Rose Greenhow—the Confederate spy who seduced half Washington.

Her goal? Flame the war to help the South secede.

But Allan Pinkerton and his detectives are on to her…

The Pinks is an original, darkly comic spy story about real life Confederate spy Rose Greenhow—a woman in a traditionally male profession— and the Pinkerton agents set on taking her down. In 1861, the Civil War was just a rebellion gaining traction (think: The Tea Party with more guns and matching outfits). A widow and mother of four, Rose used her extensive social network (and extensive charm) to seduce information from senators, military and members of the presidential cabinet to pass on to the Confederacy. She was devastatingly good.

Enter Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton was a hard-boiled detective, the first of his kind. He was an abolitionist who had worked on the Underground Railroad and offered his detective skills to Abraham Lincoln in service of the Union. Pinkerton suspected Rose was a spy and sent the first female private eye Kate Warne—another woman in a traditionally male profession—undercover to catch her.

But Rose managed to elude them and seduce secret information from a northern captain to pass to General P.G.T. Beauregard and turn the Battle of Bull Run. Pinkerton arrested Rose, but she managed to continue her espionage under house arrest, and perhaps even while in federal prison.

Gold No Trade’s The Pinks is a tautly written historical fiction that examines the deeper drives behind Allan Pinkerton and two women: Kate Warne, the first female detective and Confederate spy Rose Greenhow. The play considers how these women, both in traditionally male professions, chose alternate paths to express equally devastating talents. And how only one was able to bridge that divide and tolerate the beliefs of the other.

The Pinks began as an investigation into the motivations behind the South’s secession with the optimism that in among the supporters –fellow Americans—were reasonable people with compelling motivations that one could understand and even relate to.

It is no great leap to see the relevance to contemporary politics, ever stratifying (compare the Tea Party vs. religious fundamentalism vs. Barak Obama). With such divides in values, where can we possibly meet? What is the value of tolerance? Is it all just heroes and villains?

Rose Greenhow : A widow and mother of four in 1861, Rose Greenhow began passing secret messages to Confederate generals, helping to secure the Southern victory at Bull Run. She was placed under house arrest by the Pinkertons to curtail her activities, but continued to pass Northern military secrets to the South. She was then placed in a federal prison, but is rumored to have still managed to pass information to the South. In 1862 Jefferson Davis sent her to Europe to collect diplomatic intelligence. She also fund-raised extensively for the Confederacy and returned home carrying over $2000 in gold, some of which she sewed into her clothing. Off the coast of North Carolina, a Union gunboat pursued her ship, and Rose boarded a lifeboat. The small craft foundered and she drowned—dragged down by the weight of the gold.

Kate Warne : Little is known about Kate Warne, the first female detective hired by Allan Pinkerton. Most of her biographical information comes from Allan Pinkerton’s Reminiscences years after the fact and has not been corroborated. He describes Kate the first time she walked into his office in 1856 as “a slender, brown-haired woman, graceful in her movements and self-possessed. Her features, although not what could be called handsome, were decidedly of an intellectual cast…her face was honest, which would cause one in distress instinctly (sic) to select her as a confidante…” Accounts vary as to whether she came to Pinkerton for a job as a secretary or a detective, but Pinkerton remembers her convincingly explaining that she could “worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access”. Pinkerton not only hired her, but by 1860 his agency had an entire female detective branch, headed by Kate Warne. To compare, women were first hired as investigators by the New York City police department in 1903.

Allan Pinkerton : In 1852 Allan Pinkerton created The Pinkerton National Detective Agency –the first private agency devoted to solving crime. In 1856 he hired the first female detective, Kate Warne, of whom little is known (see above). Pinkerton was a labor activist in his native Glasgow and worked the Underground Railroad outside of Chicago. His agency stymied train robbers, captured thieves and, in 1861, foiled an attempt on the life of president-elect Abraham Lincoln. The term “private eye” derives from his agency’s trademark: an unblinking eye with the slogan “We Never Sleep.” After his death, his sons took over the agency and closed the female detective branch. In time, the agency became known for anti-labor activities.

The Pinks is a work of historical fiction. While it is unknown whether Kate Warne and Rose Greenhow ever met, we like to think they did.

Further reading:

Women Spies of the Civil War
By Cate Lineberry
Smithsonian.com

Clandestine Women: Spies in American History
National Women’s History Museum

The Wild Rose of Washington
By Cate Lineberry
The New York Times, 2011

Wild Rose
by Ann Blackman
biography, 2005

My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington.
By Rose O’Neal Greenhow
memoir, 1863

Thirty Years A Detective
By Allan Pinkerton
memoir, 1884

Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye
By James Mackay
Biography, 1997

London, 1789. A whirlpool of filth, thievery and political unrest. Jails overflow with petty criminals, many of them women forced out of work and onto the streets as jobs are reclaimed by soldiers returning from the American war. The penal code hasn’t been updated in more than a century, and crimes as trivial as pickpocketing are hanging offenses. Faced with a legal system in crisis, and a growing humanist movement opposed to executions, the courts hit upon an innovative solution: ship the woman convicts to Australia to revive the failing all-male penal colony in New South Wales.

