Steve Mentz

As is often the case in April, the cruelest month on the academic calendar, I’ve been busily seeing as many plays as I can before I stop commuting regularly down to New York after the semester’s end. First on my mid-April lineup, though the last one that I’ll blog-review, was Zadie Smith’s homage to Chaucer, The Wife of Willesden. She translates Chaucer’s Middle English couplets into her own idiomatic, slang-y version of North London patois. It’s a funny, sometimes raunchy, dazzling show – very much in the spirit of the Wife of Bath, who has been titillating and outraging audiences since the fourteenth century.

In a busy end-of-term in which I’ve seen (and blog-reviewed!) a bunch of plays, including Arden of Faversham in March, Knight of the Burning Pestle and Fat Ham in April, I’ve almost let Wife of Willesden slip through my typing fingers. But I loved the show, and I want to post a few things about it. I am thinking about teaching a Chaucer-Zadie Smith mashup in a future survey course – especially if video snippets or the full show become available! (There is a fun 15-sec teaser on YouTube from the Boston production, which might work for classroom purposes – but no talking!)

So, reaching back a few weeks, I’ll mention just two features of this production, which I saw during its final weekend at BAM in Brooklyn. The first is the gorgeous set, an open and welcoming version of Harry Bailey’s bar, renamed the Colin Campbell pub & operated, in Smith’s North London version, by Publican Polly. Colorful shelves full of bottles arc behind the stage, but for me, sitting in the front row all the way to one side at BAM’s Harvey Theater, the most interesting visual statement was made by the tables in front of me, more or less on stage. Clearly some of them were occupied by other audience members, but farther back and to the center of the stage I saw Clare Perkins, who would play Alvita, the Wife herself, chatting with Andrew Frame, an older white man who would play Ian, her first husband (as well as, in Smith’s lively cross-casting, both Socrates and a local bailiff). Putting some audience members on stage did a nice job of blurring the fourth wall, and the sense that Alvita and her pals were performing for themselves as well as for the larger crowd of paying customers in the seats was wonderfully present. It’s a tricky thing to build a set that really invites the audience in, and I appreciated the effort by the designer, Robert Jones, and director Indhu Rubasingham.

The characters speak almost always in eloquent couplets in what Smith call “North Weezian,” a dialect from North West London, mixed with a bit of Jamaican patois, for which the program provides helpful translations. “To take the huff” means “to get offended,” “Mi dah yeh” means “everything is good,” a “pum pum” is a vagina, etc. The energy and relentless force of the writing was overwhelming – just as Chaucer’s Wife drowns out her fellow pilgrims with 800+ lines in her Prologue, so Smith’s inventive language, and Perkin’s energy and performative flair, carried the performance. I was especially struck, as I am not always when I re-read or teach the Prologue and/or the Tale, at how welcome the Tale was in this performance. Smith translated Chaucer’s Camelot to Jamaica, in the days of Queen Nanny, “Famed rebel slave and leader of peoples!” The story of the rapist knight who must quest for a year to discover, as Smith has him phrase it, “Wat women want and love the most” (79). Cross-casting Troy Glasgow as Darren, husband #2 and “A young, good-looking bwoy,” as the “young maroon” knight, and subbing in Alvita herself in place of the beautiful young woman who marries the knight in the fairy-tale ending integrated the Tale more closely to the story of Alvita herself. The maroon / Darren / Husband #2’s solution to the riddle is wonderfully apt –

You know what? You’re my girl, my wife, my love,

You blatantly know a lot about stuff.

I’ll put myself into your hands – you decide.

Choose the best thing or what makes you feel pride

In both of us. I’m easy. You do you.

If you’re into it, I’m, like, on board, too…

Wife of Willesden (102)

The sentimental reunion of Alvita and Darren doesn’t quite make Alivita a one-man wife, since the soundtrack here is Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” and in the finale she “dances will all her HUSBANDS, dead and alive” (105) – but it’s a nice moment of connection, implicit in Chaucer, visualized on stage.

I’m not sure what the plans are for future productions of The Wife of Willesden – but I suspect I won’t be the only one who wants to use this rendition in the classroom!

Note 1: May 2023

We who live, swim, kayak, sail, fish, walk our dogs, and watch gorgeous sunrises and sunsets in Short Beach know that our community revolves around the water. We also know that our water quality can be poor, especially after rain.

A group of neighbors and stakeholders have come together to research the sources of water pollution and cleanup. Groups involved include the East Shore Health District, the Friends of the Farm River, the Short Beach Civic Association, and Save the Sound, among others.

Many people are involved as volunteers and organizers, but I want to introduce two. Ann Davis, Short Beach resident and retired biologist, has been spearheading this “citizen science” project since 2019. Sarah Esenther is a PhD student at Brown University who has taken on the Farm River Estuary as primary research site for her doctoral work. Say hello if you see them around the beach this summer!

Our project involves measuring bacteria flowing into the Sound after rainfall events from nine outfalls, including the three on Johnson’s Beach and one on Granite Bay. Measurements from these outfalls in summer 2019 indicated high levels of E. coli after rain, but we were not at that time able to determine the source. After losing several years to Covid confusion, we are restarting in 2023 with new technology and generous support from volunteers and the Civic Association. We hope to get enough information this summer to determine a course of remediation.

I’ll provide regular updates throughout the summer, so that our community can come together around remediation once we determine the sources of pollution. Let me know what you think – I’m the guy walking two rambunctious corgi dogs down Clark Ave every day. I’ll start back up on my daily high-tide swims once the water cracks sixty degrees.

