Shakespearing #48 by David Foley

Wit and Fresh Sorrow: As You Like It at CSC

When non-traditional casting is not the same as color-blind casting, things can get interesting. (I realize non-traditional casting is a bit of a misnomer since by now it’s quite traditional.) In John Doyle’s new production of As You Like It at Classic Stage Company, Orlando is black and his brother Oliver is white, and the production itself is set in what seems to be a version of the old South. When Orlando complains, “My father charged you in his will to give me good education: you have trained me like a peasant,” the lines take on painful contemporary significance. Doyle stages the fight between the two brothers more violently than is customary, turning race in America into a Cain and Abel rivalry, primal and recursive. When Oliver slanders Orlando as a “villainous contriver,” it becomes almost Ta-Nehisi Coatesian: the need for a criminal onto whom our own rapacity can be transposed.

Doyle seems to want us to feel the real costs of Shakespeare’s warring brothers and tyrannous fathers. Ellen Burstyn, she of the pellucid, emotive face, sits through much of the first part of the play with a volume of Shakespeare on her lap, following the events with deep and anxious empathy. For a while, you feel that the play has been brought to new life for you, made immediate and painful.

Ellen Burstynand (Jacques) Hannah Cabll (Rosalind) in a scene from the Classic Stage Company production of AS YOU LIKE IT, directed by John Doyle. Photo by Lenny Stucker.

And then it kind of dies.

And it dies because in mining the play for fresh sorrow Doyle forgets how it works.

I wasn’t a fan of Doyle’s much-praised Sweeney Todd, which seemed great at mood and theatrics and not so good at making sense of the plot. Since Sweeney Todd gets its theatrical juice from melodrama, that seemed to me a not-inconsiderable flaw. You got to see Patti LuPone play a tuba, but still. I quite liked his Company, which I saw on video, though in retrospect it was maybe more at ease with emotion than wit, another not-inconsiderable flaw if you’re dealing with Sondheim.

Andre DeShields (Touchstone) and Hannah Cabell (Rosalind).  Photo by Richard Termine.

Wit is the reason to do As You Like It, and wit is what dies once we get to Arden. Or rather wit, in the play itself, is what lifts us out of the dark currents of plot into the magic circle of Arden, where the evils and troubles of the world turn to play. That’s what wit does. It plays. It allows us to toss the serious things up in the air the better to see them.

Kyle Scatliffe (Orlando) and Hannah Cabell (Rosalind). Photo by Lenny Stucker

Like Doyle, As You Like It is not big on plot, but there is a major turn. When Orlando arrives in the forest, hungry and desperate, he flourishes his sword at the exiled Duke, demanding food. The Duke responds with kindness and grace. We are no longer in the oppressive world of the court. We are in a world of gentility and play. Doyle will have none of it. Immediately, Orlando’s old servant Anna (Adam in the original) dies in his lap. We have not evaded the sorrowful world, even temporarily, by coming to the forest. One result is that the actor playing Orlando is forced to begin carving love poems on trees, his eyes still wet with tears.

This sets the tone for what follows: a Rosalind denuded of her wit. Her jousting with Orlando is played with smothered grief, her jests run through with the pain of her feelings for him. Her wit seems foreign to Doyle, as if he can’t imagine that lightness itself might be profound.

Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Celia) and Hannah Cabell (Rosalind). Photo by Richard Termine.

Earlier in the play, the usurper Duke charges in on Rosalind and Celia in a furious rage, banishing his niece. They fly apart in terror. It was one of those moments when I felt the thrill of Doyle’s method. A moment that we by now almost blank over had been made viscerally real. But now I wonder if this, too, is mistaken. It misunderstands the pleasures of story, which are also a form of play. The emotional charge smothers the pleasure of the scene, which taps into not living trauma but our joy at hearing what happens next.

Before the play, I was joking with my friend that British directors of American musicals sometimes seem to want us to take our native form more seriously. “Don’t you see,” their productions say, “Oklahoma! is dark!” And, of course, Oklahoma! is dark, and so is As You Like It. Most things that touch on the real world are. The power of wit is not that it makes us forget the dark stuff, but that it reimagines it for us. It suggests that though we may be stuck with it we’re not stuck in it. It imagines new freedom.

