More Off-Broadway Plays from the Archive

 

THE CHERRY ORCHARD
by Anton Chekhov
adapted by Tom Donaghy
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
29 June 2005 

I saw the Atlantic Theater Company’s Cherry Orchard, which Charles Isherwood reviewed poorly back on 16 June [2005] (“ineffective production”; “it fails more or less equally at eliciting laughter and tears”), on Tuesday night, the 28th, and I think Isherwood nailed it, if a bit generously to the company. 

First, Tom Donaghy’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s text: I found it more than just “blunt” and “unobjectionable,” as Isherwood put it.  There are numerous expressions and turns of phrase that stuck out as way too contemporary.  In one instance, for example, young Anya says of Ranevskaya, “Mama doesn’t get it.”  Now, maybe teenagers in 1904 said that about their parents, but somehow I doubt it. 

I find that I can’t remember lines from this production—which may be a comment on the text, or the acting (more about which later)—so I can’t cite any of the other anachronistic lines even though there are several.  You’ll just have to take my word for it, I guess.  Sorry.  (My companion, Diana, remarked on the use of “stuff”—as in “and stuff”—but I confess that I didn’t catch that.  I might have gotten inured to the anachronistic speech by then.)

(By the way, when I went to check some things in the script, I first referred to my copy of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s translation.  The program doesn’t say so, but it looks to me as if Donaghy used—or borrowed liberally from—van Itallie’s text for his adaptation.  I looked for some of those apparent anachronisms and they’re not in van Itallie’s version—the line above is rendered “Mama doesn’t realize”—but a lot of the other language seems to be.  Hmmmm!)

Next, the set: As we all know, this is a family with no money even to pay the mortgage—it’s in the lines—and most of the family has been away, except Ranevskaya’s ineffectual brother, Gayev (Larry Bryggman), and her adopted daughter, Varya (Diana Ruppe), who have been in the house with one flibberty-gibbet maid and the ancient Firs—so how have they been keeping the place up? 

The answer should be that they haven’t been: with no money for upkeep and servants incapable of doing the work anyway, it should be like Tara during the privations of the Civil War in the middle of Gone With The Wind—seedy, stitched together, patched up here and there, and so on—showing evidence of deferred maintenance, a little forlorn and neglected. 

The Atlantic’s set, designed by Scott Pask and Orit [sic] Jacoby Carroll (names I don’t recognize at all—though Pask lists several Broadway sets in his bio, including a Tony nomination for Pillowman and a Drama Desk nomination for Sweet Charity), is pristine in its pastel-green walls with white trim (it looked a lot like a giant piece of Wedgewood!), colors that ought to show grime very clearly! 

I’ll also accept that the house and its furnishings date back before the time of the play, maybe even a century or more, but this set looks positively 18th-century—like Liaisons Dangereuses is going to be performed, say—and you know that this family didn’t just redecorate their country estate in the style of Peter the Great or something.  So the decor is either antiques, which ought to show signs of aging for the obvious reasons I already mentioned, or the set’s an anachronism on top of anything else. 

(Even the children’s furniture in the nursery in the first act is like new—and the “children” who used it are now in their 50’s: Gayev says so.  Furniture used by children—and then their children—gets pretty damn worn, especially when there’s no money for repairs and maintenance.  Replacement isn’t a solution: Ranevskaya (Brooke Adams) reminisces about several of the pieces.  Didn’t the designers ever hear of distressing?)

The program doesn’t date the setting (just the times of the year for each act—”May,” “Summer,” and so on), but I saw (or heard) no evidence that the production was moved to a different time, so, along with the questions about the set, I have problems with the costumes, too.  Many are clearly late-19th- or early-20th-century clothes, but others look like stuff from the 1930s and ’50s. 

Yasha (Erin Gann), the butler who was with Ranevskaya in Paris, arrives in a suit and tie (which looks pretty modern to me) and a little straw fedora that prompted me to lean over to Diana and remark, “Yasha must have met Sinatra in Paris . . . and stolen his hat!”  (Later, Lopakhin [Isiah Whitlock, Jr.] arrives wearing a similar-style hat.) 

When Anya (Laura Breckenridge) is awakened and comes onto the set from her “bedroom,” she’s wearing a satin nightgown and robe that looks like something Lauren Bacall might have worn in one of her old flicks.  (Additionally, the robe is opened and the neckline of the nightgown is just above her bust—not very period-appropriate as far as I can tell.  Anya’s only 17, by the way.) 

Now, if the costume designer (Theresa Squire, another artist whose work I don’t know—though I saw some of the shows in her bio) intended this blending of periods to make some kind of meaningful point, I didn’t get it; the symbolism went past me.  What it all looks like to me, though I doubt this is actually the case, is that the cast was just let loose in the costume closet and pulled out whatever looked good and fit them.  (I won’t even go into how clean, undamaged, and brightly-colored all the clothes are.  See my remarks about the set and think of Scarlet O’Hara and her dress made from curtains!)

There are two other small, obviously directorial, choices that troubled me—one more significantly than the other.  The former is a casting decision: Brooke Adams as Ranevskaya.  She just looks too young for the role.  Maybe too fresh is the way to put it—after all, Anya, her daughter, is only 17.  I don’t know how old Adams is—she’s not an ingénue anymore, certainly [she was 56]—but somehow Ranevskaya seems older, maybe worn down.  Of course, what may really bother me and make me consider this was Adams’s acting, which is of a piece with the rest of the company—which I’ll try to describe below. 

(There’s another casting thing, which Isherwood also mentioned, that’s troublesome: casting a black actor as Lopakhin, the son of a former serf who ends up owning the estate.  It just invokes historical American parallels that are irrelevant to the play.  Whether Scott Zigler, the director did this deliberately, or because he thought he could finesse it, I have no idea.  It certainly isn’t because the actor, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., is just so terrific that no one else can do the part; Whitlock, a member of the Atlantic, is just as wan as the rest of the company, bar one.  Unfortunate choice.)

The other little matter, which only someone like me would probably even notice, is the coffee scene in the middle of Act I.  (I wondered if the family was actually supposed to be drinking coffee—Russia’s a tea culture, not a coffee one—though, of course, Ranevskaya had just been living in Paris, and France is a coffee culture.  Anyway, I checked the Russian text—yes, I have one—and they do drink coffee.) 

So, Dunyasha (Pepper Binkley), the maid, brings in the coffee on a tray. (She carries the tray peculiarly, as if to make it more awkward for the performance: both her arms are underneath the tray, her hands grasping it from below on the side away from her body.  Needless to say, she has trouble walking this way, and even more difficulty putting the tray down without dumping it.  What for?  She carries it out the same way, and watching the actress pick it up that way—sliding her arms under the tray when it’s on a chest—is a sight to behold.  It’s an actor’s—or director’s—choice, not a character’s.) 

The thing is, the coffee’s in a samovar, with a small pot (hot water, apparently) sitting on top of it.  First of all, samovars are for tea, not coffee or any other drink.  They’re not a Russian equivalent to a hot-drink urn.  Second—and this is the error most people make if they don’t know about samovars—the “urn” isn’t for the tea—it’s filled with hot water.  The little pot on top holds tea essence (essentially very, very strong tea), kept hot by the water in the samovar. 

The drinkers pour a small amount of the tea essence into a cup—actually, most often a glass; Russians drink their tea (and their coffee often, too) from glasses—then add hot water from the samovar to dilute it to their taste.  What this cast does is run coffee out of the samovar—as if it’s a coffee urn—and then add water from the little pot.  I’ve never heard of anyone putting water in coffee—tea, yes, if it’s too strong, but not coffee. 

Now, I looked at this in the original, too, to see if the stage directions had called for Dunyasha to bring in a samovar—but the text says she brings in a kofeinik, a coffee pot.  Someone was being a smarty-pants!  So, maybe no one else would have noticed this—or cared—but to me it shrieked, “These people don’t know what they’re doing!”  (Hey, it’s a Russian play—Russians use samovars!  We should use one.)       

