A Note About 'Hamilton'

by Kirk Woodward

[I’m envious that Kirk has seen Hamilton because I haven’t yet.  On the other hand, though, I'm mighty glad, his having seen the hottest ticket in town, that he’s elected o share some of his conclusions with ROT and its readers.  I would feel that way even if Kirk had merely written an ordinary report on the performance as he’s done before on occasion (see “An American in Paris (Part 2),” 13 November 2015, and “Something Rotten! 1,” 11 May 2016—not that they’re really ordinary).  But Kirk has carved out a notion concerning the hip-hop musical which he says he hasn’t seen covered before and has devoted “A Note About Hamilton” to discussing a fascinating angle on the play and the production.  In addition to being an analysis of one aspect of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, “Note” serves as a suggestion for playwrights of both musicals and straight plays about freedom of expressive form.

[While reading his article, a certain parallel to Kirk’s idea occurred to me, and following his discussion, I’ll have a few thoughts to express myself.  If you can manage to wait till then, consider Kirk Woodward’s thoughtful examination of one element of Hamilton, albeit a central one, and see what you think.]

One cold day in November 2015 I walked from work to the box office of the Broadway musical Hamilton and asked for the next available tickets. I saw the show on that next available date, October 12, 2016.

Eleven months isn’t all that long a time to wait to see a musical as good as Hamilton. It doesn’t need any more praise from me; it’s gotten plenty already. It opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway on August 6, 2015, after an initial sold out run at the Joseph Papp Public Theater (January 20–May 3,  2015), and seems likely to run forever. It has won an astonishing number of prizes, including eleven Tony Awards.

So the show doesn’t need any help from me, but I do have one observation I haven’t seen made elsewhere, although, considering the amount written about the show, it probably has been made someplace. It’s difficult to describe, but I think it’s worthwhile to consider.

As everyone knows, Hamilton uses hip hop musical styles, including extensive sections of rap music, as it tells the story of the life of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury. It’s not the first show to employ hip hop music; notably, Lin-Manuel Miranda (b. 1980), the author and composer of the musical Hamilton, used rap extensively in his score for the musical In the Heights, which ran successfully on Broadway from 2008 to 2011.

Rap, Salsa, and similar forms of music are appropriate musical forms for In the Heights, which takes place in the largely Latino-populated Washington Heights area of Manhattan. However, hip hop music was unknown during the lifetime of Alexander Hamilton, and for quite a while afterward. Why is its use in Hamilton so successful?

One answer involves a theatrical phenomenon seldom seen and highly prized: the show is embodied in an approach so surprising and yet so appropriate that it might be described as a new theatrical language.

Instances of this phenomenon are few and far between. The first of which I am aware is Peter Brook’s unforgettable production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Brook used international circus techniques to embody the magical elements of the play. (An example, a video of a few moments that I’ve remembered since I originally saw the production, can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-XdfK0ntHwn.)

Brook did not just come up with a “concept” for his production of the play; he embodied the play in an entirely new “world” with its own “language.” Although Shakespeare could not possibly have had Brook’s idea in mind, Brook’s production seemed integral to the play, as though the story could hardly exist without it.

The same is true of Hamilton. One can imagine other plays about the first Treasury Secretary’s life. In the musical, however, hip hop sensibility and Hamilton’s sensibility seem to be one and the same. That unity of presentation seems to me to be the factor that links an “interpreted” work like Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and an “original” work like Hamilton: both seem to spring from the very essences of the characters, instead of being imposed on them.

Directors often come up with “concepts” for their productions. Frequently these end up being nothing much more than new settings for the plays. That is not what happens in Hamilton, which creates a whole “world” in which its story exists.

The difference between a “concept production” and a “new theatrical language” can be seen in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Jon Jory directed at Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) in 1971, shortly after Brook’s production opened.

Whereas Brook invented, in effect, an entirely new context for Shakespeare’s play through the use of international circus techniques, Jory set his production in a circus. This kind of “concept,” described by the critic Eric Bentley as a “Bright Idea,” imposes a setting on a play, and seldom feels organic. Examples abound in opera, with, for example, Wagner’s Ring Cycle playing host to Nazis, hippies, industrialists, and so on.

