Godgiven by Miranda Kassidy Franceschini

Reviewing this text is a challenge for me because it is an unpublished draft of a play and it is written by my niece. I was glad to have a full conversation of my thoughts with the playwright, and I hope that this short review can do some justice to Godgiven by Miranda Kassidy Franceschini. Godgiven is a play about desire, manipulation, responsibility, and the persistent hunger for more.

The play opens with a meta component: Echo emerges onto the stage with a participatory experience, I imagine, similar to the actual Greek tradition. The introduction to her character is a creative and clever trojan horse for bringing up some of the trigger warnings in the play. Franceschini and I talked through the implications of this opening and how to sustain its promise throughout the play meaningfully (Echo promises to warn the audience of the more traumatizing parts).

From there, the play begins in earnest with a bar scene of various Greek Gods having a good time. After six months, Helios, Maia, Elektra, Alkyone, Merope, Taygata, and Kelaino are having one last night on the town. The opening is engaging and light, and I think Franceschini really nails the dynamics of an ensemble, with characters bantering and talking over one another. There’s a great energy and rhythm to it. Then, enter Midas—probably my favourite character in the piece—who is a sordid figure who has been feeding them drinks all night and attempts to lure some of the ladies to go along with her.

Knowing nothing going in, I fully expected Midas to be one of the central sources of conflict in the play, but Franceschini subverts that expectation. Instead, we see Arvika the following morning prepared to worship Her Radiance, Kassiopeia. If you’re like me, you have only a little working knowledge of Greek mythology—luckily it’s not that important to know the backstories. In any case, in the course of her worship, Helios literally bumps into Arvika and, in an unfortunate turn of events for Arvika, Helios is selected to be Kassiopeia’s High Priest.

From there, the play becomes somewhat like Doctor Faustus: Helios has powers he doesn’t know how to grapple with, made all the more challenging due to his reluctance. He’s under the direct guidance of Echo (Aspect of Truth), Midas (Aspect of Fortune), and Ikarian (Aspect of Justice). Again, I think the dynamic between the characters is what helps the play to shine. In particular, Echo’s humour and levity plays against Helios’ doubt and self-seriousness effectively. For example, when Echo introduces Helios to the idea of the confessional, it plays Helios’ skepticism against Echo’s blind optimism in a fun, critical scene. Sometimes I found Echo to be a bit much, but if the performer sells the exuberance well it works well.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the play, but it’s partly about Helios taking on the role of High Priest, partly about his love for a mountain foundling named Vertmont, and partly about Kassiopeia giving Helios the “gift of hunger” (I like that phrase and premise) such that he can’t really be satiated.

One of the things I noted about the script is that Franceschini could trust her actors and audience a bit more and scale back in turn. Several characters have lengthy soliloquies that, in my view, overexplain what could be shown through the performance or inferred by the audience. Sometimes the exposition works; there’s a sneaky moment early on when the characters are explaining their situation and one character justifies the exposition by saying, “my memory went away six drinks ago” (4). Moments like that feel contextually justified. Some of the monologues, though, narrate more information than is necessary and the subtlety of less-is-more would help those scenes shine stronger. Similar, there’s a moment of innuendo that Helios apologizes for, but I think letting the innuendo sit without drawing attention to it would be more powerful—at the culmination of the conflict between Helios and Vert similarly feels like it could be scaled back to feel more natural. 

Speaking of staging, I am very curious to see how this play would be staged. There are a number of moments in the text that open up for a great deal of creativity. For example, when Helios bumps into Arvika, he spills wine on her and then removes the stain with magic. In another scene, Helios disappears from a confessional, the confessional is lifted into the air by a giant, and the confessional goes up in flames. Actually, the play has a lot of fire and I don’t know how one of the characters is going to get incinerated into ash.

There are a few standout lines that give the play some extra poetry. A few that stood out to me are that “when the moonlight shines over the water, it’s like the sea is space’s mirror” (3) and “he knew better than to let weeds take what belonged to the flowers” (15). There’s also a play on “saviours” and “savourers” (49) that is pretty clever and fits thematically with the text. From a technical perspective, I think there’s still a fair amount of work to do on the play—it’s in draft form, after all, but the punctuation and spelling could be cleaned up for a stronger final product.

As far as characters go, I really liked Midas as an agent of chaos. The wild card factor is fun and she’s also a creep that preys on women. There’s a scene where she’s pitching a nunnery and she’s such a gross predator, but it’s presented in kind of a fun way that is hard to resist. I just wish the characters had more of a chance for an ensemble; the opening scene of the play offers such rich characterization and seeing them interact more throughout the play would be a nice addition (though there’s a logical reason it doesn’t happen…). Helios also has a really nice trajectory; he has a redemptive arc as a reluctant messiah type to someone who is actually pretty selfless. It doesn’t work out great for him, but it feels like a genuine transformation.

Plot wise, there’s a pretty effective escalation. There’s a moment (I think in act 4?) where there’s an unexpected twist that recontextualizes the play. It’s a pretty devastating moment for Helios and actually had me flipping back to a previous scene demanding to know how I hadn’t seen the twist coming and I think that was probably the best plot beat. The conclusion of the play was satisfying, though I wasn’t entirely certain about the villain’s motivations. There might be a bit more baked into the dialogue to show why Helios gets targeted the way he does—same for why Ikarian has a change of heart. Even a little hint in a previous scene could go a long way towards the payoff for those developments.

I sincerely hope that Franceschini gets to stage this play and would be genuinely curious to see how it gets staged. It’s a play of many possibilities. I’m really proud of my niece for breaking into the writing world and hope that this is the start of a wonderful journey for her.

Happy reading!