Okay, maybe all these cavils about the technical production are picayune—though I think they’re emblematic—but then you have the acting and directing.  Now, nothing is actually bad or embarrassing, but few of the actors seem to have a real idea what the characters are going through—or even saying. 

As Isherwood pointed out, Alvin Epstein [1925-2018] as Firs is terrific—a complete character creation that’s consistent and interesting and alive (barely, considering the character’s like 150 or something).  But Firs is mostly off in his own world anyway, so the actor can safely create his character pretty much independent of everyone else. 

The main problem with all the rest of the cast, even the members Isherwood singled out for low praise, is that they’re all in different plays.  No one really connects with anyone else, and no one feeds off of anyone else.  What it looks like to me is as if each actor has created his or her character alone, then they all assembled, 19th-century style, and blocked the action the day before they opened. 

It also sounds as if they all just memorized words without much attention to what they’re saying—or, more consequently, what they’re feeling.  Even Larry Bryggman as Gayev, who turns in an amusing performance (a little too like the loopy judge he played in Romance, the David Mamet farce I saw at the Atlantic in February [see my report posted on 21 August 2013]), seems to have been working in a bubble by himself; his work is just a little more complex and thorough than anyone else’s (except, of course, Epstein’s). 

The central omission, as far as I’m concerned, is the missing center of the play.  You know that little item, the cherry orchard?  Aside from being Chekhov’s central symbol for the old world that’s disappearing while the new, unknown one is forming, the orchard is also the most prominent focus of Ranevskaya and her family and household.  (Ummm . . . that’s why it’s the play’s title.) 

I mean, they let themselves go broke and have the estate sold out from under them because they won’t sell the orchard for the land and see it cleared for dachas.  They lose everything rather than sacrifice the orchard.  But the only time you know this cast is even thinking of the orchard is when the lines refer to it. 

I think you can keep the orchard center stage metaphorically without its being visible to the audience (as it was constantly in the famous Andrei Serban production at Lincoln Center in ’77), but the actors—with the aid of the director—have to accomplish this.  No one did. 

(Firs has a wonderful moment at the end, by the way, when he’s been left behind in the empty house and the workmen are chopping down the cherry trees outside—the orchard is out in the auditorium—and he stands, lost in his fog, looking confusedly out the imaginary window down front, his lips moving in silent, unintelligible monologue and his eyebrows twitching in befuddlement.  Now, that’s acting!  Total communication without a word or sound uttered.) 

The final result is that I didn’t believe any of the actors (except, again, Epstein).  Their trouble with the words may have been exacerbated by the adaptation (there were several line bobbles, which shouldn’t be happening at this stage of the run—unless, of course, the actors aren’t really paying attention!), but the missing center of the play and the lack of connection between the characters are the fault of the cast and director Zigler, one of the founders of the Atlantic, who’s staged a lot of Mamet both at the Atlantic and elsewhere, and who also teaches theater. 

Diana complained about the slapstick she felt is used inappropriately in the production, but the only character who is prone to pratfalls was Yepikhodov (Todd Weeks), who’s portrayed as inept and clumsy, so it doesn’t bother me.  But one instance does bother me—because of how it’s set up, not because it occurs. 

When Act III opens, the set includes a sofa along a wall jutting out from left center.  To the right of the sofa is a small end table—but the right end of the sofa’s at the very end of the wall, so the table’s set so that it stands out in the entranceway into the room.  As soon as the lights came up on the set, I said to myself, “Self!  (Nyuk-nyuk)  Why would anyone put a table there—it’s just begging to be tripped over.” 

Sure enough, Yepikhodov makes an abrupt exit, spinning around suddenly and stumbling right into the table, knocking it over.  (I think he also accidentally broke it—when Semyonov-Pishchik [Peter Maloney] tried to right it, it wouldn’t stand up again; one of the legs seemed to have broken off.)  Once again, Zigler seems to have selected a bit for its theatrical effect, not its fitness for the circumstances: he had to fudge the set-up to get it to happen.  

In what seems like an inapposite cross-cultural reference, the cruel nickname for Yepikhodov in Donaghy’s version is “Schlepikhodov.”  In van Itallie’s translation, the soubriquet is taken directly from the Russian: “Twenty-two Misfortunes.” 

Maybe I’m wrong here, but I don’t think a Russian aristocratic family or its servants would come up with so obvious a Yiddish expression.  This was the time of anti-Jewish pogroms, after all.  And Yiddishisms weren’t as common among non-Jews as they are today in New York.  Small thing, maybe, but it seems wrong—a joke for the New York audience that Chekhov’s Russians would never have made.  

(Furthermore, “Schlepikhodov” isn’t even an apt joke.  The character is portrayed as inept and clumsy, but schlep means “drag, pull, heave” [as a heavy load] or “lag behind.”  In German, a Schlepper is a tugboat, but in Yiddish, schlepper means a stupid, ignorant, or foolish person.   

(A word for a clumsy person would be schlemiel or zhlub.  Of course, they don’t rhyme with ‘Yep-,’ which is why I presume Zigler/Donaghy went with the inappropriate schlep.  Ah, well!) 

Chekhov is hard to pull off, as Isherwood observes.  Having attempted it myself a few times—most notably, I guess, in a grad-student rep production of The Wood Demon—I can attest to how tricky he is.  I’ve seen a lot of mediocre—and even a few bad—productions of Cherry Orchard and other Chekhovs, and this production isn’t among the worst, by any means.  But it should be much better than it is.  

Fundamental acting and directing principles seem to have been forgotten or lost along the way: being in the world of the play, connecting to the other characters on stage with you, making the main situation of the play real for you.  These are all in Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting, for goodness’ sake!  How hard should it be for professional actors and directors to do these things?  It’s square one, isn’t it? 

Isherwood notes that the Atlantic, which performs in a converted church in Manhattan’s Chelsea [in what was christened the Linda Gross Theater in 2007], is best known for contemporary plays—though I’d debate that it has always “excelled” in this field—and they were clearly out of their depth here—but to have missed the very basics that even second-year acting students would have held on to (I hope, anyway) is almost inexcusable. 

The production might still not have worked—there are many pitfalls in Chekhov—but the result wouldn’t seem so, well, empty.  (And I probably wouldn’t have spotted all those silly little mistakes.)

*  *  *  *
MEMORY
by Jonathan Lichtenstein
Clwyd Theatr Cymru (Mold, Wales)
59E59 Theaters (Theater A)
5 June 2007 

I pretty much figured I was through with theater for the summer after the last play of Signature Theatre Company’s August Wilson season (King Hedley II, which I saw in March 2007 [and reported about on Rick On Theater on 16 March 2017 in “From My August Wilson Archive, Part 1”]), but my friend Diana called me because she wanted to check out some of the plays in the Brits Off Broadway series in Theater A (the Off-Broadway house) of 59E59 Theaters, a relatively new—it’s only three years old—glass-and-steel theater building on East 59th Street between Madison and Park Avenues. 

I hadn’t really considered the series: the first show reviewed was a Welsh play that is set in four time periods during the rehearsal of a play about a Holocaust survivor, and it sounded iffy (New York Times’ Charles Isherwood: “flawed but compelling drama”).  The rest of the bill is dominated by eight (count ’em, eight!) plays by Alan Ayckbourn, a British playwright for whom I have little regard. 

(I’m being kind.  I decided after one of the three plays in The Norman Conquests back in June 1976 that I just wasn’t going to pay money to see Ayckbourn’s plays anymore.)  But Diana wanted to see the Welsh play, Memory, by the company Clwyd Theatr Cymru [now Theatr Clwyd]; Cymru is Welsh for Wales and Clwyd is a county in the north-east corner of the country (which I wouldn’t want to try to pronounce).  I agreed to go with her, so we went on Friday, 25 May [2007].  The play was in English.

