Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental?

(SHALIKO’S GHOSTS, 1975)

On Thursday, 6 March 1975, The Shaliko Company began previews of Leonardo Shapiro’s environmental production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, only its third offering, at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater, where it ran from 2 April to 16 May.  The staging concept had been Shapiro’s strategy to bring the spectators and the actors into closer contact.  In many of Shapiro’s productions, he placed actors in or near the audience, turned the auditorium lights on during the performance, had actors address the spectators directly, and enlisted the audience’s participation in aspects of the performances.  

Shapiro said his model for Ghosts was a séance with “the actors haunting the audience, as if spirits of the past; the audience haunting the characters, spirits of the future.”  The original title of the play, Gengangere, is Danish, the language in which Ibsen wrote the play, for ‘revenants,’ supernatural creatures resembling either spirits or reanimated corpses like vampires or zombies that return from the dead to terrify the living.  (‘Ghosts’ would be spøgelse in Danish and spøkelse in Norwegian; ‘revenant,’ from the French verb revenir, means ‘to return’ or ‘to come back.’)  

In this spirit, designer Jerry Rojo created for the Public’s 99-seat Susan Stein Shiva Theater (then called the Little Theater), a former movie house, “an environment of lush Victoriana, where the audience pockets function as walls separating the rooms of this Victorian environment” which he thought of as “womb-like.”  Shapiro was most pleased with the lighting: 

To encourage an historical environmental reality for audience/performer there was an authentic use of props and light.  The lighting was created by using period practical electric light fixtures (1910) to achieve a natural incandescent light.  And the performers were directed to actually control the illumination for the play.

(In the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that theatrical lighting was used, but not within the playing areas of the set.  Stage lights were used outside the “house” to simulate sunlight as it appeared through the windows.  Within the house, only practicals were used.  Also, the reader will no doubt notice the discrepancy between Rojo’s reference to the house as “Victorian” and his later reference to the period as 1910, which is Edwardian, as was recognized by several critics.)

Shaliko’s Ghosts stressed “that the sickness which Ibsen attacked still strangles us,” an obsession, the director stated, with which the playwright contended “all his life.”  Shapiro called the play “a tragedy whose characters are trapped by an environment made up of the inheritance of ideas and conventions of the past.  An environment which they have spent their lives dutifully building.”  He validated his interpretation by quoting Mrs. Alving from Act Two of Rolf Fjelde’s translation of the play:

It’s not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that lives on in us, but all kinds of old dead doctrines and opinions and beliefs.  They’re not alive in us, but they hang on all the same and we can’t get rid of them.

Shapiro evoked the idea that the past haunts the present again in the Ghosts program with another allusion to the Norwegian playwright: “We sail,” Shapiro quoted Ibsen, “[w]ith a corpse in the cargo.”  This conviction also justified Shapiro’s effort to cross-pollinate the present of the real world with the diegetic past of the play by requiring his actors to realize “experientially these same consequences rather than paying them lip service while sitting in chairs.”  As Jerzy Grotowski, whose theories were immensely influential for the young director, admonished the students in his 1967 workshop at NYU in which Shapiro had participated: “Compare the experience with your own, compare the two.”  

Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, Woyzeck, presented at the Public in 1976 with Joseph Chaikin in the title role, was the fourth play Shaliko produced and the end of the period, from 1972 to 1977, which Shapiro designated as “Meetings with Classical Texts.”  In the Postmodernist vein, he regarded these texts as “found objects” to be treated as librettos which, as Grotowski intended, furnished “only a theme” that Shapiro used to create “a new, independent work, a theater production.”  Robert Brustein, a renowned critic, producer, playwright, writer, and teacher, opined that “if dramatic classics are not seen with fresh eyes they grow fossilized—candidates for taxidermy” and that “great plays can be ‘desecrated’ by excessive piety as much as by excessive irreverence.”  Shapiro’s approach, demonstrated in Children of the Gods (1973) as well as Ghosts, was clearly an interpretation of the Situationists’ détournement, which allows artists to appropriate material created by others and redirect its purpose and meaning, like recaptioning a comic strip, in order to detach it from its usual cultural perspective and provide a kind of Brechtian distancing.  (The Situationists, a radical art and political movement that started in France in the mid-1950s, were one of Shapiro’s acknowledged influences.  I posted “Guy Debord & The Situationists” on 3 February 2012.)  Shapiro certainly applied this tactic with Children of the Gods, which Shaliko had assembled from several classical Greek texts, and Ghosts, whose physical mise-en-scène and thematic focus Shapiro had radically reinterpreted.  He also similarly treated Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1974), for which the director didn’t toe Brecht’s own political line and into which he introduced episodes when the audience directly questioned the characters on stage.  

Essentially, Shapiro made no changes in Fjelde’s translation of Ghosts (though Fjelde, himself, made some minor adjustments for this production), and his directorial approach was more traditional and less physical (though not passive, by any measure) than on either of Shaliko’s two previous productions.  Rojo called it “expressionistic,” by which he meant “actors who really use their own private worlds as catalysts for the roles,” a fine thumbnail definition of basic Stanislavskian acting.  Though Shapiro pointed out that Ghosts was Shaliko’s first show in which the actors didn’t play directly to the audience, the spectators were the unacknowledged spirits of the Alving house, and Shapiro’s séance paradigm helps explain his interest in scenes which weren’t so much seen as overheard, a tactic that disturbed some critics.

This isn’t to say that the Shaliko production of Ghosts was entirely conventional, even putting aside the environmental setting.  “Our production attempts to re-vitalize the shock of the original production 80 years ago,” a company announcement declared, “by both being true to Ibsen’s time and place and his desire for complete naturalism and, at the same time, making the play true to contemporary experience.”  (Ghosts was written in 1881 and presented in London in 1891, then in New York City in 1894.)  What Shapiro had in mind, it seems, is what Brustein compared in his essay “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” (posted on ROT on 10 March 2011) to the “poetic metaphor,” a production that has the “potential for rediscovering the original impulses and energies of the material.”  (See also my own blog article, “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” 18 September 2009.)  

Casting his “qualified” vote for “conceptual directing,” Brustein submitted that directors like Shapiro “are more interested in generating provocative theatrical images—visually expressed through physical production, histrionically through character and relationships—that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”  Shapiro delineated his rationale for the production:

[T]he point of environmental theater is simply its concentration on the reality of the actual transactions going on during the theatrical event—the complicated three-way meeting between audience, actors, and text which happens, each time uniquely, during the performance: those two or three hours when they are locked together in spiritual combat in a dark room . . . . .  The play itself—in its text, thematic content, etc.—is the key element of the equation: it provides the purpose of the transaction, and therefor[e] determines its form. 

As Rojo characterized Shaliko’s approach, “Ghosts is a very sexual play.  Oswald returns to Mommy’s womb.  Mrs. Alving is hot for Pastor Manders.  Oswald kisses Regina . . . . .  Also, the relationship between Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders is probed to a greater sexual depth—as well as her sexual relationship to her son.”  Despite the more traditional audience-performer relationship, neither this sexual perspective nor the environmentalism sat well with many critics.  Walter Kerr of the New York Times recorded that the production “not only dispenses with the proscenium arch but . . . makes it virtually impossible to locate the actors anywhere.”  Calling the production “thoroughly mindless,” Kerr gave this appraisal of the performance:

Scenes were played in small, raised pockets of space at the far corners of the miniature auditorium or on a balcony so narrow that spectators sitting on the edge of it—feet dangling into space—had to duck or take the damage whenever the performers waxed fierce.  In the latter instance, spectators sitting under the balcony could of course, see nothing at all.

That wasn’t all that chagrined Kerr.  He felt uncomfortably close to the theatrical event: “My own first brush with the ‘environment’ came when I found Ibsen’s housemaid, Regina, watering a plant that tended to lap over my toes; being quick of mind and body, I deftly avoided pneumonia.”  Jane Mandel, who played the role, recalled it differently: “Of course, I never did water his foot, but he was just making a point.  I guess it was kind of like, ‘Who needs this’; I mean, ‘Why do we need [a Ghosts] like this.’” 

As to the sexuality, Kerr was no less graphic than he was regarding the environmental staging:

In this “Ghosts,” Mrs. Alving is a highly sexual wench, a condition partly brought about by her long sexual deprivation and partly by the fact that she is to be seen sashaying around the premises with a wine bottle in her hand—rather as though “Ghosts” and “Ten Nights in a Barroom” were playing back-to-back in repertory and she’d got the performance dates confused.  In any event, she makes a headlong dive at poor Manders, pastor though he be, and kisses him with such cobra-like passion, slithering the while, that he feels himself compelled to hurl her to the floor. 

