Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Head over Heels

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Arcadia’s got the beat. “Habemvs Percvssio,” the inscribed arch proclaims in the opening number of Broadway’s only current musical based on an Elizabethan prose romance. The show starts with the most famous of the many Go-Go’s numbers that make up the musical backstory. “We Got the Beat,” the cast self-celebrates in the opening number Why not?

I was probably the only person watching “Head over Heels” in the admittedly not quite full Hudson Theater on Tuesday night who was wondering how well the 1980s pop rhythm matches the Renaissance fixation with Arcadia as ideal place. In Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, the brilliant & intricate Elizabethan prose narrative that was the primary source for the musical & that I wrote my dissertation about in the early 1990s, the region is known “partly for the sweetness of the air and other benefits” but even more for “the moderate and well tempered minds of the people.” That ideal temperance, of course, gets remixed in the sixteenth-century story, as in the twenty-first century musical.

Maybe having “the beat” isn’t a bad way to think about Arcadian pastoral? It doesn’t mean you have all the secrets or have built full utopia — it’s just that songs are brighter, the weather fresher, life a bit tastier, in Arcadia. Or on Broadway.

Peppermint the Oracle

The modern version, written by Jeff Whitty and recently revised by James Magruder, is now on Broadway after earlier turns in San Francisco and, originally, at Ashland, OR. Its Arcadia presents a paradise of sexual plurality. The most rousing applause of the night was for trans actor and alumna of Ru Paul’s Drag Race Peppermint’s performance of the Pythian Oracle. The show’s narrative makes pretty messy hash of Sidney’s more balanced and more complex symmetries, including cross-dressed Amazon, a pair of contrasting princesses, and a royal pair who each fall in love with the visiting Amazon, the Queen because she realizes he’s a man under his armor and the King because he does not. (That final twist, along with the Oracle describing it, comes directly from Sidney, though other parts of the plot depart from both of the Renaissance versions of the narrative.)

The show was infectious and fun — and in some ways its sex-positive and erotically plural message almost fits the Elizabethan original, in mood if not words. Back in 2003, I wrote one of my first published articles on the cross-dressed Amazon figure, who I took as representing both gender uncertainty and generic multiplicity. Drawing gender and genre together via the Latine generare, I explored how Sidney’s multiply-revised text asks for plurality in both sexual presentation and literary genealogy. 

The Broadway musical, like Elizabethan prose fiction, is a wonderfully flexible genre that loves to trot out its typical figures: Basilius the vain king, Gynecia the smart and cynical Queen, Dametas the fond father, Pamela the bossy older sister, Philoclea the “plain” (not really) younger sibling. I mostly enjoyed the Broadway-fication of the Arcadian tropes, and it was hard not to be swept away by the singing and showmanship, especially of Bonnie Milligan as Pamela, making her Broadway debut.

I wasn’t thinking of the big stage when I wrote my chapter on the Arcadian Amazon around the turn of the last century, but after seeing “Head over Heels” I could not resist looking back at my argument this week, many years since I’ve last re-read any of the versions of Sidney’s Arcadia. The article is “The Thigh and the Sword: Gender, Genre, and Sexy Dressing Sidney’s Arcadia,” in Constance Relihan and Goran Stanivukovic’s collection, Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640 (Palgrave, 2003). I was surprised to find that at least some of my claims for Elizabethan fiction also work somewhat for Broadway musicals — or am I just giving myself an Arcadian benefit of the doubt?

I suggested that Sidney’s cross-dressed Amazon, who in his version in the young prince Pyrocles (in the Broadway version he’s the shepherd Musidorus), celebrateshybridity in both gender — as in the stage version, she (Sidney uses both gendered pronouns in different contexts) seems happy to be both — and in genre. Here’s a resonant proto-feminist line, spoken by the Amazon as she/he/they do battle against the mono-masculine knight Anaxius:

I seem to have taken a picture of the wrong billboard on 44th St

‘Thou dost well indeed,’ said Zelmane, ‘to impute thy case to the heavenly providence, which will have thy pride find itself, even in that whereof thou art most proud, punished by the weak sex which thou most contemnest’

The Amazon on stage last night, who went by Sidney’s alternate name Cleophila, never voiced such Latinate periods. But I couldn’t help feeling that the show’s rage for plurality, for more love in more forms, wasn’t that far from Sidney’s “idle work,” even if the Elizabethan courtier himself, who would die heroically in battle not long after putting aside the unfinished Arcadia, might not have wanted to admit it.