I saw this sweet, spicy, tangy BBQ reimagination of Hamlet last spring, when it had its first live run at the Public Theater. Like Jesse Green in the New York Times, I love the way James Ijames’s play finds a way through the English language’s most famous tragedy into comic renewal and joyful exuberance. Fat Ham tells a funny and powerfully moving story of surviving the hostile world into which today’s younger generation has been thrown.

It was very much the same production, with the same cast, set, and mostly the same staging, so while it was great to see the play gets its mid-town moment, I find myself thinking many of the same things about it now that I wrote up last June. It’s a profound and hilarious take on tragic necessity: “Why not live, instead?” It was fun, this time around, to see Chris Herbie Holland play Tio (Horatio), the stoner buddy whose video game erotic fantasia leads the cast away from bloodshed at the play’s end. (When I saw it last year, understudy Marquis D. Gibson played the role – and he was brilliant! But it was fun to see Holland this time.)

Seeing the play the night before Shakespeare’s birthday / deathday, I thought even more than usual about how Big Will works as both enabler and obstacle for contemporary playwrights like Ijames. On the one hand, the suffocating tragic structure of Hamlet represents the thing Juicy, and perhaps also his author, must overcome. On the other, there’s plenty of Ham still on this bone, and Marcel Spears delivers powerful renditions of the speech about “catching the conscience of the king” – or, as he explained, “actually I mean the cook – it’s a different play.” He soared in declaiming, “what a piece of work is a man.” The play opts out of the canon’s tragic grip in the end, in favor of queerness, disco, and flamboyance – but to an extent Shakespeare was already there.

The other thing I thought a bit differently about this time was Nikki Crawford’s brilliant performance as Tedra (Gertrude). Her closeness with her son is another intertextual joke, as when Juicy changes out of his “inky claok” and instead puts on the “Mama’s Boy” sweatshirt she got for him. But since Tedra, like all the other characters in the play with one hog-butchering exception, doesn’t die in the end, she’s faced with burying a second husband not long after losing the first. Fat Ham makes explicit what Hamlet left likely but unsaid – that the dead father was a bad, violent man. (John Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius elaborated this reading in 2000.) So when Rev (Claudius) chokes to death on his own BBQ’d rib (!), Tedra becomes bereft a second time. But she, like Juicy and the queer kids of the next generation, finds a way to go on. She and Juicy together pull a red gingham tablecloth over Rev’s body, laying him to rest. That same sheet had been covered the afternoon BBQ, and it also served as the costume for Pap’s ghost back at the start of the play. It’s red color is the blood of violence, of BBQ, and even of the murdered who dies from his own BBQ. Tedra didn’t have much to say at the end of the play, but like Rabby (Polonius) she stayed the course. The first time I saw the play I focused on Juicy, Opal, Tio, and Larry as the survivors. This time, I thought also about Tedra and Rabby, the women who outlasted their generation of violent men.

What does it take to survive tragedy? That’s a question for the 2020s, as of course it was for Shakespeare in the 1600s when he wrote Hamlet. It’s an environmental question, though Fat Ham seems mostly engaged with the toxic legacies of racism, masculine violence, and homophobia. It’s not as much of an eco-play as it could be – though perhaps Rev’s insistence on spending Juicy’s tuition money on a new bathroom gestures toward modern consumerism and its attendant costs.

Fat Ham makes a sweet and juicy meal, with much to think about and much to enjoy. At the American Airlines Theater on 42nd Street through June 25th!

I had never taught this one until two weeks ago, and I’d never seen it performed before last Thursday. My students and I had a great time working through this strange hybrid play / meta-play in class, but the collaboration between Red Bull and Fiasco, currently on stage in the West Village at the Lucille Lortel Theater on Christopher Street through May 13, was even better than we had hoped. It’s a very stage-y play, full of interruptions, jokes, improvisations, starting when a Citizen and his Wife disrupt the planned production of “The London Merchant” because they insist that they will see a Grocer on stage, and “he shall do admirable things.” Give the people what they want!

I’m in the middle of my late-spring theaterfest, and I’ve got three blog-reviews in progress – for The Wife of Willesden at BAM on 4/13, Pestle on 4/20, and Fat Ham on 4/22 – so I’ll keep it short. Three quick points –

First, I was blown away by the quality and collaborative closeness of the ten person cast. Most of the players are part of Fiasco Theater, who staged Pestle in collaboration with Red Bull. Many of the Fiasco’s trained at Trinity Rep in Providence. I’ve been a fan of Trinity Rep and its alums for many years, since I played a bit part (Charles the wrestler) in a semi-pro production of As You Like It in 1994 with a headline case of Trinity Rep actors. Some members of Fiasco currently work with NYU’s Gallatin School, so they continue to do academic outreach. What I loved most about these ten actors was their obvious joy in working together. Stand outs include Ben Steinfeld as Old Merrythought, Paco Tolson as Rafe, and (especially!) Royer Bockus as Michael, Rafe’s horse, and, in the interludes, a soulful country singer. It’s rare to see such an evenly matched company – though I think I have felt the same way about previous Fiasco productions I’ve seen over the years, from a great sea-shanty-framed Twelfth Night to Measure for Measure and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Talking with my students today, we compared Pestle to the Arden of Faversham we saw a month earlier in the same West Village theater. Arden is a tragedy, which tends to spotlight its central figures, but we all were struck by the contrast between the melodramatic presentation of husband-killer Alice and the easy sympathy across the cast of Pestle. We had talked in class about the contrast between Jasper, the apprentice hero of the city comedy main plot who conspires to marry his master’s daughter, and Rafe, the grocer’s apprentice who’s called up out of the audience to represent the common citizen. Jasper beats Rafe early in the play, but the sense of conflict or rivalry that I see as a literary critic wasn’t powerfully visible on stage. In this production, Rafe shares his subplot with the Citizen, who leads the fake armies of Act 4, and his Wife, who dresses as the exotic Princess Pampiona, who falls in love with Rafe in Act 3. But there always seemed to be plenty of space and plenty of shared community as the play developed.