Kerr’s reaction so exercised Shapiro that he responded in the Times several weeks later.  He upbraided Kerr for objecting “to the closeness and the three-dimensional physical placement of the set because it made him work.  He had to turn his head, follow the action, grasp the connections, at times even choose what was most important.”  Warning against museum productions of classic plays, which Peter Brook characterized as “buried in deadly sentimentality and complacent worthiness . . . approved largely by town, scholar and press,” Shapiro decried a “theater of dead forms and ideas done with professional ease and distance by professional but bored actors.”  In advance press materials, the company justified its production in terms reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s renunciation of “literary masterpieces . . . fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time”:

This is neither a museum piece reproduction of an expose of Victorian Norwegian life nor an avant garde pastiche using Ibsen’s title as a cover.  It is a shocking, though often humorous, examination of the way in which we sacrifice our love of life for our (usually second-hand) ideas about the way we are supposed to be leading our lives. 

Quoting innovative Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, Brustein proclaimed, “The Theatre is not archeology,” insisting that it’s “not frozen in time but rather subject to discovery.”  “[C]harges of ‘desecration’ are meaningful,” Brustein warned, “only if you subscribe to the idea of a ‘definitive’ production.”  The critic, teacher, and producer likened those “purists” who demand “faithful” productions to “Switzers before the gates of the Vatican, defending sacred texts against the barbarians.” 

Justifying his open staging of Ghosts a few years later, Shapiro spoke of good reasons for using period elements in a production, but admonished that “using these objects doesn’t mean you must reproduce all the clap-trap and bric-a-brac of 19th-century stagecraft, certainly not for Ibsen, who did so much to revolutionize that stagecraft.”  The Shaliko director cautioned against simply imitating an experience neither the company nor the audience had had first hand because this would “risk reducing the credibility of your mutual pool of life experience” which was the initial rationale for doing the play.  Quoting Ibsen’s own declaration that “a passionate writer needs to be acted with passion,” Shapiro wrote:

The so-called “realistic” conventions imposed on [Ibsen] in most theaters today have become as suffocating as the stale air in Helene Alving’s house, and interfere on a practical level with any real attempt to communicate the power and poetry of Ibsen’s vision, or to make good on his desire to create a real experience for the audience which will allow them to see the truth about their own relationships.

He was fighting against what Brook dubbed “the Deadly Theatre,” which relies on “old formulae, old methods, old jokes, old effects” instead of issuing a “challenge to the conditioned reflexes” of artists, audiences, and critics habituated by received tradition.  Shapiro seemed to be attempting what Brustein designated as “penetrat[ing] the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equiv­alent.” 

Shapiro described his own Ghosts environment as “a little like [the board game] Clue”:

The audience sat in padded black spaces inside the house, spread between, beneath, above, and seemingly in the rooms.  Some of the rooms were all or partly out of sight, and from them could be overheard a particularly dirty deal being made in secret, a hidden love scene, an especially harrowing physical confrontation. 

The young director thought the experience should involve not seeing, but overhearing, as we sometimes do in life—or as people sometimes experience ghosts.  Richard Kostelanetz, in his study The Theatre of Mixed Means, saw this as a characteristic of Shaliko’s type of theater:

Narrative, when it exists, functions more as a convention than a revelatory structure or primary component, for the themes of a piece are more likely to emerge from the repetition of certain actions or the coherence of imagery.  The comprehension of a mixed-means piece, then, more closely resembles looking at a street or overhearing a strange conversation than deducing the theme of a drama:  The longer and more deeply the spectator dissects and assimilates its sound-image complex and associates the diverse elements, the more familiar he becomes with the work. 

Many reviewers, including Clive Barnes of the Times, Marilyn Stasio of Cue, Julius Novick of the Village Voice, Martin Gottfried and Richard Watts of the New York Post, Edith Oliver of the New Yorker, and Douglas Watt of the Daily News, didn’t appreciate this concept.  Watt, in fact, felt so strongly about the whole experimental theater scene that he ran two negative reviews, the second one in the Sunday News in which he disparaged several avant-garde stagings of classic plays, including Shaliko’s Ghosts (with reference to the troupe’s previous show, Brecht’s Measures Taken), the Manhattan Project’s version of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, and Brecht’s Mother Courage by Richard Schechner’s Performance Group.  Like Kerr, Watt had complaints about the seating arrangements, but he saved his strongest opprobrium for the acting and directing: the “seemingly demented” actors were “children at play” with only “a nodding acquaintance with stage demands,” “acting as though they’d never set foot on a stage but . . . encouraged to go out and make believe they were putting on a performance.”  Shapiro’s “misdirection” resulted in a “childish travesty” that “mangled Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’” into an “idiotic farce” that “seemed ever on the verge of turning into a porno farce, if there is such a genre.”  (Watt confessed that he “slinked out of the Engstrand apartment” and left the performance early.  For some reason, just as he misidentified Schechner’s troupe as the “Performing” Group, Watt kept calling the Alvings by Regina’s family name.)  

In Shapiro’s view, the press thinks they own the standards of Western drama such as Ghosts: “They feel like Ibsen is their writer, the middle class is their turf, that we misrepresented the bourgeoisie or whatever.  They saw this as a play in which people sit around in chairs and talk and if you don’t sit around in chairs and talk then you’re fucking it up.”  This reflects the critical fallacy that Michael Kirby, a playwright, actor, teacher, and theater writer, affirmed perpetuates the cultural status quo by privileging “what has been thought to be ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ in the past” while “stifling” innovation and experimentation.  

Shapiro, however, insisted that most Ghosts audiences, responding with “eagerness and enthusiasm,” “laughed, cheered, . . . and, at the end, cried.”  Richard Brestoff, an actor who was then a student in NYU’s Master of Fine Arts program (and later taught and wrote books on acting), observed, “The Shaliko Co. had burst the play wide open—and now I like many Spiritualists believe that Ghosts can live.”  Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., critic and longtime editor of the Best Plays annuals, called the production “distinguished”; Mark Hall Amitin, a consultant and producer who was executive director of a non-profit agency representing experimental theater companies, described it in a letter to the New York Times as “exciting” and “daring”; theater professor, avant-garde director, and editor of The Drama Review Richard Schechner proclaimed, “The show is very good, and important.  People should see it[.  Y]ears from now they may lie and pretend they did”; and Peter Kass, Shapiro’s former acting teacher at NYU, even went to the length of sending Joseph Papp a telegram asking: “Do you know that the most extraordinary production of Ghosts is being given by the Shaliko Company at the Public Theater.”

At least one theater person objected openly, however.  On 28 April 1975, the Venture Theatre Club, a now-defunct Off-Off-Broadway actors’ showcase theater in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, took out an advertisement in the Village Voice to protest the notice run by The Shaliko Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival which juxtaposed the critical response in 1891, the play’s London debut, with that in New York in 1975.  Mary Bozeman Raines, Venture’s founder, objected that 

the critics’ adverse reactions in 1891 to the play itself . . . were printed alongside excerpts from the critics’ adverse reactions in 1975 to the current production at the Public Theatre.  This juxtaposition, besides being extremely presumptuous, is misleading . . . .  We feel that Ibsen has been ill-served by the ad, as well as by the production, and that Joseph Papp owes him a public apology for both. 

In the New York area press, however, only Emory Lewis of The Record of New Jersey’s suburban Bergen County and Barbara Ettorre of Women’s Wear Daily (both significant critical voices at that time) praised the production, with Lewis writing that Shapiro “has staged this probing play with extraordinary finesse.  He choreographed every movement.  The work becomes a dance of life.”  Ettorre warned, “One must abandon any preconceptions and approach it with a fresh mind . . . .  As a result, the ghosts of the past . . . loom even more suffocatingly.”  She summed up, “It is a vibrant evening, preserving some of the genteel Ibsen quality.”  In St. Louis, however, according to Judy Newmark, Shapiro “endowed Henrik Ibsen’s classic with the vitality and strength that may have characterized its original performance before the turn of the century.”  Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post that Shapiro’s “inventive staging . . . produces the immediacy that can draw the audience into the world of the play” and that Shaliko’s “most original conception of the play . . . never falls back on standard interpretations.”  

In his New York Times response to Kerr, Shapiro asked, “What is it that critics hate?  That which is visceral and immediate . . . .”  He demanded, “What kind of theater do people really want?”  Critics like Kerr, Shapiro assumed, preferred a “theater of dead forms and ideas” performed by professional actors with no bond with the audience or the outside world.  In his discussion of “the Deadly Theatre,” Peter Brook put the blame for the perpetuation of this phenomenon on “the deadly spectator.”  This kind of viewer, among whom Shapiro would doubtlessly have placed Kerr, “emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him from trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself.”  He goes to see “plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way—they look lively and colourful, there is music and everyone is all dressed up, just the way they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres” and confuses this “intellectual satisfaction” with a true theatrical experience.  Shapiro even recounted an exchange with the late Jan Kott, “a critic whose work I very much admire,” at an exhibit of early production photographs of Ibsen’s plays: “These pictures make me sure of something I had begun to suspect,” the theater scholar told Shapiro—“that these plays must be done exactly as they were originally done.  They are absolutely historical pieces.”  

