James Shapiro’s Shakespeare

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk’s an insatiable reader even in ordinary times, but the enforced leisure (if that’s even the right term) of the pandemic shut-down has given him time and the inclination to do more reading.  And thank goodness for that lagniappe.  The Max Beerbohm article he contributed to Rick On Theater on 2 November was the consequence of his having just read a book (or several, I’m not sure) on the man. 

[Now comes another guest-post Kirk drew from his reading.  He just finished four books by Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro and he’s composed a sort of book review of three Shakespeare volumes and one on the Passion Play of Oberammergau.  As you’ll see, Shapiro takes uncommon approaches to his Shakespeare studies; combined with Kirk’s own habitually unexpected perspective, “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” will be a most interesting read, whether you’re a Bardolater or not.] 

Books of James Shapiro Discussed Below:

Oberammergau. Vintage Books, 2000.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. HarperCollins, 2005.

Contested Will. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2010.

The Year of Lear. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015.

 *  *  *  *

The plays and life of William Shakespeare (1565-1616) are inexhaustible subjects, his plays because they are so numerous and so rich, his life because so little is known about it. One person who has done a great deal to close the gap between the two is the writer James Shapiro (b. 1955), who is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

I first became aware of Shapiro’s books inadvertently. Killing time while someone was completing house repairs, I glanced at a library shelf and saw a book called Oberammergau, aptly described as “The troubling story of the world’s most famous passion play.” I had no idea I owned this book and no idea where it came from.

Its subject is the famous play based on the New Testament’s gospel accounts which has been performed in the small town of Oberammergau, in Bavaria, Germany, roughly every decade for the last four centuries or so. Half the town’s citizens perform in the play, which was supposedly first created as a response to the plague, and by all accounts it can be quite stirring.

It has also been, throughout its history, horribly anti-Semitic, and the struggle to eliminate or at least mitigate those elements in the play is the subject of Shapiro’s book. He does a fine job of reporting, and he puts his finger on what seems to me to be the center of the problem it discusses:

For all the ecumenical attention to a shared spiritual heritage, the play forces Jews and Christians to face the painful fact that they read differently, and that a single version of the founding story of Christianity cannot be comfortably shared.

However true this may or may not be, and whether or not it is the last word on the subject, I was impressed by Shapiro’s thoughtfulness and his ability to put himself in many other people’s shoes. So I was delighted to have read the book.

Then, to my further surprise, I found another book by Shapiro on my shelves that I did not remember reading, much less owning, although since there is a bit of underlining in it I may have. That book is A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Shapiro begins by making it clear that “we don’t know very much about what kind of friend or lover or person Shakespeare was.”

I can’t report what Shakespeare ate or drank or how he dressed, but I can establish some of the things he did this year [1599] that were crucial to his career, what he read and wrote, which actors and playwrights he worked with, and what was going on around him that fueled his imagination. . . . I hope to capture some of the unpredictable and contingent nature of daily life too often flattened out in historical and biographical works of greater sweep. . . . I end up focusing more on things that can be dated, such as political and literary events, rather than on more gradual and less perceptible historical shifts – though because Shakespeare’s plays are remarkably alert to many of these, I do my best to attend to them as well.

And he sensibly proposes to avoid “awkwardly littering the pages that follow with one hedge after another – ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘it’s most likely,’ ‘probably,’ or the most desperate of them all, ‘surely . . . .’

And then we’re off, on the most interesting and exciting presentation of Shakespeare’s life that I’ve read, matched only in my reading by his follow-up book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

The choices of 1599 and 1606 are not arbitrary. Although scholars differ on estimated dates for Shakespeare’s plays, Shapiro follows substantial scholarly opinion that 1599 saw the writing and/or first performances of Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet.

1606, in its turn, saw the advents of King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. It makes sense, as Shapiro tells the story, that these seven masterpieces arise in a period of notable, important, and often deeply upsetting events in the history of England and its neighbors Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It was certainly a dramatic time.

1599 was the year in which Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603; reigned 1558-1603) tried to crush a ferocious rebellion in Ireland by sending there a reluctant Duke of Essex and an equally reluctant ad hoc army, with appalling results. Although Shapiro does not make this comparison, the Irish situation was basically England’s Vietnam War of its time.

The health of the Queen, nearing the exhausted end of her reign amid suspense about who would succeed her, was also on everyone’s mind. And nobles and citizens alike thought it likely that Spain would try to invade the country again (everyone thought they knew exactly when), as it had tried to do in the famous Great Armada of 1588.

1606 was even grimmer, introduced as it was by aftershocks from the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the King, Parliament, and most of the rest of the government, a scheme uncovered in late 1605. Although the plot did not succeed, the resulting panicked activity brings to mind an equivalent mood in the United States following the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Partly as a result of the Gunpowder Plot, Elizabeth’s successor, James I (1566-1625; reigned in England, 1603-25), found himself trying to balance political and religious disputes. And in the second half of the year, the situation was complicated by a serious outbreak of the plague.

Shapiro effectively draws us into these stories with detailed and vivid descriptions of events, so it’s hard not to feel we’re learning what it must have been like to be there. I have seen comments on these two books complaining that Shapiro spends too much time describing events like the Gunpowder Plot, as though his only intention were to give an historical narrative. I find these complaints off the mark for two reasons.

In the first place, Shapiro handles beautifully the historian’s dilemma – to concentrate on the great sweep of history, or on the experiences of the “common people” of the time. Shapiro gives us in detail both the objective side of events and the way they may have looked “at ground level,” at the level they would have manifested themselves to obscure but real people who were affected by them.

In the second place, the fact is that in both these years we don’t know much about Shakespeare except that he was writing and at least to some extent acting. Shapiro makes it clear that he doesn’t want to try to describe “what Shakespeare might have been thinking,” and he usually avoids it.

However, he can and does describe where Shakespeare would likely have been at the time of those events, and the results are revelatory.

To give one example, people sometimes wonder where Shakespeare got the impressions of court life that are so convincingly embodied in his plays. Shapiro provides multiple answers. He demonstrates that London was essentially a fairly small place, with a population of around 200,000. Shakespeare would have known members of the nobility.

And Shapiro makes it clear that as a member of the Chamberlain’s Men, and later of the King’s Men, Shakespeare would have been inside the royal palaces many times, often in close proximity to the sovereign.

Shakespeare saw plenty of court life at first hand. He would have known other notables of the time as well – for example, he and his family were uncomfortably close to the social circles of the Gunpowder plotters, a dangerous relationship at a fraught time.

Shapiro is not a breezy writer, but I found both these books engrossing, and I will certainly reread them. Meanwhile, I have not yet mentioned an even more important aspect of his approach: the light that it throws on Shakespeare’s plays themselves.

Shapiro does not claim that Shakespeare wrote any of the plays under discussion as a direct response to historical events. Playwrights who did, like Ben Jonson (1572-1637), whose satirical play Eastward Ho (1605) was considered by the government too satirical, found themselves in jail. Elizabethan England was not a permissive state, and neither was Jacobean England.

However, Shapiro does demonstrate that Shakespeare was attuned to the social and political events and currents of his time, and that he let them flow through his plays, not explicitly taking sides, but letting immediate circumstances influence his work.

