You, Nero

Amy Freed's new play You, Nero tells the sad tale of one Scribonius, a Roman playwright, who has the misfortune of being commissioned to write a "bio-drama" about Nero--by Nero.   Scribonius, however, has fallen on hard times (he's directing a troupe of mimes), and so this commission at first appears to be a godsend (or, at least, an emperor-send).  Needless to say, things do not go as planned.  Scribonius overhears Nero and his mother, Agrippina, plotting to do something-or-other; he finds himself enmeshed with Nero's mistress, Poppaea; and, perhaps worst of all, he makes the mistake of taking Seneca's advice about the purpose of his play--namely, to offer Nero a model of virtue.  Various unfortunate events ensue, including two murders, one castration, and a rather large fire. 

Stock characters aside, You, Nero isn't really an attempt to emulate Roman comedy, let alone to produce a historically accurate costume drama.  Instead, it is a straightforward satire on the twenty-first century entertainment industry.  Most of the jokes, for that matter, derive their humor from allusions to twentieth- and twenty-first century culture, ranging from Scribonius' output (Death of a Sailmaker, The Leper of Cherbourg) to quips about the "inner child" to lousy pop music.  At the beginning of the play, Scribonius and his actor-friend contemplate the imminent demise of scripted theatre (read: film, TV drama, live theatre), given the rousing success of gladiators and other such violent spectacles (read: reality TV).    But in taking on the job of dramatizing Nero's life--and, in the process, inventing both the biopic and realism--Scribonius falls prey to the allure of reality TV (er, reality spectacle) in the guise of countering it.  Each time Scribonius reinvents Nero's theatrical image, desperately seeking a way to make the real Nero into the fantastically virtuous Nero, he simply provides the real Nero with yet new ways to narrate his own evil to himself.  Our poor author never manages to make his intended audience interpret the play "correctly."   In fact, as Scribonius realizes at the end, Nero's audience adores the spectacle of their emperor's decadence--just as long as it is narrated properly, in terms of an ongoing quest for love and self-realization.  The play concludes with an apocalyptic Roman version of American Idol--no, not making that up--as the audience gives way to their desire to be, not themselves, but a grotesque knock-off of their celebrity emperor.  Cue Rome burning.

The LA Times called this play "smart" but "erratic," which is to the point.  Right now, the plot structure is totally non-existent: there's no real climax (even the American Idol competition at the end feels flat) and, as Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt commented afterwards, the play simply stops.  Perhaps somewhat ironically, much of the humor feels sitcom-ish; many of the biggest laughs derive from stage business instead of the writing.  And one of You, Nero's most polemical points, that Seneca's moralizing project is not necessarily an improvement on (let alone a viable alternative to) the American Idolization of contemporary culture, suffers from the absence of any well-articulated outsider's position.   Scribonius, after all, is a well-meaning hack whose track record includes political dramas and what sounds like a slasher drama--he has always been a part of what Freed satirizes, not an innocent observer.