26 April 2020

Three Plays from the Shakespeare Theatre from the Archives


[Most regular readers of Rick On Theater know that I’m a Washingtonian by birth and that my parents lived in the District of Columbia or its suburbs for almost all their married lives.  (My dad did a five-year hitch in the Foreign Service in the ’60s during which my family and I lived in West Germany.) 

[Both my folks were avid theatergoers and as soon as they figured I was old enough to appreciate the experience—somewhere in the late single digits—they began to take me.  That’s where my lifelong interest in and love of theater began.  (I’ve blogged about this part of my life in “A Broadway Baby,” posted on 22 September 2010.)

[Washington, D.C., lacked a distinctive local cultural life of its own for many decades, though the city was on the touring-theater circuit from the 19th century on.  But it slowly developed one, including a few home-grown theaters of renown, most notably the Arena Stage (founded in 1950) and the theater department at Catholic University (founded by the esteemed Father Gilbert Hartke in 1937), and the Olney Theatre in rural Montgomery County, Maryland, a summer theater founded in 1938. 

[Washington’s National Theatre (built in 1835) was the home of pre- and post-Broadway tours in my youth.  Other performance venues where I attended shows of various sorts included George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium (built in 1943) and the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in Rock Creek Park (opened in 1950). 

[As you can see, except for the National, all Washington’s theater venues date from around my arrival on the scene or a little before.  (In my youth, the infamous Ford’s Theatre, opened in 1863, the site of President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, was solely a museum and didn’t present theatrical productions for over a hundred years after Lincoln’s death.  It was renovated and re-opened as a theater in 1968.  I’ve still never seen a performance there.)

[Then in the 1980s, small theater companies began to open in the District and the nearby suburbs.  The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened in 1971, and it spawned a naissance of theatrical activity in D.C.  Among the new ventures was what is now the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

[The Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library, an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington administered by the Trustees of Amherst College, opened in 1932.  It has the world’s largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare and is a primary repository for rare materials on the Bard.  The library is also the site of the Elizabethan Theatre, a three-quarter-scale replica of a London Shakespearean-era theater (a composite design of multiple 17th-century playhouses). 

[The Folger’s Elizabethan Theatre was not originally intended for theatrical performances; it was used for concert performances and academic lectures.  In 1970, the space (later called simply the Folger Theatre) was converted into a functioning playhouse, and the Folger Theatre Group was formed.  In 1989, as the consequence of a financial shake-up, the FTG became the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger.

[In 1992, the troupe moved into the newly-built Lansburgh Theatre (now known as the Michael R. Klein Theatre) in the revitalized shopping area in the city’s downtown a couple of blocks north of the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor occupied by the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s museums.  The company changed its name again, to the Shakespeare Theatre.  (In 1991, a new and independent troupe, the Folger Theatre, was organized to perform in the library’s Elizabethan theater.)

[In 2005, it took its current name, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and built Sidney Harman Hall near the Landsburgh, which opened in 2007.  Together, the two performances spaces are known as the Harman Center for the Arts. 

[I go through this somewhat lengthy background because I want to establish my relationship to the STC (not to be confused with New York City’s Signature Theatre Company, to which I subscribe and often report on and which I also refer to occasionally as STC) and establish the various names under which the theater company produced.

[My parents, and later my mother, subscribed to the Shakespeare Theatre; indeed, my father was on the board of the Folger Theatre Group in the 1970s and ’80s.  I saw a lot of shows at the Folger, Landsburgh, and Harmon over the decades.  In this collection of archival reports, you’ll notice that one of the performances written up dates from the period of the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger; the other two are from the STC.]

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger
Folger Theatre, Folger Shakespeare Library
17 October 1988

[Some ROTers may recall that in the fall of 1988, I audited Writing about Performance in New York University’s Department of Performance Studies.  The goal of the course was to examine and practice different kinds of writing about performance.

[The class’s main, weekly assignment was to maintain a journal, made up of at least one two-page entry a week commenting on some aspect of a current performance.  These were essentially little essays, and below is one of my entries.  I’m writing about a production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra I saw when I went to Washington to visit my parents in the fall of 1988.

[You’ll see what my take on this production was, as far as my journal was concerned.  This commentary isn’t like my usual performance reports on ROT, or even like the ones I wrote before I started the blog almost 20 years after this journal entry.  There is, in fact, almost no performance evaluation or discussion of the physical production and nothing about the critical reception.]

On Thursday evening, 6 October [1988], I joined my parents for a performance of William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Folger Theatre, the Elizabethan theater within the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library.  Directed by Michael Kahn, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, this Antony and Cleopatra has several notable aspects, including its non-traditional casting.

“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 Affirmative Action.

Difficulties appear to come from misunderstanding or misapplying the principle.  The idea is to give underrepresented actors chances they might not otherwise get, but not if it changes the play’s meaning.  In other words, if casting a black man as a lawyer only says, “Here’s a lawyer, who also happens to be black,” then it’s an appropriate case for “non-traditional casting.”  On the other hand, if the character is defending the KKK, such casting would add a probably unintended dimension. 

A case in point:  Franchelle Stewart Dorn, the Cleopatra of Folger’s Antony and Cleopatra, is black.  So were most of the Egyptian court.  The Romans, including Antony (Kenneth Haigh), were white.  That ancient Egyptians, unlike their Arab successors, were dark-skinned is of little consequence, since Cleopatra and her brother, Ptolemy, descended from an imported Greek (that is, white) dynasty. 

Nonetheless, dividing the two camps is appropriate, since the Egyptians and the Romans had disparate cultures and looked on each other as foreigners who didn’t understand the other’s world.  Separating them by a racial distinction only enhances this cultural division.  No reference in the production made the racial difference disconcerting or distracting. 