Unhappily, I was right about the play.  The New York Times review had been mixed but essentially positive (especially about the acting), but I found that Isherwood oversold the play even with his misgivings.  (He called it “engrossing throughout.”) 

Besides that, unfortunately, I have a problem with Holocaust stories, fictional or documentary: I get so angry that I get uncomfortable with the my own reaction.  Usually, I just don’t watch movies or TV shows on the subject—but I hadn’t considered the problem in this case.

The play—directed by Terry Hands, onetime artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company—is set in a theater where a diegetic play, also called Memory, is in rehearsal.  It’s about a 70-something Holocaust survivor in her East Berlin apartment in 1990 (the year Germany and the city of Berlin reunified—in October—and communist East Germany ceased to exist) where her grandson, Peter, whom she’s never seen, is coming for a visit to hear her stories of heroism and escape during the Nazi regime. 

When scenes from Eva’s past are being rehearsed, the time is the 1930s-’40s in Berlin; when the actors are just chatting among themselves, it is 2007 in Britain (the specific locale isn’t designated, but since the cast, who use their real first names as the diegetic “actors” and “director,” are all Welsh, I assume the play is being staged somewhere in Wales, probably Mold, the company’s hometown (150 miles north of Cardiff). 

The fourth locale is Bethlehem in 2006 where a young Israeli bureaucrat is trying to get a stubborn Palestinian to move out of his house which will be destroyed to make way for the “security fence.”  Author Jonathan Lichtenstein (b. 1957) sees parallels between the various times and locales: there’s a wall going up in Palestine in 2006; there was a wall that came down in Berlin in 1989 (a piece of which Peter brings his grandmother—who inspects it for blood and bullet holes). 

People in Palestine are being displaced from their homes in the land of their birth; Jews in Berlin are being displaced from their homes to a series of temporary “allotments.”  In all four times and places (1930s and ’40s Nazi Germany, 1990 East Berlin, 2006 Bethlehem, 2007 Britain), someone is a pianist—an artificial parallel that has little consequence dramatically, as far as I could see.  Maybe I just missed it.

My problem with Memory, aside from my difficulty with Holocaust tales, isn’t that I have no sympathy for the Palestinians or that I like the idea of the security fence.  Dramatically, however (not to say politically as well—the Palestinian circumstances are not equivalent to the Holocaust), the parallels Lichtenstein (who, despite his name, is Welsh) depicts are all superficial and obvious.  The events and circumstances he portrays have all been used—overused, I’d say—in literature (prose, plays, films, TV) for decades and he doesn’t say anything new or revealing about any of them. 

Some of them even seemed contrived and artificial.  For instance, in the Nazi-era Berlin stories, Eva (Vivien Parry) and her fiancé/husband, Aron (Simon Nehan), have a German friend, Felix (Daniel Hawksford), who becomes Aron’s business partner.  As the Nazis gain power and start their “race” policies, Felix slowly becomes a party functionary—even an SS officer (like, we’re going to be surprised when a guy in an SS uniform turns nasty!)—and a willing activist in the expulsions and transportations. 

In Bethlehem, Isaac (Oliver Ryan) first comes to Bashar’s house to persuade him to move with no emotional commitment; it’s just a task to perform (that is “orders” to “obey”).  But as he continues to meet with the recalcitrant Bashar (Ifan Huw Dafydd), the Israeli bureaucrat begins to like and even admire the Palestinian man who just doesn’t want to leave his home. 

The mirror images—both also clichés—are just too perfectly matched.  Not one incident in the play, in any of the time periods, is unpredictable.  The only adjustment that didn’t make immediate sense—but isn’t very convincing, either—is Eva’s attitude towards her grandson, Peter (Lee Haven-Jones).  She not only doesn’t want to talk about her actions when she tried to escape Germany in the ’40s, but she’s generally hostile to Peter from the moment he arrives at her apartment, soaked from a hard rain outside. 

Why is Eva so angry at Peter?  What had he done, if anything?  Well, nothing, really.  He just didn’t visit for a year after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 (he had to save up for the trip).  Apparently she’s angry because he didn’t come sooner—though she never says so (I’m supposing this, it’s just a guess on my part—otherwise I have no clue at all). 

As I said, it isn’t very convincing.  It struck me as just something Lichtenstein threw in to make Eva a little mysterious—aside from her reluctance to talk about her escape.  The key to that turns out to be another cliché.

Eva’s legend in the family is that she had been protecting two boys who were the sons of another couple.  When her own daughter—Peter’s mother—was born, she was able to get her out of Germany on a Kindertransport, but could only afford one passage.  The story was told that when she, Aron, and the boys were boarding a train to try to leave Germany, she protected the boys with her own body when a Nazi soldier threatened to shoot them for crying. 

The truth, it turns out, is that the boys weren’t saved at all—the soldier shot them both through the head with a single bullet.  While it’s understandable that Eva wouldn’t want this story revealed—or even to remember it—the story itself isn’t a new one—it’s been used many times before and I, at least, saw it coming long before Eva tells the truth.

In the end, what with all the clichés and overused plot elements, I never really figured out why Lichtenstein, whose own father apparently escaped Germany in a Kindertransport, wanted to tell—or retell—these events.  The most poignant idea in the play is how Eva contends with acknowledging to herself—through Peter—what really happened 45 years earlier. 

The tag-line in the program is “The recovery of memory is a present-day activity.  It’s not the past.  Memory occurs in the present.  Memory must live in the present and it must be truthful.”  But that’s not a new idea, either—and the exploration isn’t very deep.  Making the events part of a play in rehearsal—also not an uncommon tactic—doesn’t make them new or revealing. 

It doesn’t even add distance because, first, the actors are so emotionally wrapped up in their characters that the empathy Bertolt Brecht fought to avoid is nearly inevitable—it certainly isn’t being eschewed; and, second, the conceit of the rehearsal is dropped after one or two scenes, and the play-within-the-play unfolds with only the interruptions of shifting to Palestine and back to Berlin.  

I felt cheated, even at only 90 minutes.  I was misled by relatively positive reviews (Marilyn Stasio of Variety was also generally complimentary: “emotionally devastating production,” “finds fresh meaning in past atrocities”) which, as I said, I think oversold the play.  Yes, the performances were nice—but not special.  Just good, solid, repertory acting. 

The little personal problems of the actors at the rehearsal—one’s worried about feeding the parking meter—didn’t add to the drama, by the way.  It was just another gimmick.  But even this element had its curiosities: Peter, the grandson, is a music-school drop-out, and when Eva gets him to play for her—as I said, each scene has a pianist; Bashar also has a piano in his house—the actor, Lee, doesn’t play.  The (diegetic) director (Christian McKay) does, and Lee stands next to the piano! 

Now, the first time this happens, Lee complains that he’s a piano teacher, so he should be playing.  We never learn why this odd set-up happens.  I have no guess—except maybe that the actual Lee Haven-Jones isn’t a pianist—but then why make the fuss over the character Lee being a piano teacher?  Got me! 

This is not the only inexplicable occurrence in the production.  Near the end of the play, Peter brings a Hanukkah menorah on stage and sets it on the floor down center.  There’s no dialogue to accompany this act, as he lights all the candles.  (I was glad to see he did it correctly—lighting the shamus first then using it to light the other eight candles—but he never says the broche.)  I have no idea why Lichtenstein or Hands, whoever made the choice, put this in.  There’s no indication that the 1990 scenes take place at Hanukkah—and we certainly don’t need the reminder that Peter and Eva are Jewish.

I don’t know why this play exists or is staged.  (That’s the basic dramaturg’s question: Why this play, why now, and why here?)  and I certainly don’t know why it got such positive reviews (though a few papers—the Post, Daily News, and Newsday—didn’t run notices at all).  Diana suggested that plays about the Holocaust get a bye from critical examination—they’re untouchable.  I don’t know if that’s true—I’ve never noticed it one way or the other before. 