Shaliko’s director, conversely, believed the troupe’s audiences wanted “a theater of involvement, of new forms and ideas in which the voices of the past are joined and amplified by the voices of the present in productions which are committed to breaking ground for the future.”  The mainstream critics, however, rejected this approach, as Elinor Fuchs, respected theater critic and scholar, noted: “New York’s critical establishment seems ever more deeply establishmentarian. . . . .  It appears unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the obvious erosion of the humanistic certainties associated with” the traditional interpretation.  Conventional Realism, Tennessee Williams contended, “with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness”—unrelated, he asserted, to the “organic” truth represented by art.  In its day, Ibsen’s theater was revolutionary, both in its themes and in its theatrical style, and what Shapiro saw as so vital in those old photographs was that very revolutionary intensity.  “[W]e will be guilty of cheap nostalgia and sentimentality,” he argued, “if we try to re-create their vision as if nothing had happened in this terrible century when so much has happened.” 

What Shapiro was trying to create with Ghosts was Brook’s “Rough Theatre,” an Artaudian theater of cruelty that “deals with men’s actions, and . . . is down to earth and direct—because it admits wickedness and laughter”—some of the very things that had bothered Kerr.  This theater, Brook argued, raises “questions and references” which spectators “can retain and relate to . . . when they recur transposed, diluted and disguised, in life.”  Reminding us that Realism was an innovative technique when Ibsen wrote plays like Ghosts, Shapiro argued that to continue to impose that style on his works today defeats the effort “to communicate the power and poetry of Ibsen’s vision, or . . . to create a real experience for the audience.”  He warned that, like Ibsen, other classical writers had lost their immediacy in the United States because their plays are treated as “self-contained aesthetic objects, like paintings” and mounted in “flat literal productions.”  “Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us,” Artaud wrote.  “We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone.”  These works are dialogues, Shapiro explained: one half is the playwright’s text and the other’s the audience.  Traditional productions ignore the second half of the dialogue: 

You can only make their work seem dull or dated or predictable by treating them as finished properties, as aesthetic objects to be put on safe display. 

The task is to take them as living poetry, as diagrams—like a wiring chart that describes a complicated series of paths through which powerful currents can flow and produce transforming energy.

Dubbing these traditional stagings “ho-hum classics,” playwright Mac Wellman, a one-time collaborator of Shapiro’s, submitted that they belong “in the simple time of clocks,” unlike “the Wild Time of nonlinear narrative” which “can bend, slow, break or fork.”  Elinor Fuchs saw the dichotomy of the apparent expectations, indeed, requirements, of Kerr and others and Shapiro’s approach as no less than a struggle between the orthodoxy of “‘standards,’ ‘taste,’ ‘high culture,’” on the one hand and “a move by hitherto invisible perspectives—racial, sexual, multicultural—to invade the dominant culture” on the other.  She reminded critics that traditional aesthetics aren’t “divinely ordained,” but one choice among many, one that “carries . . . an ideological price tag.”  Shapiro put it this way: “There must be a way to allow the dead to live within us, to help us in our effort without relinquishing our life and the life of our time.  This is the problem, whether the dead shall become part of the living, or the living part of the dead.” 

Shapiro’s admiration of Henrik Ibsen was predicated on the Norwegian’s plays, which Shapiro deemed innovative and, indeed, revolutionary, having shaken up European society even to the point of causing riots.  Ibsen appealed for a “revolution of the spirit,” and George Bernard Shaw even construed the Norwegian’s message as a radical call to purge ourselves of all our received knowledge: “If you are a member of a society, defy it; if you have a duty, violate it; if you have a sacred tie, break it.”  Indeed, sounding very much like Shapiro himself, Ibsen stated (in a proclamation that might be the playwright’s own manifesto of a theater of cruelty):

My plays make people uncomfortable because when they see them they have to think, and most people want to be effortlessly entertained, not to be told unpleasant truths. . . .  People who are afraid of being alone with themselves, thinking about themselves, go to the theatre as they go to the beach or to parties—they go to be amused.  But I find that people’s eyes can be opened as well from the stage as from a pulpit.  Especially as so many people no longer go to church. 

There’s ample evidence that Shaliko’s environmental production of Ghosts, Shapiro’s radical vision, isn’t so alien to Ibsen’s intentions as reviewers like Walter Kerr and Douglas Watt decreed.  Both prominent reviewers revealed their positions on experimental and innovative theater going into the performance.  Some two-and-a-half months before he reviewed Shaliko’s Ghosts, Kerr wrote (in a Times column subtitled “Were These . . . Revivals . . . Necessary?”): “[W]e don’t need revivals . . . unless a director or a very special company of actors has discovered an urgently personal way of introducing them to us, persuading us that in some sense they’d been strangers before.”  Arrogating to himself the determination of who’s “special” and what constitutes a worthy revival, Kerr insisted, too, that “we do know the plays, have seen them,” oblivious to the likelihood that many ordinary—as opposed to professional—theatergoers might not have seen them—or might just wish to see them again.  (He also disregarded the truth that even a failed experiment has value—and does not eradicate either the play’s text or previous performances.  It’s not, after all, painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.)  In his Sunday notice, in which he labeled the Shaliko actors “amateurs,” Watt unambiguously proclaimed:

Now, I don’t pretend to know exactly what this new esthetic is, if we can call it an esthetic, but I do deplore it if for no other reason than that it opens the floodgates to amateurism.  Which is why I think such catchy labels as Theater of the Absurd and Theater of the Ridiculous are noxious, conferring, as they do, a form of respectability on what is all too often plain nonsense.

Kerr, Watt, and other establishment reviewers, it seems, went into Ghosts with their objections already firmly in place before they even took their seats.

It shouldn’t be overlooked, first, that Ibsen was never an absolute realist.  Early in his career, the young playwright wrote that “literal reality has no place in art,” a sentiment he never abandoned despite appearances.  Many analysts of Ibsen’s work, including Anton Chekhov, remarked on the underlying unreality in his plays.  His is the illusion of reality, and it became most obvious in his last plays, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), which are existential and psychological landscapes of an inner reality.  When We Dead Awaken, in fact, hints that Ibsen had ended his focus on the realistic series he had begun with A Doll House (1879) and was ready to move on to something “in quite another context; perhaps, too, in another form.”  Ibsen’s very words anticipated Shapiro’s own ambition.  

Second, Ibsen began writing for an essentially 18th-century stage featuring wing-and-drop scenery and verse or lofty, heroic language.  Only after exposure to the realistic staging of the Meininger troupe of Germany, where he was honored by Duke George II in 1876, did he begin writing the realistic plays for which he’s renowned.  In fact, it was Ibsen’s dramaturgical innovations, considered then to be avant-garde and experimental, that began the practice of Realism in European drama.  Once having settled on his new style, he demanded that his language be treated as actual conversation and that the actors performing his plays look and behave like ordinary people in real-life situations.  Shaw, in fact, insisted that in his characters, Ibsen not only brought the audience on stage but their situations as well.  Rendering on stage the people his audiences knew and met everyday in circumstances they experienced in their own lives shocked many spectators and critics at the time.  Additionally, after seeing the Meininger, Ibsen began creating settings that were individualized for each scene, and he wrote scenes that changed as the situation required, rather than employing one setting, to be created with stock scenery, throughout the drama.  Lighting, one of Ibsen’s principal concerns just as it was for Shapiro in Ghosts, was specifically and carefully determined to set the atmosphere as well as the locale of each scene.  Ibsen wanted his audiences to feel they were watching actual events taking place in real places so that they were drawn into the drama rather than remaining outside of it. 

By the middle of the 20th century, stage Realism had become standard theatrical practice.  No longer new, innovative, or experimental, it had pretty much reached its pinnacle early in the century with productions that included live animals on stage and the reconstruction of actual places, examples of the kind of staging Richard Paul Janaro, Shapiro’s first college director, disparaged as “kitchenism” (and which a director-teacher of my own dubbed “gee-whizz Realism”).  Not only wasn’t it shocking any longer, by mid-century it was hardly noticeable, either dramatically or theatrically.  Brecht had even declared Ibsen obsolete in 1934 because his works “no longer move anybody” and the modern audience “can’t learn anything from them” and in 1945, Tennessee Williams, himself often erroneously considered a Realist, called for a “new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.”  

Perhaps most significantly for Shapiro, Vsevolod Meyerhold, one of Shapiro’s strongest influences who had directed or appeared in many Ibsen plays, disparaged the traditional naturalistic approach to Ibsen: “The urge to show everything, come what may, the fear of mystery, of leaving anything unsaid, turns the theatre into a mere illustration of the author’s words.”  Thus criticizing the technique of the Moscow Art Theater (where he trained), Meyerhold justified stylization for Ibsen.  His 1906 production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler intended to convey an “impression” of reality, to show what the Russian director sensed “behind” the play.  He eschewed “lifelikeness” in an effort to lead the audience to its own understanding of the play through the use of “new unfamiliar means”—a classic description of Brechtian “alienation” (Verfremdung) or its Russian predecessor (priëm ostranneniya) and of Shaliko’s theatrical philosophy.  Meyerhold, in fact, had also experimented in 1906 with Ghosts and his staging can be seen as a kind of prototype for the Shaliko production.  Having dispensed with the main drape and the footlights which separated the audience from the performers, Meyerhold built a forestage over the orchestra pit and extended the playing area out into the auditorium to bring the spectators and the actors into closer contact.  Like Shapiro, the Russian innovator turned the auditorium lights on during the performance.

