Maybe it’s just that I’ve seen Fiasco’s sea-shanty-filled Twelfth Night recently, or perhaps that the end of this particular spring semester brings the melancholy close of my research leave rather than joyous release from spring term classes, but I kept toggling between two thoughts last Thursday night as I watched the opening preview of The Acting Company’s Twelfth Night at Theater for a New Audience.

Mostly I thought that this play, maybe more than any other Shakespearean comedy, really can’t miss in performance. It’s so fun to watch!

And sometimes I wondered whether some of the hits were more glancing than they might have been. What lies beneath laughter?

The stand-out performances were Kate Forbes as a brilliantly conspiratorial and triumphant Maria who stole almost every scene she was in, and Joshua David Robinson as a soulful Feste. Both of these actors performed an emotional knowingness that left some meanings unspoken. The most resonant exchange of the night, it seemed to me, was Feste’s teasing suggestion to Maria about her prospects for making an elite marriage: “If Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty a piece of Eve’s flesh as any in Illyria” (1.5). Neither needed to say more; overflow of feeling was left to Lee Ernst’s red-bearded Toby, Matthew Grier’s barely-contained Duke Orsino, and Susanna Stahmann’s wide-eyed Viola. 

The comic bits were wonderfully lively, especially the physical interplay between Viola-as-Cesario and the Duke. Elizabeth Heflin performed a stately Olivia whose costume changes structured her transformation from withdrawn mourner to eager bride.

In recent months I’ve been thinking a lot about romantic comedy and consent, ever since I found myself teaching Measure for Measure‘s depiction of sexual harassment and bed-trick near-assault, at the start of the #metoo moment last fall. (I wrote a bit about this after seeing Measure twice at the Public last fall.) Twelfth Night gently satirizes the erotic willfullness of overwhelming love, played mostly-sympathetically by Olivia and Viola, only partly disciplined in the case of Orsino, and cruelly mocked in Malvolio. None of these relationships really comes close, here or in the other comedies, to a courtship of consent, conversation, and mutuality. Perhaps Maria and Sir Toby, who play jokes together, come closest?

“Fate, show thy force,” says Viola in act 1, “ourselves we do not owe.” More than the conniving heroines of As You Like It or Merchant of Venice, Viola stages the fundamentally passive heroine of classical romance, enduring tribulations and anticipating the renewals of tide and time. Such an attitude of submission doesn’t mesh well with Enlightenment understandings of selfhood and reasoned choice. Reason and love aren’t often bedfellows in Shakespeare.

“What is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve”: Viola’s language, spoken by a disguised women to a withdrawn woman on behalf of an elite man, mirrors the phrasing of harassment. It’s no surprise, of course, to find sexualized violence lurking in Elizabethan comedies: not all of these plays are as overt as The Taming of the Shrew, but the undercurrent flows through them all. It’s a good thing that such patterns of male action and female passivity are becoming visible and problematic in this #metoo moment. I’m still working out how it’ll change my teaching, and all of our lives.

Go see this one before it closes on May 27!

Walking out of the theater after this brilliant, unsettling show last Tuesday night, I didn’t know exactly what had happened. Ben Brantly’s Times review had prepared me for a play that “breaks your heart” with a light and musical touch, but not for the pleasurable disorientation I felt.

The minimalist set, deftly managed by Peter Brook with clothes racks and hangers, as well as intricate lighting and inventive music, presented a semi-abstract vision of the South African township Sophiatown, which was soon bulldozed after the events of the play. With moving parts and jury-rigged partitions, it resembled a transparent, open closet, a window into confined lives and imaginations. 

The play had opened with husband and wife, Philomen and Matilda, slouching against each other on chairs arranged into a threadbare marital bed. It ended in precisely the same place, despite the intervening discovery of the wife’s adultery, the husband’s insistance that as penance for her infidelity she care for the suit her fleeing lover left behind, and the husband’s final public exposure of the suit’s secret after she has invited local guests, and a few lucky audience members, into their home to hear her sing.

During the play I kept thinking about how the meanings of adultery expanded and tumbled over themselves as the play went on, from the thin edge of disbelief that cracked open the love we’d seen on Philemon’s face in the opening scene, to a political allegory of life under apartheid, to the slow emergence of Matilda from frustration into art as she joins a “cultural club” and allows herself to learn to sing. None of these schemes quite captured the play’s rich ambivalence, the semi-Beckettian combination of abstraction and human desperation. It didn’t matter so much what the suit meant, which of the many meanings the play would finally settle upon. We were watching lives entwined with not-quite-knowable symbols, and never knowing, never settling, seemed perfectly fine.