I will sketch a few of his insights. Shapiro writes of Henry the Fifth that

Conquest, national identity, and mixed origins – the obsessive concerns of Elizabethan Irish policy – run deep through Henry the Fifth and sharply distinguish it from previous English accounts of Henry’s reign.  . . . Battlefield deaths have not gentled the condition of the [non-noble] anonymous soldiers who fought alongside Henry. . . . In the end this fraternal goodwill doesn’t cut across social lines.

Shapiro sees within Julius Caesar an ongoing discussion of censorship, an issue continually faced by playwrights of his time. “No play by Shakespeare explores censorship and silencing so deeply . . .” as terrifyingly illustrated by the death of Cinna the poet, and by the executions ordered after Caesar’s death.

The trends affecting As You Like It, as Shapiro presents them, have to do with increasing sophistication in the demands on playwrights by the times and the audiences. “Flat” characters like those of The Comedy of Errors (1592-1593?), and routine romances, would no longer do. In As You Like It, Shakespeare parodies, mimics, and overturns stereotypes of romantic love and conventional comedy, even (in the person of Rosalind) calling the idea of love itself into question.

Of Hamlet Shapiro writes

What the Chamberlain’s men did to the wooden frame of The Theatre [they tore it down and moved it], Shakespeare did to the old play of Hamlet [a version now lost, apparently written around 1587]: he tore it from its familiar moorings, salvaged its structure, and reassembled something new. By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold . . . Hamlet [is] a play poised midway between a religious past and a secular future.

In King Lear Shapiro sees those two same elements in conflict, and also identifies resonances with the impact of the Gunpowder Plot, the succession to the royal throne, King James’ desire to make England, Ireland, and Scotland into one nation (“Britain”—of which Wales was already part), the plague, and heated attitudes toward witchcraft, including the King’s own opinions.

Macbeth continues those themes. In it Shakespeare carefully walks a thin line of discussion about Scottish kings (James I, of course, was a Scot like Macbeth), their weaknesses, and their murders – a very sensitive topic. And, finally,

Any play about Antony and Cleopatra would have been seen as a reflection on the past regime as well as on the present one; it would also measure how much had altered in the political landscape during those seven years.

To this brief survey of the seven plays discussed in Shapiro’s two books can be added numerous examples of Shakespeare’s involvement with his own theater company, the Chamberlain’s (and later King’s) Men, and their theater, the Globe. These details help Shapiro answer an often-heard question: did William Shakespeare from Stratford actually write the plays attributed to him?

Shapiro approaches this question, in his book Contested Will, from an interesting angle. Although he discusses the authorship question, and to my mind settles it as well as it can be settled with the available evidence, his primary focus in the book is on why the question of authorship came up in the first place.

Shakespeare had been dead for about 200 years before the discussion began in earnest, and Shapiro asks what changed during that time. What made it a subject that people began to have opinions on? Shapiro provides fascinating answers. For example, how many of these assumptions do you share?

• Shakespeare is virtually a divinity in the world of art. He is in a world by himself. No one and nothing comes close.
• Shakespeare from Stratford was too involved in the world of commerce and business to have been the great artist that we see in the plays.
• The plays show a refinement and an awareness of exalted social circles, professional specialties, and foreign countries that an ordinary citizen from Stratford could never have had.
• Aristocrats, on the other hand, are refined and aware people (particularly the candidate for authorship that an individual has in mind).
• If Shakespeare were well known at the time, his life should have been better documented.
• The world Shakespeare lived in was essentially the same as ours in the way people lived.
• Writers always reveal themselves in their writing. All writing is essentially autobiographical.
• Personal events (for example, his father’s and son’s deaths) must have affected him in the way we assume they did.
• Shakespeare’s plays show him to be a champion of social justice/rebellion/the common people/the nobles/Protestants/Catholics/whatever else is important to the biographer.
• Shakespeare was basically a person a great deal like me (whoever the “I” is that is speaking).

Shapiro demonstrates that none of these assumptions would have applied, or had a factual basis, in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, and that it is a mistake to assume that people in Shakespeare’s time lived under the same circumstances that we do. Yet all these assumptions are crucial to the authorship debate. Start to question them, and the debate loses its punch.

For me the clincher to the authorship issue is, as Shapiro expresses it:

Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, firsthand knowledge of everyone in the [acting] company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents. . . . It’s impossible to picture any . . . aristocrats or courtiers working as more or less equals with a string of lowly playwrights, especially with [George] Wilkins, who kept an inn and may have run a brothel.

Whoever wrote Shakespeare’s plays knew a lot of things, but he had inside knowledge of his own theater. The same conclusion, incidentally, is also inevitable after reading On Producing Shakespeare by Ronald Watkins (The Citadel Press, 1965).

Ultimately, it seems to me, the authorship controversy is really just a game, one that anyone can join, which is the source of the fun – but that’s all.

I called this article “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” because the temptation for each of us, and for the many, many people who have written biographies of Shakespeare, is to see him as a person very much like ourselves - whoever we are.

Shapiro does not do this. He tells us that there are only so many known facts about Shakespeare, and that we have no idea if the plays and sonnets reflect states of his mind and experience (nor do they in the works of many other artists of his time and of ours).

Nevertheless Shapiro has gone remarkably far into the world Shakespeare lived in, dealing with what we can know, and he strikes me as a reliable and valuable guide.

[I have a personal take on the "who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays" debate.  It’s irrelevant to Shapiro’s book Contested Will (I kinda like that title) or Kirk’s précis of Shapiro’s discussion.  In fact, not only do I recognize that Shapiro’s not entering into the debate about who wrote the plays, but I think, from what I glean, I agree with his notions of why the debate exists.

[I also see that, as Kirk pointed out when I expressed the thought that follows, the debate “matters” because Shapiro’s response “extends not just to the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but to conspiracy theories like the Kennedy assassination, and from there on to Trump’s ‘fake news,’ etc.”

[Such as it is, however, the authorship question is a matter of interest only to litterateurs.  We theater people look on the whole issue as both silly and meaningless.  We don’t care.  (Okay, yes—I’m generalizing.) 

[The only thing about the plays that’s important to theater folk is that they exist.  Whoever wrote them, they’re wonderful and we’re blessed just to have them to act in, watch, and read.  Period.  End of argument.  Nothing else matters and is all just masturbatory.  IMHO, naturally—but I think you’ll find that most actors, directors, and others in the business of show will agree.]

Dispatches from Israel 2

by Helen Kaye

[When Helen Eleasari offered to send me the journal of her trip to Berlin (see ROT, 22 July), she also offered some recent reviews from her job at the Jerusalem Post.  (Helen, as readers of ROT may have discerned, writes for JP as Helen Kaye; her other work, including “Berlin,” is by-lined Helen Eleasari.)  Needless to add, I jumped at the opportunity to run Helen’s reviews, both as a way to continue to broaden the selection of voices that appear on ROT and to keep posting items about cultural events from other part of the country and the world, distant from my East Coast beat.   

[Two of the reviews below, originally published in May and July this year, are of plays by 63-year-old Israeli playwright and screenwriter Motti Lerner.  “To put into context the reviews,” when Helen sent me the copy, she remarked: “Motti Lerner is an intensely political playwright whose work is controversial here as it pulls no punches, especially vis a vis the messianic religious right.”  The third notice is of a Hebrew translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (which Helen said was very hard to write).  “Omri Nitzan [the Macbeth director] is the artistic director of the Cameri,” Helen explained, “and has been for the last 15 years or so.  He's our Peter Brook, sort of.”]