Go see it before January 6, if you’re in New York!

Makbet in a shipping container

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Dzieci Theatre’s Makbet

Our world floats inside containers.

The familiar steel boxes, with their 8 x 8.5-foot openings that lengthen into 20 or 40-foot segments, are just right for stacking on cargo ships or hauling down the highway on trains or trucks. Containers have transformed global commerce since the American businessman Malcolm McLean patented the design in 1956. It’s not an exaggeration, as Craig Martin says in his excellent Object Lessons book Shipping Container, that “our everyday lives are utterly determined by these metal boxes” (8). Almost everything I can see in my house right now — wood, drywall, metal and other building materials, furniture, the clothes I’m wearing, the MacBook I’m typing on, the dog toys on the floor, the leash still attached to the sleeping puppy’s collar — everything except the puppy himself, really — traveled here in a container, over waves, rails, or highways. #worldinabox

I’m been obsessed with shipping containers for years. So when my friend Liza Blake social media’d the news that the Dzieci Theatre Company was producing a slimmed-down version of Macbeth inside a shipping container, I got there two nights later. Such a glorious, intense, musical, & powerful performance! Now I want to put all my favorite plays inside boxes.

Malcolm McLean at Port Newark

When I showed up at the Sure We Can recycling center in Bushwick about 20 min before the 7 pm showtime, I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. The mostly-open lot is a maze of stacked pallets and piles of aluminum cans packed up in clear plastic bags. I didn’t see anyone who looked theatre-bound, but it was an intriguing space with colorful graffiti art, so I wandered around in the lingering twilight. Someone found me and asked “Are you here for Makbet?” He threaded me through the maze to an open fire in a half-sized oil drum, around which the members of the company were gathering on what was the first chilly evening of October. One member of the group, after checking her phone, addressed me by name. I plead vegetarianism when they offered kielbasa wrapped in newspaper, but I accepted a small glass of vodka. Mostly the people there were members of the company; clearly the container would not be full on a Friday night. They remembered Liza and her mom from last week. It was odd but good to share a drink before we all went inside.

Sure We Can Recycling Center

The rules of the game for Makbet-in-a-box stated that the main roles would announce themselves through a series of costume props: a black hat for Makbet, red shawl for his Lady, berets for Banquo and Fleance, spectacles for Prince Malcolm, a bandanna for MacDuff. A trenchcoat would be worn in succession by three kings of Scotland: Duncan, Makbet, and finally Malcolm. Three members of the company alternated these props as they exchanged the principal roles. I’m pretty sure the three members who took the main parts shift from night to night; the trio I saw included Matt Mitler, the founder of the company; Megan Bones; and Ryan Castalia. After the three chanted the Weird Sisters’ opening, Mitler wore the Makbet hat for the warrior’s meeting with the Sisters in the wood — but as the play proceeded all three actors played all the parts. We were treated to three different Makbets inside the narrow metal box — Mitler played him as speculative and deeply focused on the air-drawn dagger; Bones was manic and expressive; Castalia intense and withdrawn, especially when he was wearing the monarchal coat in the second half of the play. Watching the actors pass the roles among themselves highlighted the play’s recursive focus on ambition, violence, loss, and the lure of visionary knowledge. I’ve seen a lot of good productions of this play, but none quite like this one.

An out of focus pre-show fire

Working with a compressed script and taking advantage of the narrow steel walls for sound effects and a claustrophobic mood, the company generated a powerfully ritualized version of Shakespeare’s dark tragedy. Being inside the container focused and compressed the play, as Mitler recognized. I missed a few cut lines — the “two spent swimmers, that do cling together / And choke their art” (1.2) are particular favorites — but I loved the abrupt turns of the role-switching. And I loved that it all fit inside the box.

