Shakespearing #45: Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

26 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

Shakespearing #45 by John King

Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a weird play. There, I said it.

loves-labours-lost

The premise is that four young men, in a spirit of fellowship, swear that they will forbear the company of women in order to devote themselves to a Spartan, scholarly life. The man driving this hard bargain is the Ferdinand, the king of Navarre. His cynical, witty friend, Biron, sees the impossible difficulty of this feat from the outset, but loves his fellows too much not to try.

A visitation from the Queen of France and her ladies in waiting throws this plan out of order almost immediately, but before that we have a subplot that also suggests that swearing off women, and love, is impossible. Don Armado, a lesser Spanish noble whose grasp of English is, ummm, problematic, has caught the witty and clownish Costard wooing the beautiful Jaquenetta in contradiction of the king’s edict forbidding such intercourse. Don Armado loves Jaquenetta himself, and so, for his discipline, the king places Costard into Don Armado’s questionable custody.

Jim Helsinger as Don Adriano de Armado, Jacob Dresch as Costard, and Maxel Garcia as Moth. (Photo by Tony Firriolo.)

Shakespeare’s themes of struggling to being honest and true in a complicated world, the fallibility of the heart and the mind, and our smallness before our fates, come off in ways that sometimes seem pedantic when not hysterical in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and in the last act the turns of emotion are extreme. Love’s labors are lost, after all.

Sometimes Shakespeare’s work is a provocation for interpretation, and it is up to each acting troupe to make something coherent and whole out of some of the bard’s more wild maneuvers. Elsewhere, I have lamented the nadir of Shakespearean film, Kenneth Branagh’s version of LLL, which was set in the 1940s, so when I learned that Orlando Shakespeare Theater was having a go at it with a 1920s theme, I confess I felt a pang of terror. However, I have never seen a bad Shakespeare show at OST, and was rewarded for my faith in this company.

Dan Helsinger as Don Armado (Photo by Tony Firriolo)

Jim Helsinger, who is the artistic director of OST, plays Don Armado, and it is this performance that pulls the entire production together. Helsinger somehow balances the broad slapstick of the don’s pronunciations and malapropisms and foppishness with a sense of humane tenderness that lends a gravitational weight to the larger plot. There is a hint that part of what makes Armado so uncouth is simply that he is outside of his own culture, and that his bombast, while egotistical, is not narcissistic.

Matthew Goodrich as Longaville, Blaine Edwards as Dumaine, Buddy Haardt as Ferdinand, and Christian Ryan as Biron. (Photo by Tony Firriolo.)

And really, considering the hijinks of our four would-be sequestered scholars, such as their pretending to be a troupe of Russian dancers, is Don Armado all that foolish? By the end of the play, everyone must truly be who they are.

Kathryn Miller as Rosaline and Aubrey Saverino as The Princess of France. (Photo by Tony Firriolo.)

This would include the women of the play as well, who in their pride are willing to mock the loves of these men, and their pretensions for scholarly fellowship. Shakespeare engages deeply with romantic love, but never suggests that experiencing it will ever be easy.

Jacob Dresch as Costard, Gabrielle Toledo as Maria, Kathryn Miller as Rosaline, Georgia Mallory Guy as Katherine, and Alexander Mrazek as Boyet. (Photo by Tony Firriolo.)

Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s production of LLL speeds up the exposition, and gets to the funny sooner. One detail of Dan Conway’s set design really abetted this concision: a ring upon the stage that turned like something out of a Busby Berkeley film, or an opera, that can set tableaus in motion or suggest cinematic cutaways without forcing a stop to a scene.

The ending features a play within a play that doesn’t go as smoothly as the tale of Pyramus and Thisby from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the mayhem will take a dramatic emotional turn. Thomas Ouellette’s direction manages to convey a real dreaminess to the abrupt and elliptical ending, which technically lacks Aristotelean brevity of passing time. The king tells Biron that the resolution of the plot will occur in “twelvemonth and a day, and then ’twill end,” and Biron retorts, “That’s too long for a play.” The stagecraft of Orlando Shakespeare Theater graciously makes up the difference. With another deep cut from Shakespeare’s body of work, OST finds the fun and the shocking drama that makes the play come alive.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Shakespearing #44: Gender and Shakespeare in Soho

11 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ Leave a comment

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.

