Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night
June 27 play#7 Twelfth Night- Baltimore Shakespeare Festival

I didn't go. I think I may have reached my saturation point. Our friends in Baltimore are producing one of my favorite plays featuring the immensely likable Molly Moores as Viola. But it was raining and they mic their outdoor shows so the sound doesn't come from the actors's mouths, so it makes it far less compelling- and when I'm not in the mood anyway...

I'm going to try and catch it later in the run. Promise.

Antony and Cleopatra

June 26 play#6 Antony and Cleopatra- The Shakespeare Theatre

This play has its fans. I know Ralph Cohen from the American Shakespeare Center hails this play as Shakespeare’s greatest. I’ve always thought it was a bit messy. I liked it much better on stage. Act 4 is still a trick to make sense of, but now that I’ve seen it live, I admire so much about the play.

My friend Jenny Leopold pointed out the variety of character relationships, particularly in the early part of the play. She pointed out that it was a strength of the piece. I think she’s exactly right- and something that’s counter-intuitive to a play with the name of the two main characters in the title.

Michael Kahn’s work is very interesting- visually extraordinary (a bit soulless though. It’s hard to project warmth when you have two actors playing a scene sixty feet from each other). But, I was in complete admiration of his ability to create striking, exciting visuals. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a director do it as well.

The proficiency of the artists involved with the production was on full display- a master craftsman each and everyone. But what about innovation? There seems to be a “way” to produce and direct high profile Shakespeare in North America. It’s fine, it’s good, it’s highly watchable, but….

There's an attempt to use modern perspectives to make these plays connect to a living audience, but their original point of view seems half-hearted, conventional, and, well not that original. How can you innovate if your "innovation" looks and sounds like everybody else's "innovation?" It's sort of like being a dinosaur rock band back in the 1970's, right? I mean, Foreigner sounded exactly like Boston who sounded exactly like Journey. These were all popular bands, but they were all just trying to master the same "sound." Maybe that's it. Perhaps these big budget Shakespeare companies aren't trying to innovate at all- perhaps they're just glad to have the big hits on AOR stations and being able to sell product?

It would seem like you'd have to go through a lot of trouble to do that, but...

And what about the little guys? I'm the Artistic Director of one of these little guys. Many of us (there are, after all around 100 Shakespeare companies across the US) are just trying to replicate the big guys, but with smaller budgets. Is that interesting? Mmmm, maybe not so much.To take the analogy further, aren't many of the small Shakespeare companies just like those cover bands that were everywhere in the seventies? You know, maybe they would play one original song every night, but mostly they were providing low-budget, not-as-good imitations of the Dinosaur bands.

Of course the trick is, as soon as the Talking Heads or the Ramones become popular, then everyone just tries to sound like the Talking Heads or the Ramones.

Love's Labor's Lost

June 18 play#5 Love's Labor's Lost- Stratford Shakespeare Festival

I just don't like it. I just don't like Love's Labor's Lost. There are whole chunks of it that elude me. This production was well-meaning. It was produced in the Stratford Festival's smaller theater the Tom Patterson Theater and the cast was made up mostly of younger actors- the folks who played some of the smaller roles in Romeo and Juliet. The performances were good enough. The actors had a lot of energy, which was appreciated. They had a ten year old playing Moth which was a terrific idea and added a lot.

I just didn't care. They set it, when? Probably right after the restoration of Charles II. That's as close as I could place it. There were a couple of very funny performances and the director was a "blocking machine"- I admired that aspect of the director's work as only one who loves blocking could. But the whole thing was...dead. I didn't care. I didn't want to be there. I was mad because there wasn't any wine sold during intermission. I was happy because there was no one sitting next to me and I had an aisle seat - so I had plenty of elbow room. I really liked that feature- so I evaluated my experience comparable to a flight on a commercial airliner. How I wished they had served peanuts!

I am a true skeptic when it comes to Shakespeare's lesser known plays. I have never seen a production of one of his lesser-knowns that has moved me. The best I can come up with sometimes is "there were some interesting things there." Smart people tell me that I'm wrong, so I must be, but I just don't get it.

Now don;t get me wrong, there were performances worth admiration- Brian Tree was terrific as Costard and long-time Stratford Festival actor Peter Donaldson gave me the biggest single laugh I had for the whole festival as Don Armado- but the pair of quartets were lacking in my mind. They were all very attractive and had lots of energy- they were just so... stagey. yeah, that's it. They acted in a manner that humans only act when, well, they're in a play.

I think sometimes about the notion that Elizabethan actors were in a unique place in their society- that dress was a distinct way of defining class- poor people wore crappy clothes and rich people wore nice clothes. Poor people didn't play dress up- there was no imitation wool or lace. Everyone knew your status in society by what you wore. Actors were the only exception to that. They were the only poor people who wore nice clothing. So, how did that make them move in their costumes? Did they know how to or were they just giving a ridiculous imitation of how they thought the upper classes moved?

Were they better at it then?