Before the showed started but after we were seated on milk crates inside, Mitler offered to provide readings from the spirit world for members of the audience. Mine was a vision of bowling pins, just one of which I managed to strike with a rolling ball in the vision. That one pin fell onto its neighbor, and that one onto the next and the next. Not all the pins fell down, but the ones that fell opened up a line, or opening, through which it might be possible to advance.

I’m still thinking about this vision: a path, but inside the container?

After the final battle and the tyrant’s death, wonderfully staged and punctuated by the rattle of human bodies crashing into steel walls, the trio ritually re-packed the costume props inside a large pot. I had a long drive home to CT, so I could not linger, but I stayed for a minute around the fire to break bread, and to talk about maybe bringing the company out to St. John’s sometime. I wonder if they travel with a container? 

You’ve still got a few days to see this one! Closes 10/21. Get down to the recycling center and get inside the box!

Twelfth Night @ Tfana (The Acting Company)

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 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!

 

 

RSC King Lear @ BAM

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Sometimes you get lucky and see a major theatrical star play a canonical role in a transformative way. The contours of the role remain familiar, but the actor inhabits them more fiercely than you expect. He surprises you, even though you’ve seen the play lots of times and don’t expect to be surprised. He fixes your attention whenever he’s onstage. At times he slightly distorts the way you see the play, bending it just a bit in his direction. You start to imagine a slightly different play, tilting slowly out of its usual orbit into a different perspective.

I drove home from Brooklyn last night with my imagination inflamed by Paapa Essiedu’s brilliant performance of Edmund, the Bastard of Gloucester and sub-plot’s villain in King Lear.

It’s true that I was supposed to be afire with a different performance. Anthony Sher’s mad King was strong and lucid. As he devolved from inacessible tyrant carried in atop a litter in the opening scene to doting Dad who doesn’t mind prison as long as he can sing with Cordelia “like birds i’the cage,” he became somewhat more engaging — but he never captured my attention the way Essiedu’s Edmund did. Sher was stately, plump, a bit formal in his clarity. Essiedu was the thing itself.

Anthony Sher as Lear and Graham Turner as the Fool

I’ve got a pet theory about the relationship of the plot and subplot in the final scene. While Edmund’s minions are killing Cordelia off-stage, the action presents a long interlude in which disguised Edgar challenges and defeats his till-then-triumphant evil brother Edmund. The combat set-piece runs for 145 lines in the Arden 3 edition (lines 90-235), or 35% of the stage time before Lear enters howling with his daughter’s corpse. (Actually, since the silent stage combat takes some time, the Gloucester brothers subplot occupies more of the scene than that percentage indicates.) In an unstageable gambit that seems meaningful to me, I imagine a split-screen for those 145 lines, showing the audience that while we enjoy the chivalric episode of the battling brothers, Edmund’s murderers hang Cordelia. If only we didn’t like sword-play so much perhaps we’d pay attention in time to rescue her! “Great thing of us forgot!”

Paapa Essiedu as Edmund

The relationship between plot and subplot in King Lear is a bit strange. The play is the only major tragedy to have a substantial independent sub-plot — such plots are more common in comedies — and the two stories come from very different sources. The main narrative of the King and his daughters is a medieval tale from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain by way of Holinshed, the Mirror for Magistrates, and the anonymous play the True Chronicle History of King Leir. The sub-plot of rival brothers and their blinded father comes via Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia, published around the same time as the Leir play in 1590, but Sidney’s source in turn was the classical prose romance The Aethiopian History of Heliodorus — a book that’s my personal pick for the greatest mostly unread text in Western literary history. The sinuous way in which Shakespeare’s King Lear entangles and disengages the medieval chronicle history and the Byzantine Greek romance comprises a thorough study in the legacies of these major genres and story-patterns in early modern English literary history.

Last night, I was on the side of Heliodorus, Sidney, Edmund, and Essiedu, even though I know the production wanted me to be with Geoffrey, the Mirror, Lear, and Sher. I’m probably susceptible because my first book on Elizabethan romance narrative had a Heliodoran heart. But Essiedu’s intensity carried me along. He’s a rising star, as I already guessed when I saw his Hamlet in Stratford in 2016. I thought his Edmund was even a tick better. He’s one to keep an eye on!