Adapted from historical accounts, Floating Brothel follows three of these women—a down-on-her luck country girl, a thirteen-year old prostitute and a high-class con artist—on their harrowing year-long voyage from the underbelly of London to the underside of the world.

Performed by five actors on a 3 x 6 platform, the epic tale unfolds in a radically reduced space that functions as a camera lens, enabling cinematic shifts in time, scale and location. Through the course of an hour, using only their bodies and a handful of props, the ensemble creates myriad characters and locales, transforming the raw platform into the bustle of London, the din of the courtroom, the dank bilge of the ship, and the rolling expanse of the ocean.

In this production, five actors tell the story of a ship full of convict women pulled out of their world in the underbelly of London and thrust into the belly of a ship sailing to a new continent where they will begin their lives anew. This epic journey is performed entirely within the confines of a 3’x6’ platform that the actors never step off of. With the help of a few everyday objects, they transform the playing space from the bustle and noise of London, to the dank bilge of a ship and the harrowing voyage across the sea to a new world.

The Story: A Big Story for A Little Stage
It’s the end of the 18th century and the London penal system is in a serious predicament. Soldiers are returning from the American war and taking back jobs, leaving a huge number of women out of work. With no means to make their living, many turn to crime. The jails are overflowing and since stealing anything over six pence is punishable by death, most of these women face the noose. But the humanist movement is just gaining momentum and the death penalty –which used to effectively thin out the jails—is suddenly a morally questionable act. Caught between packed jails and humanist protests, the courts decided on an innovative solution: send the ladies to a male penal colony.

Adapted from historical accounts of female convict ships in the 18th century, we follow three women—a down-on-her luck country girl, a thirteen-year old prostitute and a high-class con artist—pulled from the worlds they know and thrust into a new one: on the ship, the crew controls everything. Being able to work the new system means the difference between sleeping in the dank, rodent-ridden bilge with 200 other women (imagine menstruation and seasickness without running water) and a nice dry bunk with a full ration of food. The women must use their savvy and ingenuity to forge alliances with the men and with each other –bonds that will determine in the end whether they live or die. And when they arrive at the colonies…the rules change again.

The Style: Doing More with Less
The small raised platform we employ for this production will be familiar to Lecoq students as a “tréteau”, and is descended from the tiny, portable stages traveling commedia troupes would erect in town markets for their performances. Commedia troupes relied on the virtuosity of the performers rather than fancy set pieces and elaborate productions to amaze and entertain their audiences. Following in that tradition, we choose the tréteau to create a show based on our performers’ dexterity and skill. The reduced space functions like a camera lens, focusing the audience’s eye on a tight stage picture. The performers never leave the tréteau, but instead use their bodies and several objects to transform the small stage from scene to scene. There are close-ups, jump cuts, pan-outs—just as in film. The actors shift between being characters, backdrops and even props. The everyday objects, likewise, function at times as puppets, at times to change the scale of the stage image, and at times simply as the objects they are in a human world. At a time when the public can step into a movie theater and be amazed by the results of big budgets and special effects, we remind audiences why theater is exceptional and extraordinary: our actors amaze the audience by telling an epic story from a small wooden platform.

Further Reading and Viewing:
“The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convicts,” by Siân Rees

“Mary Bryant: Her Life and Escape from Botany Bay,” by Jonathan King

“Voyage of the Courtesans,” a PBS show about the female convict ships–the website also contains more background info

“The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner,” a memoir by John Nicol

“The Fatal Shore,” by Robert Hughes

www.floatingbrothel.com

Created by Megan Campisi, Loren Fenton, Kevin Lapin, Liz Vacco and Ben Vershbow.
Written by Megan Campisi.

Behind a homemade puppet stage Ramon Martínez and his son, Martín, forge ahead with their latest show: Little Red Riding Hood. When one of Grandma’s strings breaks, the puppet show cascades into burlesque mayhem. Backstage in their dilapidated hovel, Mimi, Ramon’s wife, withers from the lack of food (and passion) in her life. Martín, unable to please his father, finds solace in a beautiful Barbary organ carved in the shape of a woman. One failed puppet show follows another, straining the family bonds until the characters must take drastic measures to stay alive, all the while making us laugh with their naïveté and candor.

Nutmeat was first performed at the Chalon-sur-Saône and Bourg St. Maurice festivals in France in 2003. The current version was performed in French in July, 2006 at the Alpes-Mancelles Festival in northern France.

“Nutmeat refers to the sweet salty fatty goodness that drives us all to crack, chew, and rip our way through nutshells. And the nutmeat that awaits you in this 55-minute nutshell is the sheer pleasure of watching actors’ imaginations at work.” – Jon Stancato nytheatre.com review, August 11, 2006

CREATOR/Director’s Note

Nutmeat is not a play with one playwright. I conceived the piece in 2003, inspired by Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers and vaudeville, but it wasn’t until rehearsals began that the show truly came into being. The cast was international—Basque, French, Danish, Californian. Through directed improvisations the performers took the “skeleton” I had sketched—sometimes vague ideas, sometimes fully-written scenes—and turned it into flesh and blood. True to Lecoq tradition, the visual element took precedent over the textual.