In Beaumont’s play, each of the five acts gets divided by short interludes, which usually consist of the Citizen and his Wife insisting that what the play needs is more Rafe. The interludes as Fiasco staged them were less combative than in the original text, but also more gloriously musical. Picking up to some extent from the exuberance of Steinfeld’s Old Merrythought, these musical interludes resembled blue-grass or country folk music, perhaps picking up on the “common man” claims that the Citizen and his Wife trumpeted from the wings.

Music, like physical comedy, can be hard to represent in a playbook, and it’s certainly true that my students found Pestle much more fun on stage than in the classroom. I felt fortunate to get to see this rarity, which I’d never seen performed before. I still wonder how much Beaumont might have known about Don Quixote, which had been published in Spain a few years before his Rafe mistook an inn for a castle – though the first English translation did not appear until 1612, after the staging of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But whatever the network of influence – it’s a fun, lively, joyful play.

Downtown until May 13th!

The storm had started by the time we poured ourselves into an Uber heading across the river to the famous Surly Brewery Friday night. After a festive few hours of beer and New Haven style apizza (including the obscure mashed potato-garlic version that I’d not previously seen outside of CT), the return voyage was essentially underwater, awash in heavy white flakes and piles of slush. There were cars spinning out on the highway, and wintry mix flying into our car when our driver cracked his window to try to defog the windshield. In the hands of a capable north country driver, we made it back safely & even got to enjoy the remnants of a book launch party in a basement bar around the corner from the SAA Hilton. But my always-seeking-allegory mode wonders – how might we understand that slushy snowscape? What hostile but beautiful ecosystems are we #shax-ers navigating these days?

So many people kept saying what a pleasure it was to be back together after so long. Despite a nagging feeling of #Jax-erasure, since I was among the hardy few who made it to the wilds of northeastern FL in ’22, the palpable feeling of return definitely guided my footsteps this year. The two part seminar on “Intersectional Animality,” in which I played to type by contributing a paper on whales and whalesong, was chaired by two of my favorite Shakespeareans, Holly Dugan and Karen Raber. On both days the very-full seminar rooms felt like old home week, with smart, generous, speculative ideas flowing around the table and from the auditors back into the core group. Of all the things I love about the SAA, the seminar format, with its informality, its connections that develop over time, and its efforts to bring multiple things and people into contact with each other, remains for me the heart’s core. Such a pleasure to work with a group, including some people that I knew before and many I’ve just met!

Both sessions of the seminar circled around the ways in which commitments to animal rights and to racial justice might interact, intersect, or even possibly crowd each other out. It was a test for the controlling ethos of #shax2023, and of SAA as an organization, that thrives mutual support and enjoyment. There is, I admit, sometimes also an undersong of distinction-seeking and competition, as we all want our remarks to dazzle everyone in the room, but most of the time, at least in my (narrow and subjective, and in recent years employed and tenured) perspective, we Shax-ers look to like. I’m not sure how many people I heard say some variant of, “It’s so great to see all these people again” over the past few days.

My favorite moment of the conference, and a real highlight of many decades of SAA-ing, came when I was in the audience for Mira Kafantaris’s “Race-ing Queens” panel. Chaired by the inimitable Margo Hendricks, the panel featured the dazzling line up of Mira herself, the always-smartly dressed Harry McCarthy from Cambridge (UK), Anita Raychawdhuri, and my long-ago grad student Danielle Lee, who teaches at SUNY Old Westbury. It’s a truism of education that if students don’t succeed, it’s because of bad teaching, and when they triumph it’s their own natural excellence shining through. That’s exactly right in this case, as Danielle gave a fantastic presentation of her brilliant and timely work. But I must say that I was deeply proud of her lecture, especially her poise and aplomb during the q&a. Some of the material she was talking about regarding early modern African political actors included things I’ve been talking about with her for a long time, and it was glorious to see it presented before a very large and eager audience. Did I twinge a bit when, asked about the origins of her fascination with Sycorax, she said, well, Dr. Mentz made us read The Tempest in the first semester of grad school? I did, including at being called “Dr”! But it’s so exciting to see her work take off, and soar in such excellent company.

Along with the highs, also one lower note. As I was heading toward the airport on Sat afternoon, my last unfinished session was the #shaxfutures event on “Zoom-flight: Neoliberalism and Embodied Learning in the Post-Pandemic Shakespeare Classes.” This panel was part of the #shaxfutures initiative that began at the infamous 2017 #shakenado conference in Atlanta, when the first panel in the series was a standing-room plenary, “The Color of Membership,” featuring a searing talk from Arthur Little whose words echo a half-dozen years later. The series has continued through this year, but it’s no longer a plenary session, and it has usually been tucked into the last-day afternoon slot. This year, the big Hilton ballroom was substantially (shamefully) less than a quarter full. Until Jane Degenhardt arrived, I do not think any current Trustees were in the room, though past President Jean Howard was on stage to read Crystal Bartolovich’s talk. The papers, which addressed coercive racial, social, technological, and collective structures through which the neoliberal university responded to the Covid crisis, were excellent, varied, and thoughtful. In three very different ways, they spoke to the troubled futures facing our discipline, especially its youngest and least secure members. What does it say about the SAA that we as a community don’t prioritize the one panel (out of a dozen?) that directly addresses precarity and the material conditions of our profession? I loved the standing room panels that I’d been to during the rest of the conference – but where was everyone when it was time to talk #shaxfutures?