From Shapiro’s standpoint, then, the response was self-evident: given Ibsen’s determination to enliven the stage with revolutionary techniques and practices, extending the continuum from Romanticism to Realism and Naturalism, isn’t it a reasonable step further along that road to place the audience among the actors, within the environment, so that they experience the drama even more as if it were happening around them—just as Ibsen had desired 100 years before?  If Ibsen insisted that his characters speak language that sounds like ordinary speech and that the audience should seem to be listening in on overheard conversations, isn’t a next logical step for the actors/characters to speak in tones that really require overhearing, from places not quite visible to each spectator, in sometimes low volumes, even whispers?  Ibsen was adamant about rejecting asides and soliloquies and he began using actual whispers (as distinct from stage whispers), heard neither by the other characters on stage nor the audience (in The Wild Duck, 1884, and Rosmersholm, 1886, for instance).  Wouldn’t it then be reasonable for contemporary actors to stop declaiming (that is, “projecting”) their dialogue when the characters would probably speak in intimate tones?  Is it a violation of Ibsen’s wishes that the audience have to select where to look and to whom to listen, just as they might have to in real life?

And if Ibsen insists on lighting that seems natural and true to the circumstances of the scene, wouldn’t it be the next logical step to create lighting that comes entirely from actual fixtures in the rooms (that is, “practicals”), rather than the artificial lighting of theatrical instruments?  In keeping with Ibsen’s dictates, Shapiro would have insisted, wouldn’t it be appropriate for the characters themselves to control the lights in the house, rather than the unseen hand of a lighting technician?

This isn’t to say that any of these techniques would work either dramatically or theatrically in any given production, of course.  That depends on the creativeness of the director and designers, as well as the execution of any design and production concept.  (It also isn’t meant to suggest that there aren’t other, divergent steps leading along a different continuum with the same beginning.)  But doesn’t it suggest that, far from being a perversion of Ibsen, a violation of his theatrical spirit, such an experiment is an extension of that spirit and even an attempt to return to his plays the kind of revolutionary energy with which he created them?  While it might be entirely valid to say that the attempt failed, that the experiment didn’t work, it wouldn’t be valid to state that the experiment shouldn’t have been made at all, that the concept was a travesty.  Indeed, in the year Ibsen died, when Meyerhold directed his production of Ghosts, the highly theatrical, expressionistic director Max Reinhardt staged a production of the play with designs by Ibsen’s compatriot, the expressionistic painter Edvard Munch, that provided a mere suggestion of scenery making use of ghostly shadows to evoke both mood and theme.

Ibsen considered himself a true avant-gardist in the sense that he was forever out in front of literary and theatrical conventions, not to mention political trends.  He invoked his own independence as evidence that he was always moving away from the prevailing practices:

But I firmly believe that an intellectual pioneer can never gather a majority around him . . . . .  The majority, the masses, the mob, will never catch him up; he can never rally them behind him.  I myself feel a similarly unrelenting compulsion to keep pressing forward.  A crowd now stands where I stood when I wrote my earlier books.  But I myself am there no longer, I am somewhere else—far away ahead of them—or so I hope. 

Given Ibsen’s insistence that the spectator at his plays should “feel as though he were invisibly present” in the world of the play and his belief, specifically of Ghosts, that the “effect of the play depends greatly on the audience feeling that they are listening to something that is actually happening in real life,” how far afield could Shapiro have been with the concept of his production 94 years after Ibsen’s play first shocked readers?  If Ibsen was as anti-conventional as he claimed, might he not have demanded that 20th-century productions of his provocative plays be staged provocatively, defying the conventions of our day as Ibsen had those of his?  He might agree with Pirandello, who also insisted, “Unwilling­ness to take up old works, to modern­ize and streamline them for fresh production, betrays indifference, not praiseworthy caution.”  While the execution of Shapiro’s concept for Ghosts might not have pleased Ibsen in the end, it’s hard, in the face of the dramatist’s own declarations, to require that this play and any other classic works “be done exactly as they were originally done” over a century ago, as Jan Kott demanded.  

[I don’t use footnotes on ROT, but occasionally I feel it’s useful to supply a list of my sources for quotations and other references.  Below are the works and documents on which I drew for “Staging Classic Plays”; many are available in bookstores or libraries, though a few, namely the archival material and the interviews, aren’t generally accessible.  (I’m nevertheless including those references for the sake of completeness.)

• Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. Ed. Susan Sontag. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.
• Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Tran. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
• Braun, Edward. The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979.
• Brecht, Bertolt.  Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and tran. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
• Brecht, Stefan; Peter L. Feldman; Donald M. Kaplan; et al. “On Grotowski: A Series of Critques.” Drama Review 14.2 (T46: Winter 1970): 178-211.
• Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Discus Books, 1968.
• Brustein, Robert. “Stage View: Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” New York Times 11 November 1988, sec. 2 (“Arts and Leisure”): 5, 16.
• Crawley, Tom. “The Stone in the Soup: Jerzy Grotowski’s First American Workshop.” Unpublished typescript. [New York:] Thomas F. Crawley, 1978.
• “Dramatics Instructor Revolts Against ‘Kitchenism.’” Falcon Times [Miami-Dade Junior College; Miami, FL] 3 May 1962: 3.
• Fuchs, Elinor. “‘Cymbeline’ and It’s Critics: A Case Study: Misunderstanding Postmodernism.” American Theatre [Theatre Communications Group, New York] 6.9 (Dec. 1989): 24, 26-31.
• Guernsey, Otis L., Jr. Curtain Times: The New York Theater: 1965-1987. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987.
• Hand-written notes, note-taker unknown. N.d. Mark Hall Amitin/World of Culture for the Performing Arts, Inc., Archive. Mark Hall Amitin/World of Culture for the Performing Arts, Inc. Archive. MSS 121. Box 35. Folders 41: “The Shaliko Company, 1974.” Fales Library and Special Collections. New York University Libraries. New York, NY.
• Kass, Peter. Telegram to Joseph Papp. 17 May 1975.
• Kerr, Walter. “Stage View: An Agreeable Evening With H. L. Mencken: Were These . . . Revivals . . . Necessary?” New York Times 26 Jan. 1975, sec. 2 (“Arts and Leisure”):1, 7.
• Kerr, Walter. “Stage View: A Kung Fu Version of Ibsen.” New York Times 13 Apr. 1975, sec. D (“Arts and Leisure”): 5.
• Kirby, Michael. “Criticism: Four Faults.”  Drama Review 18.4 (T63: Dec. 1974): 59-68.
• Kostelanetz, Richard. The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances. New York: Dial Press, 1968.
• Mandel, Jane. Telephone interview with author. 4 Mar. 1992.
• Newmark, Judy. “Shaliko Company Gives ‘Ghosts’ At University.” St. Louis Post 10 Feb. 1975, sec. B: 4.
• Lewis, Emory. “Lively Arts: Ibsen’s modern outlook.” Record [Hackensack, NJ] 3 Apr. 1975, sec. C: 12.
• Lugné-Poe, [Aurélien-François]. Ibsen (Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1936).
• McNamara, Brooks; Jerry Rojo; and Richard Schechner. Theatres, Spaces, Environments: Eighteen Projects. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1975.
• Meyer, Michael. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
• Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre. Tran. and ed. Edward Braun. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969.
• New York Shakespeare Festival. Ghosts program. 1975.
• Shaliko Company, The. “Ghosts.” Announcement of availability for touring. N.d. Mark Hall Amitin/World of Culture for the Performing Arts, Inc. Archive. MSS 121. Box 35. Folders 41-42: “The Shaliko Company, 1974.” Fales Library and Special Collections. New York University Libraries. New York, NY.
• Shapiro, Leonardo. “Back Talk: ‘Which Excesses Are the Critics Attacking?’” New York Times 11 May 1975, sec. D (“Arts and Leisure”): 5.
• Shapiro, Leonardo. Interview with author. Baltimore, MD. 28 June 1986.
• Shapiro, Leonardo. Interview with author. New York, NY. 3 Mar. 1992.
• Shapiro, Leonardo. “Notes for a Speech on Staging Ibsen.” Typescript. [1978].
• Shapiro, Leonardo. “The Tip of the Iceberg: Creativity and Repression in the U.S.” Performing Arts Journal 13.3 (Sept. 1991): 25-41.
• Shaw, Bernard. Shaw and Ibsen: Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings. Ed. J. L. Wisenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.
• Venture Theatre Club. Newspaper advertisement protesting the Shaliko Ghosts notice. Village Voice [New York] 28 Apr. 1975: 94.
• Watt, Douglas. “Children at Play in ‘Ghosts.’“ Daily News [New York], 3 Apr. 1975: 104.
• Watt, Douglas. “Look at New School of Dramatic Thought.” Sunday News [New York] 13 Apr. 1975, sec. 3: 3.
• Wellman, Mac. “A Chrestomathy Of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater.” Theater [New Haven, CT; Yale School of Drama] 24.1 (Nov. 1993): 43-51.
• Wiles, Timothy J. The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Williams, Tennessee. “Production Notes.” The Glass Menagerie. Ed. Robert Bray. New York: New Directions Publishing Co, 1945[1999], xix-xxii.

