Pure Play: The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Zany Elizabethan antics (including improv) descend on Christopher Street

By Ian Strasfogel

April 28, 2023
That rowdy Elizabethan comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle has arrived downtown, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, for a short run—only until May 13th—and I went to see it, despite vividly remembering my irritation when I first encountered it, decades ago. Back then, the play, by Francis Beaumont, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, seemed beneath me. (I was an undergraduate at the time.) Its plot copped bits and pieces from two undisputed masterworks, El Quixote and Romeo and Juliet, and stitched them together with interruptions from irate audience members—to no seeming purpose. Its language was plain and unadorned, with none of the dazzling similes and metaphors that Shakespeare and his contemporaries scattered over their works like gemstones. How could I possibly take seriously a play whose main character dies “with a forked arrow through his head?”

Now at long last I do. Because it’s funny. Because it really works. All The Knight of the Burning Pestle needs to spring to life is imagination, which is amply provided by two treasurable Downtown companies, the Red Bull and Fiasco theatre groups, who have teamed together to present the play.

Play is the operative term here—play as in the play of children, who can turn the most disparate objects into fairies or monsters or whatever else may strike their juvenile fancy. Of course, that’s the basis of all theater—magic, transformation. We know what happens on stage is fake. The slain hero isn’t really dead; the lovers aren’t really a couple, but we believe all of it, nonetheless. Only if the actors are gifted, of course, only if they’ve got the imaginative spark. As they do in this production.

Embraceable You: Horse/Mare (Royer Bokus) shares a tender moment with Stable Boy (Ben Steinfeld). (Photo by Carol Rosegg.)
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The work’s premise is simple. A group of players are about to begin their show when two audience members, a grocer and his wife, march onstage to demand that the company change its plans and give them what they want. (Sounds familiar, right? Shades of 2023 American politics.) And what they want is a piece that glorifies the courage and valor of London’s merchant class. Since the interlopers clearly mean business and the show must always go on, the startled actors agree to incorporate the grocer’s suggestions into their opus and very gamely allow his apprentice, Rafe, to assume the title role. Rafe gleefully takes up the challenge and lurches through the work, wielding his mighty pestle (a typical grocer’s tool at the time), facing down villains until the abovementioned unfortunate encounter with a well-aimed “forked arrow.”

How to animate this curious farrago? How to unlock its theatrical verve? First, the play’s two directors, Noah Brody and Emily Young, no doubt working closely with the actors, have unobtrusively streamlined and modernized the text. Second, while much of the staging clearly derives from group improvisation, they have given the evening a clear and comprehensible shape. Everything flies by briskly; nothing drags or dallies. There’s no chance for us to ask if it actually makes sense.

String players: Adding to the evening’s indisputable enchantments is a live performance of Ain’t Misbehavin’ by, from left to right, Ben Steinfeld, Royer Bokus, and Paul L. Coffey. (Photo by Tina Chilip.)
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A well-knit ensemble of ten, drawn from the two companies, flits nimbly from role to role and mishap to mishap, spinning giddy amusement from nothing more than a playwright’s inspired notion and their own pleasure in freewheeling storytelling. Some of the performances might strike you as a bit rough and ready. But to me, given the rawness of the basic material, they always felt just right. I was especially taken by Paco Tolson as the grocer’s apprentice-turned-knight-errant, especially in his interminable (and hilarious) death scene. Ben Steinfeld’s inspired rhythmic improvisations also added to the fun, as did the apt, fast-moving scenery of Christopher and Justin Swader, and the witty costumes of Yvonne Miranda.

This little dazzler is fresh as a springtime breeze. Readers, you’ve been given fair warning. Gather ye rosebuds (and theatrical delights) while ye may. See it while it’s still in town.

Ian Strasfogel is an author, opera director, and impresario who has staged over a hundred productions of opera and music theater in European and American opera houses and music festivals. His comic novel, Operaland, and his biography of his father, Ignace Strasfogel: The Rediscovery of a Musical Wunderkind, were both published in 2021.

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