Making Cleopatra’s world “black” and Antony’s “white”--without modern racial overtones--separated them in an interesting way.  Now, I confess, I have no idea what director Kahn had in mind except to assemble the best cast he could—Dorn is an extremely talented actress and the most powerful presence on the Folger stage—but regardless of his intentions, the casting made a useful dramatic point.  

Non-traditional casting depends—like any casting decision—for its success mostly on the talent of the actors placed in each role and less on their race, gender, or physical ability.  It also depends on the willingness of the audience to put aside assumptions and preconceptions.  If a theatergoer lets it, however, this kind of casting can add a wonderful dimension to a production, as well as provide a terrific performance that otherwise would not have been possible. 

With respect to that latter point, I’ll note that the Washington Post’s David Richards characterized Dorn’s Lady Macbeth as “animated by a primitive Attic passion” and in the Washington Times, Hap Erstein proclaimed her “awe-inspiring” while the Christian Science Monitor’s Louise Sweeney found her performance “spine-tingling.”

Other actors of color in Cleopatra’s retinue included Gail Grate as Charmian and Leah Maddrie as Iras, two ladies attending on the queen; Carlos Juan Gonzalez as Mardian; and Charles dUMAS [sic] as a Soothsayer and a Country Man.  All of these actors had been drawn to classic theater as youngsters and trained to play classic roles on the stage.  (Gonzalez and dUMAS both participated in SRF’s 13-week Intensive Classical Training Program for Professional Minority Actors, a program conceived by Kahn.) 

Despite—or perhaps in response to—the continuing debate about the Caucasian, European domination of the classic theater, these actors seem never to have accepted that bias and Kahn went ahead an cast actors of color in STF classic production without regard to any criticism.  (He claims that as a side benefit, putting minorities on stage in classic plays brings minorities into the auditorium to see classic plays.)

In the Folger’s Antony and Cleopatra, Franchelle Stewart Dorn, who’d won a Best Supporting Actress award for her role as Paulina in STF’s The Winter’s Tale at the 1987 Helen Hayes Awards [Washington’s “Tonys”], was stunning as the queen of Egypt. 

---------
[In November 1991, The World & I, a monthly magazine published by the Washington Times, an ultra-conservative daily newspaper published by the Unification Church (the “Moonies”), published an article by David H. Ehrlich entitled “Nontraditional Casting.”  Ehrlich, a freelance writer and “avid theatergoer” in the Washington area who’d written a series of articles for The World & I, opposed non-traditional casting. 

[Ehrlich never mentioned STF’s Antony and Cleopatra, but he did complain about that theater’s casting of African-American actor Andre Braugher as Iago opposite Avery Brooks’s Moor in Othello in 1990-91, a production I saw.  (In 1997, Kahn cast Patrick Stewart as a white Othello in an otherwise minority company.)

[Ehrlich’s article was fairly long, so I won’t reprint it here.  In a side-bar to the article, an editor laid out some of Ehrlich’s objections, though:

There is an increasing trend toward nontraditional casting in the theater today, often to the detriment of artistic integrity and quality.  The purposes behind these efforts are to increase work opportunities for nonwhites and to change audiences’ traditional expectations about casting.

. . . .

Ehrlich believes that there is a place for works about the nonwhite experience in America; but as a devotee of classical theater he resists inappropriate casting in the service of social, not theatrical, concerns.

[I responded to Ehrlich in a letter to the editor, which was not published in the magazine.  (I did, however, receive a telephone call from Ehrlich inviting me to discuss my opinion, but I declined.  I suggested he get the editor to publish my letter and he could respond in print.)

[I thought it might be interesting to post my response here.  Please keep in mind that this was almost 30 years ago, and some things have changed since Ehrlich’s article and my letter were written.]

May 1, 1992

Editor
The World & I
2800 New York Avenue, NE
Washington, DC  20002

To the Editor:

I have just read David H. Ehrlich’s article, “Nontraditional Casting,” in the November 1991 issue of your magazine.  I do not live in Washington, and a friend passed the article along to me on a recent visit, hence the lateness of this response to Mr. Ehrlich’s opinions.  Perhaps you will be interested anyway, particularly as I found the article misleading and slanted to an immense degree.

I would like to argue with Mr. Ehrlich point by point, but he makes far too many false or misguided statements to cover.  As you can see, this letter is overlong as it is, and I have just touched on a selected number of issues raised by Mr. Ehrlich.  One, however, bears noting at the very start.  Mr. Ehrlich habitually uses the plural ‘we,’ as if he had the mandate from all spectators and potential spectators to interpret their perceptions.  He does not.  If he is hung up on traditional racial and gender roles onstage, that is his failure; not everyone shares it.  

In fact, his most common complaint regarding what he calls “nontraditional casting” stems from his insistence on letting his assumptions and preconceptions intrude on the productions he sees.  He needs to be reminded that theater is not life; it is a metaphor.  We are expected to enter the performance’s world, not impose our own on it.  For instance, Mr. Ehrlich had so much trouble accepting the racial mix in the Arena’s Our Town because he read it as literal reality.  But Our Town is not literally real: there are no buildings (that is, realistic scenery), dead people have conversations, we move about in time illogically, and there is a very strange character identified as the Stage Manager who manipulates both us and the citizens of Grover’s Corners.  Mr. Ehrlich, Grover’s Corners does not exist in literal reality; it is not in any atlas, except the one in our imaginations.  And in our imaginations, anything is possible.