[Some of the sources above are also available in other editions, such as Wellman’s idiosyncratic essay, which has been published as the preface to a volume of his plays, and Williams’s Glass Menagerie note, which has been included in most published editions of the play.  If any reader feels the need for more specific references, feel free to contact me via a Comment on this post.  I’ll do my best to satisfy you.]

'A Second Hand Memory' (2004)

[On 29 August, I posted an article by Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, on the Broadway production of the musical stage adaptation of Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, based on his 1994 film of the same title.  Kirk used the musical, now closed, to look at why some musicals fare better than others.  In his discussion, Kirk noted that Allen had had some experience directing for the stage, most notably at New York City’s Atlantic Theater Company.  One of the productions the filmmaker and playwright staged there was his own play, A Second Hand Memory, presented at ATC from 22 November 2004 to 23 January 2005 at the Linda Gross Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea.  I saw that production and wrote a report on the presentation dated 13 December 2004, so I’m posting that archival record for readers of ROT to look back at a different sort of stage effort from the famous filmmaker.  (I also saw Allen’s play The Floating Light Bulb at Lincoln Center Theatre Company’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, presented from 27 April to 21 June 1981 under the direction of Ulu Grosbard, but I have no written record of that production.)]

I have to question the perspicacity of the people at the Atlantic Theater Company: What made you even consider staging A Second Hand Memory?  (Okay, I know part of the answer to this one: two words—Woody Allen.)

Charles Isherwood nailed it.  I had read his New York Times review well before I saw the show.  (It opened just before Thanksgiving; the review’d been out for over two weeks.)  I went in determined to disagree with the review—because I just didn’t want to see another disappointing production; I wanted to like this one.  Unhappily, I can’t argue with Isherwood’s evaluation.  

Isherwood suggests that Allen’s play may have started out as a screenplay, and that may be true.  It zips around from Brooklyn to L.A., from the present (ca. 1955) to various points in the past, from “real” scenes (either past or present) to dreams and imaginary conversations with an absent character who serves as narrator (voice-over in a film, I’d imagine).  This can be disconcerting at times, since Santo Loquasto’s set never changes (nor does James F. Ingalls’s lighting for the most part) and sometimes a character will begin to do or say something that doesn’t seem to make sense relative to the immediate preceding moment—until you realize, they’re not in the apartment in the present now, they’ve transported to the past and they’re in the old house!  (The first time this happened to me, I only realized what had occurred on stage because I had read Isherwood’s review and he mentions this aspect of the production.  In other words, I only understood what was going on on stage because a reviewer had explained it to me.  That shouldn’t happen.)

I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself, I guess.  The play, like most of Allen’s works, film or stage, is about his family.  They’re the Wolfes here, and son Eddie is Woody.  I won’t précis the plot for you, but I’ll tell you that Eddie (Nicky Katt) fled Brooklyn and pop’s jewelry business to work for his mother’s brother, a big agent in Hollywood.  He gets called back home when pop (Dominic Chianese) discovers that his bookkeeper and the man he took on to “replace” Eddie have robbed the business blind and he’s about to lose everything and Eddie has to come back to help him rebuild.  The resentments and sense of oppressiveness build all around as everyone—mom, pop, sister Alma (Elizabeth Marvel, the narrator, who’s not really “present”), Uncle Phil (Michael McKean), Eddie, and Eddie’s new wife (Kate Blumberg)—all harbor secrets, unfulfilled dreams and ambitions, conflicts, and wounds.  It’s all very, very contrived—the deck is so stacked that it would take a Ricky Jay to sort it all out.  

None of the characters is remotely sympathetic—or even pleasant to be around briefly.  Why someone hadn’t committed homicide before the play began is a mystery to me—though it’d be hard to pick one deserving victim from among the many available prospects.  The worst problem from a dramatic perspective is that, even among the unpleasant crew, there’s no one to care about.  I never once wanted anyone to win out over the arranged circumstances.  No one deserved to get out—so the end, whatever it turned out to be, wasn’t significant.  Not even the narrator-sister, who got out of the family early, has any claim on our sympathy.  Like everyone else, she’s supremely selfish.  She’s also extremely undramatic/untheatrical as a stage device—a cheap way to advance the plot.  (As it happens, the play doesn’t “end”; it just stops, with a deus ex machina that’s even more contrived than the rest of the plot.  And everyone loses, to one degree or another.)

There was nothing of Allen’s cleverness and idiosyncratic view of the world in the script.  There was no humor to enliven the abject misery.  Even the dialogue is brittle and artificial—almost as if it were a translation from some foreign language.  Allen also directed, so the line deliveries are his responsibility, and every character uttered words and phrases no one would use in ordinary conversation as glibly and automatically as these people did.  Not one actor stopped to collect his or her words or come up with the turns of phrase that just tumble out of everyone’s mouths.  They all talked like a writer writing—and I didn’t believe any of it for a minute.  (Even though the play has been running now for about three weeks, many of the cast had line bobbles that seem out of place.  This wasn’t an amateur cast—it’s headed by Chianese of The Sopranos as well as many stage productions.  I don’t know what this signifies, if anything, but it surprised me.)  By the way, this is where I disagreed slightly with Isherwood—though the consequence is minimal at most.  He objected to the acting of Nicky Katt, who lists only film and TV credits in his bio.  I didn’t find him any worse than the rest of the cast—who all seemed to be doing the best they could with the material.  Isherwood saw the show long enough ago that perhaps Katt has improved with experience (and, maybe, coaching).  His character, however, has clearly not improved—but that’s not his fault.

As I suggested above, I have to ask why the Atlantic would commit to a play as obviously bad as this.  Maybe it looked better than it turned out to be—though I can’t see any reason to assume the directing can have fixed or damaged the script.  Maybe Allen revised the script downward during rehearsal, but I suspect not.  As I said, the only answer I can give to my own question is that Atlantic liked the idea of doing a Woody Allen play—regardless of its quality.  I therefore question their judgment.  (If I’m right—and no one can say I am, but so what?—the reasoning goes something like this:  “Let’s do a play by a famous writer.  It’s a bad play, but we can sell it on his name.  It doesn’t matter that we then have to inflict the bad play on our audience.  That’s all right, because we make some money.”  It’s sort of laissez-faire capitalist reasoning.)

(What is it with producers these days, anyway?  I raised questions regarding Trying, the Fritz Weaver vehicle Off-Broadway, about why the play would be moved to New York from Chicago.  Now the Atlantic makes me wonder about their selections, and so does BAM with its selection of John Jesurun’s FAUST/How I Rose and David Gordon’s execrable version of Ionesco’s The Chairs.  Meanwhile, August Wilson has trouble keeping backers for Gem of the Ocean and almost loses a production because of it.  Doesn’t anybody here know how to play this game?)

I have to add one more thing about the Allen play.  About its title really.  Shouldn’t it read A Second-Hand Memory—with a hyphen?  His way, the title refers to something called a “hand memory”—whatever that would be—and the play is about the second one.  Okay, it’s silly, I suppose—but it’s annoying.  (The title refers to the fact that Alma, who is the storyteller, wasn’t actually present for any of the events of the play: she’s relying on “memories” that aren’t her own—things she gleaned from other sources.  In other words, ‘second-hand memories.’  Now that I think about it, that may be the best thing in the whole play—the title.  Unfortunately, the fact that it has to be explained by a narrator figure kind of ruins that one asset.  It’s sort of like the Beatles song quotes Jesurun salted into the script of FAUST: once a character actually acknowledges them, they’re no longer any fun.)

Bullets Over 'Bullets Over Broadway'

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward, a frequent guest blogger on ROT, has come through with another interesting contribution.  Having caught a performance of Woody Allen’s musical stage adaption of his film Bullets Over Broadway, Kirk provides his assessment of the play and the production and as usual, he uses the performance as a way to discuss something more general (dare I say “universal”?) about musical theater.  Readers of ROT will know by now that that’s a subject about which Kirk knows a little something; he’s written on the genre before: “The Scottsboro Brecht,” 12 February 2011; “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” 2 October 2011; “The Jukebox Musical,” 7 October 2011; “Lady Gaga: Artist for Our Time,” 1 November 2011; and “Lady Gaga and Once,” 5 May 2014.