How might we make #shaxfutures central to the SAA? I suspect that we won’t, but it would not be that hard. The session could be a third plenary (alongside the conference Plenary, this year about the 1623 Folio, and the NextGenPlen.) A board member or past President could chair the session (as was the case in the NextGenPlen.) Other Trustees could make a point of going, and talking about it in person or online. Trustees and former trustees could take on the task of organizing the panel and/or speaking on it. To do any of those things would require dedicating scarce resources, including time on the program and the time of busy people, but current practice has the feeling of letting #shaxfutures wither.

I was a late addition to the Program Committee for the 2017 conference that convinced the Board to inaugurate #shaxfutures, and the initial 2017 session, scheduled back to back with the Queer Natures Plenary, represent the most electric morning of thirty-odd years of SAA-ing. I’d like to see that energy re-connected to the idea that the SAA can and should speak for and with an emerging generation that faces a very different professional landscape today.

One reason that we’ve been retreating from facing the #shaxfuture might be that it makes grim viewing, while our shared love of innovative scholarship creates happier focal points. The political urgency of the first Color of Membership panel from 2017 has been powerfully taken up in the past half-dozen years by #raceb4race, #ShakeRace, ACMRS, the Scholars of Color social, and many other excellent and necessary things, including this year’s “Race-ing Queens” panel and the inaugural Book Salon on early modern critical race studies. We can’t do everything all the time, despite the visions of the multiverse that were an intellectual highlight in another panel. Perhaps #shaxfutures is slouching toward its fated end. I’d be sorry to see that.

(No one, not even me, needs to trawl the back-catalog of my post-SAA posts, but I’ve been complaining about the de-centering of #shaxfutures since 2019 in DC. Sigh.)

It presumably comes down prioritization, which was an unspoken word in the Intersectional Animality seminars, perhaps because setting priorities might reveal conflict. Honest differences are hard to voice, and maybe we don’t want too much conflict around the seminar table. I could not help feeling, as I snuck out of the Hilton into a dazzling snowscape, that the #shaxfutures vision I played a small part in initiating in 2017 is slipping away.

On a happier note, I escaped from the Shaxverse a couple times to visit Dinkytown, the student neighborhood where a teenage Bob Dylan spent his few semesters at the U of Minnesota. (Most Shax-ers did the Prince tour, but I think some old folks like me enjoyed the Dylan backstory.) There, if we can believe the legends and the self-mythologizing Chronicles, Vol 1 (which we shouldn’t believe, probably), a north woods boy discovered modern folk music. We found the sign for Gray’s Drugs, above which Bobbie lived in the winter of 1959-60. We also saw the site of the frat house, which now hosts a different frat in a different building, where Dylan would mostly skip class and listen to records during his one year as a college student, as he began the first of many conversions from 50s rockers to folk singer to … well, lots of things. At a hole in the wall diner across the street from Dylan’s apartment, we bumped into – two more Shakespeareans, with whom we chatted about – Billy Joel? A rare vision, as somebody said.

Among other highlights of the conference were the always excellent NextGenPlen, which featured an impressive lineup of performance-centered talks. I was also blown away by the speculative brilliance of “The Early Modern Multiverse,” organized by Jane Degenhardt, featuring papers by Jane, Henry Turner, Wendy Hyman, and Helen Smith. As I didn’t manage to tell any of the panelists at the time, I kept thinking about the multiple universe theory as a break in 20c physics, as elaborated recently in Benjamin Labatut’s stunning nonfiction-ish novel When We Cease to Understand the World (2021). Labatut, I think, sees in the insights of quantum physics an unsafe break into a new and deadly form of modernity, to which he annexes nuclear weapons and industrial murder on and off the battlefield. When I read Labatut this fall, while wandering the rural byways of Bavaria as a fellow of the Rachel Carson Center, that his vision of 20c “break history” bears an interesting resemblance to ideas about “early modernity” and / or “the Renaissance” as a break with its premodern or medieval predecessors. I’ve learned too much from my medievalist colleagues to believe in any swerve-y visions of modernity emerging from the Not-Very-Dark and in fact Bright Ages – but I’m also intrigued by ideas of rupture as perennial features in conceptions of historical change. Is the multiverse, in its MCU and Oscar-winning guises, a version of cosmological ideas of rupture that bear traces of early modernity’s self-aggrandizing vision of an expanding Europe? I very much look forward to thee projects that these talks initiated!

I found a little less to sink my teeth into at the main conference Plenary, a hymn to the First Folio as, in Gary Tayler’s words, “One Book to Rule Them All.” I suppose that ’23 marks the last a the sequence of anniversaries and deathaversaries that have punctuated Shakespeare studies in the 21c, and I must say I’m not sorry to see them go. I love the Folio and am very happy to be able to read The Tempest and Macbeth &c, but I also think that things like the multiverse and #shaxfutures, or maybe a mashup of Minneapolis’s two musical geniuses Dylan and Prince, might be more stimulating. I held out hope that Gary would pull off the mask and reveal that Shakespeare has always been Sauron, the Dark Lord of Barad-Dur – but alas, ’twas not to be.

As usual, I’m exhausted after the shake-scene, but also wishing I’d been able to find a few more folks, including a grad student working on Shakespeare’s Tempest in dialogue with Dylan’s (album and song) Tempest, and a blue humanities scholar who made the long trip from Australia to the SAA. And I’m very sorry to have skipped out on my seminar’s group dinner Sat night in Minneapolis!

‘Til next year!

Writing is hard work.

