[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.”
