Some Plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from the Archive

 

THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY
by Robert Wilson
(based on Gustave Flaubert)
2004 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
21 October 2004 

My first show in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave season this year was Robert Wilson’s gospel-inspired version of The Temptation of St. Anthony on 19 October [2004].  Wilson’s piece, presented in BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, is based on a Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) novel (La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1874) of the spiritual torment of Saint Anthony the Great (251-356), but Wilson tells his version virtually without spoken dialogue at all, having turned the story into a gospel-music revival.  

Flaubert’s novel, written in the form of a play script (and itself inspired by a ca. 1557 painting of the same title attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1525-30 – 1569), details one night in the life of Saint Anthony who begins to question his years of self-imposed solitude and asceticism.  The devil tempts him with both physical pleasures—luscious food, a shower of gold, a beautiful woman (The Queen of Sheba) and man (Adonis)—and many different non-Christian beliefs and philosophies.   

(The painting referenced above as the inspiration for Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony was cited in the Wikipedia entry for the novel.  It was originally attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but has since been ascribed to one of his followers.  

(There were, however, at least two other canvases with the same title by painters in Bruegel’s family, including one painted by his younger son, Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1568-1625, in 1594, and another by his elder son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1564-1638, in ca. 1600.  [After 1559, Pieter the Elder dropped the h from his family name; his relatives continued to use Brueghel.] 

(The French Wikipedia page for the Flaubert attributes the inspiration to the version from Pieter Brueghel the Younger.  Unless Flaubert left something in writing to attest to his stimulus, I don’t know how scholars can be sure.)

Anthony’s desert retreat is visited by a phantasmagorical array of evil characters and visions.  He struggles, but he prevails.  Along the path, he’s questioned and challenged by his disciple, Hilarion. 

In Wilson’s more austere adaptation, gone are the wild delusions of diabolical temptations.  Many are represented by the gospel hymns (gluttony in “Table Is Spread”; lust in “God Is Love”).  The director’s spare style is punctuated by sections of vibrant dance (choreographed by Christalyn Wright) and spiritual Christian revelry.

As usual with Wilson, the piece is short on drama, but long on theatrical spectacle.  The music is glorious of course (more on this later), but the visual images Wilson evoked are stunning, whether enhanced by the movement (the movement coach is Valerie Winborne), set, or costumes (designed by Geoffrey Holder, a certified theatrical genius to be sure). 

I suppose that if you’re susceptible to being touched by the story of Saint Anthony, the hermit saint who went in search of the true faith by living alone in the Egyptian desert, the play (if that’s what you can call Wilson’s piece) may move you—but since I don’t have a dog in this race, I was taken by the spectacle alone.  Over a brief, intermissionless hour and forty minutes, that was enough sustenance.

Since the music is the center of this piece, I should say something about that up front.  In contrast to a musical I saw at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown this summer, which was inspired by the clash of musical cultures in Texas (so the playwright/director said) but had no one working on it who had any background in Mexican, Latin, or Tejano music (or country-western, either), Wilson did this absolutely right.  [The play at CATF was The Rose of Corazon by Keith Glover.  I reported on it on Rick On Theater on 8 July 2015.]  

Wilson collaborated with Bernice Johnson Reagon, about as much an expert in gospel music as you can find.  She not only knows the music as an academic who has studied the background and origins, but she just retired from her own gospel group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Now, I’m not a great fan of gospel music especially, but the vocal harmonies are gorgeous, and the music—which carried all the verbal element of Temptation—is superb. 

Reagon used existing songs, some of which she adjusted to fit the Saint Anthony story, and composed some original pieces.  All of them are wonderfully executed by Wilson’s cast.  (There’s a tinge of African rhythms in some of the pieces, and some of the costumes also bear African elements, but that may be embedded in the gospel tradition.  In any case, it does nothing but enhance the performance.) 

As I indicated, there’s no real spoken dialogue—except for the songs, the only other words are recitative or chants.  It makes the whole thing seem like a church pageant.  (As you might have imagined, Wilson’s Temptation was compared some to Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus.  Gospel did, by the way, have something of a life after BAM in 1983: it was shown on PBS’s Great Performances in November 1985, which is where I saw it, and went to Broadway in 1988.  It appeared in the repertoires of several regional theaters in the years afterward, too, but it’s popularity may have faded substantially by now.)

The base set, designed and lit by Wilson, is a unit which never changes—a square room with windows on the side walls and arched alcoves in the rear, flanked by doors at right and left.  The floor is essentially bare except for thin, wooden benches parallel to the side walls, one on each side of the stage.  (As usual with Wilson, the floor lights up in various colors, and there are constant washes of light from above that change the color of the set and costumes.) 

The side walls are directly perpendicular to the proscenium so they’re all but invisible from the center of the house, and the alcoves up stage resemble nothing so much as a pair of tablets for the Ten Commandments, making the space remind me of a simple synagogue, the alcoves representing the Torah ark.  This may be Wilson’s intent—to evoke the First Temple in Jerusalem, say—or I may have been the only spectator to find this resemblance.

The set’s occasionally enhanced by movable additions as the narrative calls for them.  These, of course, are seldom realistic.  In the instance that impressed me the most, a mountain flows out and one of the deities Anthony encounters descends. 

The deity first appears as a small puppet at the top of the mountain, rounds the first peak, and disappears briefly between the parts of the mountain.  When the deity emerges around another peak, it’s a larger puppet identical to the first except for its size.  Rounding another peak and disappearing again, it emerges, this time as a live actor, dressed the same as the two puppets.  Accompanied by one of Reagon’s songs, it’s a simple, but effective and delightful effect.

Holder’s costumes are mostly brightly colored and richly decorated robes but often topped by very elaborate (and, to my eyes, African-inspired) headdresses.  The women also have highly styled (and styled high) wigs of different shapes. 

Only Saint Anthony (Carl Hancock Rux) and his student Hilarion (Helga Davis) are individually cast; the rest of the characters are played by members of the ensemble while, for the most part, the rest serve as a chorus.  (According to a note in the program, most of the members of this all-African-American cast have known and worked with each other for years.)  They often weave intricate patterns, moving around the stage as they sing.  The robes are floor length and this makes the actors look like they’re gliding on wheels rather than walking.  It’s wonderfully ethereal. 

Like I said, with Wilson, often the spectacle is all.  In this case, it was enough.  Sometimes, beauty for its own sake is sufficient.