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #47 by David Foley

The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park Production of

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The cult of the Fairy Queen has fallen into disuse, reduced to a remnant of aging votaries who follow her through the woods dressed in white. They serve her gently and lovingly, and why wouldn’t they? She’s not like those other fairy queens, vain and foolish divas, throwing their fairy might around. She’s regal and wise, alive with the sensual poetry of nature. (She’s played by Phylicia Rashad, so that helps.) When she discovers she’s been “enamour’d” of a monster, she’s philosophical, as if acknowledging that love’s madness, even this late in life, can still bite you with an ass.

Phylicia Rashad and Benjamin Ye (center). Credit: Joan Marcus.

Maybe because the fairies are the hardest thing to pull off in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, director Lear deBessonet has reimagined them like this for the current Shakespeare in the Park production. Their fey chirpiness is tamped down, and their joints are too stiff for going “swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow,” as Puck puts it. Even Puck, though still up for mischief, gets a little grumpy when asked to go zipping around the world at her age. (There are few more pleasurable sights in New York right now than Kristine Nielsen as Puck clumping around the Delacorte in white pajamas.)

Kyle Beltran, Kristine Nielsen, and Shalita Grant. Credit: Joan Marcus.

When a production works it can be hard to say why. (Easier to say when it doesn’t.) It helps that Midsummer is a sturdy vehicle. Once that purple flower starts wreaking havoc, the thing practically plays itself. Maybe what this production reveals is that, despite the slapstick reversals, there’s something delicate in the play’s mood, and through her understated choices, deBessonet lets that mood sink slowly in. The trees of the forest at first appear Disney green and garish, but there’s a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse above them, from which a jazz singer streams knowing love songs into the night. It’s as if a child’s storyland has been invaded by adult rue and mystery.

Annaleigh Ashford and Alex Hernandez in The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Lear deBessonet, running at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park through August 13. Credit: Joan Marcus.

Annaleigh Ashford and Alex Hernandez. Credit: Joan Marcus.

We’re not drenched in melancholy, though. The squabbling lovers are as much fun as ever: sexy and bewildered and ready for a brawl. Funniest is Annaleigh Ashford who plays Helena as, well, a spaz. (More thematic reinforcement: doesn’t unrequited love make spazzes of us all, clumsily dislodging us from the world?) Hermia is small and feisty, as we want her to be; Lysander sweetly romantic; and Demetrius kind of a dick, but a sexy one. None of this messes with the basic formula, and you don’t want it to. You want it served up as pleasurably and entertainingly as possible. The rude mechanicals do their usual shtick, winding up with what is essentially a parody of the ending of Shakespeare’s previous play. No one is going to take the pain of love seriously this time out.

Patrena Murray, Robert Joy, Jeff Hiller, and Danny Burstein. Credit: Joan Marcus.

Instead, Titania and Oberon, trailed by those aging fairies, suggest not so much that it gets better as that it never ends. The pain and craziness and mistakes, the feeling that you’ve been pulled inside out, can happen at any time. So you’ll probably need some moonlight and poetry and jazz to get you through it.

NOTE: The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs through August 13th.

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #44 by David Foley

Father of Lies: Gender and Shakespeare in Soho

Lisa Wolpe, founder and artistic director of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, has recently been performing a couple of theatre pieces at the Here arts space on 6th Avenue and Spring Street in Soho. In one, Macbeth3, she plays the title role in a stripped-down, three-actor version of Shakespeare’s play.

The other, Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender, is a solo show that positions her work (according to her bio, “[s]he has probably played more of the Bard’s leading male roles than any woman in history”) in the context of a turbulent and painful personal story.