Hastening the End

By Motti Lerner

Directed by Ron Ninio

Khan Theater, Jerusalem

22/5/13

The observant friends who have watched Motti Lerner’s Hastening the End are stiff with outrage. The situation, says one “is more complex. You can’t make a black or white poster out of everything.”

“Lerner is as fanatical as those he calls fanatics,” observes another. “[The play] is manipulative, things are taken out of context.”

And although this is a polemic rather than a play, and preaches to the converted, there is in it a discussion on the nature of religion, on the content of the relationship between man and the deity.

But it’s the polemic that is out front. Its attack is two-pronged. It pillories what is perceived as Jewish national religious fanaticism; the kind of fanaticism, maintains Lerner, that justifies cold-blooded murder of the ‘other’ or ‘the goy’ in the name of and sanctioned by Jewish Law, or Halacha. It also charges us with moral cowardice in that we back off, refusing to see a threat that, if permitted to rampage on, will destroy us.

The vehicle is a sort-of play within a play of a father/son relationship that goes terminally bad because religion opens a chasm between them.

Religious high-school student Yuval Rosenfeld, played with fiery conviction by Itay Zvulun, has dressed up for Purim as Baruch Goldstein, the New-York born physician who in 1994 opened fire on Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125, was in his turn slaughtered by the enraged Muslims, and thereby became a hero-martyr to the extreme religious right.

Horrified that his son could identify with a killer, playwright Hagai Rosenfeld (Nir Ron), and formerly a yeshiva teacher himself, goes in search of the truth behind the massacre, proposing to write a play on Goldstein. Ron’s style of acting always conveys much with little, and here he beautifully shows us Hagai’s mounting emotional turbulence.

Director Ninio has the actors on stage throughout on Kineret Kisch’s yeshiva-classroom set, as if they’re participating in a ‘shi-ur’, a lesson in its biblical sense. Arye Tcherner invests his two rabbinical characters with a smug sanctimony whereas Jonathan Miller’s pair of settler rabbis shows fiery certitude. As Hagai’s former yeshiva colleague, Yossi Eini creates an uneasy Rabbi Amiel astride an abyss.

Not an easy play to see but if it provokes discourse, then it has done its job.

*  *  *  *

Pangs of the Messiah

By Motti Lerner

Directed by Kfir Azulai

Beersheva Theater, Beersheva (Be’er Sheva)

8/7/13

If this Pangs of the Messiah does one thing, it gives the settlers a human face, makes us realize they’re people, not just, as many perceive them, a symbol of intransigent and messianic religious nationalism.

The play itself may center on what takes place in a family home in Samaria, but its implications are national and grim. Unless we get our own house in order, very soon we won’t have one. Is this the pang? Is the title one of grim irony? Or do we take the title literally? As birth pangs produce a child, do these pangs produce Redemption?

Rabbi Shmuel Basson (Jonathan Tcherchi), a religious and political leader in his community, is desperately working to prevent the signing of a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and not just because his community will become part of the new Palestine. He genuinely believes such a treaty will be disastrous for the Jewish people, but intends to work within the law to get what he wants. Not so some of his household.

His son-in-law Benny (Nimrod Bergman) has already served time for murdering Arabs and will contemplate whatever it takes to effect that perceived Redemption. Lerner’s recent Hastening the End (Jerusalem Khan, May ’13) that deals with the Goldstein massacre in Hebron may be seen as the inevitable outcome of this ideology.

Basson’s son Avner (Oren Cohen), whom he had sent to the US to drum up support against the treaty among American Jews, returns home with his wife Tirtza (Noa Baron), and becomes radicalized, to her horror and disgust. As the negotiations move inexorably toward the signing of a treaty, events spiral out of control and more than lives are shattered.

Violence lurks throughout: Shmuel’s youngest, Nadav (Tom Hagi) is brain-damaged. His mother Amalia (Orna Rothberg) was beaten by a soldier during the pregnancy. She gets hit again now. Nadav’s dog is injured and on and on.

These are people whom history takes and shakes as they scrabble to control events. Azulai’s direction encompasses this as does the acting. Tcherchi soars as Shmuel, a principled man whose belief and faith in what he does are genuine. As Amalia, Rothberg is focused, intent on keeping their lives together. From his first moment on stage, Hagi quietly conveys that Nadav isn’t quite all there and as Tirtza, Baron lets us feel her growing despair.

As George Santayana said: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

*  *  *  *

Macbeth     

By William Shakespeare
Hebrew by Dori Parnes
Directed by Omri Nitzan
Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv

12/7/13

 

A production must reflect its place and time says Omri Nitzan, be “here and now”. Our world is visual, immediate. Everybody knows everything all the time. The social media see to that. Hence Macbeth. It’s ironic, vulgar, cynical, violent, gaudy, paranoid, brash, and overflows its bounds, into the aisles, the wings, anywhere there’s space.

 

That’s why the report to Duncan (Eli Gornstein) of Macbeth’s (Gil Frank) prowess at the beginning of the play is almost parody; that’s why, from the beginning we realize that Macbeth is essentially a little man who gets too big for his boots – even his “throne” dwarfs him; that’s why low comedy is juxtaposed with terror; why the scenes that Shakespeare keeps offstage we see close up and personal, and why the blood motif inundates not only events but the lighting, set and clothes.

 

Nitzan’s Macbeth is true to Shakespeare’s, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, according to Polish scholar Jan Kott posits a nightmare world that is ‘steeped in blood . . . it floods the stage.’ Macbeth is about lust, about toxic ambition, about power turned to megalomania, about slaughter, about pointlessness, and for us ‘here and now’, about the nightmare world we’ve lived in since 9/11.

 

After the murder of Duncan, after the murder of Banquo (Ohad Shahar), Macbeth can say callously (and famously) “. . . I am in blood/Stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

 

He has made the choice. He made it when he killed Duncan. The greatness of Frank’s performance as Macbeth is that he makes us bear horrified witness to his trajectory from good to evil. He shows us how he chooses, lets us into the mind of an evolving monster, compelling our attention.

 

Ohad Shahar also grabs us. His Banquo is no shining moral light. No less opportunist than his colleague, he’s more cautious, willing to wait and see. Then Macbeth orders his murder. Outraged at the treachery, Banquo/Shahar bestows a gleeful and witty savagery on his ghost. There are some superb scenes in this Macbeth and the Banquet is one.

 

But the tipping point to all is Lady Macbeth (Ruthie Asarsai). She it is who goads him into the initial killing, she who reassures her panicked spouse that water will “wash this filthy witness from your hand”, she who is so intent upon the immediate goal that she does not think of consequence. She cannot bend, and so she breaks. Ruthie Asarsai reaches for the stars in this hugely demanding role and nearly gets there. What she cannot suppress is her own imagination, an attribute lacking in Shakespeare’s very literal Lady M, so that Asarsai’s Lady M becomes too vulnerable.

 

From the beginning Dudu Niv’s fine Macduff is a watcher; he’s wary, keeps his head down so he can keep it on. We watch him change as the visceral shock when he hears his family has been murdered, hits home. For the time it needs, he’ll become as vicious as his former boss.

 

Eli Gornstein shines as Duncan and the gentle Doctor.  Alon Dahan’s ‘drunken’ pseudo-gravity adds irony to the Porter’s speech and Witches Edna Balilius, Yarden Bracha and Rona Lee Shimon fling themselves gustily into their roles.