In Nutmeat the actors are physical comedians, mimes, puppeteers, musicians and visual artists. The music is created, for the most part, by the actors onstage. The set is a series of paper panels onto which the setting for each scene is sketched—often by the characters themselves. Ironically, it is the virtuosity required of the performers that makes the ineptitude of the characters so compelling—and funny.

At the heart of the vaudeville genre was the art of cruelty: disparaging jokes, pratfalls and glorified failures. Nutmeat has many of vaudeville’s provocative qualities, but goes beyond simple comic cruelty. The show evokes pathos, moving the audience from laughter to tears in the same scene. The characters are so naïve and optimistic that their plight is “pathetic” in its true sense —we feel terrible as we laugh, but we do it just the same. The time is right for a play like Nutmeat and, by incorporating aspects of vaudeville and burlesque, the play offers a new perspective on an older theatrical style.

–Megan Campisi, writer & director

“Watch as everyday objects, take life and lead you into their fantastical world.”

“A joy for all ages, mixing the magic of fairytales with the dynamic world of found-object puppetry.”

Created by: Megan Campisi, Kevin Lapin, Caroline Reck, Elisa Matula and Adrian Gillot. Original music by Thomas Merlan.

The Story

In Brementown the magic and metaphors of the original Grimm’s fairytale are just the beginning. The classic themes of the original story, getting old and the value of idealism find new relevance in the trials of our endearing hero: an arthritic donkey -who loves and trusts his owner- but who is too old to earn his keep. When he catches wind that he’s outlived his usefulness he takes to the road to avoid ending up in an Alpo can. He’s soon joined by a septuagenarian cat who would prefer a nice pension and some sleep to chasing mice and the trio is completed by a fearful rooster who can read his fate in the cookbooks that compose his own body.

With this ominous beginning, our cast of innocent-but-aged hopefuls embark on the dark road to Brementown. But don’t worry, they’ve got a plan: they’re forming a band and are sure that fame and fortune await them as musicians in the big city. Who knows whether the people of Brementown city will be entertained by our trio, but this new play by an international company of Lecoq graduates is sure to entertain audiences both young and old alike.

Brementown

When the brothers Grimm collected oral tales and set them down in print, they simplified the stories and recast them into morality tales to meet their didactic ends. Bremen-Town Musicians has retained more the character of the original oral tales: the story doesn’t have a prescriptivedonkey moral framework that serves as a reference point for the characters and their actions. There is no young Jack learning the ways of the world or Little Red Riding Hood getting a lesson in obeying her elders. Our protagonists aren’t young. They do undergo trials and they do win the day, but it is in spite of themselves. So what is the lesson? With our production it’s not about what happens if you’re good or bad, but how to negotiate morally ambiguous lives –an inquiry with modern relevance.

Found-object Puppetry

The original story, like most fairytales, works with layers of meaning. Our performance style therefore needed to reflect this, and object-puppetry does just that. Since the puppets are everyday items that we know and relate to, they are loaded with associations and cultural significance. The object chosen for a given character thus informs how we see that character: a cat made from a woman’s handbag and all its contents will evoke at times the panacea of mom’s purse, and then the vanity and mask of make-up and still later a woman’s intimacy and secrets.

I like object puppetry because it takes the audience beyond the mundane through the mundane. And because on so many levels, it is engaging. The constellation of objects that create each character are not physically held together like traditional marionettes: there is negative space between body parts. The audience instinctively fills in the gaps thus provoking the imagination and allowing the audience to participate in the creation of each character. In the same way, we tell the story, less in words than in action, image and sound. The audience is once again invited to take part, putting the images together and unfolding the story for themselves.

From the perspective of a performer, I also love object puppetry because the characters often require more than one puppeteer to manipulate them. Creating character movements that are fluid and natural is a question of group precision, coordination and collective intuition. Also, the relation between performer and audience fascinates me. Present at all times alongside the puppet, the puppeteer is completely visible, and yet not the focus. Performing becomes an exploration of the shadowy space between object and character, actor and audience, creating a new relationship, mediated by puppets.

Most importantly, the puppets are all made from objects that the audience has access to at home, meaning the performance doesn’t end when the curtain falls. After seeing Brementown, the whole world becomes a place for transformation, creation and performance. I remember the first time I saw object puppetry: it was a quite serious piece on the subject of child abuse; looking around the theater I thought, how bizarre an audience of forty adults brought to tears by a handkerchief and piece of newspaper. After that I saw puppets everywhere I went. No one wanted to invite me out to dinner anymore beacuse I was sure to start playing with food.
Puppetry is an art form that for many in the West is synonymous with Les Guignols or the Muppets. These at least remain references of quality but not of artistic value. Our goal is to get untraditional styles of puppets out of the closet, off the table and onto the stage.

–Megan Campisi, Director, Brementown ]]> http://www.goldnotrade.com/work/brementown/feed/ 0