Accents

So, the Stratford Festival made a revolutionary (at the time) decision back in the sixties to have all actors use their natural dialect/accent instead of the mid-Atlantic accent that was the rule before then (and remained the rule in many places well into the 1980's). I applaud this -as anyone that knows me, I'll go on and on about how modern "English Accents" have little to do with how Shakespeare sounded and Americans who put on these artificial accents only separate their audiences further from the words.

But here's the trick about Stratford- some of the Canadian actors have Canadian accents and some are British emigrates who have natural English accents- and there's another group of older actors who have put on some version of Mid-Atlantic or semi-English accents and you can tell that it's because that's how they've been doing it their entire lives. So, with all three of the sounds coming from stage- it's just a bit confusing!

Hamlet Part Two (not the movie)

June 18 play#4 Hamlet- Stratford Shakespeare Festival

I've been thinking a lot about Ben Carlson's performance as Hamlet. The more time I give it, the more meaningful it becomes. I often consider the best movies, plays, performances, etc.. are the ones I think about afterwards and his performance as Hamlet is one of those. The clarity in which he handled the text, the connection between the words and the action, the SPEED in which he handled the words and the physical performance were nicely married. I've been spending a lot of time considering/reading about very physical performances of Shakespeare- because so much time and energy is given to the spoken word in Shakespeare, the connection between language and physical performance gets treated as a poor afterthought. I think that to link the humanity of these 400 year old plays and modern audiences relies on the physical nature of performance. That's how these plays live.I think this is what my friend Isabelle Anderson is always getting at. As performers, we need to not only let the words live, but also the language- which is not just words- live as well. I think that's the only way we have a fighting chance to let these plays transcend.

This past winter, I saw Shintoku-Maru at the Kennedy Center. It was done entirely in Japanese, and though much of it was lost on me, the sheer physical and visual nature of the performances connected to me in a true way.

Hamlet

June 18 play#4 Hamlet- Stratford Shakespeare Festival

an uncut Hamlet in three hours and 5 minutes (including a 15 minute intermission). That's remarkable. How did they do it? Well, by the action always happening on the words. The actor playing Hamlet gave a seminar on acting Shakespeare. The production was good, not transformative though. The director placed the play in pre-WWI Denmark- choosing such a stiff, tight-assed setting makes the production stiff and tight-asses from the beginning. It's what everyone that is afraid of Shakespeare thinks it'll be- stiff and tight-assed. There was so much going for the production- directed by the genius Adrian Noble. There was so much about it that was unique, interesting, engaging- but the historic stuff which just got in the way of the terrific performances.

The actors had to fight the historic style that- and some did successfully.
Aren't these people Vikings? The story comes from a 12th century Danish folktale and, I don't know how the English from 1600 viewed them, but 21st century Danes still consider themselves Vikings (being one-quarter Dane, I joke with my daughter about our being Vikings). Not, the stuffy, stoic Scandinavians of the modern era.
I liked so much about this production, but found so much of it to be unnecessary and superfluous. Our Hamlet was very funny- just, as I think, he should be. It was a funny Hamlet which I think is appropriate, but it just was too… clean- to be great.

Romeo and Juliet

June 17, Play #3 Romeo and Juliet The Stratford Shakespeare Festival

This production clocked in at three hours and was uncut. My chief impressions were a)Is this often the most underrated Shakespeare? and b)the audience seemed to be either under 18 or over 65. What happened to everyone else?

I've worked on the play- directed it and, of course, like most of us, read it(or parts of it) when I was 13. But what is it about this play that makes it seem so familiar? Is it that the narrative structure is much imitated- like by 99% of all theater that's been produced since it was written? It's so well put together. It's quite remarkable, really. The audience treated it as an almost religious experience- certainly the ritual aspect of the production was in full swing.

Stratford- what an odd experience. The vibe here seems like a cross between "look how big we got" and "yes, you may attend one of our many productions." Maybe it's part of national character of Canada not to get too excited about anything. The way I see it, this is one of the capitals of the world for Shakespeare performances- I want to feel good about the fact that I'm here, not tolerated. And-people are polite and all, but they don't make it easy.

The production was very straight-forward. The director's particular spin was that the play started modern dress, the masquerade was an Elizabethan masquerade and then they all stayed dressed in Elizabethan gear until the very end when everyone dies. It wasn't anything particularly innovative- and besides, with the attending of this play being such a ritual, I'm not sure one needs to do anything particularly innovative.

The kids in the audience really seemed to dig it- so that was cool.

More later about R&J.

Also, I went to see Cabaret- which was pretty good and they spent soooo much money on it.

The Ballet

I took a short break from Shakespeare to see Ballet Across America at the Kennedy Center. The Pacific Northwest Ballet, The Kansas City Ballet and the Washington Ballet all performed interesting pieces. It had nothing to do with Shakespeare other than the fact that, as a director, I get many more ideas about directing Shakespeare from the Ballet or Opera than from other performances of Shakespeare.

