'Measure for Measure' (Acting Company)

“This season’s repertory continues our recent practice of pairing plays that use the past to address pressing social and political issues of the present.”  That’s what the note from The Acting Company stated in the program for its rotating rep in New York City this summer, which consists of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and a new adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son for the stage.  I’ve just seen Measure (Native Son follows in a week) and the program note, composed by artistic director Ian Belknap, executive director Elisa Spencer-Kaplan, and founder Margot Harley, goes on to specify that the 1604 (some sources say 1603) Measure “presents an authoritative government, wrongful imprisonment, and sexual assault,” declaring that these are “all relevant in 2019.”

The Acting Company’s 47th season, presenting its first rotating repertory for an entire summer in New York City, began here on 14 July 2019 with previews for Measure at The Duke on 42nd Street (229 W. 42nd  Street) and continued with the production’s opening on 28 July.  My theater companion Diana and I saw the show at the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 9 August; performances are scheduled to end on 24 August. 

Readers of Rick On Theater will remember that on 20 July, I ran a post on “Shakespeare, Forgiveness, and Measure for Measure” (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/07/shakespeare-forgiveness-and-measure-for.html) by my friend and frequent ROT contributor, Kirk Woodward.  (He gives quite a nice, brief synopsis of this play about a woman who is sexually pressured by a man in power, by the way, and I think I’ll let ROTters refer to it rather than recap it here.)  Kirk’s article is based on his having seen a recent production of Measure and, having reflected on what he’d seen, conceived an analysis of it and, by extension, all of Shakespeare’s “output,” as he phrased it.

For this reason, I wish Kirk had seen this Measure for Measure with me.  Janet Zarish, the Acting Company production’s director, cut the script down to an hour and 35 minutes—no adapter, dramaturg, or literary manager is credited—turning it into a no-intermission one-act.  (Measure for Measure probably runs about three hours uncut.  That would mean Zarish’s production omits almost as much text as it puts on stage.)   I don’t know Measure for Measure that well and Kirk might have been able to tell me what got cut.

My impression is that Zarish cut out everything that isn’t about Isabella, Claudio, and Angelo and can’t be made to comment on 2019 society (that is, Brett Kavanaugh/Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, authoritarianism, unjust incarceration).  Indeed, an on-line ad for the company’s presentation (which seems to have been taken down) even asserted: “In what could be a [now-Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett] Kavanaugh biopic, Acting Co.’s play speaks on impossible moral choices.” 

(After summarizing the plot of the Acting Company adaptation, David Barbour of Lighting&Sound America reported:

There's rather more to Measure for Measure, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from Janet Zarish's stripped-down production . . . .  This is the Reader's Digest version . . . focus[ing] on the main narrative line while severely reducing or eliminating the bawds, pimps, whores, and unrepentant criminals who form the play's substructure, becoming solely the story of a lady in distress, surrounded by manipulative men.) 

If readers remember my recent posting of some archival reports on Shakespearean mountings (“Two Pairs of Shakespeares from the Archives,” 4 August), I spoke of “simile” and “metaphor” productions of classic plays.  (The reference is to Robert Brustein’s essay “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” which I posted on ROT on 10 March 2011; I also wrote a commentary on the essay for the blog, “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” 18 September 2009.)  Zarish’s Measure for Measure is a sort of wan simile staging—not really updated or transported to another time or place—it still takes place in Vienna—but dressed (by Jessica Wegener Shay) circa 2019. 

Little else is adjusted, though one character smokes an e-cigarette.  While the costumes are modern dress (though the nuns still wear habits), Neil Patel’s set (which also serves Native Son) is period-less (and characterless, resembling a concrete basement or fire stairs).  The cast is racially and ethnically diverse in the color-blind vein, making the look of the play less Renaissance Vienna (or even modern-day Vienna, I suspect), but more present-day urban U.S. 

Just to make sure we don’t miss that this 400-year-old tale of sexual coercion by the power of authority is to be read as a reflection of contemporary society, Zarish has the play open with the sounds of newscasters reporting the headlines of income disparity, hate crimes, climate change, and gun violence (the sound design is by Fabian Obispo).  Later, these same voices report on the fate of Claudio (Lorenzo Jackson), the brother of the novitiate Isabella (Rebekah Brockman).  Trying to free Claudio from Angelo’s (Sam Lilja) verdict, she goes to him and he offers to exchange Claudio’s life for Isabella’s chastity—the classic—if higher-stakes—coercive bargain of the sexual predator, so the reappearance of the news broadcasts is meant to link the real-life 21st-century stories with Shakespeare’s four-century-old fiction. 

There are other bald-faced reminders, too.  The revelation of Angelo’s hypocrisy and vile behavior, for example, is conducted like a Congressional hearing or, more to the point, a Senatorial confirmation with large tables and witnesses seated behind microphones.  I wonder how many in the audience would have missed the connections had Zarish not hit us over the head with them?  I, for one, would have liked the chance to see if I’d have sussed out the links on my own.