Jory’s “concept” was imposed on Shakespeare’s play instead of seeming to inhabit it, and the result was comic, as when, in the first act, the lion tamer of the circus pleaded with the ringmaster to put his daughter to death for falling in love with a roustabout – surely a first in circus history.

Jory is a fine director, but at least with that production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream he fell into a trap that regularly presents itself to directors in our time – to do something to, in effect, “make a play interesting,” as though that were necessary for a play that is interesting, or possible to do with a play that is not.

Still, extraordinary artists do extraordinary things in theater. Julie Taymor (b. 1952) has demonstrated in her production of The Lion King, which opened on Broadway in 1997, that she is one of them. So is Peter Brook, and so without a doubt, at least in the case of Hamilton, is Lin-Manuel Miranda, a fact that may go a long way toward explaining that musical’s popularity.

[With regard to Kirk’s point, I agree: I don’t recall having read anyone else who’s made this observation about Hamilton.  I want to make a comment on what I think he’s saying, however—in particular about Miranda’s using ”an approach so surprising . . . that it might be described as a new theatrical language.”  

[I ran an article on ROT called “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage” (18 September 2009) which I followed with the republication of a New York Times article by Robert Brustein called “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” (6 November 1988, sec. 2 [“Arts and Leisure”]: 5, 16; posted on ROT on 10 March 2011) on which my post was based.  What Kirk describes as Miranda’s “surprising approach” for Hamilton is encompassed by what I contend Brustein means by theatrical metaphor.  Note particularly Kirk’s paragraph about the “world” Peter Brook created for Midsummer Night’s Dream and Brustein’s definition of theatrical metaphor.  (Brustein even uses Brook’s Midsummer as a prime example of metaphorical theater.)  “Poetic metaphor,” writes Brustein, “attempts to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent” through which to generate “provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”

[Kirk’s dismissal of other “concepts” is what Brustein defines as “prosaic simile” productions (and what a teacher of mine at Rutgers disparaged as “Hamlet on roller skates.”)  Brustein asserts that simile directors “assume that because a play’s action is like something from a later period, its environment can be changed accordingly.”  Their “innovations are basically analogical—provid­ing at best a platform for ideas, at worst an occasion for pranks.”  Kirk’s subsequent comparison of “concept” and “new language” seems exactly parallel to Brustein’s distinction between “simile” and “metaphor”: Brustein writes that “simile productions are rarely as powerful as those that try to capture the imaginative life of a classic through radical leaps into its hidden, sometimes invisible, depths.”  (Kirk’s description of Jon Jory’s Midsummer at ATL reminds me of an Arturo Ui directed by Carl Weber I saw at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in 1974 that was also set in a circus.   I distinctly recall Givola—played by Stanley Anderson—in a swing.)

[Now, both Brustein’s and my articles are about adaptations and interpretations of classical plays, not original works, but I think the concept’s the same.  The difference between Miranda and the examples Kirk cites is that Brook and Jory were all (re)interpreting someone else’s existing work while Miranda’s creating his own with the “new language” built in.  Julie Taymor’s Lion King is a hybrid: she reinvented the Disney cartoon, but her stage version’s original; she even “reinvented” (that is, “Africanized”) the music.  Kirk’s view of Hamilton is an extension of Robert Brustein’s view of reinterpretations of classics: it’s an application of the same principle to original work.  If Tennessee Williams is right to call on playwrights to incorporate all the levers of playmaking into their scripts—this is his “plastic theater” concept, on which I blogged in “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” 9 May 2012—then Lin-Manuel Miranda’s on the same theatrical track as Peter Brook and the metaphorical auteur director—Brustein named other great examples: Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht (also himself a playwright), Ingmar Bergman, Liviu Ciulei. Lucian Pintilie, and Andrei Serban (I would add filmmaker Akira Kurosawa on the basis of his Shakespearean adaptations Throne of Blood [Macbeth] and Ran [King Lear])—who, he explains, “‘authors’ the production much as the au­thor writes the text.”  Miranda—and others who may follow his example—simply integrated his stylistic metaphor, in this instance, the hip-hop medium for telling Alexander Hamilton’s story—into his dramaturgy, just as Williams proposed, instead of turning the task over to a director.] 

“Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?”

by Robert Brustein

[Twenty-four years ago, I read this column by Robert Brustein, an almost-legendary man of the theater for my generation. I’ve found it endlessly provocative and useful and I’ve drawn on it many, many times in the ensuing years. I’ve published a commentary on classic theater based on Brustein’s analysis (see “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” ROT, 18 September 2009); now I find it appropriate to republish Brustein’s original essay, which appeared in the New York Times on 6 November 1988 (sec. 2 ["Arts and Leisure"]: 5, 16).]

The most controversial issue in the theater today continues to be the reinterpretation or “deconstruction” of celebrated classical plays. There is no theatrical activity that more inflames purist sensibilities in criticism and the academy—nothing that stimulates as many caustic generalizations about the debasements of modern culture. Perhaps because “deconstruction” as an assonant noun if not as a method, is so perilously close to “destruction” and “desecra­tion,” the standard purist posture is like that of Switzers before the gates of the Vatican, defending sacred texts against the barbarians. The paradox is that both sides are really devoted to the same esthetic purpose, which is the deeper penetration of significant dramatic literature. The difference is in the attitude. Is classical reinterpretation a reinforcing or a defiling act—a benign or a malignant development in the history of modern theater?

My own position is a qualified vote of support for conceptual directing. I have long be­lieved that if dramatic classics are not seen with fresh eyes they grow fossilized—candidates for taxidermy. Even the most harebrained textual reworking may open up new corridors into a play, while the more “faithful” version is often a listless recycling of stilted conventions. That is why I continue to echo Artaud’s call for “No More Masterpieces”—great plays can be “desecrated” by excessive piety as much as by excessive irreverence. Although I champion a radical auteurism in directing, however, not all examples of this process have the same integrity of purpose. One can support the idea of classical reinterpretation without defending all its forms or ignoring the fact that what passes for originality is sometimes merely another kind of ego-tripping.

Let me refine my position by distinguish­ing between two common methods of reworking the classics—one that depends largely on external physical changes and another that changes our whole notion of the play. It is a distinction that can be illustrated through analogies with figures of speech—the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor. Directors who are fond of similes assume that because a play’s action is like something from a later period, its environment can be changed accordingly. Directors with a feeling for metaphor are more interested in generating provocative theatrical images—visually expressed through physical production, histrionically through character and relationships—that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.

Simile directing is a prose technique. Its in­novations are basically analogical—provid­ing at best a platform for ideas, at worst an occasion for pranks. Metaphorical directing attempts to penetrate 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. Naturally, this process is controversial: critics—though somewhat more tolerant of simile directors, who only change the period—often accuse metaphorical directors of arrogance and distortion. Nevertheless, it is the metaphorical approach, I believe, that has the greater potential for rediscovering the original impulses and energies of the material. Which is not to say that all simile directing is without value, or that metaphorical directing doesn’t have its meretricious side.

The simile approach is the more familiar, at least to New Yorkers, because it is often used by visiting British companies and over the years in Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare productions. But the tradition extends back at least as far as the 30’s. Orson Welles’s celebrated “Julius Caesar” was an early exam­ple, being the transformation of Shakespeare’s tragedy of assassination and retribution into an indictment of totalitarianism. Welles accomplished this by updating the text—always the hallmark of simile theater—exchanging Roman togas for Italian black shirts and turning Caesar into a Fascist leader. Tyrone Guthrie was also a proponent of simile directing long before he inaugurated the Guthrie Theater with a Victorian “Hamlet.” I still have vivid memories of his Old Vic production of “Troilus and Cressida,” set in the American Civil War with Helen reinterpreted as a seductive torch singer and Thersites as a Brady-like photographer of the battlefield. The Old Vic also staged an updated “Much Ado About Nothing” (directed by Franco Zefferilli), complete with peanut vendors, carabinieri and Italian accents, while the R.S.C. and the National Theater produced a variety of modernized classics, including “Taming of the Shrew” on motorcycles. Perhaps the most consistent updating was done at the now defunct American Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut: a “Much Ado” set in Spanish Texas during the time of the Alamo, a “Measure for Measure” in 19th-century Vienna, and a “Twelfth Night” in Brighton at the time of Horatio Hornblower.