[Given the subject of this post, readers might also want to turn back to my own article “Movicals,” 20 September 2013, and the republished pieces in “More on Movicals,” 21 February 2014.]

I saw the Broadway musical Bullets Over Broadway the Musical, at the St. James Theatre in Manhattan, on Wednesday, August 7, 2014, and by that time the show, which opened on April 10, 2014, had already posted its closing notice for August 24, 2014, by which date it would have run for 33 previews and 124 performances. This makes it, in financial terms, a flop; it cost a reported $14 million to produce, and it will not have made back any of that investment.

Still, there are flops and flops. The show is bound to have a performance afterlife in university and community theater productions. What’s more, it had an afterlife with me too. I left the theater feeling I’d seen an enjoyable but maybe not terribly memorable show. Memorable, however, is what it turned out to be; I found that the next day I was thinking extensively about it, and I came to realize that I’ve learned something important about musical theater because of it.

Bullets Over Broadway is based on a film written (with Douglas McGrath, who this season is represented on Broadway by the book for the musical Beautiful) and directed by Woody Allen. Obviously Allen is a well-known figure, with so many accomplishments to his name that his biography in the program for Bullets reads, in its entirety, “WOODY ALLEN is a film director, actor and writer. His career spans more than six decades, and he has contributed to nightclubs, concert, television, theatre, literature and music.” Indeed he has. In 1994 the film version of Bullets Over Broadway was nominated for six Academy Awards. In 1996, Allen directed a musical film, Everyone Says I Love You, with a score made up of songs from previous decades. In 2014 he combined the two approaches: Bullets Over Broadway, the stage musical, has a score with songs like “Runnin’ Wild,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” and Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave,” in addition to some less known blues numbers. 

But films and Broadway musicals are significantly different creatures. It is relatively easy for a director to control the tone of a movie; Allen is a master at it. On the other hand, a Broadway musical is notoriously difficult to control, no matter how smooth the process can seem when the results are successful. A song, a situation, a character can run away with a musical, leaving the rest of it looking lost and forlorn. (A good book on this subject is Second Act Trouble by Steven Suskin, published in 2006.)

Woody Allen has experience as a theater director (with the Atlantic Theatre Company), but considering the complexity of the musical theater form, he was wise to enlist as director and choreographer for Bullets the formidable Susan Stroman, who has done remarkable work with shows such as The Producers, Crazy For You, and the stunning John Kander and Fred Ebb musical The Scottsboro Boys. 

Stroman has the notable ability to understand her assignment. In the case of Bullets, her task was to make the show “go” with machine-like (I almost said machine gun-like) force, so the audience would be carried through certain complexities.

Because . . . there are complexities in the show. It has levels. The most obvious level, perhaps, is the one that must have made it seem likely that the musical would be a financial success: as its title suggests, it promises theatricality. That was Stroman’s department, and she and her colleagues made the most of it. In addition to the vigorous and satisfying dancing (she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Choreography), she staged the show like, well, like a bullet, with plenty of fast-paced movement. Stroman knows how to shape a song, a scene, or an act, so its climax occurs at just the right moment.

But speaking of bullets, here’s the next level of complexity: the musical is about gangsters who kill people. It’s not that the subject of killing is off limits in Broadway musicals, going at least as far back as George Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet in the musical On Your Toes (1936), right up through Sweeney Todd. Certainly the violence in Bullets is cartoon style – there’s no blood. But the gangsters of Bullet’s plot are real gangsters, whose jobs involve killing people rather casually, unlike the gangsters in, say, Kiss Me Kate, Guys and Dolls, and The Drowsy Chaperone, who are basically song and dance men in extra large suits. 

Allen needs a certain amount of realism in his gangsters to set up the contrasts in his story, because the next level of the show is a serious theme, set up in an early discussion along these lines: Suppose you could save either the last copy of Shakespeare’s plays, or the life of a down-and-out bum. Which would you save? The show works this question out in varied ways. The Greenwich Village group we see at the beginning of the first act is art- (and politics-) obsessed, and at least one member of the group thinks the question is no contest – he’d save the art rather than the (allegedly valueless) human being. Later in the show he may rethink his position.

The gangsters, of course, wouldn’t save a life for love or money – quite the contrary - unless ordered to by the Boss. Human life has no value for them. One of Allen’s inspirations in the movie and play is that one of the gangsters becomes so involved in the world of art that he potentially might – not surprisingly, considering his line of work – kill for it. Meanwhile – a fine twist – the people in the show who are dedicated to the arts are willing to sell out their artistic values altogether, just to make a little money in the field.

This theme of value in life and art is not just tossed at the audience. It’s embodied in the story of the play, in ways both obvious and subtle. It is not, however, particularly embodied in the songs interpolated throughout the script, and that may be a weakness in the show. Another weakness is that the play-within-the-play is not particularly interesting. But at any rate Allen is not making easy points about life and art – he’s tackling them in meaningful ways, and expressing them through character.

I will mention one more level of complexity in Bullets (there may be others I haven’t noticed). Allen’s humor adds a level of complexity of its own to the work, because it’s earthy but it’s also sophisticated. This is not the place to rehash the art of Woody Allen’s comedy; volumes, quite literally, have been written about it. The point is that in most Broadway musicals the jokes are so massively structured that it would take a very dull audience member to miss them. There are a few jokes like that in Bullets, but at the performance I saw, the big laughs were few – and the smaller laughs were frequent, as someone here, someone there, caught something clever that Allen had written for a character. “Humor,” Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “is a concealed pair.” In other words, humor – humor that’s well executed – contains real complexity inside itself. Allen knows humor.

What then did I learn about musicals by seeing Bullets Over Broadway? I realized that in any successful musical, the elements are of a piece – not identical to each other, but basically homogenous. Annie Get Your Gun and Pippin are very different shows, but in each the various elements connect closely to each other. In Bullets Woody Allen took the risk – a perfectly sensible one for him to take, considering the nature of his art – that he could combine disparate elements into a musical that “worked.” 

This was not a case of ineptly connecting the parts; it was a worthy, even “artistic” endeavor, but it didn’t entirely succeed. For the most part reviewers did not agree with Allen. Two of the three New York daily papers disliked the show; other reviews were similarly mixed. The reviews didn’t agree with me either – no notice I read indicated that the show had any significance at all. Instead, reviewers were mostly irritated because it wasn’t funnier. Woody Allen has been fighting that very battle for years – “why isn’t he funnier? He used to be funny.” Reviewers often review careers, not plays. That’s Woody Allen’s lot in life.

I should note that Bullets was nominated for six Tony Awards. I already mentioned Stroman’s nomination for Best Choreography, and Allen was nominated for Best Book, a nomination I’d say he certainly deserved. Nick Cordero received a deserved Featured Actor nomination, and he had some fine colleagues on stage: Zach Braff of the TV series Scrubs; Vincent Pastore from The Sopranos once again playing a very believable gangster; and the splendid Marin Mazzie and Karen Ziemba, among other members of the play-within-a-play. There were also nominations for costumes (Ivey Long), sound (Peter Hylenski), and, particularly notably, for Scenic Design (Santo Loquasto) that featured settings whisked up from under the stage while the previous scene was just finishing, and one astonishing set that whirled around the stage at the climax of the play like a Tilt-A-Whirl.

None of those nominated won. They’ll have to be satisfied with the values of art.

[Kirk will be back with more interesting and provocative examinations of topics theatrical and other.  I know some of what he’s got in the works or on his mind, but it’s too soon to preview them.  I can only attest that each idea he’s considering is well worth hearing and I urge ROTters to come back often to catch his contributions to the dialogue.  In the meantime, ROT readers are invited to return to the blog in a few days for an archival report on one of Woody Allen’s self-directed productions, A Second Hand Memory which I saw at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2004.] 

Teaching What Shakespeare DIDN'T Write

A Dramaturg’s Perspective in the English Classroom

by William Hutchings

University of Alabama at Birmingham

INTRODUCTION

by Robert B. Youngblood

Washington and Lee University

Beginning in the ’90s—if memory serves—and for half a dozen or a few more years, Washington and Lee University hosted an annual symposium on Theater in Academe.  The presentations dealt with a host of interesting questions from teaching plays in literature courses to staging and performing whole or partial plays in university settings.  As teacher of classical and modern German and Italian literature, I derived positive and productive stimulation from a number of the presentations.

One that made a strong impression on me was William Hutchings’s.  He is a teacher of Shakespeare plays and, as I was at W&L at the time, an active dramaturg for performances of drama at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 

Following William’s presentation, which he produced in response to the call for contributions to the symposium in 2003, I communicated my enthusiasm to him and complimented him for the many practical components of his paper, elements of plays which today’s students are ignorant of and would have their attention productively drawn to by William’s teaching.  (Readers of ROT might remember a contribution I made on the subject of students’ lack of familiarity with performances of serious drama, “The Theater Problem in Education,” 21 November 2011.)  In response to my enthusiasm, he kindly presented me with his manuscript.   I re-read William’s paper annually from his presentation at W&L in 2003 until my retirement in 2005, deriving most useful and continual stimulus from it. 