None of The Acting Company’s “reworking” of Measure for Measure did anything to resolve the pervasive problem of the play, the issue that Kirk pointed out in “Shakespeare Forgiveness”: “its characters are all to one extent or another morally ambiguous, and because although ostensibly a comedy, none of its characters are very happy when it ends.”  Whatever present-day social and political questions Zarish and The Acting Company want to address in their rotating rep, they don’t manage to clean up the fundamental complication that no one in Measure for Measure is a moral exemplar.  They’re all not only flawed, but deeply flawed—and the Acting Company Production does no more than speed through this aspect of Shakespeare’s play.  It’s as if Zarish figured that if they fly past the problem without really touching it, no one will notice the difficulty.

Diana thought the production was good, but I found it second-rate, about the level of an undergrad college production.  The actors over-enunciated words—because they were speaking “Shakespeare”!  They moved and gestured awkwardly and without motivation or emotional/psychological content.  There were lots of fluttering and wringing hands.  It all seemed to me as if none of them really knew what they were saying or doing, just going through the (directed) motions.  It felt as if everyone was trying too hard to make it all seem “natural” and “earnest,” but as a result making it all look studied and fake.  I was in the front row of the house and kept wanting to whisper Hamlet’s advice to the players to them:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.  Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently . . . .

This was not the Acting Company I’ve seen before (including as recently as 2015; see my report on Desire, 26 September 2015).  After I described some of this to him, Kirk dubbed the cast “the Overacting Company.”

(Someone might have wondered why the quality of this work should be so different from what I remember from my last Acting Company experience.  I think The Acting Company, whose current troupe is made up of recent acting-school grads with a majority drawn from Juilliard, works a little like a sports team.  They assemble a troupe of good to great actors over a few seasons, the actors gain a lot of practical experience, and then they move on and the company’s left with a core of newbies and they have to start rebuilding again.  It was four years ago that I last saw them, and if the turn-over’s like that, that may be what happened.)

There was one particular maneuver that stood out among the actors’ movements that I found awkward, for example.  I mentioned that one character, Lucio (Anthony Bowden), smoked an e-cig and he didn’t look natural—like someone from my day smoking a regular cigarette on stage who’d never smoked in real life.  Bowden looked both uncomfortable and clumsy.  Now, maybe the nature of the device makes a vaper look that way—I’ve never observed e-cig smokers closely, so I don’t know.  (Maybe it’s like smoking a Russian papirosa.  They look like ordinary cigarettes, but they aren’t and the smoker’s forced to hold the papirosa differently so that it looks strange to someone unfamiliar with the routine.)   But Lucio, who’s labeled in the character list in the play text as “a fantastic,” which in Elizabethan times meant an absurd, fanciful, whimsical, or eccentric person, vaped in a couple of scenes and it always looked faked.

Lucio, a loudmouth who’s all up in other people’s business and isn’t above spreading a little fake news about everyone to everyone else if it makes him think he’s impressing them with his insider access (think Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci without the charm), is the only male character who doesn’t wear a suit (other than Henry Jenkinson’s Provost, who wears a uniform, and Claudio, who spends most of the play in an orange jumpsuit).  Shay’s got him up like a 1980s Eye-talian lounge lizard with a loud silk shirt open to his navel and gold chains mingling with his chest hairs.  Otherwise, all the men wear the politician’s work uniform: a blue suit (including a couple of double-breasteds). 

I was bemused to see Keshav Moodliar, after he’d doffed his final disguise and returned to his blue ducal suit (say that five times fast!), that he was sockless in his black, Italianate, leather slip-ons—going commando in the pedal region, I guess.  It struck me as a little too casual-Friday in the circumstances.  But then, I’m just an old fuddy-duddy.

The costumes Shay devised for the woman are more varied, from hooker-lite for Laura Gragtmans’s Mistress Overdone (hot pants and a tight top) to a demure pale-blue shift (with about a hundred little buttons down the front) for Isabella, her hair covered by a plain, white veil.  (As Francesca, the nun who accompanies novice Isabella when Lucio comes to the nunnery to tell her of her brother’s imprisonment, Katherine Renee Turner wears a full habit.)

I’ve been wondering why there’s been so little press coverage of this rep.  As of 13 August, Native Son’s gotten eight reviews and Measure for Measure, only six.  (The New York Times has reviewed only Native Son—and that was eight days after opening.)  The Acting Company isn’t an insignificant company, and a rotating rep should have been worthy of some attention.  Now I wonder if the reviewers came and either decided not to write reviews after seeing the productions or their editors spiked the reviews as unworthy of the space.  The Times (“the newspaper of record”) is usually very conscientious about reviewing almost all Broadway and Off-Broadway productions; it even covers some Off-Off-Broadway shows.  It’s not like the summer has a slew of openings to cover, after all!