 

Travesty or triumph? This Macbeth is some of both yet more than either. Its blood-soaked darkness sheds some light on who and what we may be. And isn’t that the point?

 

[As ROTters will remember, I’ve known Helen since I directed her in a showcase of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan back in the ‘1976.  Though she was born in the U.K, Helen lived in the States for years before making her aliyah to Israel.  Aside from her writing, Helen directs plays and musicals in English.  The articles Helen’s sent me for ROT include her most recent, “Berlin,” and coverage of the 2012 Acre (Acco) Festival (posted on ROT on 9 November 2012), summer theater for children (“Help! It's August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010), and other productions like an adaptation/interpretation of The Trojan Women by Yukio Ninagawa,;The Tired Hero by Eldar Galor, and Not By Bread Alone by Nalagaat (all posted as “Dispatches from Israel,” 23 January 2013).  Helen’s JP review of Harper Regan in Tel Aviv is attached to my own report of 20 October 2012 as a comment dated 28 October.  With any luck at all, Helen will keep sending me interesting stuff to post on ROT for the benefit of its readers.] 

Time & Place; Concept & Style

[Back in 1988, I made a point for the fall to see as many different Shakespearean productions as I could find. Most were in small, often out-of-the-way spaces, frequently converted storefronts, by companies that didn’t last very long or had been formed just to present this one production. A few were major Off-Broadway productions, like the New York Shakespeare Festival, in the early months of its multi-year marathon of all 37 of the Bard’s plays (1987-97), and a couple were even out-of-town shows, such as an Antony and Cleopatra I saw at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger (the predecessor of today’s Shakespeare Theatre Company).

[The purpose of the exercise was to keep a journal of the impressions I got from the performances—not reviews or even the kinds of reports I’m now posting on ROT, but little prose pieces, no more than 500 words long, discussing the treatment of Shakespeare in stage performances. Focusing on the directorial or production concept, I described the performances principally in terms of their visual design (i.e., set, costumes, and lighting) and acting style. I spotlighted one aspect of the production—or several productions together—that made some kind of impact on me, for good or ill. Some of my observations pertained only to Shakespearean productions, others applied to the classics in general, and a few were valid for all theater work. Nonetheless, they were all expressed in the journal as commentary on American (essentially New York) Shakespearean theater.

[I’ve used bits of the journal, occasionally whole entries, as the basis of ROT articles over the 3½ years I’ve published the blog—a testimony, I think, to how fascinating the overall experience was in the end. Now I’m going to compile four separate entries with related themes and present them pretty much as I wrote them 24 years ago. I’ve included the original production information to give you an idea who I saw doing what, when I saw it, and where.]

TIME & PLACE

[On Wednesday, 21 September 1988, in the first week of my Shakespeare theater project, I saw the RAPP Theater Company’s Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46th Street in Manhattan’s mid-town Theater District. On Saturday, 24 September, in the second week, I attended another Romeo and Juliet, this one presented by the Independent Theatre Company at the House of Candles (formerly an actual candle shop) at 99 Stanton Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I wrote this entry on Sunday.]

Both the Independent Theatre Company and the RAPP Theater Company attempted to transpose Romeo and Juliet to American milieus. The rationale for this seems to have been that the directors didn’t trust either the audiences to accept and understand the play or Shakespeare to communicate with modern American audiences unless the play is moved to immediately recognizable and accessible places and times. Neither company seemed to have relocated the story in order to say something unconventional about or through the play. (The RAPP Romeo and Juliet did present a new interpretation, but the change of venue didn’t bear on this.)

Not only is this reason patently mistaken—the play’s a classic precisely because it transcends its time and place to communicate to all cultures—but such transpositions, unless they’re very carefully thought through and combined with changes in the text, usually cause incongruities in the language and actions of the plays. Insignificant by themselves, together they can jolt the spectator out of the world of the play often enough to destroy the essential connection between the audience and the play. A few cases in point:

The RAPP company wanted so much to make Romeo and Juliet American that rock music played throughout, the Capulet party was a backyard barbecue and Benvolio and Mercutio played baseball. With such a strong American environment established, references to Verona and Mantua became disconcerting. So did the presence of a Prince, since American cities don’t have princes. Moreover, I couldn’t believe that a modern, middle-class, American girl like this Juliet could ever fear ghosts to the extent that her Act IV soliloquy requires. I also wondered why Friar Laurence didn’t just pick up a telephone and call Romeo instead of trusting his explanation of Juliet’s “death” to a hand-delivered letter.

The Independent Theatre Company Americanized its production by making the characters Italian-American in the Mafia vein. This inspired particularly those playing the lower-class characters to affect Hollywood hood accents. Somehow, “What light t’rough yonda winda breaks? It is de east, and Juliet is de sun!” just doesn’t ring right. I kept flashing on the hoods in Kiss Me Kate singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” There was also a good deal of knife fighting—a suitable substitute for sword play, certainly, except that the general impression of mobsters is that they tend to duel with guns, not knives.

Often such transportations of Shakespeare to another time or place can be illuminating as well as theatrically innovative. Half measures such as these, however, don’t usually accomplish much. When Orson Welles staged his striking fascist Julius Caesar in the ’30s, he was making a comment on the times. The same director’s production of Macbeth set in a Haitian voodoo world was a carefully worked-out adjustment to make the play accessible not to black audiences but to black actors. Arthur Laurent’s transposition of Romeo and Juliet to a ’50s urban jungle for West Side Story was, of course, a complete adaptation of both language and story. None of these simply recostumed the characters and plunked them down in an alien world. And none was conceived because the producers felt that American audiences couldn’t enter Shakespeare’s world without their help. We should resent the implication that we do.

WEIRD SISTERS, GOOD IDEAS

[I saw two R&J’s during my Shakespearean journey, and two Midsummer Night’s Dream’s, but the one production of Macbeth was presented by the New Rude Mechanicals at the Pelican Studio, 750 Eighth Avenue, in the Theater District. I saw the show on Thursday, 3 November 1988, during Week 8 of my Shakespearean exploration, and wrote the journal entry on Thursday, 10 November.]

Because of his popularity and flexibility, Shakespeare may be the world’s most manipulated playwright. In addition, because of limited space, budget and technology, small companies producing him must make decisions which affect casting, too. Ideally, practicality marries art in a concept which accommodates the company’s needs while opening the play to new perceptions, uncovering buried ones, or strengthening neglected ones.

A wonderful example of this alliance occurred in the New Rude Mechanicals’ production of Macbeth. An all-around good production with strong acting and an obvious and deep respect for the material, its use and treatment of the witches was especially remarkable for its economy and sagacity.

You can’t do Macbeth without the witches, but you can do without some of its many messengers and servants. Since few Off-Off-Broadway companies can afford extras, directors simply cut these roles, give their lines to other characters, or send out actors playing other roles to perform their duties in disguise. Director John Pynchon Holms avoided all these and said something interesting at the same time. The witches—undisguised and unabashed, but unrecognized as witches by the others—were the messengers, servants, and extras.

There were three levels on which this scheme worked. First, as the messengers, the witches seeded and nurtured the plot. As the bleeding Captain, for instance, one witch reported Macbeth’s valor, putting the notion of the thane’s promotion in the King’s head. After Macbeth murders Duncan, a witch played the Old Man who relates the occult happenings surrounding the death, planting the idea that the events may not have been altogether natural.

