Opposites Do Not Attract

Punch and Judy have changed their spots, or rather, they’ve traded in their slapsticks and other miscellaneous tools of attack–for a divorce! On October 28th, at the C.Walsh Theatre at Suffolk University on Beacon Hill, a musical stage version of David and Ain Gordon’s book Punch and Judy Get Divorced will be the spectacular kick-off to the American Repertory Theater’s 1996/1997 fall season.

Co-produced by The American Music Theater Festival and the American Repertory Theater, and recently presented in Philadelphia, the Gordons’ energetic adaptation of traditional Punch and Judy farces is a musical romp through the trials and tribulations of this couple’s ongoing struggle to stay married. So what has happened to the famous bantering couple of mayhem who have defied the odds and survived hundreds of years of rocky matrimony? The answer is simple–in Punch and Judy Get Divorced, Judy withdraws from the marital battlefield and hauls off her family and Toby the dog to a “Punch-free” house filled with women. In their own words, Punch and Judy’s life together is a “miscarriage of marriage.”

David and Ain Gordon, the father/son team who created Punch, are no strangers to the theater or to the creation and development of new works. David Gordon is known to A.R.T. audiences for his collaboration with Robert Brustein and others in the musical version of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s play Shlemiel the First and for The Mysteries, and What’s So Funny? To audiences across the country he is also known for his numerous dance-based works and choreographic projects with such artists as Philip Glass. Punch and Judy came to life as a creation for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in 1992 and was later adapted for PBS’s Alive TV. It became a full-length production upon a commission from the American Music Theatre Festival in association with the A.R.T. This is not the first time that the Gordon family has worked together. David’s son Ain Gordon is a successful director and playwright living in New York. Punch and Judy Get Divorced follows their first collaboration, The Family Business, a primarily movement-based drama.

Together with lyricist Arnold Weinstein, also a veteran of the Shlemiel team, and composer Edward Barnes, the Gordons have constructed a modern-day farce that injects into a dance-theater environment the excitement of revolving sets, brilliant motley costumes, role reversals, and hilarious transformations.

Also unique and appealing in Punch and Judy is the Gordons’ inclusion of two sets of couples that serve to echo and amplify the couple’s combative state.

Much of the comic appeal of a Punch and Judy presentation comes from the cartoon-like supporting characters of Punch Junior and Judy Baby, who uphold the tradition of snappy verbal comebacks and exaggerated gestures.

Although at times Punch and Judy Get Divorced partakes of the zany commedia dell’arte tradition of physical play and word play, it is not a true commedia play full of stock situations for ensembles. The Gordons are, however, inspired by the commedia character of Pulcinella–a character whose predilections for wine, women, and voracious eating are legendary. The Gordons’ quarrelsome Punch, unlike his fatalistic ancestor, is led to a lonely future void of Judy. The musical comedy artfully weaves the many different Pulcinella and British Punch routines into a colorful extravaganza that races through a broken marriage and into comic self-empowerment.

Michelle Powell is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training.