Interestingly, the solo show is not very much about gender, or at least a better title might be Gender and the Alchemy of Shakespeare. Early on, Wolpe asks us to imagine two Stradivarius violins placed at opposite sides of a room. Pluck the A string of one, she tells us, and the A string of the other will start to vibrate. Anyone who responds to Shakespeare (and some don’t) will get the image. This is what Shakespeare manages to do more than any other writer: get our responsive chords vibrating. Wolpe’s piece is a profession of faith in those responsive chords, what she calls his “tuning fork.” It’s a notion both mystical and practical. She can speak with feeling about the thinning of the membrane between herself and the world when she plays Hamlet, and this thinning has ameliorative properties. It’s alchemical, to use Wolpe’s apt term. It breaks down barriers, builds empathy, and allows Wolpe herself to understand and forgive the traumas of her past.

These traumas—family suicides, an abusive stepfather, and the discovery of a family history with deep and tragic roots in the Holocaust—form the spine of the piece. She begins with a riff on Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” and the question drives the show. It’s a piece about learning to be, learning to keep being when the option “not to be” keeps beckoning from the wings. That option has lured others off before her, including her father, a Holocaust survivor and former resistance fighter. The force of that central question drives her readings of Shakespeare. Wolpe is a fluent Shakespearean actor with an engaging command of the language and the stage. She commits herself to his words with passion and empathy, uncovering unexpected emotional layers in Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew” speech or Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man.” It’s clear what gets Wolpe’s responsive chords vibrating.

There’s a political element to Wolpe’s take. “I feel the need for the world population to come together to come together in love and empathy rather than succumbing to a fruitless cycle of revenge and destruction,” she says in a program note. It’s a salutary, and I don’t think misplaced, faith in Shakespeare’s alchemy. Empathy, though, both in art and in politics, has its limits. What I miss in these readings is a quality in Shakespeare that I want to call play of mind. There’s always a part of the character’s mind engaged with itself at play. And this, too, has political implications.

I thought about this during Wolpe’s reading of Richard III. She plays him as a snarling villain. There’s undeniable power in this approach. You could even argue that it’s more politically urgent, giving oppression its true face. This approach necessarily sacrifices the dangerous pleasures, joys even, of Richard’s rhetorical flights” The power of the dazzling liar lies in his power to dazzle, in the oldest sense: to temporarily blind, to daze. Like Elizabeth in the scene Wolpe plays, we are dumbfounded, undone, by the man who doesn’t recognize the rules we play by. We don’t know how to fight him. (Insert contemporary parallel here.)

According to Frank Kermode, Macbeth is the victim of a lie, what Kermode calls “equivocation,” apparently a technical term for early moderns: deception by incomplete truth, such as the witches practice on Macbeth. “[A]s no man…can choose an apparent good in preference to a real one unless his will is corrupted by appearance,” says Kermode, “evil acts imply the constant presence of equivocating factors in the world of moral choice.” The most intriguing change made by Wolpe and her co-director, Natsuko Ohama, in Macbeth3 is to turn the witches into Satan, the father of lies. At one pleasurably disorienting moment, Satan, not the doctor, announces Lady Macbeth’s death.

Macbeth, too, is fascinated by the turnings of his own mind, but here the fascination is horror. He cannot stop thinking about himself thinking about his villainy. He’s a Richard III, to alter a phrase that’s been applied to a contemporary hero, “molested by the rumblings of a soul.”

A lot of that is likely to go missing in a production cut down to a little over an hour. You’ll get the highlights: the prophecies, the murders, Banquo’s ghost, “out, out damn’d spot,” “untimely ripped” but not Birnam Woods. I said in my Macbeth posting last year that the play reminded me of the horror comic books that disturbed me as a child, and that’s probably the best way to view this production. With its bombed-out trash heap of a set, the production’s best scenes seem to happen in the frames of a graphic novel. It makes for a briskly horrifying rendering of the play, and a fitting bookend to the horrors Wolpe unpacks so compellingly in her solo show.

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Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender and Macbeth3 play until August 14th at the Here arts space.

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David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing by Chuck Cannini

Lisa Wolpe’s Gender-Bent Macbeth3

On center stage, he slumped over a tire. Strands of short blond hair dangled into the tire’s hole. The back of his burly leather armor faced the audience. Faceless.

