Tell us about your show, Bloody Mary: Live!
In this show, Mary Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, comes back to life and does a stand up comedy set to defend her bloody legacy, which includes burning some 293 Protestants at the stake. It’s her belief that she’s been wrongly painted in a bad light by history. She does her best to try to convince the audience otherwise. Whether or not she does that successfully is up to the audience.
It’s a dark comedy that has a lot of audience participation in it. The show changes based on how the audience responds to what she’s talking about.
What made you want to create a show about Mary Tudor?
I originally started writing a musical about the six dead wives of Henry VIII. I didn’t realise it already existed. I wrote a whole song about Anne Boleyn and showed it to my writing group. One of them had just seen SIX at the Fringe that summer and said “you can’t write this”. And I thought, “yes I can”, but then I listened to the album and realised SIX already exists and it’s really, really good.
But I’d done a bunch of research and had all this material. I was hoping that there was something that I could still work with.
I’d seen Mary pop up in my notes in a really interesting way. It was always just one sentence that went “Mary Tudor, who would then burn these people at the stake”, as a way to get to the next part of history with Elizabeth. It felt like there was this weird gap that was constantly skipped over. I decided to dig a little deeper.
I don’t want to say I feel like I have a lot in common with a queen that burned people at the stake, but I found her extremely compelling. I identified with her in a few different ways – as the eldest daughter, as someone who really loves education and sought opportunities, as a child of a messy divorce, I identified with parts of that. Obviously her situation was probably the most extreme.
There were all these things that felt like nice pathways in for me to crack open the story. Of course, there are so many things that we don’t have in common, but all it took were these small touchpoints to humanise her and make me think there’s a story I can tell here.
What was your research process like?
I can’t remember the exact biographies and textbooks I was sifting through, but I started with some real research at the library at Brown where I was studying at the time.
From there, as I started writing certain sections, I tried to go farther and farther away from the historical source. Once I had the foundations of it, I wanted to free myself up for the creative process. Honestly, by the end I would write something and then do a cursory glance just at her Wikipedia page. I wanted to make sure I had the flexibility, once I had the skeleton of her life, to make sure I didn’t feel stuck in the history of it.
At the end of the day, it is a theatre piece. Once I’d hit the target of my mission to what I wanted to say with the piece as it lines up with history, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t too overly committed to all the little details.
I actually reverse-coursed it over the pandemic, when there was not much going on and I didn’t have much to do. I spent a lot of time talking to historians at different universities, people who had written about Tudor history and this time period and about Elizabeth, other playwrights who have written about this era. We had some very interesting chats about the areas that I diverged from historically and might want to head back towards the facts. Or, talking about why they came at it from a certain perspective and what their process was like.
It encouraged me to revise with a keener eye what really does have to be historically accurate and what can be in service of theatre and be entertaining and emotionally exciting.
How much of the show is drawn from history and how much is fictionalised?
Most of the stuff that’s presented as fact is drawn from history. The arc of the show, which traces from Mary’s adolescence up until the point that she becomes queen, is rooted in history.
Where it becomes fictionalised, I’m not sure what her exact conversations were like with her father. I’m imagining what that would be like. I know she was super educated but I made up a character that tutored her. I know she would’ve had tutors to help her with her studies, but I don’t know if they were named Steve and if she had a crush on them. That’s been inserted to energise those pieces of history.
And in the audience interaction bits, depending on what the audience is saying and their responses to the questions the character poses. Sometimes I’m able to whip into the history about, and other times I’m leaning into the pop cultural moment, which obviously Mary would know nothing about. She would have no idea about The Great British Bake Off, but I can’t resist an opportunity to land a joke about something that is happening in our day to day.
I’d say if something is presented as hard fact, that’s almost always rooted in history. Then there are, of course, moments where Mary is an unreliable narrator. Mary knows the truth of these matters but would she want to tell an audience about that? What is she keeping from the audience that isn’t about me fictionalising it, but thinking based off what I know about this character and how I embody her, would Mary tell the truth here? Sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t.
What made you want to tell this story through stand up comedy?
There’s something about tragic events that makes me want to be funny.
That’s how I handle tragedy in my own life. I think it’s how many people handle difficult situations, by trying to find the humour in it, as a coping mechanism.
I was trying to write in her voice about how she would talk to someone about what she went through. She went through so much shit. I can’t imagine having five step-mothers and being older than some of them by the end of it and seeing them get beheaded. It was so terrible. As a teenager, I am sure someone would joke about that, otherwise how are you surviving in this situation?
The show doesn’t live in comedy the entire time. Eventually, the tragedy catches up with her and becomes too much. The bottom drops out and we’re left with the realisation that this poor woman had a really tough life and has become a punchline in history.