Mr. Ehrlich may believe he is “sure of what [he is] seeing” in real life, but perhaps he is not supposed to be so certain in the theater.  Perhaps the meaning of what he sees is intentionally ambiguous, meant to make him think—or rethink—received beliefs and unquestioned assumptions.  That is what art is often supposed to do; that is what Bertolt Brecht wanted his so-called Alienation Effect to accomplish.  “Alienation,” it must be noted, is a misleading translation of the German Verfremdung, which really means “de-familiarizing.” Brecht wanted his audiences to look with new eyes at old ideas, so he made them seem strange and unfamiliar.  But Brecht did not invent this tactic, he only named it, and theater artists have been doing it since civilization began.  Moreover, they have been doing it “in the service of social . . . concerns” as well as “theatrical” because the concerns of theater are social concerns.

So, when he notes that he “can burn up a lot of unprofitable energy” trying to fit a director’s interracial casting into his assumptions about race and character, Mr. Ehrlich is dead on.  It is unprofitable.  When you go into the theater, tell yourself that you will leave your assumptions outside for a few hours.  Accept that the world onstage may not be the same as the world you left behind but, just as in  the unfamiliar worlds of Gulliver’s Travels, Brave New World, Animal Farm and 1984, we can learn a great deal about ours by entering theirs for a time.  Stop fighting it, and you will stop burning energy unprofitably. 

Of course, what Mr. Ehrlich calls “nontraditional casting” is probably here to stay in one form or another, so what he does or does not like now may change as he becomes more used to seeing it.  After all, when women and African-Americans first began appearing on the TV news, many people found them disconcerting.  Now they are commonplace, as are Asian-American, Hispanic and disabled reporters, and no one thinks much about it.  Sooner or later, interracial and inter-gender casting will probably seem just as ordinary, though it may take some time and considerable effort.  Mr. Ehrlich’s comparison to African-Americans in professional sports is not inapt in that regard (though his prediction that actors of color might eventually dominate the theater to the displacement of white actors seems awfully unlikely to me). 

First, however, Mr. Ehrlich makes a fundamental error in the basis for his discussion.  He lumps all interracial and inter-gender casting together under the rubric of “nontraditional casting.”  In the business, theater people make a distinction between at least two forms of such casting.  Simple nontraditional casting usually means casting actors of color, women and disabled actors as characters they do not traditionally play as long as the role and the script do not require specific racial or gender characteristics or physical abilities.  That means casting an Hispanic man as an elementary teacher, a woman as a judge or a paraplegic as a social worker.  That is what gave us Frances Sternhagen as the doctor in Outland and Sidney Poitier as the drifter in Lilies of the Fields.  Both characters were originally conceived as white men.  It is also what enabled Mary Tyler Moore to replace Tom Conti as the patient in Whose Life Is It Anyway? on Broadway.  Few people have difficulties with this; indeed, most spectators may not even know it has occurred.

The other type of nontraditional casting is often called “color-blind casting.”  That means that roles are cast without consideration for the race, and often gender or physical abilities, of the actor regardless of the script.  That accounts for the African-American Liza in Arena’s Pygmalion and Earle Hyman as Solness in Tony Randall’s Master Builder here a few months ago.  This, obviously, takes a little more getting used to, and sometimes it works better than other times for any given spectator.  (For the record, few people had difficulty with Hyman in the Ibsen play because he was African-American; they had problems because he made the character too old.)  It is also an important part of Caryl Churchill’s concept in her Cloud Nine.  What a problem Mr. Ehrlich must have with such a play!

I think there is a real difference between both of these and casting Pat Collins as Falstaff or Linda Hunt as the Indonesian dwarf in The Year of Living Dangerously.  Those decisions, like getting Mary Martin (or Sandy Duncan or Cathy Rigby) to play Peter Pan, or Quentin Crisp to play Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, are hardly designed to break casting traditions of any kind; the audience is not really supposed to focus on the fact of the actor’s gender.  In most cases, the actors play the roles as the characters’ genders, not their own; that is not the point of nontraditional casting of either type.  (In fact, J. M. Barrie specified that Peter Pan was to be played by a woman when he wrote the original play.) 

As for the adaptation of Playboy of the Western World, Mustapha Matura’s Playboy of the West Indies, it was not a transfer of the play “from Ireland to Trinidad” by the director as Mr. Ehrlich describes it.  It is an entirely new play based on J. M. Synge’s original by a different playwright—the way Comedy of Errors is a new play based on The Menaechmi and West Side Story is a new play based on Romeo and Juliet.  It has new dialogue and new characters all its own, unlike, say, Orson Welles’s famous black Macbeth, which transferred Shakespeare’s play, characters and verse and all, from 11th-century Scotland to 19th-century Haiti.

Sweeping all that aside, what Mr. Ehrlich’s essay, reduced to its most basic terms, really says is that African-American actors (and Hispanic, Asian, disabled and women actors, by extension) are fine, as long as they keep to their places.  Let them do August Wilson and Spike Lee, and the occasional Othello (but not Iago); however, they had better stay away from White Plays.  If that sounds like saying black people are OK as long as they do not move next door to me and marry my sister, you get full marks. 

The future success of interracial and inter-gender casting notwithstanding, Mr. Ehrlich’s admonition that theaters for special audiences like the Negro Ensemble Company, the Pan Asian Repertory or the Women’s Project will disappear seems very implausible.  Jewish playwrights, actors and directors have been part of the mainstream theater for decades, but there still exist companies, such as the Jewish Repertory Theatre and the American Jewish Theatre, whose focus is on the so-called Jewish experience.  Moreover, if these special-interest theaters do disappear because the mainstream theater embraces their works, artists and concerns, I doubt many people of color, women or disabled people will really mourn in the face of the greater exposure and financial rewards that would accompany such acceptance.  