Reading papers I had stacked for re-reading after my retirement, I had the great pleasure of recently re-encountering William’s paper. So strong had his useful points remained with me that I contacted him, and suggested he present his paper to Rick for publication on ROT.  It is with great pleasure that the paper and its highly useful contents are now being published for the theater-loving community, thanks to ROT. 

*  *  *  *

Entirely too often, English majors and others who have had little exposure to the process of theatrical production are too content to regard a Shakespearean text solely as literature, to be analyzed in much the same way as a novel, poem, or short story.  Though they readily acknowledge the formal distinctions implicit in the genre (e.g., the dramatis personae, stage directions, set descriptions, dialogue), they have seldom had occasion to consider the practical problems that theatre practitioners can never avoid:  the physical presence of the actor’s body in a defined space, the effects of physical appearance, gesture, and costuming on characterization, and the endless variations in tone and style through which a line can be spoken.  To sensitize students to these issues makes them not only more careful readers of dramatic (and non-dramatic) texts but enables them to think more critically about performances that they see, whether live on stage or in a film.  Having worked as a dramaturg for a variety of modern plays at my university, I now find that classroom discussion cannot adequately proceed without such issues being raised, regardless of the period in which the play being studied was written—but it is especially important in studying the works of Shakespeare, who, as both actor and playwright, must have been particularly attuned to the issues involved.  My junior-level Shakespeare survey focuses on issues of epistemology in Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV Part 1, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet.  Accordingly, the issue of “how do you know what you think you know?” pervades not only our thematic discussion but extends toward how the students themselves “know” that their readings of lines and situations are “correct” ones.  (Short answer:  they don’t.)   Five sample “problems” that have heightened their awareness of these issues and enlivened class discussion are as follows: 

* The actor’s physical presence, especially when “playing a silence.”

* The special problems presented by short or one-word lines.

* Repetition with variation.

* The effects of casting and costuming on characterization.

* The absence of stage directions during certain key scenes.

The pedagogical usefulness of such topics extends well beyond the study of Shakespeare and beyond the walls of the English classroom OR the theatrical space.  

The actor’s physical presence, especially when “playing a silence,” often presents provocative issues that traditional English majors have seldom considered.  Thus, for example, the fact that Shylock is present on stage as Portia delivers her “quality of mercy” oration is easily ignored as that speech is analyzed in detail for its imagery, its political ideology, its religious implications, and so on, as English majors and (especially) their professors are entirely too comfortable in doing.  Accordingly, the conversation came to an abrupt halt in class when I asked, as innocently as I could manage, “What is Shylock doing during this time?”  After an almost Beckettian silence as they stared in vain for an answer on the printed page, one of them answered, “He’s not doing anything”—a suggestion with which her classmates readily agreed.  “Okay,” I replied, “but how do you tell your actor to do that?  He’s physically present, so he has to be doing something, even if he’s only standing there.”   “That’s what he’s doing, then:  he’s just standing there,” another student ventured.  “But standing there how?” I asked, adding “that’s the question.  How should the director tell him to stand there?  Is he listening attentively, or ignoring her entirely?  How does his character seem to change if you have the actor turn his back on her?  Would you have him tilt his head slightly, as if he’s really seriously considering her words, or would you have him hold his chin?   Or would you prefer to have him cross his arms across his chest, with a look of total disgust?  Or should he just look impatient, since this scolding is just holding up the proceedings that he intends to carry forward regardless of whatever she says?”   Once they had become attuned to these issues, the students’ discussion of the various options was extensive and occasionally heated, forcing them to examine anew many of the central issues of Shylock’s characterization—and arguing the different sides of problems for which the text provides no answers.   Discussion spilled over into the hallways after class as well, and suddenly “just standing there”—and textual silences—became far more problematic, far more difficult, and far more important than they had ever seemed before.   

The special problems presented by short or one-word lines also deserve detailed in-class attention for reasons that English majors seldom have had occasion to consider.  Arguments over Shylock’s character re-intensified as the students assessed Shylock’s famous exit line, “I am content.”  Is it said sarcastically? Resignedly?  Ruefully?  Or with contempt?  Or should it, as at a production I once saw at Stratford Ontario’s Shakespeare Festival, signify enlightenment and transformation, literally an on-stage religious affirmation as a celestial light illuminated an opened Christian bible?  Again, Shakespeare provides no clue, but every actor and director must decide “the truth” for their own production. 

Even such a seemingly mundane short line as Macbeth’s reply to his wife’s question about when Duncan will be leaving their castle can in many ways be crucial to characterization in ways that English students may not have considered.  Macbeth’s terse reply, “Tomorrow, as he purposes,” can be played with complete factuality and innocence, but if it is delivered instead with a pause and sense of menace worthy of Harold Pinter, it can also insinuate that Macbeth has other, far more sinister purposes already in mind.  The implications of this actor/director choice determine not only a key part of his character at this point of the play—namely whether, in fact, he has already decided to kill Duncan—but also, necessarily, the extent to which he will be influenced by his wife’s subsequent arguments that “persuade” him to kill Duncan.  

Single-word lines prove no less troublesome when the “preferable” intimation and delivery are scrutinized in class.  Cordelia’s ostensibly simple and direct reply of “Nothing, my lord” when her father requests a public profession of her love for him can in fact be said in a number of ways; opinion was divided over the extent to which she  should be meek and remorseful or bravely resolute and defiant.  Even among students who agreed about her delivery of the line, opinions differed about the tone of Lear’s reply, which repeats the word “Nothing” as a question.  Is he incredulous?  Does he believe he misheard her?  Or is he already angry?  When she then repeats the word “Nothing” in reply, should it be in the same tone as the one before?  If not, how has it changed?  As we charted the possible combinations in the repetition of this single word by the two characters, the number of possible interpretations increased exponentially, whereas the English majors had typically seen only one. 

When a word is repeated several times in the same line, collateral issues are raised.  That “repetition means variation” for some intended effect is one of the few axiomatic principles that govern class discussion throughout the term. Accordingly, when Lear repeats the word “Never” five times in a single line in his final speech of the play, the actor can play it either with increasing volume and anguish, until the final iteration of it is somewhere between a howl and a scream, or it can be progressively diminuendo, implying more and more disillusionment and ever-bleaker despair, the final word barely whispered or almost incoherently sobbed.  Similarly, the intonation of the four-time repetition of “Howl!” as he enters carrying the dead body of Cordelia can rise to a nearly animalistic scream or break into barely audible cries of futility and frailty. After the students have considered these multiple possibilities, it is especially interesting to play video of the scene from various film versions to show the differences in the delivery of just the single line in question. 

Issues of casting and costuming can also lead students to re-examine their presumptions about individual characterizations.  In Henry IV Part 1, in particular, the students’ opinions were sharply divided over what actor they would choose to play Hotspur and why—and how attractive or sinister the character should be.  Some, who had seen Kenneth Branagh's film of Much Ado About Nothing, felt that Keanu Reeves would be a good choice, since he could make Hotspur almost as villainous as that play’s Don John.  Others wanted Ben Affleck, but dressed in black and rather villainous.  They were astonished when I suggested a decidedly un-villainous Matt Damon for the part—appropriate perhaps because Hotspur rather than Prince Hal has many of the qualities traditionally associated with a romantic lead (and has the best love scene), whereas Prince Hal spends much of his time carousing in the tavern.  To my surprise, the latter activity had put him almost permanently out of favor with a number of my more religious students, who also devoutly disapproved of—and saw nothing funny about—Falstaff!  Even those who sided with Henry IV regarding Hal’s un-princely behavior were less than certain about who should play the Prince, though some opted for a young Kenneth Branagh, having perhaps seen him playing the same character in Henry V.  Their preference for (and presumption of) black costuming for Hotspur was also surprisingly consistent—and eventually led them to consider not only their presumptions about the character but the way in which costuming choices could influence an audience’s perceptions and attitudes—a subject about which, again, Shakespeare says nothing, and to which few if any of them had given much thought heretofore. 

At times, the absence of stage directions in certain key scenes increases their ambiguity, perhaps without the playwright’s intention but certainly beyond the notice of many of the play’s readers.  Like many directors and theatre-goers, most students were quite ready to assume that Marcellus and Horatio hear and react to the voice of Hamlet’s father’s ghost when he commands them to “swear”—though in fact there is nothing whatsoever in their spoken lines or in any stage directions (most of which were added by editors long after Shakespeare’s own time) to confirm that they do.  Arguably, their terror is a reaction to Hamlet’s emotional state and his having drawn his sword on them.  Yet many if not most productions have them react to the ghost’s word, seeking where the voice came from and so on.  When played this way, it confirms for the audience that the ghost is “real,” that its voice is heard by others rather than by Hamlet alone.  Yet, equally plausibly (and far more intriguingly, in my view), the scene can be played with the two of them totally undistracted by the ghost’s voice, whether they hear it or not, focusing their attention on their obviously distraught prince and sustaining for the audience many of the play’s central indeterminacies.  In the classroom, as students look in vain for evidence to “prove” that Horatio and Marcellus have heard the ghost, the episode becomes an exercise in “close reading”; in the theatre, it becomes a choice for the director, dramaturg, and actors as they shape their production through deliberate choices. 