There were some other good performances in the RSC Lear, including David Troughten as an imposing Earl of Gloucester, Mimi Ndiweni as a compelling Cordelia, and Nia Gwynne as a charismatic and beautiful Goneril, whose face-off with her father while he cursed her “organs of increase” was especially powerful. The understudy Patrick Elue did a great job playing Kent last night, and the appreciative cast gave him his own curtain call at the long play’s end. It took me a little while to warm to Oliver Johnstone’s Edgar, who was strongest when naked and mad, perhaps a bit less compelling when sane and compassionate.

There’s still time to get to the Harvey Theater to see this one before April 29!

Anthony Sher as Lear with Mimi Ndiweni as Cordelia

The Winter’s Tale @ Tfana

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I’m in the middle of a three-plays-in-five-days theaterathon — Lear at BAM tomorrow! — so just some quick notes on a lively and ultimately very moving production of The Winter’s Tale at Tfana.

It’s a real treat to see this play now. I’m getting ready to travel to Mississippi next week, to give the James Edwin Savage Lecture on “Nature Loves to Err: Catastrophe and Ecology in The Winter’s Tale.” Not only my slides will be colored by Arin Arbus’s production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn!

1. Dancing Bear / Thief in Snow 

Arnie Burton in a bear suit

The bear is always the star of the show, and Arnie Burton’s turn in the bear suit was pure joy. Whether playing in the snow before the opening scene or performing an extended dance-off with Antigonus before the chase, his bear was playful, not destructive. This goofy generosity even amid destruction spilled over into the rest of the production, including during Burton’s expert audience-wrangling as Autolycus. Burton played both bear and thief with charisma and verve. Perhaps he was less threatening in each part that he could have been — but that was the spirit of the show, which emphasized wonder over horror. That’s probably why the Bohemian pastoral redemption of second half seemed more compelling that the Sicilian tragedy before intermission — but this somewhat ungainly and gorgeously excessive play is also built in that asymmetrical way.

2. How tall is heroism? 

Dion Mucciacito as Polixenes; Kelley Curran as Hermione; Anatol Yusef as Leontes

I’m 6’4″ tall, and I basically see the world as being full of people mostly the same as my very normal height, with a few others who are a couple of inches shorter. But I spent a lot of time thinking about height during the first half of this show, partly because Kelley Curran’s authoritative Hermione towered over Anatol Yusef’s Leontes. The opening scene, in which the Queen convinces the royal guest to stay after he has refused at the King’s request, performed competing male and female forms of authority. “A lady’s verily,” Hermione quipped, “is as potent as a lord’s.” The height differential staged that rivalry in interestingly visual ways that other characters took up also: Polixenes was just a bit taller than Hermione, but in Bohemia both Clown and Shepherd were towering string beans. During the trial scene, King Leontes mounted a throne that put his head just above his now-disgraced Queen, but he descended in response to her powerfully-delivered self-defense. Am I superficial if I thought Yusef’s Leontes, like his Laertes last summer at the Public, a bit underpowered? Maybe I am. I thought Yusef’s line readings were overly smooth and somewhat disengaged, even during the rising eruptions of his jealousy (1.2). He was clear, which is a good thing, but he was not, to my ears, authoritative. This play distinguishes itself by its trio of powerful women, Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita, standing up against the male monarchs, but I thought this Leontes wasn’t really holding his end up as well as he might.

3. Hermione and the shapes of female power

A more positive way to frame that quibble would be to note that Curran’s Hermione stole the show whenever she was onstage, including a stunning statue scene that brought her back in a quasi-wedding gown. Mahira Kakkar’s Paulina was also a powerful stage presence, perhaps even a bit bullying toward Leontes after he’s broken his kingdom and family. Nicole Rodenberg’s Perdita rounded out the female trio. All three gave great performances, but of the male actors only Eddie Ray Jackson’s Florizel, and perhaps also Burton’s Autolycus, seemed able to match them.