Sometimes one side of the meaning-whirlpool appeared to surface by itself, The peak moment of political allegory came when the play’s narrator, played by Jared McNeill, sang Billie Holiday’s  brutal song of lynching in the American South, “Strange Fruit.” His piercing, pure voice, unadorned, spoke to the entanglement of emotions and repression.

But that piercing protest, while perhaps the most stunning of the half-dozen songs performed, seemed to me to have been a sideways move away from the human center of the play. The transatlantic shift to pre-Civil Rights America globalized the story, but most of our attention remained on Philemon and Tilly, their see-through house, and his refusal or inability to let go of the suit and its explosive memory.

The ending mystified me — and not just me, I asked around and others were confused too — so much that I had to google the original story, by Can Themba, to be sure that the sleeping wife wasn’t going to wake up after the applause stopped. The story related a tragedy, though I wasn’t sure of that when I walked out of the theater. Philemon’s compulsion to remember, to expose, to force the suit back into view, had killed his wife.

Is is a problem that I wasn’t sure what had happened in the moment? Or might this ambiguity represent one of the stranger, fuller, more deeply integrated combinations of tragic loss and comic endurance that I’ve seen in a while? I do like a tragicomedy, if given my choice.

I’m glad I caught this one during its brief trip to Brooklyn.

All sorts of horrible things invade a teenage girl’s bedroom in Cheek by Jowl’s great new production of John Ford’s incest tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, currently at BAM.

An over-ripe world of corruption and decadence lingers and leers from two backstage doors, but we the audience occupy Annabella’s bedroom for the full duration.  A bed with red sheets sits at  center stage, making an impromptu altar as well as serving more predictable purposes.  Posters on the back wall resemble a pre-digital Facebook page, charting the heroine’s emerging sense of self.  True Blood.  Kabaret.  Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  Gone with the Wind.  At stage right, apart from the other posters, an image of the Virgin Mary.

The trouble starts when she’s playing sock puppets across the bed with brother Giovanni, and things devolve quickly.  As they consummate their mutual love under the red comforter, a group of men, waiting on stage during most of the play, gather round to negotiate the bride’s price.  Soranzo, a nobleman who sloughes off the widow Hippolyta in the sub-plot, wins her hand — but the muffled forms under the blanket remind us that bad things are coming.

What I love about Cheek by Jowl is their breakneck packing and headlong intensity.  As with last year’s Macbeth, they played straight through without intermission.  No place to run, no  civilizing cocktails to assert distance between us and them.  The strong ensemble cast pushed the metaphors hard — Giovanni drew a lipstick heart on his chest in the first scene, then cut out his sister’s bleeding heart in the last.  The chorus of adult men chanted the couple’s lines back to them in an inverted religious rite as they first kissed.  Giovanni turns up at his sister’s wedding to Soranzo taking close-up pictures of the bride.  The widow Hippolita, played by Suzanne Burden, mocked Annabella’s sexy dancing with disturbing gyrations of her own.

Like Ben Brantley in the Times, I thought Lydia Wilson’s Annabella was the star around which this production rotated, though I like the supporting case more than he does.  Annabella, of course, gets the most play, and the most variety: child, sex goddess, coy mistress, penitent, even briefly mother-to-be.  In changing she touches everyone else onstage, from his love-idolotrous Byronic brother to her nurse, Putana — the play is full of dark send-ups of Romeo and Juliet, and this Nurse is one of the best — to her finally sympathetic husband, who appears readier to forgive incest and adultery here than in Ford’s script, perhaps because his accusations to his wife after he’s discovered her pre-marriage adultery — “Come, strumpet, famous whore!” — are played, oddly but movingly, as part of a love scene.  The kissing stops once he finds out that she’s pregnant.

As in their Macbeth, which Cheek by Jowl transformed into a tale of doomed love, this production ends on a sentimental note.  Giovanni, bare-chested as usual, sits on the edge of the bed with Annabella’s bleeding heart in his hand.  Their father lies dead beside him, and the Cardinal who in Ford speaks the titular couplet that ends the play (“Of one so young, so rich in nature’s store, / Who could not say, ‘Tis pity she’s a whore?”) mills around with the remaining chorus of men.  Rather than giving this corrupt authority his chance to moralize, director Declan Donnellan brings on a ghostly Annabella, dressed in girlish tights and t-shirt instead of the sexy panties and wedding dresses of the previous scenes.  She walks silently up to the crying Giovanni and places her hand on his bloody hand, which contains her heart.  He doesn’t move or seem to see her — but it’s a tender moment.  Pity, I suppose, is what we’re left with.