All these productions were known inside the trade as “jollying Shakespeare up,” a practice much admired by directors who (overdosed on the Bard) streamlined their assignments with decorative environments as an antidote to creative fatigue. But it was rarely more than a novelty of surfaces, skin-deep, and marred by traces of voguishness; critics were right to carp. Recently, A. J. Antoon staged an attractive example of the genre with a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the New York Public Theater set in the Bahia province of Brazil and featuring priests and priestesses of the Umbanda cult. And this summer Gerald Freedman jollied up the much jollied-up “Much Ado About Nothing” in Central Park by updating it to the Napoleonic wars. Freedman’s “Much Ado” had the advantage of a fine cast, including Kevin Kline and Blythe Danner as a ripening Benedick and Beatrice; but its novel setting lent nothing especially original to the interpretation, apart from a few cannon blasts, Empire clothes, and Kline’s grenadier mustaches.

Directors found operas as convenient to modernize as plays. Peter Sellars, for example, has often used the metaphorical approach in his theater work, but his productions of Handel and Mozart were clear-cut examples of simile directing. Setting “Orlando” in Cape Canaveral and “Julius Caesar” near the Nile Hilton, transporting “Cosi Fan Tutte” to a modern diner (his trump Tower “Marriage of Figaro” I didn’t see), Sellars managed to coat the original libretti with a visual varnish that created more flash than clarity. Sellars’s operatic work is usually spirited and impish, but what he tends to substitute for any deep probing of the material is technical dazzle and anachronistic high jinks—inventions that distract attention from the composer and librettist while attracting it to the director. (Sellars’s work with contemporary opera—“Nixon in China,” for example—is, by contrast, considerably more forthright and simple).

Updating is a shorthand way of showing how the material of a classical play has topical meaning for contemporary audiences. And when directors use this approach for thematic rather than ornamental purposes, it can be valuable and illuminating. But simile productions are rarely as powerful as those that try to capture the imaginative life of a classic through radical leaps into its hidden, sometimes invisible, depths. And while updating is sometimes a component of metaphorical theater, it is rarely the basic device. It may be that what I am trying to describe is a difference in national temperament. Whereas simile theater originally comes from England, metaphorical directing—which originated with the Russian Meyerhold—is usually associated with continental Europe. It is true that the English-born Peter Brook devised at least two fine examples of metaphorical theater with his Beckettian “King Lear” and his circus-oriented “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But Brook’s chief influences in those days were Brecht, Beckett and Artaud, and his subsequent work was largely prepared in Paris. Brecht himself, though celebrated as playwright, was also a metaphorical auteur director as daring as any who today raises purist hackles. His work is virtually a pastiche of plundered literature (“In literature as in life,” he admitted, “I do not recognize the concept of private property”). These thefts, paradoxically, were authorized by Shakespeare, a writer also notable less for originality of plot than of conception. And just as “Hamlet” was a reworking of an earlier play, probably by Kyd, so the great bulk of Brecht’s dramas were conceptual revisions of classical material—“The Threepenny Opera,” to take just the most famous example, being an adaptation of John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera.”

Brecht revised these plays in order to make them conform to a political purpose: he even began an adaptation of “Coriolanus” in which the emphasis was shifted from a story of human fallibility to a study of the economic problems caused by the price of corn. The completed “Coriolan” at the Berliner Ensemble was a brilliant example of metaphorical theater where Marcius and Audifidus stalked each other like Kabuki warriors and Menenius visibly aged before our eyes.

Partly under the influence of Brecht, partly under the influence of Meyerhold, a horde of metaphorical directors soon arose in Rumania—among them Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Serban (both of whom later had associations with my own theater) and Lucian Pintilie. Each of these men turned to the great classical tradition in their efforts to reinvent the modern theater, each doing much of his work in the United States. Ciulei’s reworking of Shakespeare, Buechner, Ibsen and Wedekind—Serban’s of the Greeks, Molière, Beaumarchais, Gozzi, Chekhov and Brecht—Pintilie’s of Molière, lbsen and Chekhov—are among the most powerful and controversial classical productions of our time. And it is possible to argue that, for all their liberties with texts and deviations from received notions, they come closest to the spiritual core of the plays.