*  *  *  *

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
by William Shakespeare
Watermill Theatre production by Propeller (London)
17 March 2004 

I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night [Tuesday, 16 March 2004], in the production by Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller company from London, presented in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, the former Majestic which had been recovered for Peter Brook’s Mahabharata back in the ’80s.  I didn’t know the company previously, though they’ve been around for seven years; they’ve done other Shakespeare (Henry V), but I don’t know if they do other writers or periods [apparently not—Shakespeare is their turf]. 

For the first time that I can remember, Diana, my frequent theater partner, liked a show that I didn’t; if we disagree, it’s usually the other way around.  (She said she liked the “energy” of the performers.  That didn’t do it for me, and I didn’t question her because I didn’t want to spoil her enjoyment.) 

I guess the actors do a good enough job (especially the rude mechanicals: Tony Bell as Bottom the Weaver, Vincent Leigh as Snout the Tinker, Jonathan McGuinness as Snug the Joiner, Chris Myles as Peter Quince the Carpenter, and Jules Werner as Flute the Bellows-mender), but I just don’t see the reason to do this with all men.  It struck me as a gimmick—Hamlet on roller skates; if there’s anything more to it, it went past me. 

It’s not really Elizabethan—these actors aren’t boys, they’re men.  They don’t impersonate women, though they wear women’s clothes: there are no wigs, the actors don’t do “female” voices, or otherwise try to present feminine characters.  (Think Jamie Farr’s Klinger from MASH.  I’d add the Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo, but that’s a deliberate travesty; this isn’t supposed to be.) 

As far as I can tell, the casting of men in all the roles doesn’t add anything to the play except one more layer of humor—but I don’t see that that addition is appropriate.  There are essentially three kinds of humor in this production: 1) the jokes Shakespeare wrote into the play; 2) the physical comedy added by the director and actors; and 3) humor that arises because men are saying lines intended for female characters.  1) and 2) strike me as perfectly legitimate, but 3) strikes me as gratuitous. 

The laughs don’t come from the writing or the acting—just the casting.  It’s not clever; it’s just opportunistic.  And I don’t see how it illuminates the play or its themes (not that Midsummer’s themes are so deep they need much illuminating). 

In the program, director Hall is quoted as saying that the all-male casting “is about ‘trying to give the plays back to the actors, so that they can really tell the story in a more one-on-one way with the audience.’”  I can’t imagine how that statement even makes sense.  It sounds like he’s saying women actors can’t tell the story or work one-on-one with the audience (if that’s even an important accomplishment). 

The whole thing—which runs two hours and 40 minutes—just didn’t work for me at all.  I thought it was silly—not funny.  It even qualifies as pretentious, considering Hall’s statement.

*  *  *  *

THE WILD DUCK
by Henrik Ibsen
National Theatre of Norway (Oslo)
2006 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
1 November 2006 

My theater companion, Diana, and I went over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday evening, 26 October, to see the National Theatre of Norway’s production of Ibsen’s Wild Duck.  Like most non-musical productions at BAM, this was at the Harvey Theater.  I’m always curious to see how the natives interpret their own playwrights.  It always strikes me as sort of like going back to the source. 

Also, those national companies are usually excellent; I don’t believe I’ve seen the Norwegian company before, but I’ve seen the Swedish counterpart (with Bergman often at the helm), and they’re superb.

(I was telling my mother about this show and it made me recall two other national companies I’ve seen in the past decades: the State Theater of Lithuania with a play called The Square by the company’s director, Eimuntas Nekrosius, and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria, with a Russian play called Retro by Alexander Galin.  I didn’t know either play, of course, and both were performed in the companies’ native languages. 

(And both were magnificent performances—and experiences.  I think The Square, which was at the Joyce Theatre on 8th Avenue in Chelsea in ’91 as part of the short-lived New York International Festival of the Arts—which may have morphed into the Lincoln Center Festival, but I’m not sure—may have had simultaneous translation, but I have always remembered that play as a fascinating and, at the time, unique take on the shift from communism/totalitarianism to freedom/democracy.  Fifteen years later, and I still remember it. 

(Retro, which was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86 [see my report on this international theater festival, 10 November 2014], didn’t have a translation—just a synopsis in the program—but the acting was so absolutely clear that that was all I needed to decipher what was happening.  The company worked in almost perfect Stanislavsky style for this domestic comedy and every action and intent was entirely clear and comprehensible even though I couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue. 

(Comedies, I think, are the hardest plays to communicate when you don’t understand the language.  A tape of that performance would have been a perfect training film for Stanislavsky acting.  I guess that my remembering these performances 15 and 20 years afterwards says something.)

The Wild Duck isn’t one of Ibsen’s well-known, frequently-staged plays—at least, not in the U.S.; it’s apparently popular and even beloved in Norway—so I’ll give a short synopsis of the plot:

Hjalmar Ekdal (Gard Eidsvold) is a photographer, but he lets his wife, Gina (Agot Sendstad), and daughter, Hedvig (Birgitte Larsen), run his studio while he devotes his time to loftier pursuits: supposedly working on a “great invention,” which he never identifies.  He spends most of his time hunting rabbits in the loft with his elderly father (Kai Remlov)—who’d been imprisoned for corruption and suffers from moral and financial bankruptcy. 

The Ekdals only get by thanks to the wealthy Haaken Werle (Bjorn Skagestad)—Old Ekdal’s former business partner who’d managed to escape the charges that had condemned Old Ekdal.  Without Hjalmar knowing it, Werle has been giving money to Gina. 

One day, Gregers Werle (Eindride Eidsvold), Haaken’s son and Hjalmar’s oldest friend, returns to his hometown following a self-imposed exile.  In his search for the truth about the two families, Gregers makes discoveries that jeopardize the happiness of the entire family and have tragic consequences.

This Wild Duck, an offering of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2006 Next Wave Festival, is a kind of trimmed-down version—not an adaptation, but it only runs two hours (without intermission) and the cast has been cut to just the nine most prominent characters.  The set reflects this slimming process as well: there are only a table and about ten chairs (all Scandinavian-modern design—very stark) and an odd wood-textured wall, about six feet tall, across the back of the space. 

Director Eirik Stubø moved the action up to the late ’50s or early ’60s—at one point Ekdal plays Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” on his flute and spins Gina around as he sings a few bars—though the text isn’t altered as far as I could tell from the supertitles.  (The translation for the titles is credited to Judith Messick and Katherine Hanson, but it looks a lot like the Rolf Fjelde rendition published by Signet that I own.  I looked up a couple of things after I got home, and the wording looks awfully close; I even spotted several exact phrases as I skimmed for what I was looking for.)