With respect to the critical coverage of Measure for Measure, ROTters know that I usually take a look at Show-Score’s surveys of published reviews and report their tally.  Well, as of 28 July, the site’s no longer scoring those reviews, though they continue to collect them.  (I’ve quoted Show-Score’s press release with the CEO’s rationale for the change below this report with a link to the document.)  Viewer reviews will be rated and the show’s average score will be calculated from those assessments, but there will no longer be number ratings for the published notices or an average score for them. 

As for the critical response to The Acting Company’s Measure for Measure, I’ll be summarizing all six of the reviews, including two Show-Score didn’t include in its collection.  (Readers should note that the notices have been tricking in over a period of over two weeks and more may be published after this report has been posted.)

In the New Yorker, Maya Phillips, reporting, “It’s no surprise that, since the inception of the #MeToo movement, ‘Measure for Measure,’ Shakespeare’s problem play about virtue and a man’s attempt to use his influence to coerce a woman into having sex with him, is seeing more productions,” asserted that “The Acting Company’s current staging makes small but notable gestures toward the play’s prescience.”  She called Angelo a “Weinstein-esque villain” and found that, “as played by Sam Lilja, [he] lacks the baseness and sleaze to counter Rebekah Brockman’s wholeheartedly earnest and virtuous Isabella.”  As for the overall production, Phillips deemed “Janet Zarish’s direction admirably holds its characters accountable for their self-righteousness and moral hypocrisies, but the comic notes fall by the wayside.”

On TheaterMania, Pete Hempstead declared, “There’s no arguing that Measure speaks directly to the #MeToo movement, and with the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings almost a year in the past, it’s no surprise that the Acting Company has chosen to keep the memory fresh and stage its own Measure, which it has trimmed to a sometimes insightful, mostly workaday 95 minutes.”  Directed with “less harrowing staging” than The Acting Company’s Native Son, thought Hempstead, the “modern-day take on Measure for Measure makes its agenda obvious from the beginning with speakers blaring headlines about hate crimes, poverty, global warming, and gun violence.”  The TM reviewer added, “What you’re going to see (the play seems to shout) is going to be relevant, damn it.”  Hempstead reported that while both plays in the rep provide “nothing groundbreaking in the way of theatricality,” together the “pairing of  Measure for Measure and Native Son does call attention to cavalier attitudes toward black and female bodies and to the white patriarchy that seeks to control them.”

Lighting&Sound America’s Barbour noted that another Shakespeare problem play, Coriolanus (New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park), is on the New York City boards with The Acting Company’s Measure for Measure, and reported that in each case, the director tackles the work’s imperfections head-on, with differing degrees of success.”  The abridgement, Barbour found, “benefits from a swift pace and a clear dramatic line, building to a final confrontation that satisfyingly strikes a blow at the Viennese patriarchy.”  He added, however, that it “scrubs the play of its considerable humor and tames its unruliness, not to its advantage.”  The LSA reviewer’s “most grievous” complaint is that the adaptation

misreads Shakespeare’s intentions:  The play is marked by a frank, scalding appraisal of the world’s wicked ways and it makes an argument for moderation in both virtue and vice.  Indeed, the virtuous characters are almost as single-minded as the libertines they scorn.

“Zarish’s take on the play,” felt Barbour, “might work better with a more engaged cast, but everyone onstage seems to be in a rush to catch a train.”  He singled out Keshav Moodliar’s Duke for his “touch of authority and an urgent sense that lives and reputations are at risk,” but criticized “Rebekah Brockman’s surprisingly tough and opaque Isabella and Sam Lilja’s Angelo, who is more middle-manager than sexual predator.”  The cyber reviewer praised the design team for Measure but complained that the “production ends with a feminist twist that will please many in the audience, but which feels tacked on, as it violates the sense of reconciliation [another synonym for forgiveness that Kirk could add to his list] that is key to all of Shakespeare’s comedies.”  His final words of advice, therefore, were that “if you love this play, I’d hold out for the next revival.”

“The Acting Company’s new production of Measure for Measure . . . is crisp, precise and thoroughly entertaining,” declared JK Clarke on Theater Pizzazz.  Clarke added, “It certainly helps that a sizable chunk of the original script, including many beloved scenes with comic characters like Elbow and Pompey, are excised from this version,” making it at least an hour shorter.  “While it may not be an unabridged version, it is nonetheless a powerful production.”  

Zarish’s staging is “precise” and even in the final scene in which Shakespeare “leaves Isabella’s response to the Duke’s shocking proposal ambiguous,” under this director, “nothing is left to the imagination and Isabella’s profound reaction is both satisfying and logical.”  Comparing The Acting Company’s Measure for Measure with Lincoln Center Theatre’s current The Rolling Stone (by Chris Urch, through 25 August), the TP review-writer concluded that the two plays are “messages in lockstep with the times.”  

