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

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.

Episode 196: Joe Vincent!

12 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Shakespeare, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

C.T. McMillan, Joe Vincent, John McMahon, Lisa Martens, Moby Dick, Orlando Shakespeare Theater, Pericles, The Tempest

Episode 196 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I interview the actor Joe Vincent,

Plus John McMahon writes about how Moby Dick changed his life.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Riverside Shakespeare

NOTES

Check out Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s current offerings, and use the discount code mentioned at the beginning of this week’s episode.

See my reviews of OST’s Tempest and Pericles.

Check out C.T. McMillan’s blog, McMillan’s Codex.

CT McMillan 1 Check out Lisa Marten’s blog, On Top of It.

Do not climb on rocks

I am so proud to share this wonderful Kerouac House/Burrow Press event from last month, My Queer Valentine, starring Ashley Inguanta, Claire Robin Thorne, Amber Norman, and Sarah Viren.

Episode 196 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Shakespearing #41: OST’s Modern Verse Translation of Pericles

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Shakespearing #41 by John King

Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s Modern Verse Translation of Pericles

Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s second Shakespeare offering of the 2015-2016 season is Pericles, rendered into a modern verse translation by Ellen McLaughlin. This translation is part of a larger project called Play on! that will offer modern translations of all of Shakespeare’s plays.

In principle, I am against this sort of thing. Why mount a production of something that is almost Shakespeare? If your production is in English, then your actors, if they are good, will make the lines intelligible and mostly understood by audiences. Technically speaking, Shakespeare was actually already writing in Modern English.

For awhile, I had to endure my friends’ fondness for smooth jazz, which was unjazzy music made for people who loathed jazz, but wanted to be able to say that they were the kind of sophisticated listener that indeed liked jazz. Kenny G and Thelonious Monk both make jazz, such a person wanted to say, they are just different approaches to jazz. Wait a minute, John, who is this Thelonious Monk person anyway?

However, despite my theoretical concerns, Ellen McLaughlin is very clearly not analogous to Kenny G, and while I do doubt the necessity of translating Shakespeare into English, in the case of Pericles, one of Shakespeare’s least performed plays, the verse translation does impart a sense of nobility and grandeur that is reasonably similar to the original. I am one of those bardolotrous freaks who has in fact seen Pericles in a different production years ago, and can make the comparison from experience.

OST’s Pericles is an amazing show, somehow even better than its exquisite Tempest, which is playing concurrently in repertory.

Pericles tells an epic tale of a hero whose fate is tortured, who goes mad from loss and despair, whose fortune is damned, despite his nobility and intelligence. Imagine Oedipus, The Odyssey, the saga of King Arthur, Pamela, and “The Book of Job” all rolled into one brutal, visceral tale. There is a psychedelic visitation of the goddess Diana. There is lowbrow humor, earnest romance, and sublime turns of pathos.

Despite my hesitation about anyone rewriting Shakespeare, Ellen McLaughlin might just have made Pericles a touch more watchable. Shakespeare could sometimes demand that actors do the impossible, and ratcheting down the rhetoric of the final scenes of the play made the emotions a little bit less draining to watch. That director Jim Helsinger could navigate the emotional upheavals of the play is a testament to the excellence of Orlando Shakespeare Theater. The move to include a chorus and the beginning and ending of the play, to lend it a pantheistic spiritual air, invites respect for the past, even as the diction of Shakespeare was made more contemporary.

John P. Keller is impressive as the long-suffering hero Pericles. Richard B. Watson is Helicanus, a loyal advisor to Pericles who gives the audience a greater notion of Pericles’s nobility. Lisa Wolpe is a wonder in her many roles, as an assassin, as the nurse of a princess, as a brothel keeper, as a vestal virgin. Greg Thornton plays multiple kings, some sinister, some goofy. And Kimmi Johnson is a marvel as Diana, Goddess of the Moon. There are too many superior performances to enumerate here, but one thing to note is that if you see both The Tempest and Pericles, you can thrill to see how differently these actors are in one play or the other.

Great theater is unforgettable. If you live in the city Beautiful, you owe it to yourself to go see Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s Pericles and The Tempest.

_______

NOTE: 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.