I can tell you, like it or not, that if I were still writing reviews, I’d be harsher on this play than the three critics I read (Andy Propst of the Village Voice was the third: “potent exploration,” “compelling tales,” “a theatrical blow that sends us reeling”). 

Diana said that plays about gay people also get special treatment—though I’m pretty sure that’s inaccurate.  (I remember, however, that back in the ’80s I was writing reviews for the New York Native, the major gay weekly in New York for a few decades before it went bankrupt in the ’90s, and was assigned to write up a new Robert Patrick play.  He was a darling of the gay community then, still riding the high of Kennedy’s Children—he was a local gay writer who made it to Broadway! 

(Well, I felt that Patrick had been writing the same lousy play for years by this time—and I said so in my review.  But I was concerned enough with my criticism that I called my editor, Terry Helbing [1951-94]—who had been artistic director of the Meridian Gay Theatre when I was auditioning around the city, so I had known who he was before I took the reviewer job. 

(I warned him that I was going to pan the play by a gay icon and I didn’t know how his readers would react.  As far as I know, though, no one objected when the review was published [“Hello, Bob,” 29 October 1990].  Patrick’s was one of only a few gay plays I saw for the Native—another was a lesbian, radical feminist play that I admitted I didn’t understand [The Rug of Identity, 15 May 1989]: I said I didn’t think I was the audience they expected to play for!—but not understanding and panning are two different things.)

All in all, Memory was very disappointing.  Isherwood remarks that the time-shifting is like “a playwright randomly changing channels” and the Village Voice interprets the Bethlehem and Berlin scenes as two different plays in rehearsal.  There’s nothing in the text to bear this latter out and neither the Times nor Variety cops to it—and I didn’t see it that way at all. 

Everyone remarked especially, after noting the casualness with which the cast approached the circumstances, on Vivien Parry’s transformation, without the aid of make-up and elaborate costuming, from a young woman to a septuagenarian recluse.  Okay, she was good at that—but it’s a trick a lot of actors have accomplished over the past few years—always to the same astonishment from reviewers.  It’s damn near an actor’s stock in trade—especially good ones.  

Any actors with some talent who went through college theater found themselves playing the old people—we (yes, it happened to me a lot) had the chops to pull it off!  I’m sorry (no I’m not) if that sounds like an ex-actor’s sour grapes—maybe it is, but it’s also true.

(I will add, too, that listening to the Welsh dialect is delightful.  The Welsh accent is really very lilting.  I have a friend, an actor, who’s of Welsh extraction and he’s been learning Welsh—an amazingly hard language, I gather; the spelling alone is daunting—and it’s quite beautiful to hear.  That’s all irrelevant, of course.)

"Equity On Tour"

 

[As readers of Rick On Theater know by now, I have an occasional series of articles on this blog describing jobs and professions in theater that few even avid theatergoers know much about.  I’ve covered stage managers, dance captains, swings, understudies, and wig-makers; now I’m posting an article from Equity News (vol. 104, no. 4 [Fall 2019], entitled “Equity on Tour”) which features interviews with union members who work on national tours of Broadway shows.  I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate article to post on ROT.] 

“ALL IN A YEAR: EQUITY MEMBERS BUSY WITH NATIONAL TOURS IN 2019”

Perhaps the only thing harder than making a living on stage or backstage is doing so while touring. And yet, there are now more members doing just that than at any point since the last recession. With interest in touring only continuing to grow, Equity News sat down with seven tour veterans – a mix that included stage managers, an understudy, principals and chorus – to find out what they have learned from life on the road. Special thanks to Kevin McMahon, chair of the SETA [Short Engagement Touring Agreement] Committee, for helping to lead the conversation. What follows is their conversation and their lessons, edited for space and clarity.

WHAT WOULD YOU TELL A NEW MEMBER BEFORE THEIR FIRST TOUR? 

Kevin McMahon: For me, it’s “bring less.” You don’t need it. If you do need something, you can buy it.

John Atherlay: It’s okay not to know the answers; ask questions. And don’t try and fake it.

Christine Toy Johnson: I’d pass along some great advice I got from my friend Jose Llana right before I left town. He had just come back from two years on the road with The King and I and suggested these top three things:

1. Ziploc bags will be your friends. (Now I have reusable ones, and they are my friends.)

2. You don’t need that much stuff. You may have a couple of parties where you really want to dress up, but he said he started the tour with five suits and by the end was down to one black blazer, which he used for all press and opening nights.

3. You don’t need to lug around gigantic, Costco-sized lotions and shampoos. Normal sizes are good!

Andrew Bacigalupo: Know we’re not brain surgeons. It’s serious, we’re all professionals, but everything doesn’t have to get elevated so quickly. There doesn’t have to be stress. This is something we want to do, so let’s enjoy doing this. There’s a lot of pressure to be perfect because everybody’s watching, but really, everybody’s in this together.

Marina Lazzaretto: It’s important to find the things that bring you joy and do them in every city. For me, I plan my workout in every city. I find the places that I want to go to, and that’s what brings me joy, and I plan my life around that.

David O’Brien: I go on websites like TripAdvisor to see the top ten things to do and try to do at least one of them in each city; something to get me out of the theater so I don’t lose my mind. I would definitely advise new people to take advantage of the cities they’re going to, because it’s such a great experience to travel the country.

Sid Solomon: I’m a big fan of meeting people. My first Equity job, I spent two years touring with The Acting Company, which is a very different kind of touring model where you’re very bus-and-truck, one night here, one night there, in very small towns.

I did everything that I could to try to meet people who lived in those places. Sit down at a restaurant that’s known as a place where people from that city go and start a conversation. The country is wide and vast and filled with lots of different kinds of people, and the people in the city are the ones we’re there to do the show for. So, every opportunity that I could take to just meet somebody and find out what their life is like felt to me like it enriched my ability to do the work that I was in that city to do.

McMahon: Most of my good memories of my years on the road revolve around the stuff that we did with my friends, like that the trip on the balloon in Albuquerque with “O’B” (David O’Brien), trips to the dog park with all my dog friends on the road . . . that’s a part of living. That’s your life.

O’Brien: We have 14 dogs on our tour now, Kevin!

HOW DO YOU STAY HEALTHY ON THE ROAD?

Johnson: Come From Away is like a 100-minute long sprint, and I find I have to prepare myself in a different way than I have for other shows. As much as I do love seeing as much as I can of the cities I’m in, I am also very conscious of not having a mindset that I’m on vacation. The only reason I’m away from my home and my husband and my dog for most of the year is to do the show.

So I’ll do whatever I need to do to be at my optimal energy for the show. It’s all about balance. I am a writer as well, and part of the leadership of Equity and the Dramatists’ Guild, and I chair a few committees. I get up at 6:30 or 7 in the morning just naturally. When it occurred to me that I needed to be at my optimal energy 12 hours after I got up, I realized that I had to really be mindful of structuring my day for both physical and mental wellbeing. It took me months to set up the parameters so that I could do this.

I don’t do meetings on Mondays anymore because even if it’s a travel day or golden day; it’s a day off. I don’t do meetings after a certain time in the afternoon because I have to reset my body clock and take a little nap or be quiet. Now I don’t really do a lot of things after the show, except for on Sundays, and it seems super boring sometimes, but for me it’s all about making sure that I am at my peak performance level at all times. I’m proud to say that (as we speak) I’ve done every single performance of our run so far.

Lazzaretto: I want to talk about food on the road, because I think it’s particularly difficult to feel your best and to perform your best when you’re consistently eating out at garbage restaurants. I make it a priority to find a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s in each city. I travel with a plate, a bowl and a kitchen knife so that I can have my normal diet, food that I would eat at home, in my hotel or in my Airbnb. And that helps me maintain my optimal body health for my show.

Johnson: Same. Exactly. It’s absolutely vital to do that.