Mr. Ehrlich suggests that the loss of the Negro Baseball League after Jackie Robinson moved to the majors was a wholly negative occurrence.  I wonder if the African-American players who followed Robinson really miss the small crowds, the low pay, the lack of recognition, the meager accommodations on the road.  I wonder if the African-American fans would want to go back to the segregated game and give up the pride the Robinsons, Aarons and Reggie and Bo Jacksons have given them when they are praised by the establishment press and public.  OK, a ticket costs more, but the rewards are greater, too.  Besides, a ticket at the NEC is not less than one at, say, Playwrights Horizons or the Circle Repertory Company.  

No, I think that the minority and female audiences and artists will applaud when Samm-Art Williams is produced at the Arena or the Guthrie or the American Repertory Theatre as often as Tennessee Williams, when David Henry Hwang is seen as often as David Mamet, when Eduardo Machado is staged as often as Edward Albee, when Tina Howe is on the bill as often as Sidney Howard, even if that means that companies devoted especially to their interests disappear.  We make trade-offs in life all the time, though I doubt this one will be necessary.

For my part, I have seen all kinds of interracially cast shows, and some have worked better than others for me.  More have worked than not, and usually the biggest problems for me have been acting and directing, not casting.  Take the Folger’s Othello that bothered Mr. Ehrlich.  I see Hal Scott’s point in casting Andre Braugher as Iago: it made the play about jealousy and betrayal rather than racial hatred.  I understand Shakespeare’s play that way anyway, so Scott’s decision reinforced the original point for me, and diminished an imposed interpretation that has accrued in more modern times.  

Mr. Ehrlich argues that making both men black reduced the plausibility of Othello’s being fooled by Iago—they would be too tuned in to one another.  My God, has one white man never been betrayed by another and not known it?  By Mr. Ehrlich’s argument, King Edward and the Duke of Clarence should both have foreseen Richard’s treachery in Richard III, and Duncan, Banquo and Macduff should have all suspected Macbeth right away.  They were not just the same race, they were related, after all.  Mr. Ehrlich’s argument does not hold much water, and Braugher’s performance was fine.  My objection was to Avery Brooks’s Othello.  I thought he was weak and wimpy—an atrocious impression for an actor as strong as Brooks.  I never understood what happened there, but it took the center out of the play for me: a weak Othello is not much of a challenge for any Iago, white or black.

Nontraditional casting, even color-blind casting, depends for its success mostly on the talent of the actors cast in each role and less on their race, gender or degree of physical disability.  It also depends on the willingness of the audience to put aside certain assumptions and preconceptions, and that takes time.  If you let it, however, this kind of casting can add a wonderful new dimension to a play, as well as provide a terrific performance that otherwise would not have been possible.  The Folger did an Antony and Cleopatra a few years ago with Franchelle Stewart Dorn as the Queen.  She was stunning in the role.  Now, there is some argument that Cleopatra was black, or at least dark-skinned, though I doubt it.  (Her dynasty, the Ptolemys, was brought from Greece, and she was apparently red-haired; the signature black hair-do was a wig.)  But she and Antony were from different worlds, and making hers “black” and his “white”—without modern racial overtones—separated them in an interesting way.

In fact, Mr. Ehrlich, himself, describes the successes of both the Our Town and the Pygmalion at the Arena, and there have been many others which audiences and critics alike have enjoyed and praised.  These very successes justify the productions and the nontraditional casts that overcame reservations with talent and skill.  The next time those spectators see an interracial production, they will be less confused, and the next time less still, until the race of the actors ceases to be an important factor.  That is how it is supposed to work.  Resident companies like the Arena Stage and Shakespeare Theatre have a responsibility to expand their audience’s cultural horizons, not pander to them.  If their goals are righteous, and Mr. Ehrlich has acknowledged that these goals are, then each successful attempt is an advance; failures are merely cause to examine the tactics, not abandon the endeavor. 

In the end, nontraditional casting is an acquired taste.  Mr. Ehrlich draws a distinction between theater and opera, saying that we accept racially alogical casting in the latter because we are more interested in the singing than the acting.  I am not sure that is supposed to be the case (opera companies are working on their acting these days, with stage directors brought in from the theater), but even if it is, we can learn to accept racially alogical casting in the theater, too, when it does not actually contravene the play’s point.  There were no black, Hispanic or Asian opera singers when that form was developed in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries; we got used to them and value their talent as part of our cultural treasury. 

In fact, throughout theater history, audiences have accepted all kinds of things outside of ordinary logic.  Some are so commonplace, we do not even think of them: Chekhov’s characters ought all to be speaking Russian, Ibsen’s Norwegian and Schiller’s German, but we have no problem when we hear them plainly in English.  Others seem very strange to us today: the Greeks and the Elizabethans accepted men and boys as female characters; in the 18th century, spectators sat on stage with the actors.  Some changes have occurred within our own memories: for centuries, western audiences accepted a white man in black-face as Othello and no one squawked until recent decades (as they would today, and loudly, Mr. Ehrlich, if white singers in black-face did Porgy and Bess).  In theater, as in life, we get used to new things—even those we resist strenuously at first.  As someone once said to me: The truth changes.  Mr. Ehrlich will probably someday find himself out of date.
                                                                                                              
                                                                                                              Sincerely,
                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                              R****** *. K*****

*  *  *  *
EDWARD II
Christopher Marlowe
Shakespeare Theatre Company
Sidney Harman Hall
4 February 2008

Sidney Harman Hall, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s new space, was being inaugurated with two less-often staged Christopher Marlowe (baptised 1564, d. 1593) works, and the production of Tamburlaine (c. 1587-88) was starring my former Rutgers instructor, Avery Brooks, so my mom and I got tix for it. 