Episode 148: Jennifer Hoppe-House!

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Jennifer Hoppe-House, Orlando Shakespeare Theater

Episode 148 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the playwright Jennifer Hoppe-House, whose debut play is experiencing its world premiere at Orlando Shakespeare Theater,

plus Lori D’Angelo writes about discovering The Scarlet Letter as a teenager, and reading it in a way probably not endorsed by her high school curriculum.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

SHOW NOTES

Ginger Lee McDermott as Molly in Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog (Photo by Tony Firriolo).

Check out Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog, playing at Orlando Shakespeare Theater through May 3rd.

Read my Portland Review essay about Sylvester Stallone here.

Episode 148 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Shakespearing #30: Macbeth

01 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Shakespearing #30 by David Foley

Macbeth

“The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,” says Banquo of the weird sisters, and this disconcerting geologic claim captures the nightmare quality of Macbeth. Like a nightmare, the play inverts the relationship between the solid and the insubstantial: the world we think we know becomes shot through with terrors the more terrifying because we can’t quite name them. People who worry about the identity of the Third Murderer (“But who did bid thee join with us?”) miss the point. He’s unsettling because we don’t know who he is: he’s one of earth’s bubbles.

The play contains Shakespeare’s most famous lines about sleep, but sleep exists in tension not with sleeplessness (“Sleep no more”) but nightmare. It’s both longed for and feared. It’s not just Macbeth who “sleep[s]/In the affliction of these terrible dreams/That shake [him] nightly,” or Lady Macbeth whom sleep cannot keep pinned to her bed. Early on Banquo says, “And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers/Restrain the cursed thoughts that nature/Gives way to in repose.” Which seems to suggest that the nightmare is not one unleashed by the Macbeths, but one suffusing our lives.

This inversion—the nightmare given precedence over the real—marks a difference between Macbeth and the history plays. Like those plays, Macbeth is a story of ambition, factional rivalries, and political murder, but here political horror takes a back seat to a metaphysical one. We’re in the realm of horror: ravens and wolves and owls, ghosts and witches and cauldrons bubbling with “Tartar’s lips” and “finger of birth-strangled babe.” It’s not that this is new in Shakespeare. The night of Duncan’s murder, riven with “strange screams of death/And prophesying,” recalls the terrifying “prodigies” before Julius Caesar’s. But here the horror is so woven into the world of the play that it comes to seem the point.

It reminds me of those horror comic books that freaked me out when I was a kid, panel after panel of lank black hair, terror-bulging eyes, banshee wails (AI-EEEEE!) scrawled across blue-black clouds, trails of blood darkening to crimson in the light of a sickly moon. What fascinated and repulsed me about those comics was the sense of being trapped in an alternative universe presided over by malevolent, magical forces.

Except that Macbeth is not an alternate universe. At its center is not a gothic cartoon but a man curiously ambivalent about his own evil, consciously aware that he does evil, not in a gleeful Richard III sort of way, but in fascinated horror. Has there ever been a villain so out of love with villainy?

I’m sure I’m not the first to suggest that in these three plays, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, Shakespeare is wrestling with the problem of evil. Macbeth is the tragedy where evil comes closest to the heroic center. There’s no Iago or Edgar or Regan to play evil’s part. Even Lady Macbeth reveals that she lacks the courage of her own wickedness long before the sleepwalking scene. (She faints when Duncan’s body is discovered.) The result is a portrait of a couple helplessly in evil’s grip. More and more, Macbeth attempts to shut out contemplation, to act without thought. “From this moment/The very firstlings of my heart shall be/The firstlings of my hand,” he says before ordering the slaughter of Macduff’s wife and children. “But no more sights!” Their helplessness becomes our own: locked in a nightmare where evil is impervious to remorse, unable to look and unable to turn away, and at the mercy of the bubbles of the earth.

_______

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 #20.1: Another Interlude, This Time Out of Sequence

24 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Orlando Shakespeare Theater

Shakespearing #20.1 by John King

Another Interlude, This Time Out of Sequence

A Review of Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s 2015 production of Henry V

One of the ironies of the current season of offerings at Orlando Shakespeare Theater is that in the spacious Margeson Theater, Merry Wives features the hijinks of Falstaff in a 1950s domestic setting, while the epic sweep of Henry V is being enacted in the snug spot of the Goldman Theater, separated from the Margeson only by a soundproofed wall.