Solomon: It has always been my experience that people who do what we do tend to be creatures of habit. We were touring with a lot of first-time-touring people, and it was really important for all of us to accept the limitations of touring as quickly as possible, to understand that for as much as you have a dedicated routine at home, there are realities to being on the road. The sooner you’re willing to figure out how to maintain as much of your routine, as many of the things that make you happy on a day-to-day basis, you should do that. For me, it’s light in hotels. I need there to be some light in my room, and I will go back to the front desk and ask for a room with better light.

My health suffered for the first six months of the tour because I’m an outdoor runner. We were in cold weather cities a lot, and I had a really hard time adjusting my exercise schedule.

Atherlay: I don’t do workout routines very often because my schedule changes at the drop of a dime, so I tend to walk around a lot. I listen to Sirius Radio, and I just see the different sites. I’ve been touring long enough that I’ve seen them all, so I know where to go that gives me peace.

I also tend to find the closest hotel to the theater so that I can go away between shows or after rehearsal and before the show, so my day is broken up. I’m not spending 12–13 hours in the theater, but maybe four or five, then going away for two hours and coming back. It refreshes my brain and relaxes me a lot.

YOU BRING UP A GOOD POINT. WHAT DOES EVERYONE DO FOR MENTAL HEALTH?

Bacigalupo: We’ve been talking about mental health on my tour recently. I think, as Christine said, we’re not here on vacation. We’re not there just to have fun in the city. We’re there to do the show. Some people go out after the shows, to this bar or that place with an “always on the move” mentality. I think it’s important to realize that I wouldn’t necessarily do that while I was at home, so working on the road I don’t need to feel the pressure to do that either. It’s okay to have time to yourself.

McMahon: I couldn’t agree with you more, Andrew. Sometimes you’re 50 years old and you feel like you’re back in high school with the parties and who didn’t get invited to this thing, and you have to step back and like realize, okay this is just for now. This is just this week, and next week we’ll be in a different city. It will all be different.

Lazzaretto: For my own mental health, it was important to realize early on in my experience that you don’t have to feel like you have to be everyone’s friend. If we worked in a normal office, you wouldn’t feel obligated to spend all your time with every person you worked with, so it’s okay to realize that not everyone on your tour is going to be your friend. You do your work together, and you can be pleasant and nice to each other, but you don’t have to feel bad if you’re not invited to something. You don’t have to be everyone’s friend. It’s okay.

O’Brien: I’m sober. I’ve been sober for 29 years, and it has its specific challenges on the road. And that is my staying healthy. A lot of it has to do with having my dog, finding people that aren’t in that party mindset. It can be done, but it’s much more challenging on the road.

STAGE MANAGERS: HOW IS YOUR ROLE DIFFERENT ON THE ROAD COMPARED TO DOING A SIT-DOWN PRODUCTION?

O’Brien: There’s so much more to it on the road, which is why I like being on the road. So much of my career was in New York, and I always found it to be a challenge, especially on shows that did run a long time. I was on Cats for five years. Five years in New York is to me tougher than five years on the road. The excitement of going from city to city and being in a new theater and a new environment gives everything a new energy.

Atherlay: I’m with O’B. I much prefer the road. We’re in Toronto at the Mirvish, and it’s our first theater without a crossover. So we had to go in and figure out what costume changes need to be moved where. And focusing the show where we are – our second stop didn’t have box booms, so we had to move everything to the front and deal with the challenge of making it look the same without the same positions, which is very, very difficult.

But I’ve been around so much, a lot of cities become second homes to me. I know the challenges in Toronto, what we’ll have at the Golden Gate in San Francisco, what we’re going to have in Cleveland when we get there in a couple of weeks. But it’s the challenges I prefer.

Bacigalupo: When you’re always moving, there’s more of a “we’re all in this together vibe,” and it’s a whole different atmosphere to the show.

WHAT TOOLS DO YOU USE TO GET YOURSELF ACCLIMATED TO A CITY?

McMahon: I always go on Trip Advisor, and there’s a new Facebook group I think a lot of us belong to called Tour Talk, where people share advice on cities and actually give tips on hotels, which was very helpful to me on my last tour.

Solomon: I have for a very long time kept a membership to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and they have an extensive reciprocal membership program for not all that much money that gets me free entry into art museums in basically every city. And so early in each week, I would go and find the major art museum in the city. It’s usually in the center of town, and it usually has some deep rich history about how it was founded and it tends to be such a part of the civic identity of a city, that it tended to tell me a lot really quickly.

Johnson: I eat a 90% Paleo menu, so I will Google “Paleo + [name of the city]” and find the restaurants that fit the bill. There’s a small group of us that likes to find a good restaurant to go to on the first night in a city, so I make the reservation and find something that’s a treat for all of us. I also start with locating the nearest Whole Foods, because you can do wonders with a rotisserie chicken and a box of salad.

O’Brien: On our tour now, we have a group of people that love to eat breakfast, so we find breakfast restaurants in our cities. It’s been great.

Bacigalupo: On every Tuesday or every load-in day, we do a management lunch where company management and stage management go out together. There’s a lot of excitement in the days before we to go a city about where we are going to lunch on Tuesday. And then just the stage managers, the three of us, always do brunch sometime in the week, and it’s important to us to have the time that’s just our department to check in.

Lazzaretto: To me, the people who know the city the best are the locals. I like to find a yoga place in every city, and I talk to the people in class there. They tell me where their favorite restaurant is or what their favorite art museum is, or what else I shouldn’t miss.

McMahon: I couldn’t agree more. I used to talk to the dressers, and I would research the dog parks and ask the people there what they like, and I’ve never been steered wrong.

DOES ANYONE HERE TRAVEL WITH THEIR FAMILY?

Johnson: My husband Bruce and my dog Joey travel with me often but not full time. In the first year of Come From Away, we had four children traveling with us, five dogs and at least two or three spouses full time. My company has been extraordinary about welcoming all extended family to everything we do, which has been, I think, really essential to the inclusive happy family feeling that we have in our show.

McMahon: For me, my husband Doug and I have a five-week rule. We had to see each other, physically, at least once every five weeks. That was the absolute rule.

Atherlay: I have three kids. My two boys grew up when I was doing Beauty and the Beast, so I was home for them. When I started touring again, we put a map on the kitchen refrigerator. My ex-wife would pinpoint where I was, and when I would call them, we’d talk about time differences and seasonal differences, and I got them to figure out what the country was. Before computers and texts, our communication was phone calls. My daughter, who is now 18, would visit me on the road because her mother’s grandmother lived outside of Chicago. Four or five times when I was playing Detroit, they would be driving home from Chicago and stop off to spend the weekend with me, to the point where when she was in first grade, my daughter told everybody at school that her daddy lived in Detroit.

It’s about communicating. It’s about talking and sending postcards and showing your kids where everything is. And now my daughter is studying theatre management in college.

Bacigalupo: I have a boyfriend that I started seeing last summer, before I started this tour. We didn’t get quite to seeing each other every five weeks, but we haven’t been apart for more than two months at a time. It’s important to have somebody that you can go to who’s not involved with the show. It helps to realize there’s a world outside the isolated bubble of the tour. I don’t think I could have made it through this tour without having someone I could go to as a sounding board who’s not really involved with the production.

WHEN YOU HAVE A CONTRACT THAT IS EXPIRING, HOW DO YOU DECIDE TO RENEW OR NOT TO RENEW?

Johnson: For all of us, I think you check the boxes: do you love the show? Are they treating you well, both salary-wise and globally? Are you artistically fulfilled? Kevin, you taught me this. If you have at least two of these three things, it’s easy to stay.

I think I can speak for everyone in the Come From Away company – we feel so invested in the message of the show. No one ever wants to be out. No one ever wants to not do the show. The people that left didn’t really want to leave; they had children going to school or other commitments that they needed to tend to.

For me, the positives outweigh the negatives (being away from home), so it was not a hard decision to stay for year two.