Mark Dundas Wood of TheaterScene.net thinks that Measure for Measure “seems as though it would lend itself to an adaptation crafted in light of the #MeToo movement,” but he cautioned, “To some extent, The Acting Company’s . . . version proves itself a good fit for such an approach, although there are elements of Shakespeare’s play that don’t quite conform seamlessly with what director Janet Zarish seems to be going for.”  Wood reported, “This rendition of the play makes Isabella a stronger, more self-reliant character than Shakespeare likely intended. She is not remotely frail or helpless,” finding Rebekah Brockman “emotionally disengaged” and wondering if “Brockman’s determination not to portray the character as victim . . . makes her seem so.”

Wood continued, “The production is more effective in its deconstruction of the duke’s motives.  Moodliar makes the character a smug sort, in love with his own benevolence and cleverness.”  The TS.net  reviewer found “Anthony Bowden as the rakish and smarmy Lucio . . .  one of the best things in the production” and he praised the design elements of the show. “The biggest twist of the evening comes at the denouement,” concluded Wood, “when Zarish and Brockman turn Shakespeare’s story on its ear, giving us a finish that defies traditional expectations.  While not true to the original ‘happy ending,’ this surprise will prove satisfying to many—perhaps most—2019 playgoers.”

On CurtainUp, Gregory Wilson explained that he’s “always enjoyed watching plays performed in rotating repertory, as even a familiar work can be seen in a new light when it's placed in proximity (and dialogue) with another.”  The Acting Company, Wilson asserted, “has tried to focus on the central themes of two well-known plays—Richard Wright's Native Son and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure—and render them more powerful through juxtaposition” in a “partially successful” experiment.  He cautioned that “the danger of this approach is that it can minimize the complexity of the works in question, and I'm afraid that happens here too.  Ultimately, Wright and Shakespeare are larger than these interpretations give them credit for.”  Wilson reported, “Both productions zoom in on what they view as the critical aspects of each play,” continuing, “The virtue of this approach, of course, is focus.” 

“The acting and directing are excellent,” the CU writer felt, but “the quality of the performances contributes to a larger problem—because it's hard not to feel like there are multiple missed opportunities.”  He explained: “Measure for Measure, after all, is about many things besides misogyny.  Religious dogma overriding common sense, love vs. law, and deep-seated hypocrisy are all just as much part of the play's thematic fabric, and stripping all of them out to go after the production's one theme flattens Shakespeare's work considerably.” 

Still, Wilson affirms that he likes “the idea of juxtaposing” the two plays, which “are [b]oth solid, well-directed and acted productions.”  Wilson concluded with a caveat:

But if it's important not to lose the forest for the trees, it's also important to avoid cutting down most of the trees for the sake of what one thinks is the forest.  Richard Wright and William Shakespeare are justly praised for their depth and breadth of thought; I wish that in the zeal to focus them on single concepts, these productions didn't reduce their works as much as they do.

I'm curious, if a little trepidatious, about how Native Son will turn out.  It's close to contemporary (1930s, assuming adapter Nambi E. Kelley didn’t up-date it), so maybe the company—it’s essentially the same cast as Measure for Measure—will be more comfortable. Cross fingers!

[For ROTters who are curious about why Show-Score has changed its review-rating policy, here’s the explanation from Tom Melcher, the site’s founder and CEO.  Show-Score issued a press release, “SHOW-SCORE ANNOUNCES CHANGES TO SCORING APPROACH: MEMBER REVIEWS WILL BE SHOWCASED; CRITIC REVIEWS WILL BE DISPLAYED BUT WILL NO LONGER BE SCORED”:

June 28, 2019 (New York, NY): Show-Score.com, the leading online community for theater fans, today announced a change to how it scores and displays reviews from members and professional critics. In an email to Show-Score’s 277,000 members (full text pasted below), Show-Score’s Founder Tom Melcher explained that Show-Score members have now written 400,000 reviews of New York City theater on the site. To further this strong community, Show-Score will now be showcasing these member reviews even further, allowing members to learn more about the reviewer and to find theater fans who share their taste.

At the same time, Show-Score will continue to aggregate the major professional critics with a brief review summary and a link out to their full review. The site will no longer be scoring and excerpting critic reviews itself, nor posting critic scores.

As Melcher said in an email, “We still want our members to access a range of professional critical opinion because we believe that critics provide useful context and commentary, and represent a spectrum of taste in theater. We would much prefer that the critics score their own reviews, since they are writing their response to the work they have experienced. However, while some critics have been sending us their scores and excerpts, we have not been able to get complete buy-in, which is necessary for a uniform scoring system to work.”

[The release includes the text of Melcher’s e-mail to Show-Score members, as it says above; both the press release and the accompanying e-mail text are available at https://www.show-score.com/pdf/Show-Score_Announces_Changes_to_Scoring_Approach.pdf.]

Spy vs. Spy

[Almost 10 years ago, I posted a report on Rick On Theater about  the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. (see “Spook Museum,” 25 March 2010).  The other day, I read “Revealing Some Spy Secrets, but Not All,” a review in the “Arts” section of the New York Times (6 August ) of an exhibit at London’s Science Museum called Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security, covering (or uncovering, as it were) some of the workings of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, better known as GCHQ (as you’d know if you were a fan, as I was, of the BBC series MI-5, 2002-11, which ran here on some PBS stations). 

