Two Men of Florence

Yesterday afternoon, Queenee and I went to see Two Men of Florence at the BU Theatre. It was great!

Playwright Richard N. Goodwin developed his play, produced in England as The Hinge of the World, into the Huntington Theatre Company production of Two Men of Florence. The play is about Galileo Galilei and Pope Urban VIII and their adversarial positions on Galileo's support for Copernicanism and heliocentrism. The church supported Aristotelian geocentrism. Galileo had no problem reconciling his science with his Catholocism. The Vatican saw many problems, and Galileo was eventually forced to recant heliocentrism and spent the last years of his life under house arrest on orders of the Roman Inquisition.

Galileo is played by Jay O. Sanders, and he spends the better part of two hours on stage. The play is a ton of dialog, almost all by Galileo, and Sanders makes you believe in and sympathize with Galileo. Edward Herrmann brings humanity to the "bad guy" role. You expect not to like his Pope, but you can't help but see the predicament in which he finds himself. You may not agree with him or his opposition to Galileo, but you understand his position.

The play isn't historically accurate (his daughter was a nun, but she was cloistered, not his assistant), but it hits the main points of Galileo's passion and problems. The Boston Globe says, "…Goodwin reveals both men as fascinating and complicated human beings, full of intellectual curiosity and spiritual passion." You can read the Boston Globe review and listen to theater critic Louise Kennedy discuss the play while seeing some slides. The set itself is spectacular, simple but very effective. The center part of the stage rotates at various points throughout the play, and stagehands dressed in dark shrouds silently move the set pieces around. I disagree that the staging was 'heavy-handed', but she's right about the dialog. You really need to pay attention and doing a bit of pre-play re-reading of your high school Galileo wouldn't hurt. I didn't have any problem at all relaxing into the play and am very happy to see at least some people don't want everything dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. If the play had been just the two men arguing, I suspect Kennedy would have had problems with that as well.

A few people around us, Queenee included, thought the first half was too long. I thought it was fine, but that's me. The play closes today, but if you get the chance to see it, do.