Solomon: Our situation was a little different in that we opened the first national tour the beginning of September and we closed in the middle of August. So the first national tour came to an end, but we knew the show was going to continue on for a second tour on a new contract.

Once we knew what the details of the contract were, there started to be conversations with the cast about continuing on with our show. If you haven’t seen The Play That Goes Wrong, it’s very intricate. It’s complicated. It’s very dangerous. And the more people you have who have done it before, the better off you are.

I loved my time on the road. I loved the tour. I loved the show. I love the people. Understudying the show is a particular challenge. I was not in the same kind of physical pain the rest of the cast is on a daily basis, but the mental anguish of not only keeping that show in my head but being prepared for it on a nightto-night basis was its own special kind of thing.

For me, it simply came down to having to be away from my wife and my dog and my family. My whole life is here in New York. Another minimum nine months on the road just wasn’t the right choice for me right now. And for me that’s actually kind of a big deal. All I ever wanted to do is work. No job is too small, no role is too small. I just want to be doing something all the time. So I’m kind of proud of myself. It was time to look for the next adventure.

Lazzaretto: I think that the number one thing for me as I’m evaluating whether or not I want to continue a contract is: am I still growing as an artist? Am I feeling stagnant? Is there more I can gain from this specific production?  What is the level of my happiness doing this job? Whether I’m going to be happy is the most important.

Atherlay: I look at how I’m being treated. I look at what they offer me to renew. I’ve been very fortunate so far in that I’ve been treated very well. I don’t believe in just leaving work. It’s not in my nature.

Bacigalupo: With stage managers, we don’t really have a contract renewal, we’re just here until we’re not here. I had an opportunity to leave the show for another show earlier in the year, and I felt such anguish about leaving this creative team. I have so much respect for them, and I care about them so much, and they have really helped my career move forward, so I felt a big responsibility to them.

I felt a lot of responsibility for the show. Everybody is replaceable, but I was in the room when the show was created. I know why we’re doing this move, not just that we’re crossing to this number at this moment. And I think a lot of that gets lost in translation as you pass the show on to another PSM.

O’Brien: The only thing I would say is the same as Marina. I left Wicked once because I felt I wasn’t as happy, and I wasn’t serving the show – I was not doing my best job at that time. I thought I needed to take a break from Wicked, and then once the position opened up again, I came back because I realized the show makes me happy. But I will leave a contract if I feel like I’m not doing it justice.

WHEN YOU HAVE A CHOICE FOR HOUSING & TRAVEL, WHAT FACTORS DO YOU CONSIDER IN MAKING THOSE DECISIONS?

McMahon: For me, I’ll tell you that Marriott Rewards Points were as important as my 401(k). (Laughs) If there was a Marriott, I knew there would be a consistent quality of housing, and they’re usually pet friendly.

Johnson: Because we’ve traveled with so many pets, our company manager has made sure that all of our housing has been pet-friendly. I generally stay with the company because I like to be around them, and I don’t like to travel home from the theater by myself. It’s most important for me to be really near the theater if possible, because I like to get there early and also go back to the hotel in between shows to rest. One other thing: the presence or absence of refrigerator and microwave. That’s really important too, because otherwise, you know, you can’t have your rotisserie chicken and a box of salad if you don’t have any place to put them to keep them cool.

O’Brien: I will also look at the company choices and look at ratings, just because where I’m living is so important to me. I will be miserable in a place if my housing is bad.

Bacigalupo: I have stayed at an Airbnb twice on this whole tour in the past year. I get super anxious about Airbnbs – there seems to be a lot of pressure in finding the best Airbnb, the closest Airbnb, the cheapest Airbnb. It’s like a full-time job. It’s too much stress to figure out, so I’ve stayed in the company option most of the time. Even if it was a more expensive option, I would still pick the company hotel, because I knew that if there were issues with the room, if the water doesn’t work, if there was mold, the company would take care of it.

And I do the same for travel. I know a lot of people do their own travel between cities, but I do Monday load-ins. The stress of a flight delay if I paid for the ticket is a lot higher than if the flight’s delayed and the company’s paid for it, because if I don’t make it to load-in, the company will help to figure it out. That takes all of that stress away from me.

Atherlay: Location is important to me, especially with my schedule. And sometimes the pricing is ludicrous, but it’s par for the course. Like Andrew, I’ve had too many actors spend too much time complaining about the Airbnb: that it’s not what they what they signed up for, it’s not what was advertised. I find the hotel is important because it’s my peace of mind. If it is a bad hotel, someone’s going to take care of it and fix it or move me or upgrade me or something.

Lazzaretto: I feel the same. Proximity to the venue is always top priority for me. I’m one of those people who’s splitting my time between the hotels and Airbnb dependent on the length of stay. If we’re somewhere for a week, I’m more likely to just choose the closest hotel option. If we’re somewhere a little longer, I like to have a kitchen.

HOW DOES BEING IN THE UNION AFFECT YOUR TIME ON THE ROAD? ARE THERE TIMES YOU’VE TURNED TO THE UNION FOR HELP?

McMahon: Speaking personally, I know I was on the phone a lot with my reps. Our tour had a lot of new members on the road, and they didn’t understand the rules and working conditions. I was deputy, and I became a teacher for a lot of people about Equity and the contract. The union was incredibly helpful to me in every capacity.

Solomon: Something both being a union member and now being a union officer had me very mindful of on the road was how I interacted with other workers on the road.

Especially when you are living in hotels, taking taxis, going to restaurants – you are constantly interacting with the hospitality industry. And so many of the workers that you are interacting with are unionized workers; sometimes they’re workers who are trying to unionize. I did everything I could to be as mindful as possible of being respectful to fellow workers. Whether that was being mindful of appropriately tipping at hotels, or in cities where there’s a difference between how people are paid to drive – a licensed taxi as opposed to just getting in somebody’s car for Uber – I tried to err on the side of that being mindful to how I was contributing to the way another person made their living.

Lazzaretto: I learned so much about our union and the contracts from Kevin when I was on the road with him. The one thing I like to tell new members in the shows I’m doing is not to be afraid to call the union. It’s there to help you and to be a resource. Call your rep, ask them questions. They’re all so lovely and helpful and willing to give you the information.

McMahon: Being a deputy also becomes a teaching experience for new members. I took that duty very seriously.

Johnson: One of the things I’m most mindful of is our 401(k). That’s an awesome thing that’s part of a negotiated contract. I’m especially grateful to be on a long-term job, having a long-term contribution from the employer in place along with my own.

Atherlay: I have a philosophy, and I teach my deputies all the time, that the words in your agreement are as important as the words in your script. I find that Equity has always been very responsive towards me when I do call with an issue.

O’Brien: With Wicked, we get a lot of new people, new people to Equity who have just signed their first contracts. One of the things that we started on this tour: when a new person joins, we do a meeting. The company buys them dinner, and the associate company manager and my first assistant stage manager go out and explain everything about the road. Then we have a separate meeting where we talk to them about how to use their deputies. And it’s been working really well.

Bacigalupo: In the past two years or so, when I moved to New York, I joined committees and I came to membership meetings. And I think that having the knowledge is such a huge help to understand the bigger picture of what’s going on, to understand what the rulebook rules are, what the agreement is. It’s so interesting to see the reasoning behind the things in these agreements. It’s so cool what you’re doing at Wicked to explain this to people, opening up the agreement and going through it together – I just wrote that down and might steal it for the future.

*  *  *  *

[I’m a dog-lover, so I wanted to include this little sidebar to the Equity News cover article.  ~Rick] 

“HAVE DOG, WILL TRAVEL”

One of the things that makes life on the road a little easier is being able to travel with a pet.

“Right now, we’re so fortunate we can even take our dogs to the theater, like we have like six dogs at the theater every day,” said Marina Lazzaretto. “They hang out in the dressing rooms. Gandalf even has his own Cats costume. I wouldn’t tour without him. Like, I can’t imagine my life on the road without him. He brings me so much joy and like he brings so much joy to other people at the theater and at the hotel, too.”