[Frequent readers of ROT will know that I was a counterespionage special agent in the army, so this kind of article piques my attention and I have little memory flashes of my spook days in West Berlin.  Some readers will remember that Berlin was still under occupation by the four World War II allies—the British, the French, the Soviets, and us—until 1990, so I had frequent contact with our British counterparts (we were on less intimate terms with the French  forces in Berlin) and occasionally socialized with them.  We Yanks gained a little familiarity with the tradecraft of the British military intelligence methods and jargon.  

[I’ve written frequently on ROT about my life in MI and West Berlin, Spy Central in Europe during the Cold War.  Among the posts touching on or derived from that experience are “Berlin Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009; “Top Secret America,” 17 September 2010; “Berlin Memoir,” 16 December 2016, 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2017; and “Who’s Who in CIA: A Cold War Relic,” 8 May 2018.

[Reading “Revealing Some Spy Secrets,” I was inspired to post two earlier Times reviews, reporting on two new museums here in New York City that cover different aspects of the espionage game.  Following the review of Top Secret are reviews of Spyscape, an immersive museum of spies, spying, and spycraft, and the K.G.B. Espionage Museum, which is exactly what the name implies.  So, don your cloaks and daggers and enjoy a little John Le Carré fantasy with me.]

 “Revealing Some Spy Secrets, but Not All”

by  Farah Nayeri

A British intelligence agency celebrates its centennial with a gadget-filled exhibition.

LONDON — The laptop — or what’s left of it — is a mangled carcass: Its innards have been ripped out, and only a few strips of metal and plastic remain. This was the MacBook Air that The Guardian used to store files leaked by the United States intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. Guardian employees destroyed the computer with power tools in July 2013 after the files on it were deemed a threat to British national security.

The destruction order came from the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, a 100-year-old intelligence and security agency tasked with keeping Britain safe. The organization, which usually prefers to be under the radar, is celebrating its centenary with “Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security,” an exhibition of more than 100 objects at the Science Museum in London that runs through Feb. 23.

In addition to the laptop, the items on show include an encryption key used by Queen Elizabeth II to make sure her phone conversations weren’t tapped and a briefcase containing a clunky brown handset that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used for top-secret calls.

GCHQ is one of Britain’s most secret and secretive organizations: It wasn’t officially acknowledged in law until 1994. So why has it decided to appear in a London museum?

“We needed to tell our story, to be able to show the British people that this is what we do on their behalf,” said Tony Comer, the organization’s official historian. Part of the aim, he added, is to convince “those who really like solving problems that perhaps a career in GCHQ is the right thing for them.”

He said that the agency was “radically” rethinking how it can attract the intelligence operatives of tomorrow.

“It’s up to us to persuade them how cool it would be to work in a place like GCHQ,” Mr. Comer said.

“Top Secret” is cleverly crafted to appeal to audiences of all ages. Adults can learn about the everyday business of communications-based espionage and counterespionage, and children have a play area full of word and number games.

The exhibition’s richest sections, which are devoted to World War I, World War II and the Cold War, showcase the unwieldy contraptions used for espionage that could now be replaced by a desktop computer, a laptop or a smartphone.

One section focuses on the first downing of a German airship over Britain, which killed 16 crewmen, in September 1916. A vitrine displays the cutting-edge technology of the time that was used to spot the airship: a radio device fitted in a wooden, glass-fronted box, with knobs on top. Also on view are pieces of metal and fabric from the skin of the airship; and a cap, badge and boot that belonged to the German airmen.

A section about British intelligence services dismantled a Soviet spy network in 1961 recreates a home in suburban London, complete with 1960s-style floral wallpaper. It includes a radio transmitter that two spies from the ring concealed under their kitchen floor, and a cigarette lighter with a secret compartment for encryption codes.

Other sections allude to the use of satellites and online hacking in intelligence gathering.

The exhibition is “not necessarily dealing with a lot of stuff that’s contemporary,” said Elizabeth Bruton, the curator of communications at the Science Museum. GCHQ was “still a secret organization,” she added, “so even though we’ve worked closely with them for this exhibition, there are still things that they do that are kept secret.”

Stuart McKenzie, now a vice president at the Mandiant consulting arm of the cybersecurity company FireEye, worked for the British government for 11 years. He said the business of intelligence had not changed drastically since World War II. “People are still trying to break codes; people are still trying to get in and steal secrets,” he said. “Some of the tools have changed.”

As the world moves toward an “intellectual and thought-based economy, where intellectual property is the key,” Mr. McKenzie said, “protection of state secrets and organizations’ secrets is going to be the most important thing.”

In the modern-day cyber landscape, he said, Britain needs more than “a few people who’ve gone to Oxford and Cambridge,” so it made sense for GCHQ to reach out to a wider pool.

But were the show’s young visitors eager to join the cloak-and-dagger world of GCHQ?