The Tempest

June 12 play #2 The Tempest (Chesapeake Shakespeare Company)

Again, this is a play produced by my company- and though I didn't direct it, I can't expected to be objective about the production.

You know, in recent decades, we've created a new category for Shakespeare's plays. In the old days, they were divided up between tragedies, comedies and histories. Now, we have this fourth category- "romances." This includes Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Pericles and the plays we don't know what to do with. One used to hear the phrase "problem play" a lot to describe plays like Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well- now that term has fallen out of fashion, but now we talk about the romances.

What struck me about watching The Tempest last night is how neatly the dramatic and theatrical structure of The Tempest fit in with his earlier comedies. Sure, it's not non-stop laughs, but what Shakespeare comedies are? The Taming of the Shrew and Comedy of Errors, maybe- but look at Much Ado About Nothing- it has a very dark edge to it. The heartbreaking scene where Beatrice asks Benedick to "kill Claudio" certainly has style similarities to this play. Oliver's redemption speech in As You Like It feels like it could have taken place on the island on The Tempest.

Is there such a thing as visual rhythm? If there is, I recognized something about that in last night's production. Like many of Shakespeare's comedies (well, and other plays as well)- you have a great visual event with lots of people at the beginning of the show, then you have about an hour of those visuals being broken down into more focused images- to be completed at the end of the night by another giant tableau. Twelfth Night looks very much like The Tempest in this sense. Taming of the Shrew (sans induction) shares that quality.

People often speculate what happened to the writer of The Tempest after he wrote this play? This, we think is his last solo-written play (and if you've ever written a play that included actors speaking the lines, you'll know that no one ever writes a play by themselves).Right before and after this play, he (and his collaborators) really starts playing around with form- I believe to a less satisfying result. Another thing struck me about the Tempest is that he views his young lovers with less empathy. Romeo and Juliet, Proteus and Julia are enormously flawed people, and immature without a doubt, but interesting, complex people. By the time he gets to Miranda and Ferdinand, it seems like he has no patience left for young lovers. But who could blame him? They seem young and almost inconsequential- Miranda exists only as a vessel for Prospero's love.

I liked The Tempest very much when I was younger and didn;t care for most of Shakespeare. I think, only, because I could follow it relatively easily and it has a real strong sense of theatricality that I loved so much. I don't imagine the forgiveness quality or the parenthood themes made any impression. I assume that works that I cared about when I was younger won't have any meaning to me- but I was happy to see that this one did, although I think in an entirely different way.

Anyway, I don't think this play is a "romance" in any way. I think it's a comedy- using Shakespeare's classic form. It is my contention that scholars take it out of the "comedy" category only because they think it is more "important" than his other comedies. Whatever.

The Comedy of Errors

June 6- Play #1 The Comedy of Errors (Chesapeake Shakespeare Company)

There's a lot to admire about The Comedy of Errors. It is an incredibly flexible play- perhaps Shakespeare's most flexible. It lends itself to bending and twisting and does not lose its form. I've seen it many times before, but this is the first time I directed a production of the great early farce. I appreciate Shakespeare's avoiding the temptation to fill the play with a lot of topical humor (unlike the difficult Love's Labor's Lost and the near-wretched Merry Wives of Windsor).

The great strength of the play is that the characters bridge the gap between the stock characters of Roman comedy and, 1,000 years later, commedia characters with that of modern comic stock characters. In my book, The Comedy of Errors does this better than the later post-commedia Italian comedies. Maybe it's the "Englishness" of it.

A problem with the play is that the author spends so much time with the details of minutia of the plot (like who gets what chain at what time) and pays little attention to giant logical questions (why do both twins have the same name? for instance).

The poetic element to the play is really non-existent. The character of Adriana has some immature attempts at poetry, but it doesn't really hold much weight and comes off unsatisfyingly. Aside from that, we're left to a closing line by one of the Dromios. It feels like Taming of the Shrew in that sense.

So, I directed this production and so I'll talk a little (subjectively) about the structure of the play. You often hear about the interludes and jigs that existed in productions- much like Lazzi in old commedia dell arte. It was my desire to add something resembling these in my production. What I learned is that rhythmically, it feels right. It certainly helps the internal rhythms of the passages of time.

There's so much craftsmanship in this play, I sort of wish that we could mix the attention to plot in this play with the beauty of language in As You Like It.

The more and more familiar that I become with Shakespeare, the more things about the work fascinates me. One of those things is the variety of imperfections in his plays. All seem imperfect but in different ways. This play's imperfections are almost the direct opposite of the imperfections of Hamlet.

I'm on My Way

Over the next three weeks, I expect to see a whole bunch of Shakespeare plays- starting off with CSC productions of The Comedy of Errors & The Tempest (so, I don't expect to be objective about Comedy of Errors, since I'm directing it). I also intend to see productions of Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labor's Lost, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony & Cleopatra, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night. So, I'll share some of my feelings and impressions about these productions. I hope you'll chime in with lots of corrections, admonitions and rebukes. We start this weekend with production number one: Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's production of The Comedy of Errors.