Caring for an animal on the road can be a challenge. Once Lazzaretto found a good veterinarian in Oklahoma, so she makes a point to stop when she is in the area and take Gandalf to visit the veterinarian they’ve come to know.

Stage Manager David O’Brien drives himself from stop to stop so that he can travel with his dog, a 55-pound rescue mix. “I actually adopted him on the road,” said O’Brien. “My other dog, Charlie, was 15 and passed last year. I was without a dog on the road for about five months. Having one makes all the difference in the world to me.”

“A pet can really be the key to everything – making sure that we have the normal thread of joy in our lives,” said Christine Toy Johnson, who often travels with Joey, a six-year-old Westie. “How we navigate that, and when we find that is supported by the people we are working with – that is really just everything.”

*  *  *  *
MEET THE INTERVIEWEES

JOHN ATHERLAY

John is Production Stage Manager with The Band’s Visit. Before that he spent two years on a cruise ship. Other touring experience includes Cabaret, Blithe Spirit, Porgy and Bess, Anything Goes, Fela! and Man of La Mancha.

ANDREW BACIGALUPO

Andrew was the Production Stage Manager on the recently concluded Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tour. Prior to that, he toured with Elf: The Musical, The Sound of Music and Million Dollar Quartet.

MARINA LAZZARETTO

Marina is an actor currently on the Cats tour. Before that, she toured with American in Paris, Wicked and Come Fly Away.

KEVIN MCMAHON

Kevin is chair of the Short Engagement Touring Agreement (SETA) Committee. In addition to serving as a Western Principal Councillor, he toured with Wicked for six years and with Bright Star for one year.

DAVID O’BRIEN

David has been the Production Stage Manager for Wicked on the road for seven years. Prior to that, he did 17 Broadway shows and tours of Chicago, Cats and White Christmas.

SID SOLOMON

Sid toured as an understudy on The Play that Goes Wrong. It was his first experience on a commercial tour as an Equity member. He also serves as Equity’s Eastern Regional Vice President.

CHRISTINE TOY JOHNSON

Christine is an actor on her second year of the first National/North American tour of Come From Away. Previously, she has toured with Cats, Flower Drum Song and Bombay Dreams. She is chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee and an Eastern Principal Councillor.

James Shapiro’s Shakespeare

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk’s an insatiable reader even in ordinary times, but the enforced leisure (if that’s even the right term) of the pandemic shut-down has given him time and the inclination to do more reading.  And thank goodness for that lagniappe.  The Max Beerbohm article he contributed to Rick On Theater on 2 November was the consequence of his having just read a book (or several, I’m not sure) on the man. 

[Now comes another guest-post Kirk drew from his reading.  He just finished four books by Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro and he’s composed a sort of book review of three Shakespeare volumes and one on the Passion Play of Oberammergau.  As you’ll see, Shapiro takes uncommon approaches to his Shakespeare studies; combined with Kirk’s own habitually unexpected perspective, “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” will be a most interesting read, whether you’re a Bardolater or not.] 

Books of James Shapiro Discussed Below:

Oberammergau. Vintage Books, 2000.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. HarperCollins, 2005.

Contested Will. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2010.

The Year of Lear. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015.

 *  *  *  *

The plays and life of William Shakespeare (1565-1616) are inexhaustible subjects, his plays because they are so numerous and so rich, his life because so little is known about it. One person who has done a great deal to close the gap between the two is the writer James Shapiro (b. 1955), who is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

I first became aware of Shapiro’s books inadvertently. Killing time while someone was completing house repairs, I glanced at a library shelf and saw a book called Oberammergau, aptly described as “The troubling story of the world’s most famous passion play.” I had no idea I owned this book and no idea where it came from.

Its subject is the famous play based on the New Testament’s gospel accounts which has been performed in the small town of Oberammergau, in Bavaria, Germany, roughly every decade for the last four centuries or so. Half the town’s citizens perform in the play, which was supposedly first created as a response to the plague, and by all accounts it can be quite stirring.

It has also been, throughout its history, horribly anti-Semitic, and the struggle to eliminate or at least mitigate those elements in the play is the subject of Shapiro’s book. He does a fine job of reporting, and he puts his finger on what seems to me to be the center of the problem it discusses:

For all the ecumenical attention to a shared spiritual heritage, the play forces Jews and Christians to face the painful fact that they read differently, and that a single version of the founding story of Christianity cannot be comfortably shared.

However true this may or may not be, and whether or not it is the last word on the subject, I was impressed by Shapiro’s thoughtfulness and his ability to put himself in many other people’s shoes. So I was delighted to have read the book.

Then, to my further surprise, I found another book by Shapiro on my shelves that I did not remember reading, much less owning, although since there is a bit of underlining in it I may have. That book is A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Shapiro begins by making it clear that “we don’t know very much about what kind of friend or lover or person Shakespeare was.”

I can’t report what Shakespeare ate or drank or how he dressed, but I can establish some of the things he did this year [1599] that were crucial to his career, what he read and wrote, which actors and playwrights he worked with, and what was going on around him that fueled his imagination. . . . I hope to capture some of the unpredictable and contingent nature of daily life too often flattened out in historical and biographical works of greater sweep. . . . I end up focusing more on things that can be dated, such as political and literary events, rather than on more gradual and less perceptible historical shifts – though because Shakespeare’s plays are remarkably alert to many of these, I do my best to attend to them as well.

And he sensibly proposes to avoid “awkwardly littering the pages that follow with one hedge after another – ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘it’s most likely,’ ‘probably,’ or the most desperate of them all, ‘surely . . . .’

And then we’re off, on the most interesting and exciting presentation of Shakespeare’s life that I’ve read, matched only in my reading by his follow-up book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

The choices of 1599 and 1606 are not arbitrary. Although scholars differ on estimated dates for Shakespeare’s plays, Shapiro follows substantial scholarly opinion that 1599 saw the writing and/or first performances of Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet.

1606, in its turn, saw the advents of King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. It makes sense, as Shapiro tells the story, that these seven masterpieces arise in a period of notable, important, and often deeply upsetting events in the history of England and its neighbors Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It was certainly a dramatic time.

1599 was the year in which Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603; reigned 1558-1603) tried to crush a ferocious rebellion in Ireland by sending there a reluctant Duke of Essex and an equally reluctant ad hoc army, with appalling results. Although Shapiro does not make this comparison, the Irish situation was basically England’s Vietnam War of its time.

The health of the Queen, nearing the exhausted end of her reign amid suspense about who would succeed her, was also on everyone’s mind. And nobles and citizens alike thought it likely that Spain would try to invade the country again (everyone thought they knew exactly when), as it had tried to do in the famous Great Armada of 1588.

1606 was even grimmer, introduced as it was by aftershocks from the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the King, Parliament, and most of the rest of the government, a scheme uncovered in late 1605. Although the plot did not succeed, the resulting panicked activity brings to mind an equivalent mood in the United States following the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Partly as a result of the Gunpowder Plot, Elizabeth’s successor, James I (1566-1625; reigned in England, 1603-25), found himself trying to balance political and religious disputes. And in the second half of the year, the situation was complicated by a serious outbreak of the plague.

Shapiro effectively draws us into these stories with detailed and vivid descriptions of events, so it’s hard not to feel we’re learning what it must have been like to be there. I have seen comments on these two books complaining that Shapiro spends too much time describing events like the Gunpowder Plot, as though his only intention were to give an historical narrative. I find these complaints off the mark for two reasons.

In the first place, Shapiro handles beautifully the historian’s dilemma – to concentrate on the great sweep of history, or on the experiences of the “common people” of the time. Shapiro gives us in detail both the objective side of events and the way they may have looked “at ground level,” at the level they would have manifested themselves to obscure but real people who were affected by them.

In the second place, the fact is that in both these years we don’t know much about Shakespeare except that he was writing and at least to some extent acting. Shapiro makes it clear that he doesn’t want to try to describe “what Shakespeare might have been thinking,” and he usually avoids it.