Jake Drexler, 12, visiting from Los Angeles with his father, a gaming-industry executive, was busy solving a scrambled word puzzle on the exhibition’s opening day. He said the show was “fun” and that he liked the wartime displays.

“They had to keep telling each other codes, but without letting the other side know what was happening,” he said. “It was interesting how they figured out how to do that, and how they broke the codes on the other side.”

Did he want to become a spy when he grew up? “A spy, maybe not so much, but a code breaker, that would be cool,” he said. “I mean, it’s less risky.”

Colin Pilat, 11, who was visiting from Vaires-sur-Marne, France, with his parents and three siblings, voiced similar concerns.

There is “action and logic” in espionage, he said, but “it’s pretty dangerous — that’s the problem.” As a spy, he said, one could “get arrested for a long time, and there could be enemies, because you’re spying on someone, and these are dangerous people.”

He greeted the prospect of a future in espionage with a shrug. He said he’d rather be an architect.

[Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security runs through 23 February 2020 at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DD; www.sciencemuseum.org.uk.]

*  *  *  *

“A Place to Come In From the Cold”

by William L. Hamilton

[This article appeared in the New York Times’ “Weekend Arts II” on 30 March 2018.  Spyscape is a private, for-profit espionage museum at 928 8th Avenue in the Times Square neighborhood of Manhattan (https://spyscape.com).  It opened in 2018. ]

What kind of spy are you? This museum tests your skills.

“Hello Bill Hamilton.” The silver kiosk displayed its welcome when I swiped the black wristband that was my admission ticket.

The days of slipping through the back of a tailor’s shop are long gone.

I was standing before the first of 12 information-gathering sentinels at Spyscape, a $50 million, 60,000-square-foot spying and espionage museum, which opened recently in mid-Manhattan.

With leading questions and embarrassing exercises, the kiosks were assessing me — personality traits, risk tolerance and I.Q. — to construct a profile of the kind of spy I might best be.

Spyscape is the newest unhidden headquarters of our cultural fascination with the art of deception, two levels inside a nondescript glass-box building on 8th Avenue at 55th Street. Its dark, labyrinthine interior landscape was designed by David Adjaye, the architect of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

The kiosk would like me to agree or disagree with a few statements.

“I’ll say anything to get what I want,” it declared in a light tone of conspiracy. I gave that idea a dissembling 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

“I’m willing to be unethical if I believe it will help me succeed.” I squashed that with a 1. “I keep others at a distance.” Well, now that you mention it: 4.

“This is like dating,” I said to Aaron Moody, a visitor services associate.

In fact, espionage may be bigger than courtship on social media right now, with Facebook at the center of a growing controversy over the use of personal data during elections, and the park-bench poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter drawing international censure. Seismic private-information hacks reveal themselves with regularity, in government and business. We accept drone-patrolled, surveillance-prying public space. Cyber warfare has come of age, and the Cold War is back.

“Scary biscuits,” as the English say.

“I thought that spy stories were really a thing of the ’70s,” Mr. Adjaye said in an interview. “And here we are at this time, that actually spying is back.”

Asked how confident he was in the security of his own personal information, on a scale of 1 to 10 — with 10 being most secure — Mr. Adjaye said, “Three.”

What is it about the shadows of deception that excites our participation and not our fear? The International Spy Museum in Washington, with its impressive collection of spy artifacts, will be moving to a greatly expanded facility next year. A new National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations, under development in Ashburn, Va., is expected to open in 2020.

Conceived as an entertainment attraction, Spyscape’s $39 experience ($32 for children ages 3 to 12 — bring them; you’ll need them) is a cultural chimera: part museum, part ride. It was created by Archimedia, a London-based private investment group that has been a developer in resorts, restaurants, and spy-themed film productions like the television adaptation of John le Carré’s “The Night Manager.”

Spyscape’s immersive experience begins in the outsize elevator, which makes a slow three-minute ascent. The Briefing Lift, as it’s called, delivers the visitor into Spyscape’s realm with a three-walled video created by Territory Studio in London, which worked on “Blade Runner 2049.”

The doors open; you have arrived at the 25-foot-high “city within a city,” as Mr. Adjaye calls the main floor: seven galleries presenting themes like encryption and special ops. In addition to a curated collection of objects, there are 141 live screens, 317 speakers, 113 live cameras and 32 projectors telling Spyscape’s stories. There are also games called “challenges” and the kiosks.

The stories are all real-life — no fictional spies like James Bond. The “Encryption” gallery tells the story of Alan Turing and Joan Clarke, the cryptanalysts of World War II, who cracked the German Enigma code; Virginia Hall in “Special Ops,” the woman with one leg who operated in occupied France and was called “the scourge of the Gestapo”; Edward Snowden in “Surveillance.” There is an actual Enigma machine, and a replica you can code on. “Encryption” closes with a present-day warning.

“The Enigma story shows no code is 100 percent foolproof.” And, “WikiLeaks revealed that the C.I.A. can’t break WhatsApp — yet. Every intelligence service is on the case trying to.”

