Why the Lady Next to Me Fell Asleep at The Wife of Willesden (Or: Doesn't Boston Like Theatre Anymore?)

The Wife of Willesden, the new play written by Zadie Smith and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, hit the A.R.T. this past February. It’s an adaptation of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” (and prologue) from The Canterbury Tales, which you may remember as the most lewd thing you were allowed to read in high school. Being a typical Patroness of the Arts (and Zadie Smith follower), I snagged myself a rush ticket to the performance on Friday, March 3rd.

The accompanying photo of this article was taken from my seat, so you can see that the view left little to be desired. The volume of the play was high, the music contemporary, and the acting larger than life. It was as much of an assault on the senses as can be squeezed from what mostly amounts to a 95 minute monologue. And yet, about 45 minutes in, as Alvita (the titular wife, energetically portrayed by Claire Perkins) mimed an orgasm for the second time to near-complete silence from the audience, I noticed a bit of motion in my peripheral vision. It was the head of the woman next to me, bobbing up and down the way my sister’s head would on long car rides. She had fallen asleep.

I won’t bother much with a synopsis, because I don’t actually think the play’s narrative contributed at all to this effect. The play’s a pretty much one-to-one translation of “the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” down to the opening slog about Christianity and sex, the raucous exploration of the wife’s exploits, and the tale of the soldier marrying a witch (which Smith ingeniously transferred from Arthurian England to Jamaica). No, there’s not much suspense, especially if you’ve read The Canterbury Tales, as, again, every person who will go to a play in Cambridge, Massachusetts has. But very few plays have suspense these days. We can’t exactly fault Smith for that.

The play, in fact, makes a valiant effort to connect with the audience, in writing and direction. Actors regularly walk through the aisles. Alvita regularly breaks the fourth wall, yells, and animalistically growls at surrounding men. Ensemble actors engage their whole bodies as only ensemble actors can, staying so tuned into the action that they react to Alvita’s every word with arms thrown into the air or a confident “no way!” And there are several dance sequences, including one in which the men of the company twerk to “Superfreak” by Nicki Minaj, asses to the audience.

(In fact, the play gets so self-aware at times that not one theatrical moment goes un-commented-on by the actors—or the director?—which leads to a disappointing but not surprising, “Haha! It’s a man in a dress!” moment.)

Despite this recipe for success, however, the Cantabrigian audience was largely silent throughout —  even on a Friday night. The play was new. Everybody had high expectations. There were even students in the audience primed by Smith in the English department earlier in the week to sit back and enjoy. But the biggest laugh of the night was a polite chuckle for a reference to Widener Library. Although there were elements of the play I didn’t love—the men in dresses joke, the lines written in couplets with a meter that distracted more than it satisfied, and the direction style, which though objectively well-executed did not quite fit my taste for more naturalistic acting—I didn’t think the play deserved nearly as silent of an audience as it got. For God’s sake, it was funny!

I’ll admit that The Wife of Willesden did not seem to have identified its audience. Its protagonist is a 57 year old third-wave feminist, but there is a scene set to “Superfreak.” Its source material courts academics, but the meter of the couplets isn’t even right! (Although, to be fair, neither is Chaucer’s.) And I challenge any male academic to sit through 95 whole minutes of a woman talking without, well, falling asleep.

Perhaps the theatre-going population of Cambridge couldn’t relate to, or didn’t care to relate to, the play’s setting at all. Zadie Smith’s oft-rearticulated favorite aspect of Willesden, a suburb of London, is its racial and class-based heterogeneity. And this heterogeneity (at least supposedly—I’ve never been) is most on display in places like the pub in which the play takes place. Folks from all walks of life, from a Patagonia-vest-clad white man in his sixties to a local South Asian student to Alvita herself all hang out together. Maybe Cambridge, MA simply cannot tolerate such a setting.

For example, Alvita regularly uses British slang and Jamaican Patois for which the average academic atheist Bostonian WASP would need both an online dictionary and a shit they don’t necessarily want to give. Or they could do what I (academic, atheist, Bostonian, and W but not ASP) did, which is rely on context clues. If one laughed at Shakespeare in the Common last summer and didn’t laugh at this, I have to wonder whether they found Shakespeare in the Common funny, either. It was excruciating to watch these actors work so hard on something that, while less political than promised, was definitely both funnier and more ~important~ than Shakespeare, all for the audience to not throw them the simple bone of laughing.

(Although, side note, at least Shakespeare on the Common had gay people in it. How hard would it have been to make one of the seemingly unending background characters gay? Or is homosexuality where Willesden’s diversity ends?)

Maybe Cambridge/Boston are simply using the theatre as an intellectual status symbol à la nineteenth century Europe, or for that matter, nineteenth century Boston. Especially post-pandemic, when one might need more motivation than mere entertainment to sit in a room with a couple hundred people, the most important part of theatre-going is making sure you’re seen ambling to your well-placed $200 seat. It doesn’t quite matter what happens when the lights go down. Might as well take a nap—nobody can see you! Well, nobody except the person to your immediate right.