Hi Yo Mazeppa

From Maine to North Carolina last week, converted barns were clamorous with off-season revivals. Most ambitious bit of resuscitation was undertaken by The County Theatre of Suffern, N. Y., which presented Mazeppa, or The Fierce Tartarian Steed. Hard to deduce from this over-whimsified, bucolic performance is the fact that Mazeppa is one of the most ancient and honorable horse operas in the language.

First concocted as a poem by Byron, Mazeppa's most famous adaptation for the stage described the life and hard times of the crown prince of Tartary. As a page boy in the castle of a Polish King, Mazeppa inspires a gaudy first-act curtain by shooting the fiance of the King's only daughter. Before the hoopla has subsided, Mazeppa, traditionally played by a curve-some female, has been tied to a "fiery Tartarian steed." headed precipitously away from the lone Polish prairie. Enacted in Suffern by the papier-mache horse used by the Lunts in their Taming of the Shrew, the role of the high-tempered stallion is reduced to comic relief. But riding one of his flesh-&-blood predecessors back in the 1860s, Adah Isaacs Menken, most celebrated Mazeppa of them all, was bruised on many occasions by being thrown, kicked, stepped on. As Mazeppa, the well-made Menken used to be stripped down to her step-ins before being tossed aboard the horse. Critics of the time deplored her striptease, grieved at the tawdry sensationalism she was bringing into the theatre.

Among the fiery steeds that pranced off with Mazeppa were Black Bess, Flying Cloud, Toodles, and one sobersided mount named James Melville.

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