But as I was writing it, and trying to find how Mary would find humour in her situation, a caustic, angsty teen sort of humour, it felt like a direct address was the best way to go about it. If she’s going to be making these jokes, she’s going to deliver them directly to someone. She wants a response, she’s yearning for someone to either laugh with her or grieve with her, or even butt up against her so she can bury them with her wit.
Stand up comedy became a very appropriate medium very quickly. It’s a medium in which someone is delivering jokes directly to an audience and riffing off what someone responds to, how they’ve laughed, if they’ve had any kind of reaction. I would say the stand up comedy piece was one of the early things that I committed to. It was easy to have Mary be able to speak directly to a person, given the fact that I wanted her to try to defend herself.
The other option would’ve been a courtroom comedy or something, but stand up made it easiest for this one person event to happen.
What do you hope people will take away from Bloody Mary?
I wonder if that’s changed for me as I’ve done it in the past year.
I think my hope is that people walk away and they’re not necessarily on the team of Queen Mary Tudor. I don’t want them to be like “hell yes, girlboss, slay, gatekeep”, I don’t want that.
I want them to feel complicated about her. I want them to think, “I laughed with this person, I cried with this person, I felt for this person, and yet this person still did very terrible things, how do I reconcile that?”
It’s not that I want people to walk away thinking that Mary Tudor was absolutely in the right for what she did based on what her life story was. Just as I don’t want people to walk away from how she’s been portrayed in history thinking “wow, she’s absolutely a horrible person”. With women in history, we have a tendency to paint them as the good witch or the bad witch. It’s easy to put someone in that bucket of “what a righteous queen” or “what a terrible tyrant”.
I want people to see that there are people who live in this grey zone and we have to grapple with that. We have to sit with that discomfort and decide what parts of them we want to hold up and what parts to dissect to show we don’t want this to happen again.
We’re a lot better at history in doing that for the men, at saying “this was an amazing leader, but did terrible things to this one group of people”. Even contemporary leaders. How many people are holding office and will be remembered fondly despite having many terrible things under their belt?
The same grace isn’t given to women in history. I want people to walk away challenging themselves to consider the histories of people, both living and dead, not to buck them as good or bad. To look at them holistically as a person and be able to live in a complicated space with complicated people. At the end of the day, most people aren’t entirely good or entirely bad.
Obviously, I’d love people to walk away thinking the show was funny and exciting and that they’ve had a good time. But I also want people to walk away with new critical thinking skills as they encounter history and people in their life.
What are your hopes for the show after your Vault Festival run?
Immediately after, we’re doing a mini-tour at a couple of other venues that came out of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which was great. My real hope after all this would be that we get a full run at some kind of theatre space, either in London or New York where I live. A fully supported theatrical run where the show would have an opportunity to reach a broad audience night after night after night.
It’s a theatre piece and I would love for it to have a full life as a play, off Broadway or off West End, in some place that would be willing to take a risk on a macabre, dark comedy piece that’s really theatre.
Are there any other shows at Vault Festival that you’re looking forward to?
I haven’t done my big deep dive into the programme yet. But I’m really excited to see All By Myself, which I saw at the Fringe. I’m excited to see how that’s grown. The company I’m working with are bringing a show called The Tinker and I’m excited to see what they’re up to. I’ve heard through our Vaults group chat how things are going and I haven’t seen it.
I’m also excited to get into the programme and dig a little bit. Get to the UK, get my bearings and make a big list of things!
Do you have any advice for anyone looking to get into the creative industry?
Making your own work is extremely valuable. For a long time, I wasn’t writing things for myself. The things that have been the most rewarding for me and have taken off the fastest have been things I’ve been the creator and generator of.
It’s important for artists to have the practice where they write something for themselves that they want to be at the helm of. It helps you interrogate things you’re most excited about as an actor and most passionate about as a person. It helps you identify the stories you want to tell. It’s a rewarding experience whether or not you put your show on somewhere. There’s something rewarding about the creative process for anybody to be able to write something and assess what it means for you. And how fantastic if you do end up doing it live. Even if you aren’t, it’s an important and valuable tool to have in your arsenal.
Also, work with the people you enjoy working with as much as you can. If you love what your friends are doing, work with your friends on something, even if it’s in the basement of a comedy venue. Working with people you actually enjoy and find enrichment and creativity in and are inspired by – you truly can’t go wrong with that. While it may not start off at the biggest venues and prestigious places, working with people you enjoy working with pays off in the long run. You’re stimulated creatively and you’re making meaningful artistic connections.
In this space, especially if you’re starting off in a basement somewhere, you have to figure stuff out for yourself. I’ve known my director, Olivia Munk, since college and I love that I get to work with someone who I really trust, have a rapport with and hopefully we’ll be able to work on many projects in the future. It’s great working with your friends.
The arts are stressful enough without working with people you don’t even like being around. It’s amazing if you can make art with people you like.
Bloody Mary: Live! is at Vault Festival from Tuesday 24th to Sunday 29th January.
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