Lucian Pintilie’s recent “Cherry Orchard” at the Arena Stage in Washington, for example, dispensed entirely with orthodox Stanislavski furniture and canvas flats, taking place in an environment that brought this familiar play to vibrant new life. The design was basically a bare, painted floor and ramps, with an armoire at one corner that served as bookcase, storage area and crèche. In the second act, sheaves of golden wheat appeared through the floor, presided over by an ominous scarecrow. After the family’s departure in the final scene, as stage tremors rattled the glass of Lopahin’s champagne, the ghost of Ranevsky’s child Grisha materialized to hover over the house as a rebuke to his mother’s irresponsibility. At Firs’s death, the glass rattled more violently, and wheat rose again to gather his body into the artifice of eternity. Thus the metaphysical quality that is always implicit in Chekhov’s work became tangible and manifest through spiritual presences.

Rumanian productions invariably impress us with vivid memories of similar tableaux: Serban’s “Cherry Orchard” with its circular images of confusion and disorder, and his maze-like “Uncle Vanya” with its sense of mechanization and imprisonment; Ciulei’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with its themes of sexual strife and contention emotionally reinforced by an angry Chinese-red surround; Pintilie’s “Wild Duck” with its climactic scene of eggs falling from the loft above, followed by Hedwig’s body smashing to the floor—each provided suggestive visual stimulations in order to generate strong new visions of the play.

Not all metaphorical productions offer equal satisfactions. Lee Breuer’s rendering of Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus”—located in a pentacostal black church and retitled “The Gospel at Colonus” (perhaps more a simile than a metaphor)—featured some rousing gospel music by Bob Telson but vitiated the power of the original by adapting a Greek dramatic myth to Christian sacraments and Afro-American rituals. Similarly, Peter Brooks’s [sic] celebrated production of “The Cherry Orchard” done last season at Brooklyn’s beautiful Majestic Theater was the first Chekhov without walls, being located in an abstract space furnished with lovely Persian carpets, bleached and aged is if by Clorox. But the atmosphere was too penumbral, the interpretation too denatured, to capture Checkhov’s [sic] unheard music, and the acting (with notable exceptions—Erland Josephson’s Gaev, Roberts Blossom’s Firs, Linda Hunt’s Charlotta) alternated between British staginess and American clumsiness. In fact, if there is a generic weakness in metaphorical production, it is usually found in the acting performances, which are sometimes neglected in the directorial concern with visual elements.

For me, the most brilliant recent expression of metaphorical reinterpretation was Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish-language “Hamlet” during its brief run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this summer. Rethinking every character, every scene, every moment of the text Bergman managed to invent not just a fresh approach to the title role reflecting the current style of a generation (the actor-oriented pattern of English Hamlets), but rather a comprehensive and original reading of the entire work that prophesied the nightmare of the future. Performed on a bare stage decorated only with an arc of lights, the action followed the disintegration of a completely depraved, in which even Hamlet— sulky, sullen, entirely self-absorbed—was part of the brutalization process. Only Ophelia preserved her innocence. A witness to every vicious action, including Hamlet’s premeditated murder of her father, she fell into a degenerative psychosis—mutilating her hair with a dangerous pair shears and distributing heavy iron nails as if they were flowers. She ultimately appeared as an angelic presence at her own funeral.

The final scene, a stunning coup de théâtre, superimposed a simile coda on an essentially metaphorical conception. Up to that point, the action had occurred in an unknown European country during an indeterminate period. With the entrance of Fortinbras, accompanied by the earsplitting sounds of rock music from a ghetto blaster, the setting became site specific. Outfitted as a Central American military leader in beret and jackboots, and leading soldiers wearing Korean riot helmets and brandishing machine guns, Fortinbras ordered his men to throw all the stage corpses into a pit and take Horatio off and shoot him. His speech over Hamlet’s body—lying on a crude platform—became a photo opportunity in front of Kleig lights, a microphone, a hand-held video camera. The final line of the play—“Go bid the soldiers shoot”—was punctuated by deafening machine gun blasts.

It was a scene of ferocious intensity that penetrated the audience’s soul like a stab wound. It also managed to reinvent the meaning of catharsis for our time. It is true that Bergman’s “Hamlet” evoked more terror than pity, but then so does our century. By reconceiving Shakespeare’s tragedy as a bleak prophecy of the totalitarian future, Bergman managed to shake his audience to its very being while preserving the basic outline of the play.