This lively play, written by Liz Duffy Adams and directed by (full disclosure – my college friend) Rob Melrose, presents the most intense imaginable writers’ workshop. Just two writers, alone together, in a rented room upstairs in a London tavern. Nothing but small beer to drink. Lord Strange’s Men need a new history play, and their buddy Tom Nashe has botched up a first act only. Time for Will and Kit to learn to work together – but what does that twinkle in the country boy’s eye mean when he looks at the flashy, well-dressed London writer?

Their banter sparkles, with assorted familiar lines parceled out to each of the two writers. At this stage of Elizabethan history, Kit Marlowe, played by Matthew Amendt, is the reigning star while newcomer Will Shakespeare, played by Dylan Godwin, has just a play or two, plus a nasty line by Robert Greene about being an “upstart crow,” to his credit. The play skips through gorgeous banter about some of the juicier figures in the early history plays. Sentimental Shakespeare wants Joan of Arc (1H6) to be a tragic figure, while Marlowe relishes her burning. The two writers, now mutually besotted, perform the heartrending farewell of Queen Margaret and her lover Suffolk (2H6 3.2), even though that means positioning themselves as enemies of the state. When Will blurts out play’s title, “Born with Teeth,” as a description of Kit, both writers immediately say “I’m using that.” (The line echoes a bit of self-description by the future King Richard III in 3H6 [5.6].)

Without spoilers I can’t say too much about the love story, except that it’s both set up from the first glimpses of hero-worshipping Will wanting to work with his literary hero, and also manages still to be surprising, and moving, through the end.

Two lines of Will’s echoed along my bitter cold walk back to the Hilton and the arriving throngs of #shax23. Especially in the first scene, when Kit brags about his elite connections, his spycraft, and his literary successes, Will’s refrain is “I just want to write.” The country boy is a careerist, a writer-bee, living to sit before his quill, though he also speaks passionately about needing money to support his family in Stratford, where his debts, if perhaps not his heart, lie.

The other line, which works in semi-opposition to the first, has Will repeating “You don’t know me” to the then-more famous Kit. At first it’s the anonymous writer’s self-defensive riposte to the star about whom so much is public. But there’s mystery behind the new guy’s facade.

Some speculative lines about Kit’s exuberant desire to live in and on and through all parts of the world, in opposition to WIll’s dedication to the “ineffable” punctuates the literary-theoretical elements of their dialogue. Kit’s suggestion that he’s never encountered anything in the world he could not “eff” got a nice laugh, and also intensified the brewing love plot.

Together the two rough out, though not quite in the order in which we think they were written, the plays we today call the first two parts of King Henry 6th. It’s not clear that they get all the way through Part 3, or into Richard III, which closes out the sequence, due to Kit’s reckoning in Deptford.

I won’t comment on the final solitary tableau, since I don’t think I can without spoilers, though of course we all know which of these two men died in a tavern in 1593 and which one went on to write Richard III, Hamlet, and all the rest. But I think I would have stopped the last speech one line before the play did – not because the last line is wrong, but because I think we’d gotten there without it needing to be said.

#shax23-ers should get to the Guthrie this week so we can chat about the play in between lectures and seminars!

“Love is a god,” says the murderer, twice more often in Red Bull’s lively adaptation of this celebrated anonymous Elizabethan “true-crime” play than she does in the sixteenth-century original. Alice becomes a killer by the end of the night, but she’s a lover from the jump. Under Jesse Berger’s deft directorial touch, with script modifications by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Wallat, Red Bull’s production swirls with passion, errancy, dark comedy, and – perhaps above all – a deep dive into love’s divine madness. It’s a great show!

Recent computer-assisted analysis suggests, with I think solid if perhaps not airtight evidence, that a then just-getting-started Shakespeare may have written the middle scenes of the anonymously published play, and of course Red Bull leans into the attribution. Big Will fills the seats! In an interesting YouTube conversation, Tanya Pollard suggests that the timing of the play’s early performances might make young apprentice actor Richard Burbage, who would go on as an adult to debut the roles of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, a prime candidate for the role of Alice as a boy actor. It’s hard to know for sure, but Red Bull’s staging certainly placed Alice at the play’s beating, loving, violent, reckless heart. Cara Ricketts dominated the stage in the lead role, pining for Mosby, manipulating her husband and her servant Susan, and even, after the bloody ending, performing a remorse that I at least could not distinguish as more sincere than her past conversions and re-conversions. “Love is a god” was Alice’s watchword and guiding star. It took her in many directions. At the night’s end, when she announced that she would be burned at the stake in punishment for killing her husband, it was impossible not to think that she had one last transformation up her sleeve – but then the large fireplace that dominated the stage, in front of which she and her Mosby had enjoyed a multiple-scene-spanning bout of lovemaking, exploded into fire. That seemed exactly the right way to end.

Red Bull modified the script in several ways, notably by increasing the role of Emma Geer as Susan, Mosby’s sister who must choose between two men, her fellow servant Michael, played with verve and physical comedy by Zach Fine, and Clark the Painter, a wonderfully over the top Joshua David Robinson. The play’s third female role, two of which were interpolated by Red Bull, featured Veronica Falcon as Widow Green, transposed from the play’s Mr. Green, a landowner who had been displaced by Arden’s expanding estate. The hired killers Big Will (Black Will in the original), played by David Ryan Smith, and Shakebag, played by Hayne Thigpen, rounded out a lively cast of at first inept but eventually successful killers.