If Falstaff shakes the water from his ears and listens really closely, he might be able to hear the gratifying sounds of his friends mourning his death in the history play next door.

Stephen Lima & John P. Keller (by Tony Firriolo)

Jim Helsinger’s direction takes its cues from Shakespeare’s own meta-theatrics, explicitly drawing on the audience to buy into the make-believe necessary to make “this wooden O” of the little stage hold throne rooms, taverns, the ocean, and the towns and fields of France. Bob Phillip’s set design was made entirely of untreated wooden planks, making one think not only of Shakespeare’s simple stage in the Renaissance, but also the barns of Andy Hardy movies, and that can-do madcap spirit infects the performance with a level of fun one seldom associates with a history play, especially one in which Falstaff dies off stage.

Stephen Lima, John P. Keller, & Geoffrey Kent (by Tony Firriolo)

Before the play is over, all of the actors will portray the narrators of the chorus, either singly or simultaneously, in ways that demand the audience imaginatively invest in the creation of the artifice. In a crowd scene, the audience is among the “band of brothers.” Adding to the intricate sense of artifice is the fact that the actors use American accents for the chorus, but use appropriate English accents and variants or French for the characters they play, with sometimes a bizarre amount of doubling. For example, John P. Kellar plays both the emotionally overtaxed Henry and the simpering, foolish Dauphin, the latter to comic excess.

I sometimes wondered if perhaps the comic turns this production finds in Henry V might be somehow contrary to the spirit of the text, but ultimately I sincerely found those comic interpretations funny, which almost renders the question moot. I also enjoyed that the major through-line of the production seems to be fun, as a counterbalance to the somber, sublime experience that is too much in the minds of Shakespeare fans due to Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film of Henry V. Enough with the pre-game bravado of the Battle of Agincourt speech. This production gives us Shakespeare in his full bathos, the high and the low, the aspirational and the confessional, the spiritual and the slapstick.

Since Merry Wives finishes its run before Henry V, I do hope Falstaff will conceal himself one night in the Goldman, and enjoy the show as much as I did.

_______

Henry V runs from February 18 – March 22, 2015. Get tickets here.

_______

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

Shakespearing #29: King Lear

22 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

King Lear, The Vile Jelly

Shakespearing #29 by David Foley

Photo & cocktail (The Vile Jelly) by Susan Lilley.

King Lear

I’ve had a mental block about my Lear posting. I finished reading the play a few weeks ago, wrote two paragraphs, and stalled. It may be because I’ve already written about Lear in this series, or it may be because I began with the claim, “King Lear is Shakespeare’s masterpiece,” and feared living up to so unhedged a bet. Or perhaps, having scaled Shakespeare’s plays to their pinnacle, it was daunting to describe the view.

It’s a famously barren view where “for many miles about / There’s scarce a bush.” It’s a shelterless, comfortless place. “Man’s nature cannot carry / The affliction nor the fear” of it. “The first time that we smell [its] air / We wawl and cry,” and from that moment on we make “sport” for the pitiless gods.

It makes me think that pity is the great Shakespearean virtue, and pitilessness the moral void his plays keep trying to expose and fill. Pity is an exacting virtue. Empathy, by comparison, seems comfortable and twee, tinged with self-regard. Pity keeps company with brutal fact, “the thing itself,” as Lear calls the disguised Edgar. It marks the great difference between Cordelia and her sisters. When Regan sends Lear out into the storm, her justification might be pity’s opposite: “O sir, to willful men, / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters.” Cordelia tells Lear, “Had you not been their father, these white flakes / Did challenge pity of them… Mine enemy’s dog, / Though he had bit me, should have stood that night / Against my fire.”

Lear’s transformation is an awakening to pity. Moments after he rages madly in the storm, he tells his Fool, “I have one part in my heart / That’s sorry yet for thee,” and he is so struck by Poor Tom, who “answer[s] with [his] uncover’d body this extremity of the skies,” that he tears his own clothes off.