The second level was less directly involved in the events of the play. As the various servants, such as the Porter who greets Macduff and Lennox when the murders are discovered and the waiters at the banquet where Banquo’s ghost appears, the witches’ presence suggested their control over Macbeth’s life and fate. They were always there, keeping an eye on things.

All this was simply well-planned doubling. In the third level, Holms put the witches “invisibly” on stage in portentous scenes. For instance, they watched as Lady Macbeth reads her husband’s letter about the predictions and Duncan’s arrival and when she soliloquizes while Macbeth is murdering Duncan. They hovered on the fringes of the action, staring at the focal character as if willing her or his actions. They didn’t enter into the action, though they sometimes echoed lines such as Malcolm’s “shift away” when he flees the castle after his father’s death is discovered, or made sound effects such as the knocking that unnerves Macbeth just as he’s about to murder his king.

This strategy implied that an external force had taken control of Macbeth’s life. Whether wittingly or unwittingly and whether the force was the Devil—whose putative servants witches are—or some abstract evil such as greed or ambition, we were left to choose. Still, the text, enhanced by a few unintrusive production decisions, can support this interpretation. Holms and his company didn’t merely solve some troublesome practical problems; they gave their audience something to ponder.
 

 WHAT IS PERIOD COSTUME?

[I returned to the New Rude Mechanicals’ Macbeth for another journal entry in the ninth week of my Shakespearean excursion (I kind of liked this production), composing this observation on Sunday, 13 November.]

Shakespeare’s 400-year-old locales are inevitably remote from us, but some, like Caesar’s Rome, Cleopatra’s Egypt, and Lear’s ancient Britain, were “period” settings even in Elizabethan theaters. Historians know little about the performances of that era, but they believe that the costumes were mostly 16th- or 17th-century clothing, with a few antiquarian touches for the more exotic characters. Not until the 18th century did theaters attend to historical accuracy in clothing.

So what is “period dress” for Shakespeare? Ancient Greek or Roman, or Italian Renaissance? Elizabethan? Jacobean? Take your pick.

Bigger question: Is it even necessary? Clearly not, since revealing productions of Shakespeare in this century have been mounted in modern dress, 19th- and 18th-century costume and fantasy clothing of every description, including those of Peter Brook’s now-classic circus-inspired A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If Shakespeare’s own King’s Men put no great store in period accuracy, dressing the 14th-century Richard III as a 16th-century monarch, why should we? Clothes don’t make the man; costumes don’t make the show.

So why worry? Because a bad decision can send the production down an unproductive track. Updating for the sake of superficial relevancy is a potentially fatal trap.

Other possibilities, however, can be liberating. This was the case with the recent New Rude Mechanicals’ Macbeth, whose costume design, credited simply to “deBolt,” included contemporary elements with allusions to “ancientness” and “Scottishness.” Though doubtlessly in part budgetary, the decision was made with at least a corner of an eye on artistic interpretation. Theater, after all, often makes virtues of necessity.

The basic costume for the mortal males—the witches were far more fanciful—was a foundation of modern attire draped with rough wool- or burlap-like tunics or sashes. The colors were muted, mostly charcoals, browns, or blacks, except for the almost blood-red royal sash worn first by King Duncan, then by Macbeth, and finally by Malcolm. The modern under-costume suggested general character: the more soldierly wore combat boots and bloused trousers; the more administrative, including Duncan, wore civvies. Other modern accouterments included contemporary haircuts, military field jackets, bayonets, turtlenecks, eyeglasses, and flashlights.

Because of their nondescript coloring, I paid little attention to the costumes after first remarking them. They did make their point at the outset, though. The lack of period specificity asserted that to Director John Pynchon Holms this play isn’t just about an 11th-century Scottish king; it’s relevant to today, not lost in some past era, and to all cultures, not only ancient Scotland or modern America. Simply transposing the play to contemporary America narrows it as much as some directors fear leaving it in its own period—whatever you think that is—would.

COLD WARRIORS

[On Tuesday, 6 December 1988, in my 15th week of seeing plays by the Bard, I caught the New York Shakespeare Festival’s presentation of Coriolanus, part of the company’s on-going Shakespeare Marathon. The play was staged at the Public Theater’s Anspacher Theater at 425 Lafayette Street in the East Village, and I composed the entry on Sunday, 11 December.]

Attempting the whole Shakespearean canon, some of which are overfamiliar and others not very good, probably necessitates occasionally straying from the conventional stagings of the plays. Steven Berkoff’s production of Coriolanus, New York Shakespeare Festival’s sixth in its Shakespeare Marathon, is its farthest stretch yet.

While I had mixed reactions overall, I found much of the highly stylized work theatrically very interesting. I was particularly taken with the combat scenes which seem emblematic of the overall production concept. There were three fight scenes, not counting Coriolanus’s murder at the end. One was the individual combat between Coriolanus and his Volscian adversary, Tullus Aufidius. This was followed by the victorious Roman assault on Corioli. While these were both interesting moments, the clearest example of Berkoff’s stylization came in the first battle, the initial Roman attack on the Volscian stronghold.

Berkoff’s ensemble, dressed in black shirts and trousers with high, black boots, were arrayed apparently at random around the playing area. Having been established as the Roman army, though the same nine men also played the Volscian army and the Roman citizens, the group fought an invisible enemy with mimed weapons. In moderate slow motion, much like the speed of T’ai Chi, the Chinese martial art-cum-exercise which it very closely resembles, the struggle was more like a dance than a choreographed battle in the usual sense. The movements, performed expressionlessly by the actors and different for each combatant, were repetitious and carefully controlled. They resembled fighting actions but abstracted, as if only the essence of each stroke or blow was performed. Each soldier, fighting his unseen opponent, moved very little from one spot on the stage, as if there were a nail through the sole of his boot. A few fighters did cover small amounts of space, but even this was mostly with the upper parts of their bodies; they didn’t move their feet very much except to keep their balance.

The battle was accompanied by drumming from the on-stage percussion group on a platform over the stage-right entrance. The drum for this fight was predominantly a snare-like instrument with a sharp, high-pitched thwack-thwack-thwack. The rhythmic beating, somewhat faster I think than the rhythm in which the fighters moved, not imitative of battle sounds, was also an abstraction. It might have recalled horses’ hoof beats or a volley of musket fire or even the beat of a battle drum—or perhaps a rapid, adrenaline-driven heartbeat.

The abstractness of the sound and movements, the lack of a personified enemy and the coolness of the execution created a fascinating theatrical moment. It was almost a brutal ballet, the kind of battle scene common in Kabuki or Beijing Opera whose aesthetic beauty belies the underlying violent and deadly reality. In line with the rest of Berkoff’s production, this depiction removed the heat and threat from the scene for me. There was no blood, not just because the production shunned its use, but because the warriors were bloodless. This was a true cold war, in the literal sense of the word.

'Throne of Blood' (BAM)

On Saturday evening, 13 November, my friend Diana and I drove over to Brooklyn to see Ping Chong’s staging of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. This is the great filmmaker’s 1957 adaptation of Macbeth, starring Toshiro Mifune in a masterful performance as Taketoki Washizu, the ambitious samurai who is the Macbeth character in the film as well as Chong’s stage adaptation. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the Kurosawa flick—college, I think—so I don’t remember many of the details, except that it was black and white and a driving, thrilling movie, a classic in its own right, even without Shakespeare’s poetry. Chong’s version, of course, is in English, but he doesn’t return to the Shakespearean text.