(Brooks, who taught movement in the MFA theater program at Rutgers when I was one of the first students at what became the Mason Gross School of the Arts—it was just the School of the Fine and Performing Arts while I was in residence—has returned to Washington often to perform at the STC since his first appearance as Othello at its predecessor, the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger.  He reprised the role in a later production at the STC.  He’s best known, I suppose, as TV’s tough guy Hawk in Spenser: For Hire and its spin-off, A Man Called Hawk.  He was also Capt. Benjamin Sisko on the long-lasting series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.) 

My mother and I expected to see Tamburlaine on Thursday, 27 December [2007], but several weeks earlier, Brooks injured himself at his home in Washington and broke three ribs.  (The papers only reported that he’d had an accident—the details were never released, as far as I know.)  In an unfortunate coincidence, Brooks’s understudy had had a family emergency and had had to leave town and the new understudy had not had time to learn the part, so performances were canceled for weeks. 

It was day-to-day by the time I got to D.C., but when we called STC to determine if Brooks would be back on stage or if the understudy would be taking the part, the theater reported that the performances of Tamburlaine were still canceled and no date was projected for a return, so we exchanged our seats for tickets to the other Marlowe in the rep, Edward II (c. 1592)

(As it happened, Brooks did return to the stage shortly after that, but it was too late for us to get new seats and STC didn’t extend the run to compensate for the lost performances.  I never got to see my former teacher on stage this time—I had seen him do Othello opposite Andre Braugher as Iago a decade or so ago.  It would have been an interesting experience, but, as that great philosopher Mick Jagger once said, “You can’t always get what you want.”) 

We saw Edward II, which got the better review in the New York Times (Charles Isherwood paid a visit to the Nation’s Capital for a few columns late last year) at the mat on Saturday, 29 December.  Neither my mother nor I had been to the new STC space on NW F Street, sort of around the corner from STC’s older, 7th Street site in downtown Washington; the Marlowe rep opened the new theater.

Harmon Hall is high-tech in design as seems to be the going style (many of the newer spaces in the Times Square area, as well as the theaters at 59 E. 59th Street, are similarly constructed of etched glass and perforated steel.)  This is the old shopping district of downtown Washington: the Lansburgh Theatre is so named because it occupies the space where the former Lansburgh department store used to be. 

I assume most people know the basic plot of Edward (or can read it somewhere), so I’ll cut to the chase.  Never having seen Edward or even read it previously, I don’t know if director Gale Edwards emphasized the love affair of King Edward (1284-1327; reign: 1307-27) and the commoner Piers Gaveston, but it was central to this production.  The homosexuality isn’t supposed to be terribly significant—though I can’t imagine that Queen Isabella’s decision to shift her allegiance from her husband to his rival, Mortimer, and even become his lover isn’t impelled by the sense that she’s not only been put aside, but for another man. 

The nobles of Edward’s court are angered not by the affair, they say, but by the fact that Gaveston is raised up not only over their heads, but far above his station.  (It doesn’t help matters that Gaveston is . . . French!)  Just as Iago is more incensed by jealousy than racism (a fact given great credence by the 1990 STC production in which Avery Brooks played opposite Andre Braugher’s black Iago), Edward’s nobles are more enraged by his audacious advancement of a plebe than they are by the fact of his gay affair. 

As the King and his lover, Wallace Acton and Vayu O’Donnell behaved much like two college boys having a fling—though O’Donnell appeared to play Gaveston as something of an opportunist, basking in the control he has over Edward and the authority he gains over the court.  At times, he seemed to be genuinely in love with Edward; at other times, he could almost have been playing gay for pay, as it were. 

Edward and Gaveston were both arrogant and petulant like little boys, flaunting not only their affair (there’s a party scene that rivals anything imagined at Plato’s Retreat back in the go-go ’80s) but their power.  On this level it’s not at all out of line for the nobles to react with rebellion.  It’s like a frat in which the prez elevates a lowly pledge over the senior brothers—whooaaah!  Being Marlowe, whose poetry my friend Leo Shapiro, an experimental theater director, characterized as “this sort of wild beast that Shakespeare domesticated,” everyone overreacts to the max.  (The frequent fights and several battles were nicely choreographed by Rick Sordelet.) 

This dynamic is somewhat reinforced by Murrell Horton’s costumes, which were sort of ’30s modern.  There were also lots of varied military uniforms like a Russian play—every nobleman had his own color and cut—and some outrageous party duds, such as the gold suit with angel wings in which Gaveston returned to court after his exile.  (The Times said this last looked like a gay Mardi Gras party.)  

The production had the look and something of the feel of a Noël Coward version of Richard II on ’roids.  The Post’s review drew a connection to a more recent Edward—Edward VII, who abdicated the English throne “for the woman I love” in 1936—but I don’t know if this was in director Edwards’s or designer Horton’s mind or just in critic Peter Marks’s.  I suppose an argument could be made for finding a parallel between one king loving a divorced American and the other a male French commoner.  They both had their consequences, didn’t they? 

It’s also likely that the modernization of the play helped soften the impact of the overt relationship between Edward and Gaveston, which might seem more acceptable in the mid-20th century than in the 14th.  In the end, however, as well as Edwards managed Marlowe’s untamed beast, Edward II just has too much plot.  (I sound like a character in Amadeus: “Too many notes!”)  Too much is going on, too many intrigues and plots, and too many of the characters seem to be clones of one another—Shakespeare’s people are just more differentiated and therefore easier to keep track of—I kept getting lost in it all. 

I mean, it’s easy enough to follow the basic story—Edward loves Gaveston, the nobles want Gaveston gone, they conspire and depose Edward, and so on—but along the way to that conclusion, there are so many little twists, turns, and reversals that I kept forgetting who was on top and who was doing what to whom.  (So to speak.) 