Macbeth_LisaWolpe_3

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.”

Macbeth3

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.

_______

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

_______

David Foley

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 #43: Lisa Wolpe’s Gender-Bent Macbeth3

02 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 2 Comments

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.

Macbeth_LisaWolpe_3

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.

Macbeth3

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.

LadyMacbeth_Macbeth_3

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.

_______

Chuck Cannini

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.

Shakespearing #42: New York Classical Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in New York City, Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 2 Comments

Shakespearing #42 by Chuck Cannini

New York Classical Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Central Park)

Central Park West’s entrance at 103^rd Street welcomed all beneath the gentle glimmer of lampposts as green as the surrounding undergrowth, tree leaves, and shrubs. Manhattan’s brick-walled apartments and rumbling cars ceased to exist. This transition from a city to a forest of an almost otherworldly beauty must parallel what characters Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena experienced when the young lovers fled Athens and into the Athenian Woods.

The artistic director greeted my friend and me minutes before famed New York Classical Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream started. My editor had instructed me to introduce myself to the artistic director. I called him Drew. His name is Stephen.

Drew-Stephen extended a pamphlet to me. Tiny green balls, presumably fairies, dotted over leaves that adorned the pamphlet’s edges. Beyond the leaves, through blackness stared two alluring blue eyes, an invitation to the magic that awaited us.

A wet spot darkened the back of my nice shirt. My thick runner’s legs screamed mercy. Summer had arrived in New York and the walks and subway rides were long. Out of her bag, my friend whipped out a waterproof shower curtain that lowered onto the grass and dew, which my tired ass welcomed like fresh bed sheets.

Without warning, Stephen Burdman’s voice boomed. The mutters and whispers stopped. All eyes – men, women, children, and their dogs – concentrated on the stage: a stretch of grass beneath a great big tree’s evening shadow, a murky lake as the backdrop.

True to the comedic play’s tone, a lot of strange sights and surprises occurred.

Theseus (Clay Storseth) strutted in Navy Blues, white hat, medals, and all. Philostrate (Matt Mundy) flashed a camera. Modern touches to a 16^th-century play.

The devious fairy Puck (also Matt Mundy) popped in one scene earlier than usual. With a flick of his magical fingers, Puck froze the terrified rude mechanicals. With single tugs, the mechanicals’ shirts and skirts flipped inside out to transform the characters in to the hunched and insect-like fairy servants of Queen Titania (also Amy Hutchins).

Photos by Miranda Arden, © New York Classical Theatre.

Then Puck said, “But there is so much more for you to know, / so deeper in the woods we all must go!”

Our snacks and waterproof shower curtain hastily gathered up, my friend and I followed the crowd on an easy two-minute walk around the murky lake.

Photos by Miranda Arden, © New York Classical Theatre.

Laughs were aplenty both in and out of the play. When a scene tensed, a dog barked in upset, which Oberon (also Clay Storseth) humored mid-dialogue. I’m not so sure about the children, though. Their faces paled and their eyes widened when a Southern-accented Flute (Montgomery Sutton) danced onto the final scene dressed as a big-breasted Thisbe.

Then, through the legs of the Brooklyn-accented Snout (Patrick Truhler), Flute and Bottom (Ian Gould) attempted to kiss. Flute complains, “I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all.”

The innocent children did not understand what made the grown ups burst forth in laughter.

This show is well acted, and fun.

Photos by Miranda Arden, © New York Classical Theatre.