It’s an entirely minor quibble, I admit, but the juxtaposition of the 19th-century text (Wild Duck was written in 1884) and the mid-20th-century look is occasionally jarring.  Two instances that I noted in passing include an exchange between Hjalmar Ekdal and his wife regarding cutting the pages of some of his reference books and a mention of “freshly-churned butter.”  Unless Norway was way behind the rest of the Western world in the ’50s and ’60s, we pretty much stopped selling books with uncut pages and getting butter fresh from a churn, as opposed to a grocery store’s fridge, was relegated to farms. 

More of a problem for me is the total ambiguity of the setting—and especially that back wall.  The script says the first act is in the Werle house, and the other four acts are in Ekdal’s photography studio.  In the published translation, the studio is described as completely furnished, not spartan, so Stubø (and his designer Kari Gravklev) are making a stylistic decision beyond the period of the action—to make a Symbolically minimalist environment for the (essentially) Realistic acting.  I can only say that I had a hard time imagining where the people are in real space—and maybe that’s my failing. 

I don’t think it’s my failing, however, that I was bothered by the constant need for the cast to reset the table and chairs, including moving the table on and off stage and adding or subtracting chairs.  (There are only three chairs and no table when we first arrive at Ekdal’s house in act two.  There are no act breaks, except that needed to reset the stage—accomplished by the actors themselves with the lights up.) 

There’s also a lot of action devoted to setting and adjusting the table (which has extension leaves, stored under the table top, that are taken out and put in as the needs of the scene demand).  I remember seeing a production of The Duchess of Malfi (by Cheek by Jowl) at BAM in 1995, and it became a play about moving chairs.  (There was a staging of The Brothers Karamazov—not the acrobatic clowns—at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in 1994 that devolved into the same thing.)  This production almost becomes a play about moving the table!

Now, that wall.  It’s just a plain, blondish wood-pattern expanse that extends from stage right to stage left, about six feet high—just over head height.  It looks to be about six to eight inches wide—wide enough for Hedvig to walk or crawl along.  But, what the hell is it?  I mean, we know that the studio is indoors—it’s described in the text as a loft, suggesting that it’s above ground level.  (I always pictured it as a sort of attic space, in fact.) 

Except for the fact that this looks like wood, it otherwise seems like a garden wall of some kind, and seems, from the action, to separate the “indoor” area (that is, the studio) from the “outdoor” area (where the rabbits Old Ekdal shoots and the wild duck of the title live).  There are no door and no windows in the wall, so when someone goes into the area on the other side (which we can’t see), he climbs over, often using a tall, wooden step ladder he brings from off stage. 

When people look over the wall, they usually climb on chairs (which are either already placed against the wall on “our” side or are moved into position for the purpose of peering over the wall’s top.  As I said, Hedvig walks along the top of the wall once and crawls along it another time.  I’m sorry, but if all this is symbolic, I didn’t get it.  (I cop to not being good with Symbolism.  I guess I’m just too literal-minded.) 

If it isn’t symbolic, I can’t figure out how that wall works (along, of course, with the rest of the space).  I’m going on about this because it occupied my focus so much of the time I was watching, trying to understand what I was looking at, that it became a distraction.  (And, believe me, what with having to look up at the supertitles and then back down at the actors, an additional distraction is totally unnecessary!)   

I’m not sure I can articulate this, but using the chairs that way and carrying an actual ladder from off stage seems to make the wall real—it’s an actual wall.  But, then, what’s it doing there?  What kind of space has a tall wooden wall with no doors or windows like that?  If it’s a garden wall, it wouldn’t be wood (unlike, say, a fence).  If it’s a room wall, it’d have windows or doors. 

But if it’s symbolic, not “real,” it seems you shouldn’t have to use real, practical things to negotiate it.  Does that make sense?  Maybe I’m way off—as I said, I’m not good with Symbolism.  If I were designing a symbolic wall, I’d have made it low enough to look over without aids, or I’d make it a scrim or a latticework painted like a wall; I’m sure someone more imaginative than I, especially in stage design, would come up with more and better ideas.  The problem I see with most of my ideas is that if the director of Wild Duck deliberately wanted the area on the other side of the wall to be invisible to the audience, these wouldn’t work.

I’ve said on several occasions that I find trying to turn Ibsen’s Realistic plays into some other style, Symbolism among them, is a usually disastrous directorial decision.  I allow that Wild Duck is partway to Ibsen’s more Symbolistic period at the end of his career—according to director Stubø’s program note, Ibsen wrote his publisher: “This new play has in certain ways its own place in my dramatic production; its dramatic progress is in many ways different from my previous ones”—but it’s not there yet.  Maybe I am too literal minded to buy such a shift.  Maybe I only think it doesn’t work—but in reality, I just don’t like it.  I don’t think that’s the case, but would I know? 

It’s not that I mind a minimalist set, a suggested set without all the 19th-century trappings.  I did that myself in an adaptation of a Chekhov story—and I believe it worked.  I don’t even mind up-dating the look of a play; I did that, too, with an Oscar Wilde play I reset in the 1920s.  But when the director moves into an alien style, then I think the balance gets tipped.  Finally, if I can’t figure out what’s going on, then almost nothing else really matters—it’s just not working.  In my humble opinion, of course.

The acting all seemed fine, except that it was all on a rather even keel for the most part.  There are a few highs and lows—and some long silences while the cast takes care of tasks like setting that table and putting in or taking out leaves (I joked that maybe Stubø is trying to rip off Pinter, but it’s not much of a corollary.) 

I mean, Ibsen’s plays lean toward melodrama by today’s standards—there’s lots of emotion and psychological drama.  These folks are all moderated and even-tempered an awful lot of the time.  Now, maybe that’s a Norwegian character trait, I don’t know, but it struck me as odd, given the circumstances. 

The casting of Hedvig was also a little peculiar.  Ibsen says she’s 14—Juliet’s age—but the actress in this production, Birgitte Larsen, plays in her later teens (and, I’m sure, the actress is actually older than that [it turns out she was 25]).  She’s much more precociously sexual than I figure Hedvig is intended to be, though I’m not convinced Larsen is playing it that way.  She just looks more like a woman than a girl. 

Diana thought she was and that the others actors, especially the men (and her father in particular), were responding.  (Diana felt that Stubø might have been suggesting the daughter is starting to take after her mother.  That might not even be contrary to Ibsen’s creed, which held that the moral corruption of the parent is inherited by the children.  That’s why Nora couldn’t stay with her children or take them with her in Doll House.)  I didn’t get that impression, however—though perhaps I just missed it.