This, of course, isn’t Edwards’s fault, and she did a damn good job of keeping the whole mishegoss swirling and roiling; but it makes for a somewhat tiring evening in the theater, trying to keep up with all the goings-on.  At the same time, the play’s very one-note; Shakespeare’s are more multifarious and complex.  (I had the same sense with The Jew of Malta as compared to The Merchant of Venice which I saw in rep at New York’s Theatre for a New Audience in March 2007.  [See my reports posted on ROT on 15 February 2020 and 28 February 2011, respectively.]) 

The cast, especially Acton and O’Donnell, were fine.  (They’re both little blond guys—the Times said they’d look great on top of a gay wedding cake!)  I thought Deanne Lorette was weak as Isabella in the first act or so, but she manned up later and did a creditable Goneril-lite.  Given Edwards’s apparent stylistic aim—a kind of effete, jazz-age brutality-manqué (in spite of the severed heads and such), it was perhaps inevitable that the men would come off as slightly fey—I don’t think Marlowe had that in mind. 

I know that costuming can have an effect on an actor, even if he doesn’t intend it to.  (I once did a Macbeth which we costumed as sort of Scottish Vikings—all pelts and leather.  Man, did we feel macho!  Very “Iron John.”  Maybe Edwards’s image ought to have been more Brokeback Mountain.)  In the end, though, the production was more than enjoyable as both an introduction to Marlowe’s play and an evening in the theater.

*  *  *  *
TWELFTH NIGHT
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare Theatre Company
and
McCarter Theatre (Princeton, New Jersey)
Sidney Harman Hall
9 January 2009

In part because of the season and in part because of ticket prices, my mother and I saw only one stage performance while I was in Washington for the winter holidays [2008-09].  (There were no other interesting performances on stage except the Broadway-bound revival of West Side Story which Arthur Laurents is directing at the National Theatre.  But the production was asking in excess of $100 apiece [worth about $120.58 in 2020] for the cheapest seats during Christmas week, so we passed on that even though I’ve never seen WSS on stage.) 

The Shakespeare Theatre Company, however, was presenting Twelfth Night (in association with Princeton’s McCarter Theatre), my second favorite Shakespeare play (Much Ado is my favorite) and offered a New Year’s Eve performance, an evening we like to go to theater before seeing in the new year.  So that’s what we did, hying ourselves off to the still relatively-new Sidney Harman Hall (where I last saw Marlowe’s Edward II just about a year earlier).

I had some trepidations about this production, even though I adore the play.  (It has just always tickled me ever since I read the Charles and Mary Lamb Tales from Shakespeare back when I was in middle school.)  I had seen the STC’s Taming of the Shrew by the same director, Rebecca Bayla Taichman, and disliked it rather thoroughly, as you all may recall (just before Thanksgiving Day in 2007).  [See my report on this Shrew on Rick On Theater on 8 April 2019.] 

I didn’t like her concept for the theme and design of the play and though she’d gotten near rave reviews for a previous gig (Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House at D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth in 2005), I’d never seen any of her work other than Shrew and I was afraid she’d play inappropriate games with Twelfth Night, too.  Well, she didn’t.  In fact, she staged it pretty much straight, and it was terrific. 

(Now, don’t start thinking I object out of hand to messing about with Shakespeare because I don’t.  I’ve enjoyed many even fairly outrageous interpretations of Shakespearean stuff from the Royal Shakespeare Company—a magnificent psychedelic Troilus and Cressida back in the summer of 1969—to New York showcases with no budget—a fascinating Macbeth by a troupe called the New Rude Mechanicals in the ’80s.  I just demand that something interesting—not even profound, mind you—come out of it.  I’ve also seen some pretty dumb stagings that didn’t make any sense, and Taichman’s Shrew fell into that category.  It just happens that this time, she didn’t do anything idiosyncratic, and that turned out to be just fine.)

[I have no record of that RSC Troilus and Cressida in the ’60s, but the Macbeth mentioned is discussed in the my “Shakespeare Performance Journal” from the NYU writing class I mentioned earlier.  I posted most of those comments in “Time & Place; Concept & Style” (30 October 2012), in the sections “Weird Sisters, Good Ideas” and “What Is Period Costume?”; that production also gets passing mention in “Two Pairs of Shakespeares from the Archives” (4 August 2019), in the section on the RAPP Theater Company’s Romeo and Juliet.]

Okay, to be precise, Taichman did a little visual interp—but that’s all it was: all visual.  First of all, she costumed the characters (with the help, obviously, of designer Miranda Hoffman, who had also done Taichman’s costumes for Shrew) in vaguely 19th-century garb, essentially late Victorian, I’d say.  (Some of the gowns worn by Olivia (Veanne Cox) and her ladies looked a little 1950s-prom-like, and it seemed that Olivia had bought a whole rack of the same dress in every color, including both black—for mourning—and white—for her wedding—but none of this was detrimental.) 

Taichman’s only thematic device, also entirely visual, was ubiquitous rose imagery.  The set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, was abstract with realistic furniture pieces flown or carried in to create each setting.  The background, dominated by a steeply sloping rear wall/scrim, was decorated with panels depicting roses (similar panels carried by the three comic gentlemen in the Malvolio letter scene served as their “hiding” place) and at appropriately romantic moments, rose petals fell gently from the flies.  None of this ever reached the egregious level of the commerce imagery Taichman had shoehorned into Shrew that so exercised me.  It didn’t add much to the production, but it ultimately didn’t detract from it.  I’ve already made more of it than I should have, really.

The acting was uniformly good, but the comic roles were especially well played.  Malvolio was played by Ted van Griethuysen, a longtime Washington actor of usually serious mien—kings and nobles and such.  At 74, however, he handled the figure of fun that Malvolio is—and the physical comedy that can go with it—with ease and grace. 