Scary biscuits.

I am inside a black booth, facing a black-glass monitor. There is a heartbeat playing. Or are my ears pounding? Nick Ryan, a sound artist whose clients have included Tate Britain in London, designed Spyscape’s aural landscape, which is as originally and meticulously rendered as Mr. Adjaye’s architecture.

“Hello Bill Hamilton. Welcome to Deception.”

I am being tested for how well I lie and how well I detect lies. I stare at a grid on the monitor, which registers my face, and begins a live feed of me at the bottom. I put my fingertip on a red sensor, which takes my pulse.

“Have you ever been to space? What did you like about it?”

“Yes. It wasn’t New York,” I lie. The screen replays my face. My eyes are blinking like signal lamps.

“People blink more when lying,” the booth says empathetically. It knows I know I’ve failed.

Spyscape’s experience is mildly paranoiac, but it is never deadly dark. Its affirmative message — on T-shirts and tote bags — is “Question Everything.” Be your own information gatherer. Who would argue with that? There are no rendition programs or extraditions here. (Shelby Prichard, Spyscape’s chief of staff, who previously worked for the 9/11 Museum, said that the information gathered here was not shared externally or sold.)

In a timely way, Spyscape shows us what we know, but choose to ignore: that espionage and spying are not only the stuff of extraordinary tales or specialists’ tools. They are the “enemies among us” — the CCTVs, the closed-circuit tracking systems, the browser cookies. There is a double agent in every pocket. “Mobile phones are the most powerful spy devices of all,” the Briefing Lift explains.

Hakeen Betts, the retail associate who sold me John le Carré’s “The Pigeon Tunnel” in Spyscape’s exhaustive bookshop, told me that on a visit, his 10-year-old son was evaluated and told he was a “spymaster,” based on his performance with the interactivities.

All 10-year-olds are spymasters now. At the Encryption challenge, large horizontal touch screens, which look like naval charting tables, test your ability to grasp ciphers quickly. (It reminded me of dealing with an iOS update). A girl wearing a sparkling ballet skirt and sequined cat’s ears explained ciphers to her befuddled father: “Here’s how you do it.”

Swipe. “Hello Bill Hamilton.”

I am at the door of a laser tunnel. I step through. The tunnel is studded with unlighted buttons. I hit the red start button. “Welcome to Special Ops. Avoid the lasers. Good luck.”

The buttons turn bright white. Smoke hisses in. Loud music, with a “There he is — grab him!” mania to it. The tunnel is now a spider’s web of laser beams. I have 90 seconds to punch as many buttons as I can, deactivating them, without hitting a laser beam, which deducts 5 seconds from the running clock. I break into a sweat so hard I can hear it. And that’s the last thing I remember.

Two men rolled out laughing from other tunnels. Competing in side-by-side chambers, they scored a 165 and a 140. I am the spy who came in from the cold, really slowly. 95.

Spyscape’s last chamber is Debrief. On the black-screened walls, streams of information glow. Visitors are given their analyses and told what spy roles they might play.

My screen says some conciliatory things, a kind of ‘‘you were second on the list, really” that I recognize from human resources officers.

“You take risks after careful consideration.” Thank you. “You are mathematical.” Uh, ok. It’s never seen my SATs. “You are very precise in your work.” Nice — tell my editor.

“Bill Hamilton, you are a cryptologist.”

In three tries, over three visits, I am repeatedly a cryptologist, passed over for ‘‘intelligence operative,’’ ‘‘spycatcher’’ and other action roles I coveted. No rooftop motorcycle chases, perfect cocktails or brand placement. A desk job. If I couldn’t crack my own code, how good could I be?

Michael Amendola, an assistant theater producer I met in the gift shop, told me Spyscape had decided he was a “hacker” — a risk-taker. He praised the museum’s immersive nature.

“I loved the code breaking, I loved the laser exhibition,” Mr. Amendola said, adding that he learned a great deal, too. He compared Spyscape to a recent visit to the Museum of Sex on lower Fifth Avenue. “It’s an interesting concept,” Mr. Amendola said of MoSex, “but I thought it felt a little underwhelming.”

If you can beat sex, you’re in like Flint.

[Or Matt Helm, or Maxwell Smart, or Napoleon Solo, or Illya Kuryakin . . . or Special Agent Rick, MI.  Sorry.  Had a little flashback there.  I’m back now.

[“Secret agent man, secret agent man / They’ve given you a number and taken away your name.”]

*  *  *  *

“A Peek Into Soviet Secrets”

by Sopan Deb

[This review was published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 22 January 2019.  The K.B.G. Espionage Museum opened in January 2019.]

The K.G.B. Spy Museum opens a door into espionage.

“This is a Bulgarian umbrella; have you heard about this one?” Agne Urbaityte asked, pointing to a blue umbrella behind a glass case. There was a needle peeking out from the top.