New York Classical Theatre productions are free, which helped me justify any gnats as magical fairies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream continues from Thursday June 23rd to Sunday June 26^th before shifting south to Nelson A. Rockefeller Park, and I encourage any New Yorkers (or visitors) to please treat themselves and support the theatre’s hard (and fun) work. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not an option, fear not! The Winter’s Tale will play at Battery Park July 18-August 7 and August 8-14 at Brooklyn Bridge Park.

_______

Chuck Cannini read Shakespeare in high school, then immediately fell asleep. After he graduated with salutatorian honors and a B.F.A. in Creative Writing for Entertainment, he decided to study Shakespeare again.

Shakespearing #41: OST’s The Tempest

25 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Anne Hering, Lisa Wolpe, Orlando Shakespeare Theater, The Tempest

One of my articles of literary faith is that Shakespeare is the best writer who has ever lived.

A related article of literary faith is that few of my writer friends quite understand this because they think Shakespeare can’t really be understood, or play in an authentic way.

They think this because their curiosity has not survived trying to read his plays in high school and college. They blame the bard for their reading mildewed books with half-assed footnotes.

When you see a good production of any of Shakespeare’s plays, though, the experience is vital, and fun. They are called plays, after all. When performed well, the stories are not much hard work at all to follow.

Orlando Shakespeare Theater offers wonderful productions of Shakespeare that simultanously deliver some classic sense of period and also enough imaginative flair to surprise more experienced audiences. I’ve seen every one of OST’s Shakespeare productions over the last five years, and every one of them have been superior.

Lowndes Center Red Carpet

OST’s The Tempest is no exception.

The Tempest is one of those plays that is so conceptually weird that the stage is actually a far superior place than the cinema for showing its action. At the core of the play is the wizard, Prospero, driven to something like madness in his exile. He controls the loyal sprite, Ariel, and the disloyal beast Caliban as well. Prospero has lived his life on an island alone from any human company, except for his beloved daughter, who has grown up in the time of his exile.

When the noble relations are traveling near the island, Prospero cataclysmically affects the weather in order to shipwreck them onto his home in exile, and sets about forcing these people into undergoing trials in their survival, in the hope of gaining retribution for his betrayals, and a reconciling with his family. The Tempest is known as a problem play, for it feels as dark and wrenching as a tragedy, even if it has some moments of slapstick hilarity, as well as the marriage plot ending typical for comedies. Making the tone of the play seem natural is a great accomplishment.

As usual, the acting from OST’s players is superior. Richard B. Watson makes a formidable Caliban, animalistic, barbaric, yet vibrantly human. John P. Keller is delightful as the alcoholic butler, Stefano, well-matched with an equally crapulent Brad DePlanche as Trinculo. Dameka Hayes is a compelling Ariel, otherworldly, balletic, yet intelligent, and somehow the conscience of the play. Gracie Winchester as Miranda renders the love story of The Tempest wonderful, along with Brad Frost as her suitor, Ferdinand. Greg Thornton brings a noble gravitas to the role of the wizard, Prospero. Joe Vincent adds just the right amount of pathos as Gonzalo. And Lisa Wolpe, as the treacherous usurper Antonia, extracts exquisite humor as a self-satisfied villain, yet with a few subtle gestures manages the transformation of profound contrition. The Tempest is a difficult play, in all its bizarre modulations of emotion, yet this production by Anne Hering finds the psychological logic perfectly, as if it were a straightforward play.

I don’t want to reveal too much about the staging and effects that OST uses to make The Tempest feel like a tempest, how OST makes Ariel seem like a multi-dimensional being. I need to leave some surprises intact. But Orlando Shakespeare Theater is a blessing upon our town, and you owe it to yourself to get out to see a show. Tickets are only slightly more than the cost of going to a movie, and this particular theatrical experience, unlike most movies, is unforgettable.