John Keating and Ed Malone as wet clowns

Hermione’s pregnant body in the opening scene carried a powerful stage charge, and a moment in which she invited Polixenes to touch her belly and feel the hidden baby move was staged as a key trigger for Leontes’s regicidal rage. In a strange extension of the play’s performance of pregnancy, the country maids Mopsa and Dorcas (Maechi Aharanwa and Liz Wisan) of 4.4 were both also played as heavily pregnant. During their joint performance of the “Two Maids Wooing a Man” ballad, they even belly-butted each other, sumo style. The audience appreciated the excess of the show Autolycus staged, but it seemed symbolically confusing.

4. Time, the Oracle, the Statue

At the moment I’m thinking obsessively about “Time, the Chorus” in relation to my upcoming talk at Ole Miss and also regarding my general #pluralizetheAnthropocene ideas. In Brooklyn right now, the bear gets top billing. Robert Langdon Lloyd played a creditable white-bearded Old Man Time, but the more striking theatrical coup was the Oracle. Arbus’s direction emphasized the formal theatricality of the Oracle; Michael Rogers, who also played an impressive Camillo, sat stoic on the side of the stage as Hermione orated and Leontes dismissed her — but it was clear that Apollo would have the final word. Like the statue in the final scene, the Oracle was set apart from the action. The non-Oracular clarity of the God’s words knocked the king to his knees: “Hermione is chaste, Polixenes, blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant…” Yusef’s finest moment as Leontes, to my mind, came in response to the Oracle: he doubled up, fell, and clapped his hands to his mouth, unable to speak. His wretched reposte, “There is no truth at all i’th’ oracle,” seemed hauled out from deep in his jealous bowels. He could not look at his Queen as he clung to her supposed guilt.

Arnie Burton as Autolycus looking for clothes to steal

5. Clowns and other responses to the storm

The other element of the play that I’ll be talking about next week is (of course) the shipwreck scene, which also doubles as the bear scene and the transition from tragic Sicilia to tragicomic Bohemia. The bear stole the show, but the Clown who buried half-eaten Antigonus, played by Ed Malone, and the Old Shepherd who found the infant castaway, played by John Keating, performed the shift into comic verve. Costume changes carried us into the new Bohemian mode: the rural men wore yellow slickers for the storm scene, and Autolycus sang his first song in just his skivvies. By contrast with the evening-wear formality of the Sicilian court, we clearly had arrived at a more practical place.

6. Mamillius

Memories of the dead son linger after the statue comes back to life. In this production, Eli Rayman as Mamillius took a silent turn before the final curtain, running in between Hermione and Leontes after the final non-rhyming lines had been pronounced. The symbolism was pretty on the nose — the dead boy flashed in between the couple’s efforts to reunify their marriage — but the royal pair still walked off together. I’ve only seen the full impact of the child’s death played once — in a devastating final tableau by Propeller at BAM in 2005 — but I appreciated the hint here.

Hermione, Leontes, and Nicole Rodenburg as Perdita, after that which was lost is found

Get to Fort Greene by April 15 to see this one!

Alan Cumming’s Macbeth

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2013-05-20 17.26.55This One-Scot Show was my end-of-semester treat, and this poster gets it right, if hitting the spot means catching you between the eyes. The production interwove an inventive performance by Cumming that only occasionally slipped into caricature — mainly in his whining, petulant child-king Duncan — against a spare institutional backdrop. The performance opened in silence, as a female doctor and husky male orderly medicated Cumming and changed him into a hospital gown. He clutched a paper bag labelled “Evidence” that will eventually reveal a child’s sweater, later appropriated to play the part of Macduff’s doomed son. Concerned faces on the medical personnel implied that the patient might at any time explode, implode, or scatter his bloody fragments about the stage. (But we know that already from Shakespeare.) The first lines spoken were also the first lines in Macbeth, but they worked doubly, referring both to the Weird Sisters and to the institutional trio — patient, doctor, orderly — who are the only figures on stage:

When shall we three meet again?

