17c dir. by Annie-B Parson (review)

To dedicated fans of Restoration marginalia, devotees of London's Great Fire, and nerds of theatre and dance history, the fondness for Samuel Pepys is a seemingly inexplicable quirk. Despite being a Member of Parliament and the Academy of Sciences during the reign of Charles II, the foppish Pepys led a relatively undistinguished life. He has long been known, however, as an unparalleled diarist, his personal writings offering a uniquely compelling glimpse into not just late-seventeenth-century English manners, but the mysterious whirlpool of consciousness itself. Bereft of metaphor and frequently allergic to allegory, Pepys's artless prose nevertheless lays bare the strange condition of the human mind better than many novelists. As likely to complain of a gallbladder infection as brag of an audience with the king and to vainly undertake a diet or go to the theatre and complain about bad Shakespeare, Pepys's diaries convey the nonhierarchical highs and lows, the lulls and eddies of daily existence with a clarity that pricks the right reader with a sudden shock of self-recognition. He is the ur-blogger, the proto-postmodernist, his digressive imagination anticipating Sterne's Tristram Shandyby almost a century and his catalog of daily minutiae the nonfiction quafiction of Karl Ove Knausgård by 350 years.

In her thrilling 17c, a fleet yet comprehensive theatrical bricolage of the entire thousand-plus-page, million-and-a-half-word corpus, Annie-B Parson and Big Dance Theater bridged this wide gap of time. Employing the full range of Brechtian "literarizations" of the theatre, Parson amply made the case for Pepys's charms, while shining a bright light on his depressingly familiar faults. In ninety minutes that seemed to glide by, Parson's excavation was above all an attempt to see and hear the historical lacuna to whom Pepys devoted so much of his life and to whom the diaries return with obsessive regularity—Elizabeth, his wife.

Fittingly for such an un-introspective subject, Parson worked from the literal outside-in. The evening began with company member Cynthia Hopkins reading Pepys on the topics of his "yards" (erections) and "electuaries" (enemas). Whereas his wife had been bothered by the former, she tells us, his "butthole … unable to fart nor to go to stool" has need of the latter. Bits of effluvial trivia were similarly cataloged with glee over the course of the show by the "Annotators"—a millennial Statler & Waldorf hosting a livestreaming webcast devoted to Pepys, itself inspired by the lively message boards at www.pepysdiary.com. On January 9, 1663, one Annotator told us gleefully, Pepys gave himself a nasal infection by "over-rubbing"; later, the other says, Pepys masturbated with a skeleton in a church, exclaiming with a note of triumph, "and he records it!"

The Annotators served as a dramaturgical key to Parson's adaptation, allowing her the freedom to toggle in and out of the text, simultaneously footnoting his prose and commenting on it, while organizing an otherwise narrative-resistant litany of dates into scene-like thematic clusters. Standing at a desk and addressing the camera in the manner by-now ubiquitous to YouTube testimonials, they provided a modern-day "here" to which Parson repeatedly returned from the abstracted "there" of Pepys's seventeenth century. The Annotators also provided much needed moral mitigation, offering a modern-day perspective that pinpointed precisely the qualities that make Pepys so uniquely alluring and alarming.

Peeling the layers of the Pepys onion back methodically, Parsons moved steadily toward the curious abyss at the figure's center. Starting from erections and enemas, the first thirty minutes commenced to Pepysian self-fashioning, at prayer or in leisure, shopping or dancing, always significantly returning to the conjoined subjects of wife and property. "Blessed be God" Pepys writes in his very first entry, "I live in Axe Yard havingmy wife Bess. … My own private condition, esteemed rich but indeed very poor and uncertain." In each of the...