Chong’s stage version, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House over an hour and 40 minutes without intermission, was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the cast is drawn from the resident Ashland troupe. (The play ran at OSF’s Angus Bowmer Theatre from 21 July to 31 October this year.) The cast is heterogeneous so, aside from the English dialogue, Chong’s adaptation is already a step or two away from Kurosawa’s vision. Furthermore, the stage obviously can’t accommodate the sweep and visual force of Kurosawa’s film, which was almost wordless.

Chong’s Throne of Blood is a curious, but fascinating, effort. First of all, it’s not Shakespeare and it’s not Kurosawa; Chong, known for his multi-media experimental and avant-garde performances for the past 30 years, isn’t up to that level of artistry in my opinion. The only review I saw before Saturday was Charles Isherwood’s notice in the Times the day before, and he took Chong to task essentially for not doing the movie or the Elizabethan original. But if you look at Chong’s Throne of Blood as an artwork on its own, rather than an attempt to capture the essence of either of its predecessors, that doesn’t matter as much (even though Isherwood’s right in the short run). My companion was unimpressed (to put it mildly): “What do you get out of it?” she asked, after I disagreed with her negative response. A profound theatrical experience, it’s not. This isn’t West Side Story or My Fair Lady set beside Romeo and Juliet or Pygmalion. It’s also not Terrence McNally and Kander and Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman compared to the Hector Babenco film. What’s on show here are the staging techniques and the visual effects Chong devises to accomplish what Kurosawa did with his camera. And while even these aren’t fully satisfying in their execution, there are some ideas it’s intriguing to imagine in their ultimate perfection (as they probably can only be achieved on the mind’s stage).

The outlines of Shakespeare’s story are still here, as they were in Kurosawa’s film, transposed from medieval Scotland to feudal Japan. Chong, I think wisely, doesn’t revert to the playwright’s words (except for a few allusions to phrases from several plays), which would only make the play seem pretentious and more derivative than it already is. The language of Chong’s version, based on the subtitles from the film, is neither poetry nor contemporary prose. What it resembles more than anything else is the English translation of classical Japanese theater, principally Kabuki. Since Chong draws considerably on Kabuki and Noh staging traditions for his presentation, this seems appropriate to me, rather than a draw-back. It comes off as being foreign—sort of like a well-dubbed film—but neither lofty nor pretentious. It also let me remember that I was watching a performance, not a slice of reality or fictionalized history like, say, Lion in Winter or Man for All Seasons. Since there are other elements in the production that are presentational, this fits with the style I believe Chong is after.

Isherwood seemed to complain about the film sequences Chong used (designed by Maya Ciarrocchi) and the suggested scenery (by Christopher Acebo) because the one suggests Kurosawa’s cinematography without realizing its “mood and atmosphere,” and the other doesn’t evoke the “sweep and intensity” of Kurosawa’s outdoor imagery. Again, if you don’t insist on comparing this play with the film, that becomes an academic point, I think, and both work for what Chong is doing. The films, which are projected in a strip above the set, are mostly segments of nature scenery—trees in a forest, cherry blossoms, rain. These serve as fragments of projected scenery, to set the image of the terrain and the landscape the way fragmentary sets do for interiors on a stage. Some of the projections are story-related, like the moving of Spider Web Forest (the stand-in for Birnam Wood). One repeated image is the abstract ink drawing, in a style reminiscent of Japanese painting, of bare branches with two leaves that become a pair of staring eyes in a suggested face at the end of the two Forest Spirit scenes. The fact that the projections resemble film means they unavoidably call cinema to mind, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood in particular, but I don’t believe that Chong means for this technique to substitute for Kurosawa’s film work; Chong, after all, is a multi-media artist in his own right. Aside from directing, writing, and choreographing, Chong, whose parents were performers in Chinese opera (a precursor of Kabuki), is also a video installation artist. He got his start as a performer with Meredith Monk, and has worked in such diverse fields as puppetry and oral history.

As for the stage sets, it’s incontrovertible that they can’t compete with the outdoor vistas that made Kurosawa’s film so visually powerful, but since this is a stage play and not a film, no setting could, so why try to compete? The play is episodic, one of its weaknesses, so there are a lot of scene changes. The set fragments, which silently move in electronically on slides or drop down from the flies, accomplish this with alacrity and elegance, giving the impression of a place without depicting it literally. While Kabuki plays use elaborate and often quite realistic sets (Noh uses almost no scenery), this looks more like Japanese interior design—simple, unobtrusive, spare.

The acting, though, is what was interesting to me. Chong obviously wants to incorporate the stylized performance of Noh and Kabuki in his staging of Kurosawa’s semi-realistic screenplay (written by the director with four collaborators). First of all, the whole play is framed as a flashback, with a prologue and an epilogue (in Japanese with English supertitles projected on a photograph of the ruins of Spider Web Castle) that outline the backstory—and, in Brechtian manner, remind us that this is an ancient tale, not a contemporary one. This makes the play an enactment of the history of the place, a very typical Noh structure. (In true Noh, the narrator of the tale, who’s only a voice-over in Throne, transforms into the spirit of the place, often a demon or the ghost of someone connected to the story. This isn’t part of either version of Throne of Blood.) Then the music, composed by Todd Barton (who also did the sound design, which includes such effects as the sounds of weather conditions—very integral to Kurosawa’s film—nature, and horses’ hoofbeats), is recognizably evocative of Kabuki and Noh music (that is, for anyone who has a familiarity with those forms of theater, of course). There are also koken, the black-clad stage assistants of Kabuki and Noh theater, on stage several times.

The Forest Spirit, Throne’s stand-in for the witch (there’s only one instead of three as in Shakespeare), is a Noh demon, all in white with a very long, full white wig. Sitting on a small platform, the spirit turns the wheel of a loom, weaving . . . . what? A spider web? He’s in Spider Web Forest—and a familiar character in Noh and Noh-derived Kabuki is the Demon Spider (who looks a lot like this Forest Spirit). Is this spirit out to ensnare Washizu in his magical web of enticing prophesies? As portrayed by Cristofer Jean, he speaks in a rasping, unreal, stylized (and electronically manipulated) voice that is an approximation of the slow, rhythmic delivery of many Noh characters.

Lady Asaji (the Lady Macbeth character), the most Noh-infused role in the film, wears pasty makeup with stylized facial features so that her face resembles a living Noh mask. The actress (Ako, who is from Japan originally and performed there with an all-female troupe, the Takarazuka Theatre) moves with the deliberate gait of a Noh actor. These and other aspects of the performance demonstrate that Chong wants to evoke traditional Japanese theater in his staging. This is where his experiment fails for me.