Some reviewers found the constant shuttling among different characters distracting, and it clearly confused at least a few of the chattering people sitting near me in the theater. There were some over-flashy touches, like the rapid-towel shifting that switched from Lady Macbeth — torso covered — to Macbeth — naked to the waist — but in general Cumming gave an engaging performance and has a great, clear, Scottish voice. The shifts were disorienting enough to draw attention away from some powerful speechs, especially early in the performance, but others took on new force:

Is this a dagger which I see before me?

photo (1)The backdrop of mental illness made the hero somewhat less than awe-ful in both the ethical and purely theatrical senses. I can’t agree with Ron Rosenbaum that this production provided unique insight into the nature of evil, but by performing the play as a kind of auto-investigation, self-generated therapy or protest against therapeutic invasion, it does show off the paranoid closeness of perhaps Shakespeare’s most hero-centric play. The super-warrior who unseams his enemies from the nave to the chops isn’t much in evidence, but Cumming’s mad, obsessed figure, dragging himself from bed to bathtub to sink, always aware of the overlooking eyes of his attendants and their three video camera-witches, provided menace and danger. He also became, perhaps because he’s the only person to look at much of the time, powerfully sympathetic, in a slightly disjointed, almost Beckettian way.2013-05-20 17.26.41

It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.

The most powerful prop on stage was a large doll, dressed in pink, that stood for baby-prince Malcolm, named heir to boy-king Duncan. Without engaging over-much in extra-textual speculations of the sort mocked in the famous essay, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” I kept thinking that the emotional core of this production wasn’t so much vaulting ambition or shared lust for power but a fundamental rage against the Child and the futurity that children represent. (Does Lee Edelman talk about Macbeth in No Future? He did recently write a great essay on Hamlet.)  When the doll gets propped up on the wheelchair-throne for the final tableau, it’s hard not to feel that Macbeth’s death — the conflict with Macduff ends with “him” drowned in the bathtub, where Macduff’s sweater-son had also been immersed — marks the triumph of an infant’s future over an adult’s present.

How does your patient, doctor?

Addressed to the female doctor who has returned to the stage, this line, like the performance’s opening line, works both within the theatrical frame and in Shakespeare’s play. It also edges toward the death of Lady Macbeth, often the emotional high point of the play. The last great Macbeth I saw, by Cheek by Jowl in 2011, had me wanting a production of just the love story, with no one on stage but Him and Her. Cumming’s performance of the marriage was quite strong — he did slightly overdo some of the sexual impersonation jokes when Lady Macbeth read her letter in the bath, and the inventive staging of her seducing her husband into the murder seemed to rely on a sophomoric reading of the line, “Screw your courage to the sticking point.” The central loss or crime or catastrophe in the ambiguous frame story seemed to involve a child, but Lady Macbeth, and the concerned, sympathetic female doctor, were somehow at the heart of it too.

…full of sound and fury, / Signifying…signifying…signifying…nothing.

Certain lines in Shakespeare are too over-familiar to be performed easily. At times Cumming’s soliloquies, in particular, suffered from their clear, direct enunciation: we know the words already, I wanted to say, what else can you do? (Sometimes I think I’m not the intended audience for Shakespeare on Broadway.) Probably the most interesting twist on a canonical phrase was Cumming’s triple-take on what follows sound and fury. He struggled and stopped three times before getting to “nothing,” as if he couldn’t quite get through it, couldn’t quite accept his wife’s off-stage death, his pronouncement of an absurdist universe, the rounding close of the play itself. What comes before nothing?

2013-05-20 17.27.10In the end Cumming’s production stayed, of necessity, within one head. It was propelled by rage of the present against the future, the desire never to cede the stage, not to be displaced —

If it ’twere done, when ’tis done, ’twere well

It were done quickly…

We watched on the video feed as the hero held himself underwater in the bath where young Macduff had been drowned. He couldn’t hold out, and emerged with a splash. Exhausted, avoiding the enthroned doll at center stage, he dragged himself back to his hospital bed. He looked up at the doctor.

When shall we three meet again?

A great performance of the theatrical “now,” packed into a scant 100 minutes. The sun was going down as I left the Barrymore Theater.

The Suit at BAM

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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. Th Suit

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.

suit-articleInlineSometimes 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.