Finally, I’ve decided I don’t like supertitles.  I’ve had a series of bad experiences with this translation device—they’re badly located on the stage so that I can’t read them and watch the actors or they’re too small or distant so I just plain can’t read them.  In this instance, the screen isn’t too high above the actors, and it isn’t too small, but I found myself bobbing my head up and down so much and trying to catch the longer phrases fast enough to get back to the stage before the next text is projected that I was losing far too much of the theater for the logistics. 

When BAM used the infrared earphones, I used to keep the volume down low so I could just hear the translators and still hear the actors’ actual speech, even if I couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t have to bop back and forth between a text and the action—I didn’t have to choose where to look at a given moment—and I didn’t have to worry about reading a line or two of text instead of listening and watching. 

I’m sure paying live translators every night, maintaining the transmission system, and keeping track of those earphones was both more cumbersome and more costly than the projection system, but it was a lot easier on me.

I guess I have to come down on the side of disappointed with this experience.  It isn’t bad—say, like Nora, the German up-date of Doll House a few seasons back at BAM [see my report on ROT, 18 June 2016]—but I didn’t really enjoy it or get much out of it.  It certainly didn’t reveal anything new about Ibsen or the play for me.  Charles Isherwood had a pretty decent review (a “stark but perceptive production”) in the New York Times on Friday, 27 October, the day after we saw the show, but I can’t say I saw the benefits he did.  

Two Pairs of Shakespeares from the Archives

[In the fall of 1988, I audited a course in New York University’s Department of Performance Studies, Writing about Performance, taught by Marcia B. Siegel.  Marcia’s an accomplished dance critic and I’ve mentioned her before on Rick On Theater (see “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Part 2,” 8 November 2009, and the introduction to “Joan Acocella: Critic, Historian, Or Critic-Historian. An Interview, 28 November 1988,” 31 May 2019).  The goal of the course was to examine and practice different kinds of writing about performance, which readers of ROT will know is a major concern of mine.

[The class’s main, weekly assignment was to maintain a journal, made up of at least one two-page entry a week, and Marcia gave us a choice of two general topics.  I selected “any aspect of current performance.”  (The other option was “commentary on one type of performance as it is being covered in the current press,” and I did a little of that occasionally as well.)  Here’s my proposal to Marcia for my journal subject, submitted at the start of the term:

I will study the treatment of Shakespeare, concentrating primarily on stage performances, though I won't ignore appropriate film and television productions when they are available.  Focusing on the directorial or production concept, I will describe the performances principally in terms of their visual design (i.e., set, costumes, and lighting) and acting style.

[I strayed some from this proposal, as I wrote about acting, programs, and casting as well as directorial and design concepts.  ROTters may have noticed that I’ve repurposed many of my journal entries as blog posts before,  (That Joan Acocella interview I referenced above is an example, as is “Calvino Is To The Mind What Exercise Is To The Body (Part 2),” 17 March 2016, which was the second major  assignment for the course).  I’m about to do it again.

[It’s probably unsurprising that in a four-month-long survey of Shakespearean performances in New York City and beyond, some plays will turn up in several productions between September and December.  Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are among the Bard’s most popular plays, and they get presented around the country dozens, probably hundreds of times a season.  I covered two productions of each of these plays in my Shakespeare performance journal back in 1988; they were the sources of a half dozen or more entries, focusing on different aspects of the presentations.  I’ve pulled together the several short pieces and reassembled them into four reports, each covering one production of the plays.  My idea is to see how the same script can render very different stage interpretations (not always for the best).]

ROMEO AND JULIET

RAPP Theater Company

Theatre at St. Clement’s

21 September 1988

In “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” a New York Times essay (republished on ROT on 10 March 2011 and discussed in “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” 18 September 2009), Robert Brustein takes on the issue of “the reinterpretation . . . of celebrated classical plays.”  He divides this “deconstruction” into two categories: “the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor.”  A simile production, he asserts, simply shifts the time or location to an analogous one nearer our own, while a metaphorical one examines the play from the inside, “generating provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”

Brustein cites world-famous examples of both types, like Orson Welles’s totalitarian Julius Caesar (1937-38), a simile, and Peter Brook’s circus-oriented Midsummer Night’s Dream (1971), a metaphor.  Do the more modest and lesser known efforts of Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway avail themselves of these tactics, and are the results similar?  I think so, and recent productions indicate that I may be right. 

In two of the recent similes I’ve seen, the Pointed Stick Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Independent Theatre Company’s Romeo and Juliet (both covered below), there were no profound reinterpretations. 

The second R&J, however, did assert a new interpretation, but it was given only lip-service.  At the RAPP Theater Company’s Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre at St. Clement’s (423 W. 46th Street), R. Jeffrey Cohen’s “Notes From The Director” explained that he saw Friar Laurence (Raphael Nash) as the witting catalyst of the tragedy, and ascribed to him an un-Christian reliance in the occult.  The note provided some evidence from the text for this notion, and it might well have worked at least theatrically, not to say intellectually, if the director had followed through with it in his production. 

Alas, Cohen went no further than giving the Friar the prologue and the epilogue, having him do two parlor magic tricks and using a violet light when the Nurse (Maxine Prescott) describes the natural phenomena on the night Juliet (Carrie Owerko) was weaned.  Beyond the program note, the production, decked out as middle-class suburbia, showed me nothing new about this play. 

With the Capulet party a backyard barbecue and the Tybalt-Mercutio (Jarred Hammond and Darian Sartain) duel fought with aluminum bats on a baseball diamond, this kind of directing, as Brustein notes, is “at best a platform for ideas, at worst an occasion for pranks.”  (The lighting for this R&J was designed by Pat Dignan, the set is by Alexis S. Cohen, and the fights were choreographed by Hammond—who also did the costumes—Tom Harford, and Sartain.)

In addition, in the director’s program note, Cohen explains, “moral corruption masquerading as religious zeal is explored . . . tragically in Romeo and Juliet.”  He believes that it “is a substantially different play thematically than traditional stagings and scholarship have rendered.”  Invoking unspecified “dark forces,” Cohen sees Friar Laurence not as a “bumbling fool,” but “a dominant motivating force in the tragedy,” convinced that any sacrifice—even the lives of the two teenagers—is justified in order to heal the feud between the Capulets and Montagues.

Cohen bases this interpretation on several “facts,” only one of which focuses specifically on Friar Laurence.  The director points out that the priest’s opening speech makes no mention of God and refers to “a sophisticated moral view that is far more based in natural or pagan philosophies than in Christian teachings” such as that all things are equally good and bad and “that death is an essential component of the cycle of life.” 

His “other evidence” is that the lovers are called “star-crossed”—an astrological reference opposed to “the Christian concepts of . . . free will”; Juliet is 13—a magical number—and was weaned on the day of a great earthquake; Juliet describes the devil in 13 different ways when she learns Romeo (Harford)) has slain Tybalt.  Except for the remarks regarding his first speech, the rest of this actually has nothing to do with the Friar.

