Bloody Mary & the Virgin Queen close Hyperion’s season
By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
With multiple series streaming about Henry VIII and the Tudor family, Ian Hauer has chosen an interesting time to write and direct a play about half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth Tudor as they vie for their father’s throne. Call Me Sister, staging June 8 to 11 at the Ivy Tech Auditorium, 300 N. 17th St., Noblesville, will be the final show of the group’s pilot season.
There is very little historical record of the interaction between Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, making this historical drama largely a tale from the playwright’s imagination.
“In general, most sources of the time are not necessarily fully reliable,” Hauer told The Reporter. “For the time from near the end of their brother’s reign to the beginning of Mary’s reign, there’s not a lot there that suggests what their relationship would have been like. So, the play kind of imagines what some of that would be.”
According to Hauer, the play begins at Christmas 1550, when the young king Edward VI welcomes his half-sisters, Lady Elizabeth and Lady Mary – the latter, daughter of a Catholic – back into his Protestant court.
The evening sours when Mary confronts the king’s adviser for harassing her younger sister, resulting in their removal from the line of succession. After the king dies, Mary vies for her God-given right to the throne and to restore the nation’s ties with Rome. But Elizabeth, a Protestant sympathizer, has ambitions of her own, and refuses to stay silent as “Bloody Mary” earns her moniker.
Hauer is looking forward to a strong show to close out the first season for his new community theater. Hyperion Players’ first show was The Glass Menagerie in February of 2022.
“We had a lot of people who were just curious to see what we were about and what Hyperion was going to be like,” Hauer said. “That started a lot of conversations about what we wanted to do and gave us a bit of momentum going into the season proper.”
Next they performed Barefoot in the Park, which Hauer says was successful in part because it is a well-known story by Neil Simon.
“The one I think that surprised me was God of Carnage, which went up in March” Hauer told The Reporter. “The script is a little bit edgier. Even the theater folks around here, many of them hadn’t heard of it before. So, there was a lot of uncertainty over how it was going to play, how it was going to be received. I was expecting significantly lower ticket sales for that production, but that ended up being just a few tickets short of Glass Menagerie. It is a comedic script, but it’s sort of darkly comic. I didn’t know how the audience was going to feel, but the audience was absolutely delightful. They were laughing along with it from start to finish. I received a number of emails afterwards, completely unsolicited from people I had never met before, just saying, thank you so much for bringing this. This is the kind of theater we want to see more of. So that was very encouraging.”
And now the season will close with Call Me Sister.
“There’s a lot of curiosity around an original script and one that’s one about an area of interest to many,” Hauer said. “It’s opened up a number of partnerships. We have several high school students who are working on the crew in the play. We have a high school student who’s involved in the cast. We are working with the Shepherd Center of Hamilton County to provide free tickets to some senior citizens in the community. We’re very excited about that. And it’s open to dialogue with several artists as well who have come to me to say, ‘All right, so if you’re interested in doing original scripts, what do you think about this?’ Really at every point throughout the first year and a half now of our existence, it’s been a lot of fun. And certainly there are challenges to being so young and so small, but the flip side of that is there’s so much potential and so many things in front of us still. So it’s been a good year.”
Tickets are just $12 online at hyperionplayers.com/tickets and will be available at the door.