Beyond him, a figure obscured by a tattered hood and cloak skulked in the shadows. The way the figure hunched and walked, something could be seen in its palms. A crown.

For a moment, the figure lingered, wary of the man who slumped over the tire. The figure watched the man, cocked its head left and right, then hurried on. To the steel drum surfaced upon a mound of garbage and muck.

As the figure stood over the steel drum, the golden crown slipped from its fingers. When the crown disappeared past the drum’s rim, a well-timed clang echoed through the theatre. Two more objects, two more clangs followed the crown. Then a burst of fiery red light rose with a cough of smoke out of the drum, and the mound of trash breathed.

As the hooded and cloaked figure backed away, hands clapping excitedly, leather horns peaked over the steel drum. A sunken face and a bare chest followed in a sort of slither.

“What bloody man is that?” Satan hissed through the red light and smoke, his eyes fixed on the man slumped over the tire.

The figure, a witch, grabbed the man by his burly leather armor. With a great yank, she turned the man’s muddled face to the crowd. But he was not a he at all. He was a she: Lisa Wolpe.

Minutes prior, I had explained to my friend and Shakespeare sidekick how Lisa Wolpe and other thespians in her plays transcend the physical – racially, sexually – so long as they embody a character emotionally, psychologically.

After Disney’s Captain Hook, well, hooked me in at three years old, I grew up enjoying the VHS of the 1954 musical Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin as Peter Pan. Years would pass before I learned that a woman played Pan, but subconsciously Lisa Wolpe’s ideas of gender-bent performances had already resonated with me.

And yet, not five minutes into Macbeth3, I had already forgotten this key aspect of Wolpe’s gender-bent Shakespeare or “Trans-Shakespeare” as she sometimes calls her renditions. Wolpe had succeeded.

“Where has thou been, sister?” the witch (Mary Hodges) asked Macbeth, who became temporarily possessed as a second witch in this new trio of devilry.

Wolpe’s response boomed with a deepness and aggression absent in the pleasant tone I had first heard during her podcast interview in Episode 215. “Killing swine,” she said. In an almost drunken state, Macbeth stumbled and swiped a dagger through the air. “And like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.”

Macbeth3’s opening scene differs from Shakespeare’s original story a lot, and I found Wolpe’s tweaks benefitted even the original narrative.

Based on what I just described, Macbeth3’s Act I, Scene I blended action and dialogue from the first two scenes of the original, which quickened the pace, but I also found the scene more visually engaging when compared to the original – the three witches rhyming in the rain.

Though Wolpe served as the second witch, the three mysterious hags combined into a single witch played by Mary Hodges, who also challenged Macbeth as graceful Duncan. Funny enough, Mary’s most lively performance occurred when she played dead. During the famous dinner scene, while the Macbeths were in mid-conversation, Mary entered in such a slow and casual and creepy manner as the bloodied ghost of Banquo. Her face forward, devoid of expression, I snorted an uncomfortable laugh as she also sat down for dinner. You can also add an expository demon masturbating into the steel drum to her resume.

The same can be said of Nick Salamone, who played Satan and also rocked a Swami hat and purple dress as the ruthless Lady Macbeth. (Salamone also performed in New York Classical Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I reviewed in Shakespearing #42.)

Fewer characters, blended scenes, and one single simple set throughout brought in a resounding applause a little over an hour later.

Macbeth3 is as dark as Shakespeare’s original vision, if not darker and maybe a little more satanic. Lisa Wolpe’s execution of this gender-bent tragic tale is clever and, in comparison to other Shakespeare renditions, revolutionary.

The blood of sliced throats will continue to stain H.E.R.E theatre’s stage until August 14^th. Anyone interested in Lisa Wolpe’s gender-bending and overall “Shakesperiences” should also check out her one-woman show Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender, which also plays at H.E.R.E until August 14^th.

Get tickets for Lisa Wolpe’s current run of shows here.

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Chuck Cannini familiarized himself more with the graffiti on his high school desks than he did Shakespeare. However, he did enjoy Macbeth. Today, he uses his B.F.A. in Creative Writing for Entertainment as an excuse to study Macbeth and learn how to get away with murder.