This suggest that pity has a leveling power, and indeed Gloucester later says, “Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man… that will not see / Because he does not feel, feel [heaven’s] power quickly; / So distribution should undo excess / And each man have enough.” At moments like these, we recognize that we still live in Shakespeare’s world and guess that pity, that great corrective to the pitilessness of God and nature, still lies at the heart of our debates.

All this by itself would not make a masterpiece, though it does form part of something I noticed in Othello and I expect is evident in Macbeth: that these are plays of the Unified Effect. I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that, except that Shakespeare’s bent towards multiplicity, to looseness, to shifts of tone and territory, is in abeyance in these plays. Everything points relentlessly towards a central image.

Even this would not be enough, if Shakespeare weren’t also at the height of his artistry. And perhaps it is an artistry of pity. Certainly it’s one of psychological immediacy. His great subject is the mind at war with itself, riding the rough waters of mental and emotional upheaval. Here’s Lear:

No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall—I will do such things—

What they are yet I know not, but they shall be

The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep:

No, I’ll not weep.

I have full cause for weeping, but this heart

Shall break into a hundred flaws

Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad!

This is more than psychological acuity. It’s psychological transposition. It pushes us past empathy and forces us to ride the storm with Lear.

_______

Shakespearing #28.1: Four Observations About Othello

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A.C. Bradley, blackface, Fintan O'Toole, Iago, Laurence Olivier, Othello, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Shakespeare

Shakespearing #28.1 by John King

Four Observations About Othello

1. In Shakespeare is Hard, But So is Life, the Irish theater critic Fintan O’Toole says,

If you look at the character of Othello in isolation, and in particular if you look at him through the notion of the “tragic flaw’, then he is not, for all his facility with words, very bright. He can talk up a storm, but he’s not much for thinking. His tragic flaw is jealousy and he carries it around like a crutch, just waiting for someone to kick it from under him. He is manipulated by Iago, a man he didn’t enough trust enough in the first place to make him his lieutenant, without ever attempting to ascertain facts for himself. Suspecting his wife, he fails to confront her with her supposed infidelity, or to question her alleged lover, or to ask any of the other people who could tell him what’s going on. He is driven demented by a handkerchief. (69)

Now O’Toole is setting up a discussion of the chaotic Elizabethan context of the social construction of social status and political power, but if we look at Michael Cassio as being the hero of the play, then his tragic flaw is that he cannot hold his liquor. Sad, really.

2. Othello is about race, or more particularly, it is like a litmus test about race. We out ourselves in how we react to the race and racism of the play.

O’Toole remarks on how icky 19th century scholarship was about the interracial couple at the core of the play (76-77). O’Toole is so keen to show how progressive he is that he misreads A.C. Bradley entirely.

In a lengthy endnote in his Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley chronicles the ridiculous debate over whether or not Shakespeare actually intended Othello to be a black man because, you know, Othello would have kissed Desdemona, which means that our beloved bard has perhaps accidentally almost wanted people to consider interracial love. This dimwitted denial among otherwise intelligent people so enervated Bradley that he writes wearily in the first person plural, in this endnote, “We do not like the real Shakespeare” (416). Bradley’s dry sarcasm was lost on O’Toole.

I once got to hear James Earl Jones discuss his career, and on the subject of Shakespeare, he said that he preferred the part of Michael Cassio to Othello.

When portraying Othello for the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, Kevin Crawford forewent any pigmented make up at all so as to avoid the stench of blackface, and considering the emotional and political climate post-9/11, made Othello a converted Muslim.

White actors are still drawn to this perplexing role in Shakespearean tragedy, but have stopped using blackface since at least the 1990s. There are so many black actors that the grotesquerie of blackface is easily avoided, and while this has long been true, we are now at least two generations into being fully aware that this is true.

If many audience of previous ages have found the color of Othello’s skin disgusting to contemplate, when that skin color is the bizarre co-optation of blackface, I must confess that the spectacle does make me queasy, as in Olivier’s turn as the Moor.

othello

3. From Olivier’s perspective, the convention of using make up to render him black was an established stage convention, and the connection to Step and Fetchit perhaps seemed especially remote to him.