Alice poised herself between two lovers, her wealthy landowning husband, played by Thomas J. Ryan, and flashy up-and-comer Mosby, played Tony Roach. It wasn’t hard to see why she might turn from dull Arden to the young hottie Mosby, and the extended sex scene in front of the fireplace emphasized the physicality of her choice. Love is a god that burns hot! I could not help but wonder how the play might work with a more charismatic performance by Arden, who could have been given a little more stage presence to make a better case for himself. Arden is, of course, the old rich guy who everyone loves to hate. But I wonder if there could be more in the part. Certainly Franklin, the friend who is clearly in love with Arden, played with moral force by Thom Sesma, presented a different view of the man than Alice reflects to the audience. Franklin, also, in another slight change to the story, became the agent of retribution who made sure the murderers didn’t get away with their crime. Might his view of Arden have carried more weight? But I guess that wasn’t what this production was after!

Some of my favorite moments came from smaller figures responding to the titanic force of Hurricane Alice sweeping through their lives, as when Susan realizes that her mistress’s mad ambition has destroyed both of Susan’s suitors, or Big Will and Shakebag hurriedly skipping town after the murder. Both the ruffians get caught, one in London and the other across the Channel, as the play, which is based on copious historical sources, emphasizes that all evil doers are punished appropriately. But at least for 21c audiences, rightful retribution seems, to some extent, beside the point. What if it’s really true that “love is a god”? What do we think of Alice, who follows the blaze of that god as far as it takes her?

At the Lucille Lortel Theater on Christopher Street through April 1!

Green baseball caps in the audience snuck in a little St. Paddy’s Day festive color, but Beckett’s stripped down refusal to look away from darkness soon settled the house into a chastened silence. Endgame‘s semi-chorus sounds echoingly familiar, almost like Beckett parodying Beckett: “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.” So why did I drive home inside a swirl of imagination?

The short answer is that I’ve rarely seen four better performances on one small stage at the same time.

I was there because I’d never seen a production of this tragedy, though I distinctly remember being blown away by it in college in the 1980s. And I was also there to see John Douglas Thompson play the part of Hamm, immobilized patriarch and tyrant, who bellows his bitterness at his parents — his father Nagg, who he calls “fornicator,” and his mother Nell, both famously confined in garbage cans during the entire performance — and especially at his resentful servant Clov. Thompson’s Hamm was magisterial – I’ve been watching him perform for years, including an astonishingly physical Tamburlaine at Theater for a New Audience in 2014, an open-hearted Satchmo in New Haven, and more recently as Shakespeare’s Kent (2019) and Shylock (2022) in NYC. He’s one of the most generously emotional actors I’ve ever seen; he gathers the whole house into his feelings. As embittered, blind, immobile Hamm, who enjoys lashing out at his father and his servant, Thompson’s empathy-machine is restrained but indomitable. The music of his voice, gestures of his hands, his efforts to get Clov to position his chair just exactly at center stage – it’s hard to imagine a more compelling presentation of rage, confinement, and comic aggression. I suspect I’m not the only one who can’t wait to see his King Lear!

Thompson’s Hamm somehow managed to be both overwhelmingly emotional and palpably restrained. His immobility played against the complex physicality of Bill Irwin’s Clov, who resents his master, serves him, and in the end can’t leave but also won’t reveal his lingering presence to unseeing Hamm. It’s hard to describe the movement patterns of Irwin’s Clov – he managed to make his legs appear as both functional and also structural impediments, moving awkwardly across the stage and up the folding later to the two windows Beckett insisted were the only possible set elements. Clov plays in Hamm’s shadow, but with his expressive clown-trained body he works in comic tension with his master urge to dominate. Through Irwin’s Clov, and especially through his frayed but tangible connection to Hamm, the painful comedy of endurance of Beckett’s undersong shows itself. “There’s nothing funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

A more nostalgic and sentimental form of comedy comes from the parents-in-garbage-cans, played by the engaging Joe Grifasi and dazzling Patrice Johnson Chevannes. They reminisce about their lives before they were frozen into stage-cans, and before Chevannes’s Nell apparently dies (or at least vanishes inside her can and stops responding) they present a glimpse of light that can’t quite touch the painful duet of Hamm and Clov.

Like Laura Collins-Hughes in the Times, I appreciated the play’s comic touches, even or perhaps especially the bitter ones. But my lasting image of the show features Thompson returning a stained cloth – “old stauncher!” – to his unseeing eyes while Clov, dressed to travel but remaining in place, stares with us as the set fades to black. Might the whole thing be Beckett’s refusal of the advice that Kent gives to his master in act 1: “See better, Lear!” Instead, how about we don’t see at all!

I talked briefly with Irwin and Thompson after the show, since I was also catching up with my friend Ayanna Thompson, who knows everyone. They both mentioned that a hearing aid started buzzing a few times during the performance, and Thompson, who played Hamm’s blindness behind dark goggles that meant he really could not see, got disoriented. Irwin’s Clov tried, successfully as far as we in the audience could tell, to feed the lines that momentarily vanished. There’s something about that stage moment – an actor loses his way, and must rely on his co-star, who of course can’t speak the missing lines, only prompt them – that seems powerfully consonant with Beckett’s unsettling vision of the world as almost-empty stage. What is there to do, as the world doesn’t quite end, but talk, and listen, and help our fellows find the right words?

The website says the show must close on April 16! Get there if you can!

[in which I can’t resist the discourse, after my visit to Tempe synchronized with the latest skyfalling in the national press. With a bonus proposed solution to the butter-beard dilemma, including toast!]