_______

Production photos by Tony Firriolo.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Shakespearing #40: A Reflection

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Shakespearing #40 by David Foley

A Reflection

I’m supposed to come up with some final thoughts about Shakespeare after my long trek through the plays, but I keep thinking about his books. I recently stumbled on a Times article from 2005 in which the author flogs the old idea that Shakespeare couldn’t have written his plays because he left no books in his will. There are several things wrong with this assumption, beginning with the question of whether Shakespeare actually owned the books he used; but it suddenly occurred to me that all the anti-Shakespearean arguments based on what’s in the plays—he must have owned tons of books; he must have been trained in law; he must have been a nobleman; he must have gone to sea—evade the central mystery of the work, which is a mind so preternaturally absorptive that it saw, heard, sensed all; everything was material to be captured and pinned down in words. It begins to feel relentless and insatiable, this will to absorb the world and put it in words.

This may be why Shakespeare still feels like one of us, even though logic tells us that he’s not. It’s as if he’s constantly striving to see past the filter of country, time, and culture to the thing itself, and as a result, for sudden, thrilling moments, he helps us see past our own filters. The other night I saw Cymbeline in the Park. The sexual politics of Cymbeline are alien to us, but Imogen’s intelligent despair is not.

Which makes me think that it’s not just the thing itself that he captures, but some kind of ideal of what it is to be human. Last week I saw Ubu Roi. I wrote in my notebook that it’s what you would get if you stripped Shakespeare of any notion of the basic dignity of the human endeavor. Not such a bad play to produce teetering on the verge (1896) of the twentieth century. But the humanist ideal dies hard, and if we keep returning to Shakespeare, it’s because he tells us that even our madness has meaning. Our sorrows are deep and often of our own making, but they’re woven into the fabric of the world and resonate in its reaches. As are our joys.

One reason Shakespeare is a touchstone for writers is that we all do some version of his grab and capture. We try to get the world in words. We do it with joy and conviction when we’re young—a clever satisfaction in the neatness of the trick—and with increasing befuddlement, perhaps desperation as we get older. The world eludes us; the project of capturing it becomes harder, the usefulness of the project more suspect. We use thornier sentences to capture a human meaning that becomes more and more elusive.

You can sense this happening to Shakespeare as he gets older. The language becomes denser, the images knottier, his faith in the dignity of the human endeavor shakier. But if you’re a writer you keep trying. As I was writing this, my sister emailed me a wonderful piece about Grace Paley, who says, “[The writer is] like an idealist who marries nearly the same woman over and over. He tries to write with different names and faces, using different professions and labors, other forms to travel the shortest distance to the way things really are.” In my Love’s Labor’s Lost posting, I suggested that Shakespeare is “our greatest poet of the real.” Maybe this is what I meant, that he succeeds more than any of us in leaping that distance to the way things really are. But even he seems to have been driven forward by the maddening inachievability of the task.

He was also a man of the theatre. I began this project in part because I wanted to get at Shakespeare the playwright. Part of the fun of it has been intuiting the ways in which Shakespeare’s theatre—so different from ours in so many ways—might have shared, indeed might have provided the first iteration of, certain features of our own: fandom, rivalry, and backbiting; celebrity playwrights and the people who collected their plays; art as an accidental byproduct of a make-or-break business; and even an audience demographic that tilted towards the queer.

It’s also been fun to see Shakespeare develop. To see him go from journeyman to innovator to, in his young old age, a kind of restless experimenter, teasing the boundaries of what theatre can and should do, so that his last plays seem to quietly break and remake the rules. Having just seen Cymbeline I can tell you that the long, closing recognition scene—containing twenty-four separate revelations, my friend told me—shouldn’t work and does. It’s thrilling.

A long time ago, on a grant application, I wrote rather grandiosely that I thought theatre tries to capture the condition of a human being trapped between earth and sky. As a formula it lacks multiplicity—it leaves out not just the range and complexity of Shakespeare’s worlds but the fact that theatre inevitably deals with human beings in relation to each other. But it does capture something about the theatrical space: boards planked above Eurydicean depths; overhead: empty, aspirant air. Between these spaces Shakespeare gave us a bewildering variety of worlds. How is it possible that the same writer gave us A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Coriolanus? King Lear and Taming of the Shrew? And yet you can see that the same mind, the same way of seeing and shaping the world, created them all. No alternate explanation of authorship can crack that riddle. As I say, it’s a mystery. Unless it has something to do with what I’ve been talking about: in each new world a flying, ferocious attempt to give us the world itself.