To support his interpretation, Cohen has adjusted the script.  Principally, he’s given the Prologues and the Prince’s (Labrini Stathopolus) epilogue to the Friar, thus lending him an air of prescience that isn’t born out in the text.  Additionally, in consonance with the company’s advertising that there would be “magic” in the production, the Friar performs two brief tricks. 

Before the first Prologue, with several pantomimed street fights behind him, the Friar, sitting at the front center of the playing area flanked by a hooded bride on one side and groom on the other, cuts out two paper dolls—one male and one female.  As he rises to utter the first Prologue, the two dolls, cut from flash paper, burst into flame in his hands. 

In the second magic trick, at the end of the marriage scene, Friar Laurence makes a paper bouquet appear in his hands.  Neither trick elicits any reaction from the company.  Nor, for that matter, do any characters react to the Friar’s putative machinations.  In fact, other than these changes, the play proceeds fairly traditionally for the most part.

None of this seems to raise the possibility of Friar Laurence’s control above that of an intellectual curiosity.  The Friar’s part itself is simply too small, and while he may not be a “bumbling fool,” other, non-Machiavellian interpretations, such as a sincerely involved friend, have been played successfully.  To create the impression that Friar Laurence is a controlling force in this tragedy, the director needs to put him on stage more and make his presence more substantially felt.

(In an excellent production of Macbeth by the New Rude Mechanicals that I saw this fall, director John Pynchon Holms said something interesting by increasing the witches’ presence—undisguised and unabashed, but unrecognized as witches by the other characters.  He used them as the messengers, servants, and extras and put them “invisibly” on stage in portentous scenes.  This implied that an external force had taken control of Macbeth’s life without making any substantive changes to the text but adding an intriguing dimension to the production that remained largely subliminal.  Oh, and by the way, Holms didn’t put a note in the program to explain this.  It was just there—for us to discover and interpret.)

There are a great many supernatural references in all of Shakespeare; that there are several in Romeo and Juliet doesn’t mean that the Friar’s the source.  So why compose such an elaborate program note?

Usually in this country, when program notes are published, they’re generally statements of what the director or playwright, or both, were trying to accomplish.  RAPP’s Cohen was attempting a reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet and felt it necessary to justify and explain his interpretation.

My reaction is dichotomous, however.  If the director’s ideas are well thought-out and the work is clear, the notes become superfluous.  I don’t need to be told what I can plainly see.  If the ideas are muddled and unfulfilled on stage, the note serves only to illuminate what might have happened, but didn’t.  In the first instance, there is an implicit insult to the audience: we need help to see what’s right before our eyes.  In the second, it suggests the company doesn’t have to worry about its ideas: if they can’t get them on stage, they can write them in the program.  This seems to have been what occurred in Cohen’s R&J.

Further, the RAPP company wanted so much to make Romeo and Juliet American that rock music plays throughout, the Capulet party is a backyard barbecue, and Benvolio (John Harmon) and Mercutio play baseball.  With such a strong American environment established, references to Verona and Mantua become disconcerting.  So does the presence of a Prince, since American cities don’t have princes.  You have to suspend a lot of disbelief!

Moreover, I couldn’t believe that a modern, middle-class, American girl like Owerko’s Juliet could ever fear ghosts to the extent that her Act IV soliloquy requires.  I also wondered why Friar Laurence didn’t just pick up a telephone and call Romeo instead of trusting his explanation of Juliet’s “death” to a hand-delivered letter.  The technical director of my MFA program used to  call production ideas like this “Hamlet on roller skates.”  Brustein would call them “an occasion for pranks.”

It’s also a manifestation of another implicit insult to the audience.  The director seems to believe that modern American playgoers can’t understand productions remote from us in time or place and that the common, human problems classic plays treat can’t be communicated unless they’re portrayed by people just like us.  (Curiously, the RAPP’s change of venue for Romeo and Juliet doesn’t bear on the new interpretation Cohen wants to convey.  In fact, it seems to get in the way.)  As we’ll see, director Cohen and the RAPP Theater aren’t alone in this misapprehension.

*  *  *  *

ROMEO AND JULIET

Independent Theatre Company

House of Candles

24 September 1988

The Independent Theatre Company at the House of Candles (99 Stanton Street), like the RAPP Theater Company, attempts to transpose Romeo and Juliet to American milieus.  Neither company seems to have relocated the story in order to say something unconventional about or through the play.

I’ve already invoked Robert Brustein’s essay on “Reworking the Classics,” and the second R&J I saw follows a similar path.  The Independent Theatre Americanized its production by making the characters Italian-American in the Mafia vein.  This inspired particularly those playing the lower-class characters to affect Hollywood gangster accents.  Somehow, “What light t’rough yonda winda breaks?  It is de east, and Juliet is de sun!” just doesn’t ring right.  I kept flashing on the hoods in Kiss Me Kate singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”  

There was also a good deal of knife fighting, a suitable substitute for sword play, certainly—it worked in West Side Story—except that the general impression of mobsters is that they tend to duel with guns, not knives.  If you’re gonna go with clichés, then stay in your lane!

Not only is director Barbara Schofield’s reasoning patently mistaken—the play is a classic precisely because it transcends its time and place to communicate to all cultures—but such transpositions, unless they are very carefully thought through and combined with changes in the text, usually cause incongruities in the language and actions of the plays.  Insignificant by themselves, together they can jolt the spectator out of the world of the play often enough to destroy the essential connection between the audience and the play.  A few cases in point:

Often such transportations of Shakespeare to another time or place can be illuminating as well as theatrically innovative.  Half measures such as those in this Romeo and Juliet, however, don’t usually accomplish much.  When Orson Welles staged his striking fascist Julius Caesar, he was making a comment on the times in which he and his audience were living—the rise of right-wing totalitarian governments in Europe: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany.  The same director’s production of Macbeth set in a Haitian voodoo world was a carefully worked-out adjustment to make the play accessible not to black audiences but to black actors. 

Arthur Laurent’s transposition of Romeo and Juliet to a ‘50s urban jungle for West Side Story was, of course, a complete adaptation of both language and story.  None of these simply recostumed the characters and plunked them down in an alien world.  And none was conceived because the producers felt that American audiences could not enter Shakespeare’s world without their help.  We should resent the implication that we do.