Accordingly, this focus on “what Shakespeare didn’t write” has a number of pedagogical advantages for students in the classroom as well as in the theatre attending a performance, whether of a play by Shakespeare, Pinter, Beckett, or any other playwright.  In the classroom, it teaches not only the importance of close reading and critical thinking but also the importance of attention to absence as well as presence in the text.  For those who have had little or no exposure to theatre in performance, it reinforces the importance of the physical presence of the actor as well as the choices that are made.  In the theatre, indeed, it makes students aware that literally EVERY detail of a performance is the result of deliberate choices made by actors, directors, costumers, designers, and everyone else involved with the production—and that every such choice has been made from among numerous other options that could have been chosen and could radically alter the implications or the entire production. With this array of choices suddenly foregrounded as they watch the performance, they see it with a heightened critical awareness, willing to question the choices that were made, to disagree with them or support them for articulable reasons, and to watch the performance before them with a honed critical awareness and newly fresh eyes. They can thus approximate the ideal audience that Lindsay Anderson, the British film and stage director, critic, and polemicist, envisioned over fifty years ago in his essay defining “Vital Theatre”:  audiences “who come . . . to the theater not just to sit, and be ‘absorbed,’ made to laugh or cry by an expert machine, . . . audiences who come not with the expectation of passive ‘entertainment,’ nor just with mouths wide open for another slab of minority culture, but themselves prepared to give something, to work, with minds open and alert, themselves creative.”   

©  Copyright William Hutchings, 2014.  All rights reserved. 

[William Hutchings is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he teaches a course on Shakespeare’s plays among other theater-oriented classes.  His most recent book is Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: A Research Guide (Praeger, 2005), and he is also the author and editor of two books about English playwright David Storey.  His academic specialty is 20th-century English drama and fiction, and his articles include studies of such authors as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Peter Shaffer, Alan Sillitoe, Woody Allen, and Mae West.  Dr. Hutchings has also worked as a dramaturg in university productions of Equus, The Playboy of the Western World, Arcadia, Dancing at Lughnasa, and The Importance of Being Earnest.  This essay was first presented, in slightly altered form, at the Sixth National Symposium on Theatre in Academe, at Washington and Lee University, in March 2003.]

 

 

“Smell of the Greasepaint, The Funds of the Crowd”

by Patrick Healy 


[In another article on inside theater, the New York Times reports on innovations in financing commercial productions.  This one started in London (where the laws are different) and is called “crowdfunding,” and it’s on its way to the U.S. and Broadway.  The days of the big, powerful individual producer has been gone for a while, but even the producing conglomerate or consortium may be on its way out, if Patrick Healy’s report is an indication of things to come on the Great White Way.]


LONDON — As an up-and-coming theater producer, Jamie Hendry didn’t have many investors when he started raising money for a musical based on the children’s novel “The Wind in the Willows.”


What his show did have was a famous title and a celebrity script writer, Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey.” And their publicity value came in handy given how Mr. Hendry was trying to raise money for the show here: by appealing to the masses.


He raised about one million pounds ($1.7 million) last winter by selling equity stakes in “Willows” in relatively small units of £1,000, £2,500 and £5,000 through an online campaign. Any British citizen could buy in with a debit card by visiting Mr. Hendry’s website, which included a plainly worded prospectus dotted with images of Toad and Mole, characters from the story. He had the money in three months from 400 people, and he now has a list of 10,000 others who signed up to learn about investing in the future. “Willows” hopes to open in the West End in the fall of 2015.


Call it entrepreneurship or gimmickry, but Mr. Hendry’s strategy was London theater’s most ambitious attempt at crowdfunding — and a method that will soon become an option for New York producers. Proposed changes to United States securities rules, which could take effect by this fall, will make it far easier for Americans to raise money the way Mr. Hendry did. 


“The old-time producers with wealthy investors are a dying breed,” said Mr. Hendry, who is 29 and studied computer science and management in college. “Who’s going to put millions of pounds into a commercial musical when those people are no longer with us? We have to find ways to expand support for theater.”


Under the proposed United States rules, theater artists and producers would be able to publicize and sell equity stakes in plays and musicals online, which is now generally prohibited. The proposed rules would also expand the pool of potential backers.


Current rules make it cumbersome to enlist so-called nonaccredited investors, or people who earn less than $200,000 a year or have a low net worth: those who might be risking their life savings on a play or musical, say, given that 75 percent of Broadway shows flop. The proposed rules would make it easier for them to invest limited sums and allow Broadway and Off Broadway productions to raise up to $1 million a year through crowdfunding websites registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.


Under the current system, most producers have long made private equity offerings to wealthy associates and friends, many of whom have invested in theater before. Broadway plays regularly cost $3 million to produce, and musicals tend to cost $8 million or more, and investors usually put up at least $25,000 apiece; the amounts are considerably less for Off Broadway. (The equivalent amounts in London are often one-third of Broadway’s numbers.) 


“In American theater, we now have a powerful club of producers who work with wealthy investors to put on shows they like, and younger people don’t have access,” said Crystal Skillman, a New York playwright who has earned strong reviews for Off Off Broadway plays like “Geek!” and “Cut.” “Being able to recruit our own investors online could become revolutionary.”


Ms. Skillman and her husband, the comic book writer Fred Van Lente, are among the thousands of theater artists in the United States and Britain who have increasingly turned to crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo for financing. But people donate though these platforms; they are not purchasing equity in shows. 


Ms. Skillman said that she and Mr. Van Lente planned to look into selling equity in shows once the proposed securities rules take effect. 


Broadway has had only one major attempt at crowdfunding: the 2011 revival of “Godspell,” in which 700 people invested $1,000 or more and made up about 55 percent of the show’s $5 million budget. The “Godspell” strategy was hamstrung, however, by the securities rules: Ken Davenport, the lead producer, said he could not make online sales as Mr. Hendry did, and recruiting nonaccredited investors involved red tape and legal expenses.


“I would crowdfund again, if it was the right show — ‘Godspell’ was about community, and we had a community of investors — and if the rules do become lighter,” said Mr. Davenport, who is going the traditional route of recruiting accredited investors as a lead producer for the Broadway show “It’s Only a Play” this fall. 


“I just find it ridiculous in this country that we prevent people from investing in Broadway if they are not accredited and well connected to producers, and yet anyone can travel within 60 miles of their homes and bet their life savings at a casino,” added Mr. Davenport, who writes a blog called The Producer’s Perspective.


The “Godspell” approach has not caught on, because most Broadway producers look down on crowdfunding, citing the presence of their pools of experienced investors and the administrative headaches that Mr. Davenport had. But “Willows” could emerge as a new model, especially for Off Broadway as well as London. The producers of the current West End revival of “The Pajama Game” raised about $340,000 late last winter from 218 investors through the equity crowdfunding site Seedrs; the money accounted for 15 percent of the show’s capitalization. The limited-run production is scheduled to end in September and will probably close at a loss, although the producers declined to confirm that.


Other British producers are interested in licensing Mr. Hendry’s online platform, he said; he declined to name them. But several London producers said crowdfunding seemed like a tool for producers who needed cash or a stunt to raise the profile of younger ones like Mr. Hendry, who has also been a producer here on the Beatles’ tribute show “Let It Be” and the musical “Legally Blonde.”


“Jamie gave a very posh workshop of the musical at the Savoy Hotel, but it remains to be seen if his approach will work and if the show will indeed open,” said Michael Codron, a producer who has been mounting shows here and on Broadway for more than 50 years.


“When I started out, I had a group of people — agents, other producers, people I got from my accountant — who regularly invested with me, and I was sufficiently autocratic that I didn’t have to listen to their opinions,” said Mr. Codron, who was responsible for major premieres of works by Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Harold Pinter, among others. “Now, I usually take a deep breath and write my own check to get shows on, because there’s too much paperwork with investors today. Crowdfunding sounds like even more bureaucracy.”


Mr. Hendry said he had raised “a significant chunk” of his $11 million show budget, chiefly from traditional investors, including some in the United States. As for his online investors, most of them are affluent or middle-class professionals in their 40s, 50s and 60s from London and surrounding counties, and 91 percent of them had never invested in theater before, according to a survey by Mr. Hendry’s office.


“The game is on in London and New York to find the investors of the future,” he said.


[This article was originally published in “The Arts” section (sec. C) of the New York Times on 28 July 2014.  Patrick Healy has a New York Times reporter since 2005 (when he started reporting on politics) and has been covering theater for the paper since 2008.  His beat extends from news, features, and profiles about Broadway, Off Broadway, elsewhere in New York, and then to the national theater scene.]