So my trek through the plays ends here, but Shakespearing doesn’t. John will open it up to other writers, and hopefully I’ll chime in, too, when I’ve got something new on my mind. Thanks for following me on the journey.

_______

Shakespearing #39: Two Noble Kinsmen

19 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Two Noble Kinsmen

Shakespearing #39 by David Foley

The Two Noble Kinsmen

“There’s many a man alive that hath outliv’d/The love o’ th’ people.” This is Palamon in The Two Noble Kinsmen, congratulating himself that his impending execution will spare him this and “prevent/The loathsome misery of age.” It’s a line Shakespeare supposedly wrote.

One of the stories you can tell yourself while reading this last play is a story of youth and age. John Fletcher was in his mid-thirties when he collaborated with Shakespeare, an age when Shakespeare was writing Henry V, As You Like It, and Hamlet, among others. Fletcher’s scenes in Two Noble Kinsmen are light, charming, sunny. Shakespeare’s are scored with images of death, old age, decay. He opens the play with a strange and startling scene. Three queens appear in Athens, seemingly out of nowhere (in the Chaucerian source they accost Theseus on his way home from conquest), to lament their husbands, killed in war at Thebes and left to rot in the field by King Creon, who will not let them “take th’ offense/Of mortal loathsomeness from the blest eye/Of holy Phoebus, but infects the winds/With stench of our dead lords.” One of them begs Hippolyta to tell Theseus what she would do “if he i’ th’ blood-siz’d field lay swoll’n/Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon.”

This world of cost and woe becomes knowing and sophisticated when Fletcher takes over. We take a couple of steps away from the story and feel ourselves breathe easier. (You can guiltily start to prefer Fletcher’s scenes.) Perhaps this is most obvious in the treatment of the Jailer’s Daughter, whose lust for Palamon is refreshingly straightforward (“I would fain enjoy him”) but lacks the lived reality of desire that Shakespeare gives his love-struck women. The account of her madness—flowers, water, snatches of old songs—seems deliberately intended to echo Ophelia, but does so with the prettiness of a pre-Raphaelite painting.

The charm of this works best in the friendship of Arcite and Palamon, the kinsmen of the title. In the funniest scene, the cousins, about to duel to the death for the love of Emilia, solicitously help each other into their armor.

Arcite: Do I pinch you?

Palamon: No.

Arcite: Is it not too heavy?

Palamon: I have worn a lighter,/

But I shall make it serve.

The image of same-sex affection running through the play makes we wonder again, as I did in my Twelfth Night posting, what signals were being sent and received in Shakespeare’s theater. There’s the bachelor Pirithous’s love for Theseus. “How his longing/Follows his friend,” says Emilia, before telling about her own love for her late childhood friend Flavina, a love, Hippolyta suggests, that means she “shall never…/Love any that’s call’d man.” Pirithous has a few suggestive lines. In a play full of bawdy puns, he gives the Morris dancers “something/To paint your pole withal,” and says of Palamon, “O heaven, what more than man is this!” And his praise of a young knight’s beauty is suspiciously lyric. And, of course, there are the cousins, who, Arcite declares, “are one another’s wife.” This is not to give a queer reading of the play, but to wonder whether an element of the Blackfriars crowd was being played to. Fletcher’s parting words in the Epilogue are playfully ambiguous: “He that has/Lov’d a handsome wench then, show his face—/’Tis strange if none be here.”

It’s left to Shakespeare, though, to recall us to the cost of desire. After Arcite’s death grants Emilia to Palamon, he says: “O cousin,/That we should things desire which do cost us/The loss of our desire!”

