpress

      No part of this book may be reproduced, downloaded, or used in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review or by a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca.

      For professional or amateur production rights, please contact:

      Colin Rivers, Marquis Entertainment

      312-73 Richmond St. W., Toronto, ON M5H 4E8

      416.960.9123, info@marquisent.ca, www.marquisent.ca

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Tannahill, Jordan

      [Plays. Selections]

              Botticelli in the fire ; &, Sunday in Sodom / Jordan Tannahill.

      Plays.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-77091-917-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77091-918-1 (PDF).--

      ISBN 978-1-77091-919-8 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77091-920-4 (Kindle)

              I. Tannahill, Jordan . Botticelli in the fire.  II. Tannahill, Jordan .

      Sunday in Sodom.  III. Title.

      PS8639.A577A6 2018                  C812’.6                            C2018-903580-3

                                                                                                   C2018-903581-1

      Playwrights Canada Press acknowledges that we operate on land which, for thousands of years, has been the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Huron-Wendat, the Anishinaabe, Métis, and Haudenosaunee people. Today, this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and play here.

      We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts — which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country — the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada for our publishing activities.

      The Canada Council for the ArtsThe Government of CanadaThe Ontario Media Development CorporationThe Ontario Arts Council

      Contents

      Contents

      Playwright’s Note

      Notation

      Botticelli in the Fire

      Re-imagining History by Kirsten Bowen

      Characters

      ACT I

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      VIII

      ACT II

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      Sunday in Sodom

      Genesis 19:1–26

      Characters

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Landmarks

      Cover

      Title

      Copyright Page

      Table of Contents

      Start of Text

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Page List

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      Dedicated to Saint Genet and Saint Jarman

      Playwright’s Note

      A few years ago I came across a footnote in an art-history textbook that mentioned Sandro Botticelli — the famed painter of pagan imagery in the early Renaissance — burned several of his lost masterpieces at a bonfire of the vanities in 1497. The bonfire was a massive inferno of books, paintings, musical instruments, and all manner of occasions of sin orchestrated by the charismatic friar Girolamo Savonarola in reaction to the emergence of secular thought and the Renaissance. Many historians believe that Botticelli was genuinely swayed by the friar’s firebrand teachings, but Botticelli in the Fire goes about queering the official record, providing an alternate rationale for his drastic action. Both Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci were accused of sodomy in their lifetimes; an offence that saw many men burned at the pyre throughout Italy at the time. The play asks: In a moment of great social unrest and political upheaval, in which sodomites were the scapegoat du jour, what deals with the devil were made to avoid the fire? Botticelli in the Fire aims to be both a meditation on the ways in which, throughout history, pleasure, sexuality, and vice are blamed for all manner of ills, as well as a celebration of the enduring spirit of queer survival.

      The parallels between 1497 and the present have only grown more stark since the play’s Toronto premiere, and resonated in chilling, new ways when performed mere blocks from Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, in May 2018. A people’s fury at an entrenched and unresponsive ruling class, the rise of an incendiary populism, the vilification of minorities and metropolitans, the assailing of art. In this new age of upheaval, I can’t help but wonder, with immense apprehension, what forms the bonfires of tomorrow will take.

      Sunday in Sodom, on the other hand, is a feminist retelling of the mythic destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as told by Lot’s wife; a story recounted in the holy books of all three Abrahamic faiths. In the Bible she is unnamed, mentioned in a single sentence when she is turned to a pillar of salt for looking back at the destruction of her hometown. When I was growing up, my father read the Bible to my brother and I as a bedtime story each night. The story of Lot’s wife was seared into my consciousness at a very young age. I tried to imagine what went through her mind as she decided to disobey god and turn back to behold his wrath. I would try to imagine her face. Sometimes I would imagine her as my own mother. In Sunday in Sodom her name is Edith, and she recounts that final, fateful day, in a town that is situated both within a mythic, Biblical past and an all-too-real contemporary present.

      What is a sodomite? Who gets to tell their story? And for what end? After centuries of being spoken for and about, maligned, maimed, and misremembered, it’s time for the sodomites to speak for themselves.

       — Jordan Tannahill

      Notation

      An em dash ( — ) at the end of a line denotes a cut-off.

      An em dash ( — ) at the start of a line denotes a carry-through of a previous line.

      A forward slash ( / ) denotes the place where the next line begins, causing overlap.

      Line breaks suggest spoken rhythm and internal microshifts of thought.

      Text in the right-hand column is meant to be spoken in overlap with text on the left.

      Occasionally lines run longer than the page width, and continue indented in the line below. These lines are meant to be performed as single, continuous thoughts, without break.

      Botticelli in the Fire

      Re-imagining History

      by Kirsten Bowen, Production Dramaturg

      In February 1497, Florence was burning as followers of conservative Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola created a massive sixty-foot, seven-storey pile of luxuries — heretical and immoral books, nude paintings, musical instruments, perfumes, and baubles — and lit them on fire. This bonfire of the vanities may have also contained artwork by the painter Sandro Botticelli. Why did Botticelli participate? And why did he save his

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