1. The doomstory shows the shape of a slowing river, but we all swim in distinctive little eddies. In the early parts of the decade of decline, enrollments in English at my academic home, St John’s U in New York City, a large Catholic metropolitan uni that doesn’t closely match any of the places described in the article, stayed reasonably solid. Then we ebbed slowly, and only in the past 3 or so years have our numbers taken a dive – which, basically, means we’ve caught up with the flow of the national river, after having resisted for a bit.
2. We need better numbers! I’m not confident in my figures or the precise timing of my local story, and I don’t have an easy way to get better information. I also wonder, both locally and farther away. about two things the NYer glosses over. If the past decade and more has seen a significant rise in “adjacent majors,” new-ish programs like Gender Studies or African-American studies, New Media Studies, Environmental Studies, &c, into which some potential humanities students have been funneling, then a slump in the house of English might not necessarily indicate the decline of the humanities. Have students left for the sciences, or for pre-professional programs, like Business, Education, Pharmacy, or Nursing? The article is slippery in its movement back and forth between “English” and “the Humanities,” and it seems to think that English means only “the study of canonical literature.” Neither of those things is true.
3. The surge in online enrollments that Covid accelerated, also, may be shifting the numbers – ASU’s recent rebound in enrollments appears to include many online students, including non-traditional age students. The Starbucks barista whose tuition is being paid by her corporate overlords makes an appearance! To be clear, I think that’s a very good thing, though I wonder how many universities have the capacity, and the willingness, to expand this way. Maybe we should figure out how to do it! My very rough sense is that both new programs within the humanities and new students supported by online learning may well be significant in shaping the visible decline in old-timey majors like English. Since at most individual institutions we’re really not talking about huge numbers of students overall, we might be misdiagnosing or miscounting, in some cases. Obviously “The End of the English Major” is a prewritten (and oft-repeated) doomstory designed for clicks – but better numbers might lead to a more subtle narrative. (But I am the sort who would want a subtle narrative – I’m an English professor!)
4. Arizona State University, the happiest example of an English department in the NYer, during my short visit felt even happier than the story seems willing to admit. One thing I noticed is that ASU commissioned a marketing firm to help sell its humanities majors. It has used the results of that survey. Those are two good things to do!
5. I don’t believe that students no longer “love” books or stories or made-up things. A love of imaginary objects forms a baseline in human culture, and always has. That love can be a resource for us English profs, but we neither own it nor always know how best to use it. In some ways, a love of books, esp the books we read at an impressionable age, sometimes in the company of charismatic teachers, might be a distraction. (I say this as a Shakespearean, perhaps overly secure in the belief that Big Will will do fine even if he must shed some cultural authority and adapt to new media forms.)
6. The real barriers to the major – leaving aside the question of whether majors and minors are always the best ways to think about college experiences – are fear and money. Those programs are larger than the English department! Some local problems also flow from too much nostalgia, which may not be scary but can certainly feel dull.
7. The folkways through which our profession appears to be responding to this moment, whether critical and diagnostic, as voiced by Columbia’s James Shapiro, or speculative and plaintive, as per Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, aren’t going to get the car out of the ditch. I admire the work of both those distinguished figures, but they don’t look good here.
8. Like many of my academic friends, I’ve been mulling the compound adjective “butter-voiced” since I first read the article, which describes ASU’s Dean of Humanities as “butter-voiced, [and] bearded.” What exactly is a buttery voice? Does my old friend Jeffrey Cohen really have a butter voice? What might that succulent and symbolic reference mean? Can we spread his voice on toast? During my visit to Tempe, I did, in fact, eat a deliciously buttered piece of toast at Casa Cohen. Surely all these things can’t be coincidences?
9. Everybody loves to dog-pile the English major, including onetime English majors who now have bylines in The New Yorker. But English is not the humanities, and English is not just great books either. I enjoy great books, old ones and new ones. But books are not the only things we share with our students and communities.
10. The NYer’s tripartite idea of what colleges are – Oxbridge quads or research-focused institutions or glittering multiversities – matches poorly onto the majority of colleges in America, and the world. It’s probably true, though, that most NYer subscribers (including me) went to colleges that fit those models. Much public confusion about higher ed in the US comes from a failure to understand the diversity of institutions we collectively call “college.”
11. Money is always the subtext, whether we’re talking about why students, administrative advisers, and parents worry about English or what the latest fancy building for STEM or the business school looks like. I wonder if we should speak more honestly about money. Plenty of humanities majors do well financially, though as in other areas of the American economy, its helps to start with social and financial capital. The connection between college majors and money might be more oblique that some assume.
12. I admit I’m not sure what to do with our old friends Truth and Beauty, who make an appearance in passing. I like them well enough, but do they really need to hog the limelight?
13. The latest interdisciplinary major at ASU is called “Culture, Technology, and the Environment” – a nice list of terms that could also describe the content of the English courses I’m teaching this semester! What is the value of re-naming? I like culture, I like technology, I like the environment, I like (new and old) media, I like performance…
14. Marketing to new majors can be fraught, since I imagine that many if not most prospective new English majors would come at the expense of our friends down the hall in History and Philosophy, or of bigger majors across campus like Psych or Bio. (The ASU English major who gets the last word in the NYer had started as a Psych major.) At St. John’s, the requirements of the School of Education mean that a significant number of my Shakespeare students who want to be teachers are told they can neither major nor minor in English. Does squabbling over majors really seem like the best thing for profs to do?
15. The best thing about the NYer’s description of ASU was its celebration of the people who comprise English and the Humanities. The students rightly occupied the center of attention, and the long article’s last words were from a newly declared English major at ASU. She “hasn’t told anyone yet” (except the NYer) that she wants to be a novelist. “You never know,” she closes out the final page. “You never know what’s a possibility.” I like “possibility” as the last word on the future of the humanities!
16. I also loved the rich portraits of ASU faculty, including my Shakespearean friends Brandi Adams, whose lively class got portrayed in generous detail, and Ayanna Thompson, who has remade ASU’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies as a thriving national hub for #Raceb4Race scholarship and for supporting scholars of color. There’s no livelier or more influential place in early modern studies in America today. One advantage of being big, like ASU, is having space for lots of people, including the ability to hire even in current conditions. Back in Queens, alas, that’s not the way our little world seems to be going. But we are a much smaller place.
17. What’s the moral of the story? Some simple imperatives: Celebrate your people! Market your courses! Invent (or rename) courses, majors, minors! Get help from Deans, or at least figure out ways to smooth out university bureaucracies! Get better numbers, and pay attention to them! Investing in faculty helps too, though perhaps faculty who say so risk seeming self-interested.
18. Those straightforward-sounding things are easier said than done.
19. If butter-voiced means alluring, as I guess it does, maybe the NYer writer was worried that Dean Cohen’s smooth delivery of ASU’s happy story would, if the reporter wasn’t careful, smear up the prewritten story of catastrophe he and his editors have been counting on? Maybe our future can be well-buttered despite it all? Or maybe I just enjoyed visiting friends in the lovely desert last week?