_______

Shakespearing #38: Henry VIII

12 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Henry VIII

Shakespearing #38 by David Foley

Henry VIII

As John King wrote two weeks ago, there’s sadness in The Tempest. The notion that, in Prospero, Shakespeare is throwing down his own books of magic (what John calls “the ending before the ending”) gains force when you’ve followed the trajectory of his work from the beginning. It makes reading the next play he wrote a melancholy experience.

Or co-wrote. Clever stylometrists have pretty definitively assigned what of Henry VIII is Shakespeare and what is John Fletcher. Fletcher, who seems to have been the George S. Kaufman of his day, a skilled and witty collaborator, wrote most of the play, and you can amuse yourself noting differences of style and approach. But the play itself is not hugely interesting, and you might instead start telling yourself stories about Shakespeare’s retreat from the theater.

You might imagine that the King’s Men turned to Fletcher, their new house playwright, with some relief. Fletcher writes a clean, clear line, whereas Shakespeare’s love for compounded meanings and contortionate phrasing (like Henry James, his style got more rarefied as he got older) might at this point have been testing their patience. Here he is describing Henry’s encounter with French king:

When these suns

(For so they phrase ’em) by their heralds challeng’d

The noble spirits to arms, they did perform

Beyond thought’s compass, that former fabulous story,

Being now seen possible enough, at last got credit[.]

…which, in trying to compass a mental construct, pushes almost beyond thought’s compass.

You can note the unusually long and detailed stage directions and wonder if Shakespeare was no longer sitting in on rehearsals. Why not? Was he ill? Depressed? Tired of it all? Written out? Then why these last two collaborations with Fletcher. Generosity to a younger playwright? Crush on same? Business necessity?

There are no answers to any of this, of course, and you’re left with the image of a mysterious fading away: his last solo play written in 1611, three collaborations (one lost) in the two years that followed, and then nothing at all for the last three years of his life.

And you can see Jacobean theater moving on without him. Fletcher seems clearly impossible without Shakespeare. Some of Shakespeare’s facility for mental movement, for instance, has rubbed off on him, as in this speech of Wolsey’s:

What sudden anger’s this? How have I reap’d it?

…

I must read this paper;

I fear, the story of his anger. ’Tis so!

But this limns a mental action without capturing its destabilizing force. A hundred lines earlier, Shakespeare, through Norfolk, links Wolsey’s body and mind:

Some strange commotion

Is in his brain; he bites his lip, and starts,

Stops on a sudden, looks upon the ground,

Then lays his finger on his temple; straight

Springs out into fast gait, then stops again,

Strikes his breast hard[.]

When Henry describes how his doubts arose about his marriage to Katharine, he says they

shook

The bosom of my conscience, enter’d me,

Yea, with a spitting power, and made to tremble

The region of my breast[.]

He was left “hulling in/The wild sea of my conscience.” Do we lose this psychological immediacy (almost literally visceral) when we lose Shakespeare?

And something else: one of the most powerful scenes in the play is Katharine’s plea to Henry and against Wolsey, who she says is “cramm’d with arrogancy, spleen, and pride.” This voice rising up against power is heard throughout Shakespeare. The voice of justice, which is a human voice, is constantly opposed to the more destructive constructs of the human mind. Does it, too, fade out when Shakespeare goes?

_______

Shakespearing #37.1: More on The Tempest

28 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

The Tempest

Shakespearing #37.1 by John King

The Tempest

I adore The Tempest.

David Foley was entirely right last week: the drama of this play is peculiarly light and strangely weighted.

The wizard Prospero’s grievances seem unfathomable, and his sense of family, of relationships, is both intense, yet distant, pushed through his mind like a vicious abstraction trying to form itself into something like love.

The trap that Prospero sets for the brother and king and the other conspirators who betrayed him feels like a pageant of robots who know their crimes, but are incapable of feeling anything about them, not even a stoic callousness that denies morality or loyalty.

