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.”