Chong can’t improve on Shakespeare and he can’t duplicate Kurosawa’s masterpiece, so what would have worked for me was to see the script interpreted in a hybrid of Western and Japanese staging styles. As I said, I think that’s what Chong is attempting, but while he can get the production artists—the designers and technicians—to approximate Japanese staging techniques, he can’t make Western actors do after a few weeks of rehearsals what Japanese actors do. So, though I can see what Chong probably wants on stage (because, as some of you know, I’ve studied Asian theater, especially Kabuki, for some time), I can also tell that the performers don’t execute it precisely. It’s the difference, I’d say, between learning a language from childhood, with years of study and living among native speakers, and learning some speeches phonetically after a few months of practice and coaching. (Ako, who trained in Kabuki dance, lent her knowledge and expertise in Japanese traditional performance to the task of training the company, along with a movement coach.) I’ll give you one example. There’s limited action in the play; many scenes involve groups of characters sitting, as in the great councils the emperor holds several times. In a Kabuki play, when an actor isn’t the focus of attention on the stage, he’s absolutely still. Having struck the pose he’ll hold during that scene, often kneeling and sitting on his heels, he doesn’t move a muscle until he has lines or business. (This is a very important element of Kabuki performance, and total stillness is a skill all novice Kabuki actors must learn very early.) This stillness makes the slightest movement momentously dramatic and theatrical; but it also makes the merest twitch from an actor not in focus destructively distracting. In Throne, the actors come on stage for those councils, say, and take their positions in semi-darkness, and we can see them strike their poses, usually a wide-legged seated stance, because they do it with a sharp, deliberate movement, all executed at the same instant. But Western actor aren’t expected to be totally still under just about any ordinary stage circumstances—and no actor who’s not been trained in this technique can manage it. So while they’re sitting without moving about or turning their heads, they aren’t really still. What I believe is supposed to be a Kabuki moment just isn’t, which mars what I think Chong is aiming for theatrically.

Stillness is only the most salient of this kind of problem, the easiest to spot and to describe. There are similar issues with walking—both Noh and Kabuki have very distinctive walking styles and it looked like the cast was trying to approximate them here—and the choreographed fight sequences, which seem to be modeled on Kabuki tachimawari battle techniques. Only Ako, trained and experienced in this performance style, executes it well—and her presence on stage makes the slips and lapses of the Western actors that much more obvious. (In my studies of Asian theater, one of my teachers has been James Brandon of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His department there has a program of presenting Asian theater forms in English with American actors, and I’ve seen taped performances of Kabuki in English. Those actors, who are coached by professionals from the theater they’re emulating, have similar problems because the discipline is different.)

I think I’ve made this all sound much more disastrous than it was. I said that in my mind, I could see the perfect version of what I believe Chong wants, but for an ordinary Western viewer, I suspect none of that is noticeable. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive, or at least hypercritical. Without the execution of the Japanese traditional techniques in Throne, however, we do come back to Diana’s question: “What do you get out of it?” For whatever reason, the Japanese seem taken with Macbeth: aside from Kurosawa’s 1957 treatment, popular Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando V became the first onnagata (specialist in female roles in the all-male Kabuki theater) to portray a Western female character when he played Lady Macbeth at Tokyo’s Nissei Theatre in 1976; in the ‘70s and ’80s, director Shozo Sato created a Kabuki Macbeth (and a Kabuki Lady Macbeth); in 1986, New York’s Pan Asian Rep staged Shogun Macbeth; and in 1990, BAM imported the image-dominated, experimental Macbeth by Yukio Ninagawa. The various staging styles aside, what these adaptations all show is the universality of Shakespeare’s play about ambition and treachery, which I believe was Kurosawa’s motivation to make Throne of Blood 53 years ago. (Kurosawa’s been said to have been responding to World War II, which ended just a dozen years before he made the film. Chong has said that he sees the world today as very similarly self-destructive.) But having already demonstrated that (assuming, of course, that the very longevity of Shakespeare’s tragedy hadn’t already made that clear), why translate to the stage what Kurosawa already showed on film? Well, besides making the screenplay accessible in a different medium (not to say, a different language), I contend that it’s the staging style, the theatricality Chong envisioned, that prompts yet another go at the Scottish play à la japonaise. (At the risk of making an unnecessary, and perhaps irrelevant, joke, it begins to sound as if we’re encroaching on the territory of that silly series of ads for Starburst candy where a character calls his son a “contradiction” because he’s “Scotch-Korean.”) If that vision is badly executed, the experiment fails, I’d say. The idea’s not uninteresting, theatrically speaking, but without a much longer training time, and maybe some resident Kabuki or Noh actors in the company, I don’t think it’s viable. Still, the attempt was interesting—even a failed experiment can be worthwhile—and I don’t join my friend Diana in saying it was a painful experience. (I should probably equivocate some here: without my admittedly somewhat rare perspective, other spectators might find far less of interest in the production.)

One thing about which Isherwood was correct is that “most of the actors make little impression.” Except for Ako, as he noted, no one stands out. (Cristofer Jean gets spotlighted as the Forest Spirit, but that’s the role, not so much the performance, that’s prominent. Jean does a fine job of it, however.) Kevin Kenerly as Washizu, much like the other soldiers, has little to do but bluster and strut, He has a couple of choreographed fights with the samurai sword, and he’s convincing enough given the caveat I’ve already issued about the tachimawari, but it even took me a few scenes to be sure which actor was Kenerly as Washizu and which was Danforth Comins as Yoshiako Miki (Banquo) because there’s so little to distinguish one character from another aside from the costumes. (The costumes, which approximate 17th-century Japanese armor and other dress, are beautifully designed by Stefani Mar. They’re modeled more from museum exhibits, I’d say, than from Kabuki or Noh costumes, but they have an air of authenticity. I must add that the battle helmets are wonderfully exotic, with horns, wings, and crescents looming atop the actors’ heads.) Eventually, the plot made the distinction for me, but there’s nothing in the staging that might have approximated, say, a bombastic aragoto (“rough style”) performance from Washizu, as I might have expected in a Kabuki rendition. In fact, in several scenes of great tension with Lady Asaji, while she’s kneeling in stillness, a figure all in white (including her face makeup) except for the blood-red splotches on her kimono, Washizu paces all around her in what looked to me like aimless agitation. That weakens the character (in Kabuki terms, it almost makes him a wagoto, or “soft style,” character), which may align with psychologically realistic Western behavior, but in a traditional Japanese performance, it makes him less than the ruthless protagonist of a Shakespearean tragedy as reflected in a Kabuki mirror. Washizu’s fall is more anticlimactic here than tragic. I can’t entirely blame Kenerly for this; it looked like a directorial choice, not an actor’s; but if Chong had been true to the Kabuki or Noh style in such moments, Washizu would have stood stock still, looking like a giant in an oversized costume, or stridden across the stage in slow, heavy steps.

If Chong doesn’t entirely succeed in translating Kurosawa’s film masterpiece to the stage, he has done some intriguing work in the attempt. Isherwood called the effort “an ill-conceived theatrical enterprise,” and Diana agreed with that. The Backstage reviewer, however, asserted that the production “succeeds and then some” in its ambitious aims. I don’t agree with either estimation, but I ended feeling it was a worthwhile theater experience—although I may have had an inside track.

[For some explanation of the Kabuki terms and techniques I mentioned in this report, see my recent article, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” (1 November).]

Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage

In a New York Times essay about two decades ago, Robert Brustein took on the issue of “the reinterpretation . . . of celebrated classical plays” (“Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” New York Times 6 Nov. 1988, sec. 2 [“Arts and Leisure”]: 5, 16). Brustein divided this “deconstruction” into two categories: “the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor.” A simile production, he asserted, simply shifts the time or location to an analogous one nearer our own, while a metaphorical one examines the play from the inside, “generating provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”

Brustein cited world-famous examples of both types, like Orson Welles’s totalitarian Julius Caesar, a simile, and Peter Brook’s circus-oriented Midsummer Night’s Dream, a metaphor. I’ve recently seen prominent examples of what Brustein was describing: the Théâtre du Soleil’s 1992 Kathakali revisioning of Greek cycle of plays which recount the story of the House of Atreus, Les Atrides, a metaphor; this year’s resetting by the Katona József Theatre of Chekhov’s Ivanov to mid-20th-century Hungary, a simile; Nora, an up-dated Doll House by Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (2004), a simile; and John Jesurun's FAUST/How I Rose, a 2004 deconstruction of Goethe’s classic, a metaphor. As you might expect, some were more successful (Les Atrides, Ivanov) than others (Nora, FAUST). Do the more modest and lesser-known productions avail themselves of these tactics, and are the results similar? I think so, and some Off-Off-Broadway productions I saw some time back, when I made a concerted effort to see a broad sampling of Shakespeare productions on New York City stages, indicate that I may be right.

In two of the similes I saw, there were no profound reinterpretations, and, in a third, one given only lip-service. The first two--an Italian-American Romeo and Juliet with Paris as a Mafia godfather and the servants as musical-comedy gunsels, and a yuppie Midsummer Night’s Dream with the lovers romping through the forest in designer shorts and warm-ups--carried their reworking through mostly by costuming. In fact, the company seemed to have fallen into a trap they laid themselves (however unwittingly): by giving the play a soap-opera setting and look, the actors all exhibited soap-opera acting, the superficial, shallow, and hollow performance style necessitated by the fast-moving production process of a daytime drama. The R&J included several “dese and dose” accents among the servants, but for the rest, nothing was reinterpreted to further a new approach or shift my attention from the traditional focus. The director didn’t seem to have relocated the story in order to say something unconventional about or through the play.

A second R&J, which I discussed not long ago, did assert a new interpretation. The director’s program note explained that he saw Friar Laurence as the witting catalyst of the tragedy, and ascribed to him an un-Christian reliance on the occult. The note provided some evidence from the text for this notion, and it might well have worked theatrically, not to say intellectually, if he’d followed through with it in his production. Alas, he went no further than giving the friar the prologue and the epilogue, having him do two parlor-magic tricks, and using a violet light when the Nurse describes the natural phenomena on the night Juliet was weaned. Beyond the program note, the production, tricked up as middle-class American suburbia, showed me nothing new about this play. While Brustein notes that this kind of simile directing is “at best a platform for ideas,” with the Capulet party a backyard barbecue and the Tybalt-Mercutio duel fought with aluminum bats on a baseball diamond, this R&J was nothing more than “an occasion for pranks.”

Though a comparison of the two kinds of reworkings will have to wait until after we take a look at metaphorical directing, on the basis of this small sampling, it’s fair to draw a few simple conclusions. First, simile directors seem to strive for familiarity, all three of these choosing contemporary America for their settings or costuming. (Nora and the Hungarian Ivanov, too, were transferred to locales and times that would have been immediately familiar to their original audiences.) Second, there was a similar approach to acting, with all three casts treating Shakespeare’s language as conversational Realism. Third, either because of this or along with it, all the actors endowed their characters with a minimal emotional life. (This was not true of the two international examples.) Fourth, these directors seemed to believe that modern American playgoers can’t understand productions remote from us in time or place; that the common, human problems the classics treat can’t be communicated unless they are portrayed by people just like us.

The simile production, which Brustein saw as an update, “depends largely on external physical changes.” On the other hand, the metaphorical production “changes our whole notion of the play” by probing “the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent--a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks, since the director ‘authors’ the production much as the author writes the text.” While acknowledging that “not all examples of this process have the same integrity of purpose,” Brustein nonetheless “champion[s] a more radical auteurism in directing.” Having examined the simile, let’s look at two metaphors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream I saw (and discussed recently in another context) promised to explore the violence and animalism in all of us. Attired in tights and tee-shirts or leotards overlain with identifying character accessories--red shorts, a studded wristband--the mortals entered in pairs with martial-arts shouts and struck combat poses. During their opening lines, Duke Theseus and Hippolyta rolled on the ground in rough sex. “Tough guy” Demetrius, who, like Lysander, wore leather costume pieces over his tights, later rapes Helena to punish her for following him into the forest and dissuade her from interfering further. In the face of this, however, the acting was flat and unengaged.

The animal imagery was invoked by the fairy characters, all but one of whom had costume additions of pelts and skins and, for the men, went bare-chested. Except for one fairy, however, none exhibited any animal-like behavior.

Now humans with bestial characteristics and spirits with animal traits make a likely combination, and to explore human brutishness through the medium of a fantasy-comedy could be a very effective tactic. Theatrically, at least, it has promise. The director and actors, however, merely let the visual imagery of their costumes and blocking carry the whole exploration without developing any deeper performative aspects. The director conceived the idea but was either unwilling or unable to carry it over into performance.

Finally, in a metaphorical Macbeth, the cast and director made some decisions and ran with them. Determining, for instance, that Macbeth was in the hold of evil forces, not just swayed by the power of suggestion or caught up in a tide of action--other possible approaches--this company tripled the the witches’ appearances on stage. By acting as servants, messengers, and others and standing silently on stage during all the portentous scenes, the witches, symbols of evil, seemed to control events and guide Macbeth’s and his wife’s fates. There were three levels on which this scheme worked. First, as the messengers, the witches seeded and nurtured the plot. The second level was less directly involved in the events of the play: as the various servants, the witches’ presence suggested their control over Macbeth’s life and fate; they were always there, keeping an eye on things. In the third level, the director put the witches invisibly on stage in momentous scenes. They didn’t enter into the action, though they might echo lines or make sound effects such as the knocking that unnerves Macbeth just as he’s about to murder his king.

Further, the costumes were selected elements of modern dress draped with rough fabric to camouflage their silhouettes and allude to “ancientness” and “Scottishness.” The basic costume for the mortal males--the witches were far more fanciful--was a foundation of modern attire draped with rough, wool- or burlap-like tunics or sashes. The colors were muted, mostly charcoals, browns, or blacks, except for the almost blood-red royal sash worn first by King Duncan, then by Macbeth and finally by Malcolm. The modern under-costume suggested general character: the more soldierly wore combat boots and bloused trousers; the more administrative, including Duncan, wore civvies. Other modern accouterments included contemporary haircuts, military field jackets, bayonets, turtlenecks, eyeglasses, and flashlights. The lack of period specificity asserted that this play is not just about an 11th-century Scottish king; it is relevant to today, not lost in some past era, and to all cultures, not only ancient Scotland or modern America.

As Brustein suggests, directors who have an attraction for similes settle for an updated environment and may load their productions with tricks and gimmicks. Metaphorical directors, however, try to “capture the imaginative life of a classic.” A simile staging can be effective and even thought-provoking (the Hungarian Ivanov, which I have described in another post, was extremely compelling, for instance), but even when it misses, the metaphor production can be more powerful and exciting, particularly when the simile is used merely for “ornamental” purposes.

[Much of my discussion above was based on the Robert Brustein essay cited in the first paragraph. After publishing this article on ROT, I’ve decided to reprint Brustein’s original New York Times column; see “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” 10 March 2011.]