One cannot argue that such interpolations are faithful to Shakespeare’s original intentions—and it is glib to use the familiar defense that we don’t have the playwright’s telephone number. Still, charges of “desecration” are meaningful only if you subscribe to the idea of a “definitive” production. I don’t. The specialness of theater—alas, the poignance of the theater, too—is its impermanence. Culture is a series of echoes and responses, and a “desecrated” classical text can always be reproduced again on stage in versions closer to the purist’s heart. Texts develop fullness of being only through continuing intervention of collective minds. They are not frozen in time but rather subject to discovery, and each new production generates others in response. It is the proper role of theater to let us look at plays through a variety of perspectives rather than in a single authorized form. It is also the function of criticism. Both act as prisms through which to view the limitless facets of great works of art.

Obviously, metaphorical reinterpretation is a process more appropri­ate for classics than for new plays, and living playwrights—Beckett, for example, who was outraged when Jo­Anne Akalaitis set his “Endgame” in an abandoned subway station—are often resentful of the director’s grow­ing privileges. Still, it was a play­wright, Luigi Pirandello, who put the matter best: “The Theater is not archeology,” he wrote. “Unwilling­ness to take up old works, to modern­ize and streamline them for fresh production, betrays indifference, not praiseworthy caution. The Theater welcomes such modernization and has profited by it throughout the ages when it was most alive.” If our own theater is once again showing signs of life, it is partly because of such bold investigation and daring interpretation.

[Robert Brustein was the founding artistic director of the American Repertory Theater in Cam­bridge, Massachusetts, where he remains Creative Consultant, and the Yale Repertory Theatre; he is the long-time drama critic of the New Republic. His most recent books are The Tainted Muse (2009), Millennial Stages (2006), Letters to a Young Actor (2005), and The Siege of the Arts (2001).]

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.]

Ian McKellen’s 'King Lear'

PBS is broadcasting Ian McKellen’s King Lear under the auspices of its semi-regular program Great Performances. (The first airing on WNET, chanel 13 in NYC, was Wednesday, 25 March, but it's being repeated on WNET and other area PBS outlets.) I thought it would be worthwhile to revist the stage performance on which the video is based and which I caught at BAM’s Harvey Theatre on 15 September 2007. (The 2½-hour TV version was recorded at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, not on a theater stage, but all reports indicate that the production and the cast are essentially the same as the stage production. It was performed in 2008, at the end of the RSC tour, after the performance I saw.) I scored a ticket to the Royal Shakespeare Company presentation starring McKellen in the title role at the last minute when a friend had to give up her seat. (They were doing Lear in rep with The Seagull in which McKellen shared the role of Sorin with another actor, William Gaunt--who played Gloucester in Lear.) I think that, for once, Ben Brantley got his evaluation exactly right in the Times on 14 September. My only quibble would be that he was harsher on the rest of the company than I would have been; perhaps they hadn't settled into the new space as comfortably when Brantley saw the show as they had by the time I got to see it at the Saturday mat.

I had tried to get seats for Lear back when BAM opened their box office for single tickets, but the show had sold out in subscription already. (My theater-going friend, Diana, and I couldn't put together the minimum number of shows required for a subscription this time around. That happens sometimes, but the last time, when Vanessa Redgrave came in with Hecuba, we had no trouble picking up single seats to see her.) Anyway, Diana called the week before to say that a friend of hers, an actress whom I also know, had a ticket but had a rehearsal that afternoon and couldn't go. Since Diana also had a conflict, she offered me the seat, and I grabbed it. (Fortunately, I have no life, so I was available at no notice to go on a Saturday afternoon!)

The stage production ran 3½ hours (with a two-hour first act!), but the time moved quickly, despite what Brantley described as "a heightened costume melodrama" with "overbaked acting." Director Trevor Nunn created a compelling momentum--and when McKellen was on stage, it was filled with vibrancy anyway. In fact, in my opinion, if McKellen hadn’t been so terrific in the role, the production would have seemed fine; he just showed everyone else on stage up. Not his fault--though perhaps Nunn could have cast a higher-caliber company to support McKellen. He had the RSC to draw on, after all--yet none of this company had a name I've ever heard before. (I don't know if this was a touring cast, different from the one that played the roles back home, but I sort of doubt that.)