I have, over the years, shrugged off my aversion to Olivier and his seemingly old-fashioned acting. In his own ways, he was bold, and funny, and worthy of some indulgence (not that the blackface thing in Othello is tolerable). Olivier was a term used throughout my childhood to indicate an absurdly perfect actor, when in fact he was a human actor devoted to Shakespeare. The Shakespeare thing is why, for so many people, he wasn’t quite real.

For Olivier, the challenge of Othello was finding an appropriate voice for the Moor. In his autobiography, he writes,

I decided to have a bash at that voice. I have always felt nervous about roaring and screaming at home, but feel no self-consciousness if I can get out into the hills. I remember once screaming King Lear at a group of cows that had formed a ring of curiosity around me. “God,” I thought, ‘I hope the audience is as patient as they are.’

4. In 2009, I got to see Philip Seymour Hoffman portray Iago in Peter Sellars’ production of Othello in the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU. Very little of that experience stands out to me, although I may have been a little drunk and certainly gastrointestinally encumbered by too much Arturo’s pizza.

Othello and Desdemona’s bed was plexiglas and filled with television images, a tableau that looked stupid rather than expressionistic or meaningfully postmodern, since sleeping on plexiglas seems like a non-starter no matter what such weird behavior is supposed to mean.

But what I do remember is the strangeness of Iago himself–the play seemed to be about Iago’s attempts at having human relationships with his wife, with Othello, with Desdemona, and his transgressive ways of breaking some unspoken barrier between human loneliness and the emptiness of convention to the secret authentic core of other people’s lives. Hoffman’s Iago seemed, in his soliloquy, to be having a hard time having a relationship to himself, an outsider, even when he is all alone.

_______

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

Shakespearing #17.2: Another Interlude, This Time Out of Sequence

09 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 2 Comments

Shakespearing #17.2: Orlando Shakes’ Merry Wives

by John King

Note: Once more I am commandeering David Foley’s blog in which he offers his impressions while reading Shakespeare’s plays chronologically. This interruption happens to be a review of a current production of one of Shakespeare’s comedic masterpieces.

Orlando Shakespeare Theater is among the best companies interpreting Shakespeare in America, and their current production of the seldom-seen comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is entirely worthy of this reputation.

It is one of the gross oddities of American culture that Shakespeare, one of the world’s best entertainers, is a phenomenon most experienced by captive readers burdened by the texts in an academic setting. Being more teachable than comedies, Shakespeare’s tragedies are often flogged upon the poor consciousness of wary high school and college students.

The Wachowski Brothers don’t hope we’ll sit down with the screenplays for The Matrix. George Lucas does not hope that the script for Star Wars, Episode IV will be the point of entry in his work for future generations. Peter Jackson does not hope we will open Tolkien. But I digress.

Orlando Shakes simply puts on a wonderful show, and in performance Shakespeare seems remarkably contemporary, and what’s more, wickedly fun.

Jean Tafler (Mistress Ford) and Suzanne O’Donnell (Mistress Page) by Tony Firriolo.

At the center of the play is Sir John Falstaff, a boastful, lecherous, larcenous, corpulent raconteur who at some point took the liberty of dubbing himself as a knight.

He is like nearly all the vice characters fro a medieval morality play rolled into one, and yet too full of personality, too amoral and intelligent, to serve as a dull allegory. Sir John was a minor character in two of Shakespeare’s history plays, Henry IV parts 1, but undercuts the epic sweep of the drama with his egotistical hijinks and callous wisdom about the grim realities of politics and war.

Legend has it that after the Henry Fourths, Queen Elizabeth—perhaps threatened by this clown—demanded Shakespeare compose a play showing Falstaff in love. In traditional theater, comedies end in marriage, and a wedded Falstaff would be dull and fangless, one supposes. And Merry Wives ends in marriage—but not for Falstaff.

Falstaff spends most of Merry Wives wooing two women married to wealthy husbands, so that he can gigolo his way out of his considerable debts.

Elizabeth is not likely to have been pleased, but her loss is our gain.