Except for the ridiculous accents used in this Italo-American version of Romeo and Juliet, the most damaging acting decision made by Schofield was to treat Shakespeare’s characters as if they were ordinary, modern folks, say out of an afternoon soap opera.  Ordinary folks don’t talk poetry, but, possibly more importantly, they seldom get as passionate as Shakespeare’s characters do.

Kirt Allen Markle, for example, was actually quite a good Romeo in all technical respects: handling the language, moving well, behaving convincingly, projecting vocally without shouting.  He even appeared to understand the words he was saying.  What seemed to be missing was the ability to come to grips with the poetry on any level other than ordinary speech.  It drained the character of his passion.

Can you imagine a Romeo without a consuming ardor for Juliet (Nina Minton)?

A Tybalt (Robert Kane) whose hatred for Romeo is all macho posturing?

That’s what the Independent Theatre has given us—and we’ll see that it has company. 

*  *  *  *

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Stratford on Hudson

Nat Horne Theatre

22 September 1988

Like other recent Shakespearean productions, Stratford on Hudson’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Nat Horne Theatre (440 W. 42nd Street) attempted to make the play both contemporary and American with costume and style.  Though references to Demetrius’ designer shorts as “Athenian garb” were transitorily silly (I suppose modern Athenians can wear designer shorts), the problem with this production was not the look or even the directorial interpretation.

Acting style is hard to describe.  Specific moments don’t always occur upon which you can hang a telling illustration.  This was particularly so with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  (I’ve  already broached this problem with respect to the Independent Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet.)

Imagine a Lysander (Robert Bender) who feels nothing more than puppy-love for Hermia (Dina Hampton).

A Helena (Dawn Isaac) with a teenage crush on her Demetrius (Neal Mayer).

Shakespeare’s characters are rarely cool or dispassionate.  Portraying such loves and hates requires much more than volume and poses.  There must be a belief that convinces us that the lovers literally cannot live without one another; that the enemies would go to any lengths to defeat each other.  Is it possible that dressing the actors up as modern Americans (no credit is listed for the costumes) leads them into the tones and rhythms of modern Americans?

Perhaps, but more likely there’s something missing in the training and experience of these young performers.  You see, none was an obviously bad actor, but flattening out the poetic rhythms, as these actors did, inevitably flattens the poetic content, too.  If an actor is insufficiently trained or experienced to handle heightened language—and, by the way, modern dramatists like Tennessee Williams and August Wilson write in this vein, too—he’ll likely be equally unable to raise the stakes for his character above the quotidian concerns of everyday people.  It was this lack of high-stakes acting that stripped the characters of their grand passions and ultimately rendered them unbelievable and unsatisfying.

Shakespeare did not write soap operas.

In Stratford on Hudson’s yuppie A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the cast was racially mixed, about evenly split between black and white.  Although Hippolyta, the Amazonian princess about to marry Theseus, Duke of Athens (Mark Fortgang), was African-American, so were several Athenians.  The fairy kingdom was also mixed, as were the Rude Mechanicals.  There wasn’t a pattern in the casting, like the Antony and Cleopatra I saw at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger during the fall in which Cleopatra (Franchelle Stewart Dorn) and the Egyptian court were African-American and Mark Antony (Kenneth Haigh) and the Romans were Caucasian.

“Non-traditional casting” is the Actors’ Equity name for its policy of encouraging producers and directors to consider women, minorities, and the handicapped for roles that do not specifically require them, but also do not specifically exclude them.  Equity contends, for instance, that all doctors are not white males.  Surely, no one can argue with this practice.

The idea is to give underrepresented actors chances they might not otherwise get, but difficulties can come from misunderstanding or misapplying the principle and care must be taken.  In other words, if casting an African-American man as a lawyer only says, “Here’s a lawyer, who also happens to be black,” that’s great.  On the other hand, if the character is defending the KKK, such casting might add an unintended dimension.  (Samuel Beckett rejected the idea of casting  a woman as either Estragon or Vladimir in Waiting for Godot because such a pairing would imply things about the relationship between the two characters that aren’t part of the play.)

Now, most of director Alfred Hyslop’s color-blind casting in Stratford on Hudson’s Midsummer was fine, and several of the actors made striking visual impacts, such as the black actress (Pamela Jean Shaddock) playing Puck in a leather skirt and sequined blouse.  One case of casting, however, appeared incongruous because it didn’t line up with Shakespeare’s words. 

In his magic-induced passion, Demetrius says to Helena, “That pure congealed white, high Taurus’ snow. / Fann’d with the eastern wind, turns to a crow / When thou hold’st up thy hand: O, let me kiss / This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss!”  Dawn Isaac, who plays Helena, is African-American.  Demetrius’ lines don’t make sense while he’s kissing a bronze-colored arm.  How can he mean them?  How can the actor believe them? 

Compounding the incongruity, a few lines later, Lysander calls Hermia, Helena’s (white) rival and friend, an “Ethiope” and, later, a “tawny Tartar.”  The intended comparison is clearly “beautiful” white skin over “unattractive” dark skin.  The racism of this attitude—pervasive in the Renaissance—by today’s standards makes it valid to change the text to accommodate the mixed cast.  Unless the lines are changed, this is an example of misapplied “non-traditional casting,” and I don’t understand why Hyslop didn’t just make the rewrite.  If you are loathe to tinker with Shakespeare’s lines, then you must also cast accordingly.  You can’t have it both ways.

*  *  *  *

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Pointed Stick Theatre

29th Street Repertory Theater

23 October 1988

The “Director’s Note” in the Pointed Stick Theatre’s program for A Midsummer Night’s Dream  (at the 29th Street Repertory Theater, 527 W. 29th Street) states that John McDanal is “treating the ‘Dream’ as a new play.”  After 400 years, that may be a little presumptuous, but the production does contain several ideas that are, to say the least, curious. 

McDanal promises to explore the violence and animalism in us all.  Attired in tights and tee-shirts or leotards overlain with identifying character accessories—red shorts, a studded wristband—the mortals enter in pairs with karate shouts and strike combat poses.  During their opening lines, Duke Theseus (McDanal) and Queen Hippolyta (Avis-Marie Barnes) roll on the ground in rough sex. 

“Tough guy” Demetrius (David Bloom), who, like Lysander (Michael H. Higgins), wears leather costume pieces over his tights, later rapes Helena (Hazel Robinson) to punish her for following him into the forest and dissuade her from interfering further.  In the face of this, however, the acting is flat and unengaged.  It’s another instance of the director using a program note to stand in for missing stage work.

The animal imagery is invoked by the fairy characters, all but one of whom has costume additions of pelts and skins and, for the men, go bare-chested.  Except for one fairy, however, none exhibits any animal behavior.