So, let me save my description of McKellen's work till the end or so, and get the small observations over with first. I didn't see Seagull, so I don't know what that production looked like, but Lear seemed to have been designed to save on costume expenses. Everyone was dressed like characters out of Tolstoy! (Costumes were "supervised" by Stephanie Arditti. Why this distinction was made for costumes, rather than "designed" as the other elements were credited, I don't know. The Voice said the costumes were mostly "pulled" from stock. Did RSC ever do a stage version of War and Peace?) Lear looked like a Cossack king and all the others, except the French soldiers Cordelia brings back with her, looked like they were plopped down somewhere in the steppes of Russia. (I assume the uniforms the Frenchies wore were based on period French military dress, but I wouldn't know. The British soldiers looked like they might rush off to fight in Crimea or some place!) The women's dresses were late-19th-century gowns, as if they were all about to take off for the ball. (Goneril had a stunning red-and-black velvet outfit she wore throughout the second act.) Edmund and Edgar, and Albany and Cornwall were costumed pretty much as matched pairs (until Edgar, played by Ben Meyjes, became mad Tom, when he was nearly naked and curiously resembled Golum in the films of Lord of the Rings--in which McKellen appeared, coincidentally)--all Cossacks; Burgundy and France were paired, too, except for some trim on Burgundy's uniform: a couple of panels which were . . . well, burgundy! (I'm not sure this was meant to be a joke--but I thought it was funny.)

(Side remark: Cornwall was played by Guy Williams. Didn't he play Zorro on TV in the '50s?)

The set (designed by Christopher Oram) was of this image, too. The basic element, which remained in place throughout, was a kind of balcony running from down right around to up left. (Otherwise, the stage was mostly bare, except for set pieces--tables, the beggar's hovel, the stocks, etc.--that were carried on and off for specific scenes.) It looked like marble, with wine-colored drapes across the openings like the boxes at an ornate opera house and the same fabric draped beneath the balcony rails like bunting. (This was torn down in one scene and carried around the stage when Lear's men behaved raucously in Goneril's castle--you know, drunken carousing.) As the play proceeded, the framing set piece became more and more decrepit as if it were decaying as the kingdom fell to ruin (The Picture of Lear's Kingdom?). The opening scene was resplendent in gold robes and rich costumes in grand ceremony, as if to set up the visual decline that began almost immediately. In the second act, it looked like Grey Gardens, especially when the ceiling collapsed. It was a tad obvious, and I'm not sure what any of it meant--Brantley suggested "the audience-wooing" Nunn was just doing "popcorn" theater and he may have been right. In any case, it was not destructive or disturbing.

I was put in mind of the last time I saw McKellen on stage, also at BAM. It was the Royal National’s fascist Richard III, and in that 1992 production, the costuming had real significance. Making Richard a military dictator à la Hitler, Mussolini, or Pinochet enhanced the interpretation and gave an added dimension to the production. (Costumes had been supervised by Anne-Marie Winstanley.) I'm reminded of an essay Robert Brustein published in the New York Times back in 1988 in which he contrasted what he dubbed "simile" productions of classics with "metaphor" stagings. "Simile directing," Brustein wrote, "is a prose technique. Its in­novations are basically analogical--provid­ing at best a platform for ideas, at worst an occasion for pranks." This seems to be what Nunn accomplished in Lear, just laid a look and set of images over the text without doing any real reinterpretation. "Metaphorical directing," Brustein continued, "attempts to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equiv­alent--a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks . . . ." This lines up with Richard Eyre’s R3 17 years ago (and which became a film, I recall). It accomplishes a deeper reimagining and tells us something new or unrevealed about the play. Nunn didn't seem to have attempted to do this, it seemed to me; he just dressed it up. I certainly don't know why Nunn decided 19th-century Russia was a useful image (except, as I suggested, that it dovetailed with Chekhov). It did no harm, and it looked nice, even if it didn't really add anything. (My one objection was that, since Lear is set in pre-Christian Britain, the Imperial Russian look is just a little too spiffy. I'd have preferred something rougher, more elemental.)