Floyd King, another long-popular Washington actor, took on Feste and may have channeled Harpo Marx some (in a costume—especially his hat—I’m sure was intended to recall Harpo).  He put over Feste’s word play and made a diverting and touching fool.  (The music for Feste’s songs, by composer Martin Desjardins, was often bittersweet and moving.) 

Rick Foucheux (Sir Toby) and Tom Story (Sir Andrew) pulled off the low comedy the roles demand delightfully, assisted in their tomfoolery by Nancy Robinette as Maria.

The lovers were fine, especially Samantha Soule as Viola.  She’s a tiny lady, but she performed with terrific energy and verve, which worked very well in this role.  (Except for one, somewhat disconcerting disconnect that was no one’s actual fault: Soule’s so small that dressed as Cesario, she looks more like a young boy than a young man.  Both Olivia and Orsino (Christopher Innvar) ought to have been ashamed of themselves!) 

No one, including Taichman, really did anything out of the ordinary, but everything was solid and consonant with the timbre and tone of the play.  If this sounds like damning with faint praise, it’s not meant to: Taichman and her cast assembled an outstanding rendition of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy and an excellent theater evening.

I might have distrusted my own response to this Twelfth Night because of my prejudice for the play.  You all know how I am with old-time musicals—I have no distance from them and often can’t separate the plays from the productions. 

Not only, however, did everyone to whom I spoke say they also loved this production, and my mother was also pretty effusive, but both the Washington Post and the Washington Times praised it.  (The Times is a staunchly conservative paper published by the Moonies.)  The Post didn’t like those design elements I mentioned, but I think Peter Marx, the reviewer, made too much of Taichman’s visual excesses.  As he also points out, however, “The actors . . . are very capably steered.”

21 April 2020

"Terrence McNally's lifetime award speech at the Tonys was ignored — but it was the most important of the night"

by Chris Jones

[The playwright Terrence McNally  (1938 -2020) died on Tuesday, 24 March, at 81.  

[On Sunday, 9 June 2019, McNally had been honored at the 73rd Annual Tony Awards with a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre.  The award citation reads:

Terrence McNally has had a remarkably far-ranging career, including at least one new work on Broadway in each of the last six decades.  A revival of his play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune begins performance on Broadway on May 4, starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon.  In 2018 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He is a recipient of the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award.  He has won four Tony Awards for his plays Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and his musical books for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime.  He has written a number of TV scripts, including “Andre’s Mother,” for which he won an Emmy Award.  He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards from the Dramatists Guild.  In 1996 he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.  He wrote the libretto for the operas Great Scott and Dead Man Walking, both with music by Jake Heggie.  Other plays include Mothers and Sons; Lips Together, Teeth Apart; The Lisbon Traviata; A Perfect Ganesh; The Visit; The Full Monty; Corpus Christi; Bad Habits; Next; The Ritz; Anastasia; It’s Only a Play; Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?; and The Stendhal Syndrome.

[On 12 June, Chris Jones, a Chicago Tribune theater reviewer, published the following article.  I’m running it on Rick On Theater as a belated tribute to the dramatist the New York Times called the “Tony-Winning Playwright of Gay Life.”  ~Rick]

“Lifetime achievement,” said the writer Terrence McNally at the Tony Awards last weekend. “Not a moment too soon.”

That dry opening joke by the 80-year-old author of such dramatic masterworks as “Master Class,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” and the criminally underappreciated “Mothers and Sons,” not to mention the books to the musicals “Ragtime,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and “The Full Monty,” and the libretto to the opera “Dead Man Walking” and countless other screenplays, teleplays and other works, was about the most awkward gag of the night.

Why? Clearly the ever-impish and self-aware McNally was acknowledging his own mortality. And in America, at this moment, nothing seems to make an awards show crowd less comfortable. It’s hard to come out in your fancy clothes and roar for youth and change, to take down the old guard, when the old guard is not necessarily looking so good.

McNally had taken a while to walk out on stage, leaving the award’s presenter, Karen Olivo, to nervously stare at her monitor. And he came out with attached breathing apparatus, tubes dangling, as if with a certain intentionality. In play after play, McNally wrote about gay Americans confronting early deaths that could have been avoided, had people outside the theater industry given more of a darn. His own appearance put that back in mind. Broadway artists love to complain about the grip of the patriarchy. But an inconvenient truth is that the patriarchy — if you mean straight, white, WASP-ish men — never gave two shakes about the theater. This industry was never banking, or even Hollywood.

Broadway always was the home of outsiders. In fact, Broadway largely was the creation of outsiders, especially gay men. They were the ones who composed most of the musicals, choreographed most of the dance numbers, wrote a whole lot of the plays. They ran things, too. And they were most of the critics. (They still are).

This remarkable community, often under duress, sometimes working while dying, built a stable, billion-dollar industry for the rest of America and, as the now-cliched Tonys speech about the kids watching at home goes, in the process made a lot of people in the hinterlands feel less alone.

They taught us all how to love. And, yes, how to die. For, as Tony Kushner once said to me, we only learn how to deal with grief and loss by hearing the survival stories of others.

It’s fair enough to argue that much must now change for all kinds of good reasons, that opportunities must be broadened, but the lack of gratitude to these forefathers expressed by many young progressives is nothing short of breathtaking. There is a chronic misunderstanding of history. The Broadway establishment has always been composed of rebels and outcasts — without whom, the misery of the era of AIDS would have been so very much worse. These gay men saved lives.

But back to McNally, a lifesaver himself.