However, he can and does describe where Shakespeare would likely have been at the time of those events, and the results are revelatory.

To give one example, people sometimes wonder where Shakespeare got the impressions of court life that are so convincingly embodied in his plays. Shapiro provides multiple answers. He demonstrates that London was essentially a fairly small place, with a population of around 200,000. Shakespeare would have known members of the nobility.

And Shapiro makes it clear that as a member of the Chamberlain’s Men, and later of the King’s Men, Shakespeare would have been inside the royal palaces many times, often in close proximity to the sovereign.

Shakespeare saw plenty of court life at first hand. He would have known other notables of the time as well – for example, he and his family were uncomfortably close to the social circles of the Gunpowder plotters, a dangerous relationship at a fraught time.

Shapiro is not a breezy writer, but I found both these books engrossing, and I will certainly reread them. Meanwhile, I have not yet mentioned an even more important aspect of his approach: the light that it throws on Shakespeare’s plays themselves.

Shapiro does not claim that Shakespeare wrote any of the plays under discussion as a direct response to historical events. Playwrights who did, like Ben Jonson (1572-1637), whose satirical play Eastward Ho (1605) was considered by the government too satirical, found themselves in jail. Elizabethan England was not a permissive state, and neither was Jacobean England.

However, Shapiro does demonstrate that Shakespeare was attuned to the social and political events and currents of his time, and that he let them flow through his plays, not explicitly taking sides, but letting immediate circumstances influence his work.

I will sketch a few of his insights. Shapiro writes of Henry the Fifth that

Conquest, national identity, and mixed origins – the obsessive concerns of Elizabethan Irish policy – run deep through Henry the Fifth and sharply distinguish it from previous English accounts of Henry’s reign.  . . . Battlefield deaths have not gentled the condition of the [non-noble] anonymous soldiers who fought alongside Henry. . . . In the end this fraternal goodwill doesn’t cut across social lines.

Shapiro sees within Julius Caesar an ongoing discussion of censorship, an issue continually faced by playwrights of his time. “No play by Shakespeare explores censorship and silencing so deeply . . .” as terrifyingly illustrated by the death of Cinna the poet, and by the executions ordered after Caesar’s death.

The trends affecting As You Like It, as Shapiro presents them, have to do with increasing sophistication in the demands on playwrights by the times and the audiences. “Flat” characters like those of The Comedy of Errors (1592-1593?), and routine romances, would no longer do. In As You Like It, Shakespeare parodies, mimics, and overturns stereotypes of romantic love and conventional comedy, even (in the person of Rosalind) calling the idea of love itself into question.

Of Hamlet Shapiro writes

What the Chamberlain’s men did to the wooden frame of The Theatre [they tore it down and moved it], Shakespeare did to the old play of Hamlet [a version now lost, apparently written around 1587]: he tore it from its familiar moorings, salvaged its structure, and reassembled something new. By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold . . . Hamlet [is] a play poised midway between a religious past and a secular future.

In King Lear Shapiro sees those two same elements in conflict, and also identifies resonances with the impact of the Gunpowder Plot, the succession to the royal throne, King James’ desire to make England, Ireland, and Scotland into one nation (“Britain”—of which Wales was already part), the plague, and heated attitudes toward witchcraft, including the King’s own opinions.

Macbeth continues those themes. In it Shakespeare carefully walks a thin line of discussion about Scottish kings (James I, of course, was a Scot like Macbeth), their weaknesses, and their murders – a very sensitive topic. And, finally,

Any play about Antony and Cleopatra would have been seen as a reflection on the past regime as well as on the present one; it would also measure how much had altered in the political landscape during those seven years.

To this brief survey of the seven plays discussed in Shapiro’s two books can be added numerous examples of Shakespeare’s involvement with his own theater company, the Chamberlain’s (and later King’s) Men, and their theater, the Globe. These details help Shapiro answer an often-heard question: did William Shakespeare from Stratford actually write the plays attributed to him?

Shapiro approaches this question, in his book Contested Will, from an interesting angle. Although he discusses the authorship question, and to my mind settles it as well as it can be settled with the available evidence, his primary focus in the book is on why the question of authorship came up in the first place.

Shakespeare had been dead for about 200 years before the discussion began in earnest, and Shapiro asks what changed during that time. What made it a subject that people began to have opinions on? Shapiro provides fascinating answers. For example, how many of these assumptions do you share?

• Shakespeare is virtually a divinity in the world of art. He is in a world by himself. No one and nothing comes close.
• Shakespeare from Stratford was too involved in the world of commerce and business to have been the great artist that we see in the plays.
• The plays show a refinement and an awareness of exalted social circles, professional specialties, and foreign countries that an ordinary citizen from Stratford could never have had.
• Aristocrats, on the other hand, are refined and aware people (particularly the candidate for authorship that an individual has in mind).
• If Shakespeare were well known at the time, his life should have been better documented.
• The world Shakespeare lived in was essentially the same as ours in the way people lived.
• Writers always reveal themselves in their writing. All writing is essentially autobiographical.
• Personal events (for example, his father’s and son’s deaths) must have affected him in the way we assume they did.
• Shakespeare’s plays show him to be a champion of social justice/rebellion/the common people/the nobles/Protestants/Catholics/whatever else is important to the biographer.
• Shakespeare was basically a person a great deal like me (whoever the “I” is that is speaking).

Shapiro demonstrates that none of these assumptions would have applied, or had a factual basis, in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, and that it is a mistake to assume that people in Shakespeare’s time lived under the same circumstances that we do. Yet all these assumptions are crucial to the authorship debate. Start to question them, and the debate loses its punch.

For me the clincher to the authorship issue is, as Shapiro expresses it:

Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, firsthand knowledge of everyone in the [acting] company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents. . . . It’s impossible to picture any . . . aristocrats or courtiers working as more or less equals with a string of lowly playwrights, especially with [George] Wilkins, who kept an inn and may have run a brothel.

Whoever wrote Shakespeare’s plays knew a lot of things, but he had inside knowledge of his own theater. The same conclusion, incidentally, is also inevitable after reading On Producing Shakespeare by Ronald Watkins (The Citadel Press, 1965).

Ultimately, it seems to me, the authorship controversy is really just a game, one that anyone can join, which is the source of the fun – but that’s all.

I called this article “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” because the temptation for each of us, and for the many, many people who have written biographies of Shakespeare, is to see him as a person very much like ourselves - whoever we are.

Shapiro does not do this. He tells us that there are only so many known facts about Shakespeare, and that we have no idea if the plays and sonnets reflect states of his mind and experience (nor do they in the works of many other artists of his time and of ours).

Nevertheless Shapiro has gone remarkably far into the world Shakespeare lived in, dealing with what we can know, and he strikes me as a reliable and valuable guide.

[I have a personal take on the "who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays" debate.  It’s irrelevant to Shapiro’s book Contested Will (I kinda like that title) or Kirk’s précis of Shapiro’s discussion.  In fact, not only do I recognize that Shapiro’s not entering into the debate about who wrote the plays, but I think, from what I glean, I agree with his notions of why the debate exists.

[I also see that, as Kirk pointed out when I expressed the thought that follows, the debate “matters” because Shapiro’s response “extends not just to the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but to conspiracy theories like the Kennedy assassination, and from there on to Trump’s ‘fake news,’ etc.”

[Such as it is, however, the authorship question is a matter of interest only to litterateurs.  We theater people look on the whole issue as both silly and meaningless.  We don’t care.  (Okay, yes—I’m generalizing.) 

[The only thing about the plays that’s important to theater folk is that they exist.  Whoever wrote them, they’re wonderful and we’re blessed just to have them to act in, watch, and read.  Period.  End of argument.  Nothing else matters and is all just masturbatory.  IMHO, naturally—but I think you’ll find that most actors, directors, and others in the business of show will agree.]