Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom
By Jordan Tannahill and Kirsten Bowen
()
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.
Jordan Tannahill
Jordan Tannahill is a playwright, theatre director and filmmaker. His plays and short films have been presented in theatres, festivals and galleries across Canada and internationally. He received the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for his book Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays. In collaboration with William Ellis, Jordan runs the alternative art-space Videofag, out of a defunct barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market.
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Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom - Jordan Tannahill
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
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Colin Rivers, Marquis Entertainment
312-73 Richmond St. W., Toronto, ON M5H 4E8
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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 CouncilContents
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