Now bestial humans and animal spirits could go together nicely, and using a fantasy-comedy to explore our brutishness might make a strong dramatic point.  It could certainly be a stunning theatrical premise.  The cast, though, doesn’t follow through with the visual images created in their costumes and blocking.  Having devised this interpretation, the director couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to it as a real production concept.

McDanal, for example, gives Puck (Pierre Shrady) and Peaseblossom/Egeus (Mikal Reich) each a set of drums upstage which they play at selected moments and provides Bottom (John Haran) with an immense, green phallus along with his donkey’s head, but these things don’t seem to add anything to “the grand humor of Shakespeare.”  One might have, had the director and cast followed through on it.  Unhappily, they seem to have relegated it to little more than a design element.

The costumes in this Midsummer are essentially non-representational—mostly tights and leotards or other tops.  Color and the style of the top, along with certain accouterments such as a bright, red miniskirt or a studded belt or wristlet, indicate character, but there’s no attempt to create a specific period or culture.  The fairies, however, are given definite animal elements for their costumes. 

Oberon (Ken Kodish) has a pelt strapped to his left thigh and a piece of leopard-skin cloth over his right shoulder; Titania (Mary Louise Dobrian) wears a lizard-skin body stocking; Puck wears leopard-skin tights, and Cobweb (Sharon Caplan) has a small lizard appliqued on the back of her leotard.  In some cases, animal images are continued in make-up, such as the spiderweb on Titania’s left foot and the “warts” on Cobweb’s face.  The male fairies—Oberon, Puck, and Peaseblossom—are bare-chested, an added suggestion of their feral nature.

Of these characters, only Caplan’s Cobweb behaves in any way like an animal.  She walks about in a crouch, her arms dangling in front of her and her tongue flicking in and out.  She usually enters with Peaseblossom, whose character I was unable to determine, her left arm curled around his right leg as if she were a lizard clinging to a tree branch.  Except for a stomping dance twice performed by Oberon and Titania, none of the fairies’ other behavior is in any clear way animalistic.  Director McDanal seems to have left it to the costumier, uncredited in the program (as are all of the designers for this production), to fulfill the “sometimes bestial” part of his concept.

Now, unlike making drummers out of Puck and Peaseblossom/Egeus—the same actor plays both characters, and he drums in both guises—the view of the forest folk as animal-like, even “bestial,” could be useful to the production, particularly if the idea were carried over to the lovers as they go deeper and deeper into the woods—and fall deeper and deeper under its fairy spell. 

Passion—love, fear, jealousy, hatred—has an animal aspect: in the grip of passion, people can behave more like beasts than thinking humans.  But for the play to make this point, the production must commit to the idea and go with it.  Animal images can be a wonderful, useful, and liberating technique for an actor, but a few costume trappings don’t accomplish anything.  An actor must develop the image and communicate it in behavior—speech and gesture—to the audience, otherwise it adds little to the production.

It’s too bad.  Among the confusion of incongruous images in this production, here’s a good idea that went astray.

I wrote earlier about playing Shakespeare as if it had the passion content of a present-day soap opera, in which the actors treat the poetic language and the poetic substance as if they were daily speech and common concerns.  It seems that this failing recurs in many Off-Off-Broadway productions of Shakespeare.  As I hinted earlier, Pointed Stick’s Midsummer is, sadly, no exception.

Director McDanal is of the opinion that “The ‘Dream’ . . . is damn near actor-proof.”  Obviously it isn’t; it isn’t director-proof, either.  It may be “open to almost every conceivable interpretation,” including his, but no play is safe from actors or directors who don’t heed their author’s most basic acting lesson: “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”  Actors can’t do this if what they say is belied by what they do, including line delivery.

Here’s what I mean:  Demetrius, who is hopelessly in love with Hermia (Sarah Joy Bloom), has followed her and her lover Lysander into the woods.  Helena, who desperately loves Demetrius but whom he loathes, has, in turn, followed him. 

Now, here’s a circumstance fraught with strong emotion.  Yet when Demetrius says to Helena, whom he can’t get rid of, “I do not nor I cannot love you,” Bloom says it so flatly, so matter-of-factly, I almost missed it entirely.  Can you imagine chasing your one-and-only love who has run off to elope with your rival, and having a kid you can’t stand clinging to your shirttails?  Would you dismiss her with a cool “I don’t love you, now beat it”?  I don’t know about you, but I’d get pretty frustrated, angry, and out of control.

Helena, in her turn, responds, “Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me. / Neglect me, lose me . . . .”  That sure sounds like pleading to me, and pretty self-abasing at that.  Robinson’s Helena, however, delivers the lines passively, with minimal physicalization of her feelings.

At the scene’s end, when McDanal has Demetrius rape Helena, Robinson merely shouts to suggest passion; whether it’s fury or eroticism I’m not sure.  “Fie, Demetrius!” she utters, with no emotional content whatsoever.  In a show larded with gratuitous displays of violence and brutality, none of it shows up where it’s needed.

This kind of empty acting exists all through the production.  Toward the end, after the four lovers are awakened by Theseus and Egeus, after the fairies have wreaked their chaos and put the four through what has to be the strangest experience of their collective lives, Demetrius says, “These things seem small and undistinguishable, / Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.”  Hermia adds, “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double.”  The wonderment expressed in these lines is entirely belied by the actors’ behavior; they dismiss it with the sort of verbal shrug New Yorkers might use when they see one of our ubiquitous street crazies.

Shakespeare also said, “Be not too tame neither.”

Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage

In a New York Times essay about two decades ago, Robert Brustein took on the issue of “the reinterpretation . . . of celebrated classical plays” (“Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” New York Times 6 Nov. 1988, sec. 2 [“Arts and Leisure”]: 5, 16). Brustein divided this “deconstruction” into two categories: “the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor.” A simile production, he asserted, simply shifts the time or location to an analogous one nearer our own, while a metaphorical one examines the play from the inside, “generating provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”

Brustein cited world-famous examples of both types, like Orson Welles’s totalitarian Julius Caesar, a simile, and Peter Brook’s circus-oriented Midsummer Night’s Dream, a metaphor. I’ve recently seen prominent examples of what Brustein was describing: the Théâtre du Soleil’s 1992 Kathakali revisioning of Greek cycle of plays which recount the story of the House of Atreus, Les Atrides, a metaphor; this year’s resetting by the Katona József Theatre of Chekhov’s Ivanov to mid-20th-century Hungary, a simile; Nora, an up-dated Doll House by Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (2004), a simile; and John Jesurun's FAUST/How I Rose, a 2004 deconstruction of Goethe’s classic, a metaphor. As you might expect, some were more successful (Les Atrides, Ivanov) than others (Nora, FAUST). Do the more modest and lesser-known productions avail themselves of these tactics, and are the results similar? I think so, and some Off-Off-Broadway productions I saw some time back, when I made a concerted effort to see a broad sampling of Shakespeare productions on New York City stages, indicate that I may be right.