Orlando Shakes as often as not tries to stay relatively traditional in setting Shakespeare’s plays, and when they stray from tradition, they are bold and purposeful. Director Brian Vaughn has delightfully set this Merry Wives in the hypocritical and infantilizing context of a 1950s sitcom. The bizarrely cheery incidental orchestral music one associates with 1950s television (or Ren and Stimpy’s satires of the same) helps set the mood. Scenic director Bert Scott and costume designer Holly Payne, also makes us see what those black-and-white television shows could not: midcentury fashion and décor was delightfully colorful and stylized.

Jean Tafler (Mistress Ford) and John Ahlin (Sir John Falstaff) by Tony Firriolo.

All of the actors do delightful work, sometimes casting their characters as variations of 1950s stock characters, and the concerns that plague the characters of The Merry Wives of Windsor or The Merry Housewives of Windsor or ourselves today don’t seem at all that far apart.

The Broadway veteran, John Ahlin, however, needs to be singled out for his Falstaff.

Warren Kelley (Master Ford) and John Ahlin (Sir John Falstaff) by Tony Firriolo.

When I interviewed Mr. Ahlin back on Episode 65, I did dearly hope I would someday see him perform as Sir John, and John did not disappoint. His stature and grace are impressive enough to imbue the fat knight with a compelling amount of pomp and pride, which made the slapstick turns and occasional grotesqueries of the plot seem all that more wonderful.

Get off your ass, Orlando, and see this show, which runs from February 4 to March 7, 2015.

_______

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

Shakespearing #28: Othello

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Othello

Shakespearing #28 by David Foley

Othello

Othello is about as streamlined and relentless a play as Shakespeare ever wrote. It’s as if he’s inventing the form of the psychological thriller—the claustrophobic dread, the implacable villain, even the false hope of a reprieve dangled before us.

And it’s a tragedy, too, of course, but it’s a strange kind of tragedy. In school, we were given Othello’s jealousy as an example of a tragic flaw. But if Othello’s tragic flaw is jealousy, why is everyone so insistent that he’s not jealous? “I think the sun where he was born,” says Desdemona, “drew all such humors from him.” And Lodovico says, “Is this the nature/Whom passion could not shake?” The terror of the play is not the destruction of a man by a tragic flaw; it’s the idea that even a man like Othello can be consumed by a demon.

He may be the most admirable of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. He’s the kind of leader Shakespeare seems most to approve of: like Henry V, a people’s warrior. When he breaks up the fight between Cassio and Montano, he berates them for brawling “in a town of war/Yet wild, the people’s hearts brimful of fear.” This concern for the effects of war on the common folk is always for Shakespeare the sign of a noble heart. Yet in this same speech, Othello says, “Now, by heaven,/My blood begins my safer guides to rule,/And passion, having my best judgment collied,/Assays to lead the way.” In high school, we called that foreshadowing.

Browsing the internet, I find a 1916 essay about the “moral enigma” of Othello, in which the author worries in a 1916 sort of way about critics who are ready to lay the blame for the tragedy on Iago: “[I]t must be said that there is no Shakespearean tragedy in which the responsibility for the deed of the hero and the subsequent tragedy can be shifted from him to another person of the play.”

But if Othello is responsible, how is he responsible? Even in the speech I’ve quoted, his passions have begun his “safer guides to rule” because of a fight Iago has ginned up. Our 1916 critic wants to leave room for legible moral choice, but 2015 me can’t help reading Othello as a bitter parable about the susceptibility of even the best of us to irrational forces.

We go so quickly—in one long, shifting scene—from a serenely confident Othello to one looking for “some swift means of death” for his wife. You can read this as Elizabethan cultural prejudice—the noble Moor revealing his savage nature—but that doesn’t make the spectacle any more edifying or the moral less enigmatic.

It also puts us on the side of Iago, who’s adept at manipulating cultural prejudices to his own ends, whether those prejudices are against Moors or women. He himself is not irrational, but he has the power to breed irrationality in others. With Othello, he does it by guiding his thoughts away from the woman herself into the phantasmic beliefs about women floating in the culture.

It’s strange how often in these plays a minor character becomes the raisonneur. It’s left to Emilia to break through the nightmare, with some sharp words about men and women in her scene with Desdemona and some sharper ones for Othello in the final scene.

But even she is involved in the great mystery at the center of the play. Why can no one see through Iago? Why are the things that lead us through our worst fears to our worst ends so hard to make visible?

_______