In slightly different world, I’m riding horses, hiking red rock canyons, and visiting old friends and my two year old nephew in the American West this week. In the only world we’ve got, I’m digging out from the only measurable snow we’ve received in the CT shoreline this year, and blogging about the academic part of my Arizona trip. I do love tromping in my local woods in the snow, but…

I spent part of last week at Arizona State University in Tempe, where I traveled to give the inaugural lecture for their new Blue Humanities Institute. I was lucky, when I was there, to overlap with a visit by Erica Fudge, so I got to do a lunchtime conversation with her about the relationships between animal studies and blue humanities, as well as hear her great talk on Hamlet and “being edible” in the Renaissance. Another wonderful treat of spending a few days at ASU was getting to visit, at least briefly, many of the amazing people who are now making, as a current piece in The New Yorker shows, this large public university a vision of possible futures for the humanities. Back now in the chilly East, and having read through the long and overdramatic piece in The New Yorker, with the inevitable click-bait title, “The End of the English Major,” I’m left thinking about how Western ASU feels, in the American sense. The campus teems with new construction, and even its oldest buildings date to the late nineteenth century. It was unseasonably cold and windy when I was there, and we even got a bit of rain, but palm trees, saguaro cacti, and views of rocky peaks combined to make an easterner like me feel the landscape as openness, possibility, and perhaps a little disorientation. I won’t refer back to the NYer article all the way through this blog recap, but the unspoken thesis of the piece showcased Columbia and Harvard as stuck, while ASU appears active and onward-moving, even if all the answers might not yet be clear.

I went out to the Sonora Desert on the invitation of Sir Jonathan Bate, who is heading up the new BH Initiative. I’d not met him before, though his 2000 book Song of the Earth was an inspiration for me, as for many of us who turned toward literary ecocriticism in the 00s. Recent ASU connections (or acquisitions? it’s a bit hard to tell) to research centers in Hawai’i and Bermuda suggest that ASU’s Blue Humanities hub will be well positioned to speak across Atlantic and Pacific contexts. Maybe they need Indian and Southern Ocean toeholds next?

Since ASU, despite its surging novelty and the feeling that changes are being made, teems with Shakespeareans, including Ayanna Thompson who runs the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies as well as the Raceb4Race collective, among many others, I gave a Shakespeare lecture, focusing on the “Coast of Bohemia,” the infamous geographic error at the heart of The Winter’s Tale. In thinking about the play’s combination of fantasy and reality, I opened the discussion with Rachel Carson’s mid-century The Edge of the Sea in dialogue with the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1970s lyric, “Bohemia Lies by the Sea.” The point was to introduce Shakespeare through both marine science and poetry. I also asked the sympathetic audience to listen twice to some descriptive phrases that I would apply to both real and imagined coasts:

It’s not a fixed place. There’s no real line in any coastline. Nothing stays still. It’s a jumble, a chaos. Always moving. Everything is re-made, re-imagined, at every instant. Things touch, but not in reliable ways.

That dynamism, alienation, and disorientation captures coasts as physical spaces and imaginative opportunities. I read those words aloud twice, asking everyone to think about the coast of Bohemia as both place and idea. My slide was my local CT coast with Whale Rock. I was so pleased when the playwright Madeline Sayet, who was at the talk, tweeted out that phrase that evening! It’s always fun to speak to a receptive audience.

Coasts of Bohemia are fictive opportunities that shift locations, change shapes, and flow unexpectedly. My local waters, even when forbiddingly cold as they are now, always open spaces for me. The most richly experiential water I found at ASU was in the Mona Plummer Aquatic Complex, where for a glorious half hour I had all the lanes to myself on a brisk Friday morning. I anticipate that the Blue Humanities Initiative will generate many watery insights and connections as it moves forward.

On my last day in AZ, after vacation plans had come undone, I spent a happy afternoon and evening hiking and sipping cocktails with my friend Jeffrey Cohen, who’s been Dean of Humanities at ASU since 2018, and who was described, in that national press article, as “buttery-voiced and bearded.” (Yes, I assume it’ll be on his business cards soon.) He’s one of the speculative engines behind ASU’s growth in the humanities, though he always says that his job is primarily to help other people do the things only they can do. I think of Jeffrey / Dean Butter Beard’s western swing as having grown out from his collaboration with ASU astrophysicist Lindy Elkins-Tanton on the 2017 Object Lessons book Earth. A book co-written by a planetary scientist who is currently leading a research expedition to the metal asteroid Psyche and a medievalist eco-scholar strikes me as exactly the imaginative and generative projects that humanities scholarship, teaching, and even administer-ing needs. Not all moon shots reach their destinations – but it’s exciting to see good things taking shape.