Now let's get to the acting. (I don't really have anything to say about the directing, except from the point of view that the actors' work was Nunn's ultimate responsibility. I can't say he made any wrong choices or interpretations; he just didn't seem to have pushed his cast to do anything extraordinary.) I'm not really going to single out anyone here--no one excelled or fell egregiously short. I'm just going to capsulize the whole thing--with the exception of McKellen, of course. Everyone did pretty much what you'd expect--no one surprised me or startled me with a novel idea or interpretation. Philip Winchester's Edmund was a little too actorly in his technique, especially his gestures. (The New York Post called him "hammy," though the Village Voice said he was "strong" and "lucid.") In his first scene, when Edmond extols his assets and says, "My mind as generous," Winchester made a sweeping, graceful arc with his arm, all his fingers extended, to point to his temple. This is the action of an actor trained to make gestures visible from the back row of the balcony--but it's not the gesture of a man talking heatedly to himself alone. If I'd been playing the part--and Edmund is one that I always wanted to play, second to Iago (I like the villains in Shakespeare! I got to play Don John, a sort of Iago-manqué)--I'd have done a simple short, sharp jab at my head with one finger (two, if the visibility demanded it--some theatrical adjustments are necessary!) That's just an example, of course, but Winchester did this same kind of thing all the time, and the other actors were only slightly less stagy, punching their dominant character traits (e.g.: Frances Barber and Monica Dolan's Goneril and Regan's villainy and treachery). It was always clear that they were in a play, while McKellen was in a world. (I'll get to that in a moment.) Considering that this was the RSC and this is their bread and butter--what they do with their lives, as it were--I expected much more. If this production were on the stage at the Public, say, or the Shakespeare Theatre in D.C., I'd have said, 'Okay, it was a little flat, but good. It was a nice show.' But the RSC--they're supposed to be like the Comédie-Française doing Molière or the MAT doing Chekhov. It's what they do.

And none of this would have been all that obvious if it hadn't been for Ian McKellen. He was Lear--and I don't mean that in the clichéd way Hollywood uses it. He was a real man, aging, weakening, failing, floundering, lost, grasping for his waning strength and stolen dignity. However he did so, McKellen used both emotion and intellect to make Lear infuriating and sympathetic--by turns and often at the same time. McKellen was only 68 in 2007 (less than eight years older than I am--good grief!), but I never for a nanosecond doubted Lear was 80. I don't know if this was at all intentional, but there were times, after he'd turned over his kingdom to Regan and Goneril and been wandering about the land depending on their hospitality, that he appeared to be suffering from the beginnings of Alzheimer's. I saw this with my father in his last years--McKellen even looked a little like my dad, with his longish white hair and full white beard--and in the early days of the illness, Dad sometimes seemed lost and confused, but he was aware this was happening and it made him angry and afraid. That's what McKellen was doing. I brought my opera glasses with me this time, and I was able to watch McKellen's face. His eyes changed from fierce and angry to afraid, to lost, to insane, to determined--and then through all those responses again as fate buffeted him about. Not a moment was false or "acted." (He must be either brilliant or oblivious--I couldn't figure out how the other actors, who weren't really giving him much, didn't throw him at least now and then. If he was doing all this technically, not only did he fool me good, but he must be as great an acting technician as Olivier was said to have been.) I know this sounds like puffery--as if I were overwhelmed by the Great Actor or something--and maybe I was. I don't think so, though. I watched him--having read Brantley's review beforehand--to see what he was doing, and when I began to feel he was giving this incredible performance, I tried to see if I could figure out why or how. (I couldn't: whatever technique McKellen used, he's mastered it beyond analysis by me. I can tell you the results, but not the method.)

I was particularly impressed with McKellen's performance of the two big speeches--"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!" (for which he stripped naked before the storm's elements) and "Howl, howl, howl, howl!" when he carried Cordelia's body on stage at the end. Again, I can't really analyze the technique, but he managed to make these moments both significant and ordinary. I mean that he didn't underplay them so as to downplay their iconic theatrical nature and he didn't overplay them to signal their momentousness. I can only say that he conveyed the impact of the moments by the force of his voice--though not principally through its volume--and his face and body, but at the same time, they were part of a man's experience--however soul-rending that was. Of course, the play, being Shakespeare and Lear, is oversized, even melodramatic, but within the world of the play, McKellen was going through it all--while the other characters were portraying images--showing what it should look like.

I used to keep a mental list of the greatest individual stage performances I had seen. I don't do that anymore, but at the time it included James Earl Jones in Great White Hope, Alec McCowen in Hadrian VII, Virginia Capers in Raisin, and Cronyn and Tandy together in The Gin Game, among a few others. I'd have considered adding McKellen's Lear to the list, I think.