In two of the similes I saw, there were no profound reinterpretations, and, in a third, one given only lip-service. The first two--an Italian-American Romeo and Juliet with Paris as a Mafia godfather and the servants as musical-comedy gunsels, and a yuppie Midsummer Night’s Dream with the lovers romping through the forest in designer shorts and warm-ups--carried their reworking through mostly by costuming. In fact, the company seemed to have fallen into a trap they laid themselves (however unwittingly): by giving the play a soap-opera setting and look, the actors all exhibited soap-opera acting, the superficial, shallow, and hollow performance style necessitated by the fast-moving production process of a daytime drama. The R&J included several “dese and dose” accents among the servants, but for the rest, nothing was reinterpreted to further a new approach or shift my attention from the traditional focus. The director didn’t seem to have relocated the story in order to say something unconventional about or through the play.

A second R&J, which I discussed not long ago, did assert a new interpretation. The director’s program note explained that he saw Friar Laurence as the witting catalyst of the tragedy, and ascribed to him an un-Christian reliance on the occult. The note provided some evidence from the text for this notion, and it might well have worked theatrically, not to say intellectually, if he’d followed through with it in his production. Alas, he went no further than giving the friar the prologue and the epilogue, having him do two parlor-magic tricks, and using a violet light when the Nurse describes the natural phenomena on the night Juliet was weaned. Beyond the program note, the production, tricked up as middle-class American suburbia, showed me nothing new about this play. While Brustein notes that this kind of simile directing is “at best a platform for ideas,” with the Capulet party a backyard barbecue and the Tybalt-Mercutio duel fought with aluminum bats on a baseball diamond, this R&J was nothing more than “an occasion for pranks.”

Though a comparison of the two kinds of reworkings will have to wait until after we take a look at metaphorical directing, on the basis of this small sampling, it’s fair to draw a few simple conclusions. First, simile directors seem to strive for familiarity, all three of these choosing contemporary America for their settings or costuming. (Nora and the Hungarian Ivanov, too, were transferred to locales and times that would have been immediately familiar to their original audiences.) Second, there was a similar approach to acting, with all three casts treating Shakespeare’s language as conversational Realism. Third, either because of this or along with it, all the actors endowed their characters with a minimal emotional life. (This was not true of the two international examples.) Fourth, these directors seemed to believe that modern American playgoers can’t understand productions remote from us in time or place; that the common, human problems the classics treat can’t be communicated unless they are portrayed by people just like us.

The simile production, which Brustein saw as an update, “depends largely on external physical changes.” On the other hand, the metaphorical production “changes our whole notion of the play” by probing “the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent--a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks, since the director ‘authors’ the production much as the author writes the text.” While acknowledging that “not all examples of this process have the same integrity of purpose,” Brustein nonetheless “champion[s] a more radical auteurism in directing.” Having examined the simile, let’s look at two metaphors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream I saw (and discussed recently in another context) promised to explore the violence and animalism in all of us. Attired in tights and tee-shirts or leotards overlain with identifying character accessories--red shorts, a studded wristband--the mortals entered in pairs with martial-arts shouts and struck combat poses. During their opening lines, Duke Theseus and Hippolyta rolled on the ground in rough sex. “Tough guy” Demetrius, who, like Lysander, wore leather costume pieces over his tights, later rapes Helena to punish her for following him into the forest and dissuade her from interfering further. In the face of this, however, the acting was flat and unengaged.

The animal imagery was invoked by the fairy characters, all but one of whom had costume additions of pelts and skins and, for the men, went bare-chested. Except for one fairy, however, none exhibited any animal-like behavior.

Now humans with bestial characteristics and spirits with animal traits make a likely combination, and to explore human brutishness through the medium of a fantasy-comedy could be a very effective tactic. Theatrically, at least, it has promise. The director and actors, however, merely let the visual imagery of their costumes and blocking carry the whole exploration without developing any deeper performative aspects. The director conceived the idea but was either unwilling or unable to carry it over into performance.

Finally, in a metaphorical Macbeth, the cast and director made some decisions and ran with them. Determining, for instance, that Macbeth was in the hold of evil forces, not just swayed by the power of suggestion or caught up in a tide of action--other possible approaches--this company tripled the the witches’ appearances on stage. By acting as servants, messengers, and others and standing silently on stage during all the portentous scenes, the witches, symbols of evil, seemed to control events and guide Macbeth’s and his wife’s fates. There were three levels on which this scheme worked. First, as the messengers, the witches seeded and nurtured the plot. The second level was less directly involved in the events of the play: as the various servants, the witches’ presence suggested their control over Macbeth’s life and fate; they were always there, keeping an eye on things. In the third level, the director put the witches invisibly on stage in momentous scenes. They didn’t enter into the action, though they might echo lines or make sound effects such as the knocking that unnerves Macbeth just as he’s about to murder his king.

Further, the costumes were selected elements of modern dress draped with rough fabric to camouflage their silhouettes and allude to “ancientness” and “Scottishness.” The basic costume for the mortal males--the witches were far more fanciful--was a foundation of modern attire draped with rough, wool- or burlap-like tunics or sashes. The colors were muted, mostly charcoals, browns, or blacks, except for the almost blood-red royal sash worn first by King Duncan, then by Macbeth and finally by Malcolm. The modern under-costume suggested general character: the more soldierly wore combat boots and bloused trousers; the more administrative, including Duncan, wore civvies. Other modern accouterments included contemporary haircuts, military field jackets, bayonets, turtlenecks, eyeglasses, and flashlights. The lack of period specificity asserted that this play is not just about an 11th-century Scottish king; it is relevant to today, not lost in some past era, and to all cultures, not only ancient Scotland or modern America.

As Brustein suggests, directors who have an attraction for similes settle for an updated environment and may load their productions with tricks and gimmicks. Metaphorical directors, however, try to “capture the imaginative life of a classic.” A simile staging can be effective and even thought-provoking (the Hungarian Ivanov, which I have described in another post, was extremely compelling, for instance), but even when it misses, the metaphor production can be more powerful and exciting, particularly when the simile is used merely for “ornamental” purposes.

[Much of my discussion above was based on the Robert Brustein essay cited in the first paragraph. After publishing this article on ROT, I’ve decided to reprint Brustein’s original New York Times column; see “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” 10 March 2011.]