“It’s a weapon umbrella,” she said. “You press the button here, you see the needle, the needle goes out and shoots a small shot of ricin poison. It’s still the most harsh poison in the world.”

Thank goodness this was not the real thing. It was the kind of tool famously used to kill the Bulgarian dissident author Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978, roughly a decade after he defected to the West. Many have speculated since that the K.G.B. was involved.

Ms. Urbaityte, 29, was standing against a wall Wednesday at the recently opened K.G.B. Spy Museum in Chelsea, a warehouse-type space housing what Ms. Urbaityte said are thousands of artifacts documenting the rise of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or in plain English: the Committee for State Security. Or more familiarly: the K.G.B., the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency and secret police.

The museum opens at a time when Russian intelligence services have been at the forefront of both pop culture and current events. “The Americans,” the FX show about a married couple who spied for the Soviet Union in Washington, has been a cultural phenomenon. It won a Golden Globe this year for best television drama. (Another popular TV show, “Homeland,” has had Russian antagonists.)

In a news story that seemed as if it were straight out of “The Americans,” in December, Maria Butina, a 30-year-old Russian, pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent. As part of a deal with prosecutors, she acknowledged that Russian officials were behind her efforts. Last year a former Russian spy was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent in Salisbury, England, drawing international outrage. Prime Minister Theresa May said it was “highly likely” that Russia was behind the attack.

And a newly released K.G.B. archive has revealed the names of 4,141 Latvians who might have been secret informants for the Soviets.

But this museum, Ms. Urbaityte said, is apolitical.

“It’s historical and about technological progress; you cannot erase facts from history,” she said in an interview, sitting next to her father, Julius Urbaitis, 55. They are the co-curators of the new institution.

The Spy Museum is the culmination of three decades worth of collecting by Mr. Urbaitis, he said. He first had an interest in World War II artifacts, but when he acquired a listening device that belonged to Adolf Hitler, he became fascinated with espionage, he said. The family hails from Lithuania, where they founded a museum in 2014 called Atomic Bunker — which was actually based in an old nuclear bunker.

“My dad has a collector’s spirit,” Ms. Urbaityte said.

Some of the objects from Atomic Bunker have migrated to Chelsea. About half of the items in the collection, a combination of original artifacts and copies, are owned by the father-daughter duo. The other half were acquired separately by the curators. Ms. Urbaityte and Mr. Urbaitis do not own the museum, which is private and for-profit. The owners have chosen to remain anonymous.

The museum doesn’t shy away from depicting the harsh tactics of the K.G.B. Far from it: There are interactive exhibits, like a model of a chair used for interrogations.

“If people want to, we can tie them up,” Ms. Urbaityte deadpanned.

The tour starts with a mock-up of a chief officer’s work space. A mannequin wearing a K.G.B. chief officer’s uniform is at a desk with a flag of Soviet Russia behind him. To the mannequin’s left sits a bronze desk lamp, which, according to the curators, sat in a villa belonging to the former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Nearby, Russian propaganda posters cover a wall. One of the oldest items in the space is a switchboard from 1928. Its operator was almost always recruited by the N.K.V.D., the Russian secret police and a forerunner of the K.G.B., according to a description of the item.

There are also original doors from a K.G.B. prison housed at the back of the museum. The accompanying information reads: “People who did not take psychologically the interrogation process well were put into soft cells. Then people were given various medications to turn from a politically idealistic person into a vegetable.”

Many of the exhibits are dedicated to showing exactly how the K.G.B. carried out business, particularly surveillance. Several glass displays show where K.G.B. agents would embed lenses and bugs: in rings, watches, belt buckles, cuff links, dishes, among other places.

This isn’t the only spy museum in the United States, of course. There is Spyscape, which opened early last year on Eighth Avenue at 55th Street. And Washington has the International Spy Museum. The National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations is in development and is slated to open next year in Ashburn, Va.

As we finished up our tour, I couldn’t help but ask: Had the curators seen “The Americans?” After all, some of the devices in the museum were likely visible onscreen in the show.

“It is precise and it’s good and we loved it,” Ms. Urbaityte said.

Ms. Urbaityte added that Vitali Baganov, who played the role of Stepan in four episodes of “The Americans,” had stopped by the museum recently to offer his support. Mr. Baganov also appeared in “The Sopranos” as Valery, the Russian who disappears in one of the show’s most famous episodes, “Pine Barrens.” He recorded a one-minute video on behalf of the budding institution, calling it “fantastic.”

“Creates an atmosphere of really unique K.G.B. past,” Mr. Baganov says.

The museum has hired tour guides for the space — a guided walk-through costs $43.99. But if you want to stroll around yourself, it will cost $25 for adults and $20 for students and people age 65 and up. Children under 6 enter for free. The curators want audiences to get their money’s worth: Mr. Urbaitis said he and his daughter want the museum “to blow their minds.”

[K.G.B. Espionage Museum is located at 245 West 14th Street (east of 8th Avenue), Manhattan; it’s open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily; https://kgbspymuseum.org.]

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.”