Barbara Blatner
Title of Play
Jane, Queen's Foole
Date and Place of Reading
June 2, 2025
Pearl Studios, New York City
How to Access the Play
Email blatnerb@aol.com
Director
Jan Powell
Cast
Caroline Kinsolving–Mary Tudor
Matthew McGloin–Will Somer
Kleo Mitrokostas–Stage Directions
Lauren Molina–Jane Foole
James Joseph O'Neil–Chester
Cassia Thompson–Lucerne
About the Playwright
Barbara Blatner is a playwright, poet, and composer-musician. The language of her plays has been noted for being charged, bent, and stoked; her subjects are women’s power, war, mental illness, racism, mythic America, and figures in history. Barbara’s verse play No Star Shines Sharper aired repeatedly on Christmas eve on NPR stations and was acquired by the Museum of TV and Radio. The award-winning Years of Sky was produced by Scripts Up! at 59E59 Theatres. Jane, Queen’s Foole, based on the little that is known of the only documented female fool/jester in the English court, was co-winner of the
Broad Horizons 2025 New Voices, New Plays, New York contest and has placed in many competitions (including runner-up for the 2024 Julie Harris Award and finalist for the 2024 ATHE Judith Royer Award for Excellence in Playwriting, Centenary Stage 2023 Women Playwrights Series). Hamlet Leaves England was produced by Pittsburgh New Works Mainstage; Secret Places by New Circle Theatre Company; and Spell, a riff-in-verse on Shakespeare’s Tempest, by Toronto’s Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival and as an audio play by Open Door Playhouse. New York Quarterly Books published two of her full-length poetry collections, The Still Position and Living with You. Playwright-director-educator Erik Ehn said that Barbara’s fantasy play Marilyn Monroe in the Desert invokes "commerce, politics, and vast forces of time and death...."
About the Play
Tudor London, 1553:
Princess Mary Tudor, the passionately Catholic daughter of the late King Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, is distraught: Her 15-year-old brother, King Edward, on his deathbed, means to stop Mary from inheriting the British throne, overturning his Protestant rule, and reinstating Catholicism as state religion.
Mary’s factotum, Chester, brings Mary a “mad,” compulsively rhyming beggar named Jane. Claiming in skewed but pungent language that her “brain is - aha! - God!”, Jane predicts Mary will inherit Britain’s throne. She makes Mary laugh. Mary employs the starving Jane as her “Foole,” and Jane enters a radically upgraded life at court; falls in love with another fool, Will Somer; and bonds with a feisty acrobat, Lucrece.
Not understanding hierarchy, Jane is hurt when Mary rejects her as a “sister,” but she secures her place in court when she predicts all events that will lead to Mary becoming Queen. Jane also predicts that Mary will become a great ruler if she unites all Britons, both Catholic and Protestant, and refrains from punishing “those unlike you/lest some day they are you.” Will Mary listen?
In Jane, Queen’s Foole, two women in Britain’s male-centric Tudor world wield different kinds of power. Jane is a creator of meanings, a seer, and an intuitive soul who edges close to divine power and seems oblivious to social caste. Mary, born to wealth and the monarchy, exerts the power of the state, dynasty, and religious inheritance. Jane and Mary mirror each other empathically, but Mary’s inflexibility and Jane’s loyalty to truth separate them. Jane speaks truth to power; she cannot do otherwise.