Many an outre fashion statement was photographed and breathlessly described at the Tonys. But nothing shuts people up like a breathing tube. No one wants to tweet about that. Almost no one did. Especially since McNally appeared in stark contrast to an image of the writer that had shown up a few weeks earlier in a glossy New York Times Style Magazine shoot, which had made him look 20 years younger.

Now you might well have watched the Tony Awards on Sunday night (assuming you weren’t part of the 14 percent of viewers of last year’s ceremony who had dropped away) without seeing what I am describing. McNally’s award, and thus his speech, did not appear in the broadcast portion of the evening, which tells you right there how much we value lifetime achievement these days.

Of course, lifetime achievement awards are complicated for artists. Upon receiving one, David Mamet once said to me: "The idea of life achievement only means one thing to the artist. ‘Don’t you think that’s just about enough?’ The healthy artist would respond, ‘I’ll be the judge of that. At some point, I’ll leave. But you’ll have to kill me.’"

Mamet was exactly right.

But I found what McNally had to say (I was watching it live) to be far and away the most powerful part of the evening. He did not quip like Mamet; clearly, McNally had decided this was the moment to define his life.

The speech was little more than three minutes. Yet this was the most beautiful recounting of one of this nation’s most distinguished artistic careers.

“Theater changes hearts,” he said, struggling to fully breathe his way through his words. “That secret place where we all truly live.”

McNally found time to speak of early failure and how John Steinbeck told him to get back on his horse: “If you ain’t been throwed, you ain’t rode.” He recalled how much the artists of a previous generation had meant to him as a small boy. He revealed that his father, after watching “Death of a Salesman” and seeing a traumatic vision of what happens to so many of us later in an American life in an American business, had quit his job and struck out on his own.

He talked about his pride in “softening the hearts” of unforgiving parents, which is about as noble a quest for an artist of any one could imagine. He told young artists that he was part of a writing club with open admission: “The only dues are your mind, your soul and your guts. All of you.”

“The world needs artists more than ever,” McNally said, “to remind us what truth and beauty and kindness really are.”

And he finished with a quote from the last act of “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s late, great world of personal legacy: “O brave new world that has such people in it.”

I thought at first McNally was talking about the theater in the self-congratulatory way theater people often do.

But no. He had a broader purview.

“Shakespeare was talking to all of us,” McNally said. “No one does it alone.”

Right. Whatever you do.

What an achievement. What a life.

[Terrence McNally was born on 3 November 1938 in St. Petersburg, Florida, but raised in Corpus Christi, Texas (the setting—and one level of the title-reference—for his controversial 1998 play, Corpus Christi).  He moved to New York City in 1956 to go to Columbia University (class of 1960, Phi Beta Kappa). 

[He went to Mexico after graduating to work on his writing, returning to New York when a play he’d submitted to the Actors Studio was rejected for production but attracted the Studio’s attention to his potential. 

[Openly gay, he began a personal and professional association with Edward Albee and later actor Robert Drivas.  (McNally married Thomas Kirdahy, a public-interest lawyer, in 2010, following a seven-year civil union.) 

[What would have been the writer’s first major project was the book for the 1968 musical Here's Where I Belong (based on John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden), but McNally had his name removed from the credits.  (The show closed after a single performance.)  He gained critical attention for his Off-Broadway plays like Next (1969) and The Ritz (1975), and became recognized as a presence on the American stage with 1987’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune Off-Broadway (and the successful 1991 film adaptation starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer).  In 2002, the play was revived on Broadway for 243 performances.

[McNally’s gone on to win acclaim for both the books of musicals (The Rink, 1984; Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1993; Ragtime, 1998 ) and non-musical scripts (The Lisbon Traviata, 1989; Lips Together, Teeth Apart, 1991; Love! Valour! Compassion!, 1995), winning four Tonys (in addition to the Lifetime Achievement Award) and three Drama Desks, among many other kudos; McNally even won a 1990 Emmy for Andre’s Mother, an AIDS-related tale broadcast on the PBS series American Playhouse. 

[Then in 1998, the playwright stirred up a storm of protests and counter-protests with Corpus Christi, his contemporary retelling of Jesus’ birth, ministry, and death in which Jesus and his disciples are all depicted as gay. 

[The Catholic Church condemned the play, death threats were sent to McNally (who even received a fatwa from a British imam) and the Manhattan Theatre Club, the company producing the première, and anyone connected to the production. 

[Right-wing pundits and commentators wrote against the play—without ever having seen or even read it—and leftists defended it on principal, also before any public performance or the publication of the text.  (I have written about this incident in “The First Amendment & The Arts” on ROT; see 8 May 2010.)  

[The theater postponed the presentation, but First Amendment advocates and theater artists across the country objected to the cave-in and the play was rescheduled.  Subsequent productions of Corpus Christi attracted similar controversy, including legal action to prevent public money from being spent on them at institutions that receive federal or state subsidies.  (Some suits were defeated by the productions’ backers and others succeeded.)

[McNally won, in addition to the Tonys, the Obies, and the Emmy, many other awards, including Lucille Lortels and Drama Desks.  He was also nominated for a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for A Perfect Ganesh. 

His last Broadway project was the revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune last June and July.  He also wrote the book for the musical Anastasia, which ran for 808 regular performances and 38 previews in 2017-19.  Off-Broadway, McNally last wrote Fire and Air in 2018, premièred at the Classic Stage Company.

[McNally survived lung cancer in the late 1990s and suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from that time on.  He died at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida on 24 March from complications of the coronavirus.

[I saw six McNally plays or musicals and appeared in one of his one-acts as a grad student.  The only two, however, for which I have reports, both on ROT, are The Stendhal Syndrome (2004), posted on 15 June 2019, and And Away We Go (2013), 5 December 2013.]