The love story between Miranda and Ferdinand seems passionlessly bland—the meeting of almost unbearable innocents–a retread of a fairy tale or Greek myth (Psyche and Eros) turned on its head.

The alcoholic antics of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo have a difficult time seeming funny.

Stephano,_Trinculo_and_Caliban_dancing_from_The_Tempest_by_Johann_Heinrich_Ramberg

Few productions can live up to this illustration.

Only Prospero’s relationship to Ariel, the enslaved sprite, feels emotional throughout the play.

David said, “the island is a created world, and it’s created through language, and you need to pay attention to that.”

The words are the world of The Tempest.

And it is a world that will return the fantastic to the ordinary, through a deliberate leave-taking of magick and the transcendent. Propsero vows,

[T]his rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

This is the last play Shakespeare wrote solo, and its farewells fill me with sadness, this sense of the ending that Shakespeare had before the ending. Four to five years before his death in 1616, Shakespeare said goodbye as a thaumaturge.

_______

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Shakespearing #37: The Tempest

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

David Foley, Shakespeare, The Tempest

Shakespearing #37 by David Foley

The Tempest

The Drink: Dark and Stormy. Photo by Amy Watkins.

Sometimes it takes a production that doesn’t work to make you understand how a play does. As I re-read The Tempest, I wondered guiltily if I’d ever much liked it. Coming after Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, it felt tepid. Where was the drama, the deep emotion? The next night I went to see the new Shakespeare in the Park production, directed by Michael Greif, and irritably doubted if the play works at all.

Part of the problem was language. Nobody in the production—including, weirdly, New York Shakespeare Festival stalwart Sam Waterston—has been encouraged to think about it, and a good deal of Prospero’s magic is a magic of words. If anything makes him seem like a self-portrait of the playwright, it’s the way he builds a world of words and makes everyone play a part in it.

So the island is a created world, and it’s created through language, and you need to pay attention to that. On the other hand, with a lot of Shakespeare you can get away with short-shrifting the language. Even if you mess it up, Shakespeare the dramatist will pull you through.

But, as I say, there isn’t much drama here. Greif tries to deal with that by pumping up what he can find. Pitched intensities of speech keep burying the language, and the dialogue is underscored with kettle drums and flashes of light in an understandable but misguided hope that drama will happen if he just keeps hitting it hard enough.

It occurs to me that pretty much the opposite tack is needed for The Tempest. You should take your cue from its most famous line: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” This is not Midsummer, though; it’s a daylight dream. Prospero is insistent that everything needs to be concluded by “the sixt hour.” The play makes a dream of the drama of our waking life. Even the drama of grief is transformed in Ariel’s lovely song: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.”

The play is built on such dream-like images. Greif leaves out an important one. In the final scene, Miranda and Ferdinand are revealed playing chess. Chess is a game of rank and stratagems. It’s the world in small, if you understand the world and all our experiences of it (even love) as inextricably bound to skirmishes for power and advantage. The island, too, writes that world small. Far from civilization, it helplessly recreates structures of obeisance and aggression. Caliban, the least civilized character in the play, only needs to see a pair of drunks on the beach to create a little principality of them.

And yet The Tempest longs for a world innocent of all that. Gonzalo conjures this world in his vision of a “golden age” without “treason, felony,/Sword, pike, knife, gun” where “nature should bring forth” in “all abundance,/To feed my innocent people.” And Miranda and Ferdinand’s wedding pageant is an idyll of peace and plenty, of “turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,/And flat meads thatched with stover.” Miranda is radically innocent, always encountering the world as if for the first time. What loss of innocence does that chess game represent?

Caliban represents another kind of innocence. From a position beyond the reach of civilization, he calls into question its most cherished structures. As does the play. Perhaps The Tempest is less a drama than a diorama, framing all our structures and stratagems as a dream and hinting at the dream’s dark irrationality. As Prospero says of Caliban at the end of the play, “This thing of darkness/I acknowledge mine.”

_______