King Lear by Wu Hsing-Kuo

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I missed the Shakespeare Olympiad in London this summer, but saw  Wu Hsing-Kuo’s one-man Chinese opera version of King Lear last night — pretty amazing.

Wu, a trained master of Chinese opera who has broken with tradition by staging Western literary classics, made Lear into a vehicle for psychodrama, leaving much of the play’s action to the side and embracing the internal dilemma of Lear as character. As Alex Huang oberserves in an excellent essay on Wu’s career,

The tension between father and child in King Lear is turned into an allegory about Wu’s uneasy relationship with his jingju [Beijing opera] master.

Act 1, “The Play,” starts and ends in storm. I always think of these scenes as the heart of the play, but it was great to cut directly to it, to see the rest of the place as architecture surrounding this basic confrontation of human body with unfriendly elements. Wu’s Lear engages himself, his elaborate costume, his long white beard, and his world in an apparently vain attempt to connect. It’s Shakespeare as Beckett — interesting the Wu has also performed “Waiting for Godot” — and it’s both intense and moving.

Act 2, “Playing,” followed a 20 min intermission with manic energy: Wu starts as the Fool then becomes Lear’s dog (!), followed by Kent, Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, the blinded Gloucester, Edmund, and the “mad” Edgar, who calls himself, in one of a few English words spoken to comic effect, “Tom.” Particularly powerful as the evil sisters and as Gloucester seeking the cliffs of Dover, Wu’s physical inventiveness buoyed this longer act, constantly reinventing himself and his surroundings. His Gloucester climbed atop a large rock formation at the climax of this scene — the rocks had been half-broken human statues in Act 1 before they had fallen — and the roar of the ocean made this scene seem less invented, less acted, than it sometimes does on stage.

Act 3, “A Player,” features Wu playing himself, as the super-titles and program notes reveal. He’s still reconnizably King Lear, but filtered through Wu’s own struggles with his master, his artistic career, and perhaps — I’m not certain about this, or exactly what it amounts to– about the relationship between Chinese and English dramatic traditions. He performs no other characters, but when he walks on stage carrying the elaborate costume he wore in Act 1 in his arms, it’s hard not to thing of the old man bearing his daughter’s body.

I left thinking about Taiwan as an especially fraught cultural location, caught between China and a global world that has become increasingly, since Wu and  his colleagues started the Contemporary Legend Theater in 1986, Anglophone. Alex Huang reads Wu’s Lear — which apparently also goes under the title, Li Er zai ci [Lear Is Here], though the program last night, at New Haven’s Festival of Arts and Ideas, didn’t mention that — as a “local” rather than “global” production. I agree with his focus on the intimacy of the performance, the way Wu’s Lear burrows down into internal questions, so much that (for me at least) I felt the performance was richest in Acts 1 and 3, when he wasn’t switching between characters but was just the mad old king / Chinese Shakespearean actor, inviting the audience to see him try to work himself out.

The dialogue, spoken in Chinese but also projected with English translation on two screens flanking the stage, was largely — 2/3? — straight translations from the play, but an extended poetic riff on things that the self does to itself — I hate myself / I love myself / I forget myself / I imagine myself… — had the feeling of a strong distorting reading of the play rather than a production of it.

I’ll be thinking about Wu Hsing-Kuo the next time I see anyone else play this role.

This sort of thing isn’t for everyone, though the house was pretty full last night.  “I would never,” said Olivia when I told her where I was going, “see a play with only one Chinese character.” Then she smiled to make sure I understood her joke, about “characters” being units of Chinese writing as well as people. Clever girl.

Ethan Lipton’s “No Place to Go”

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This tender love story between man and corporation won’t break your heart — we all know what happens when the company relocates to Mars, where office space is cheap — but the show gets down inside you and does its work.  It’s as sharp and funny a take on today as you’re likely to find.  If you’re in New York this weekend, get to Joe’s Pub to see it.  The Times likes it too.

Bandleader / playwright Ethan Lipton sings the small joys of the workplace — “I’ve got a place to go in the morning” — and unfurls the half-noticed pleasures of that temporary community, with its private languages — “information refining” — and particular characters, including a special vocal appearance by “the last sandwich in the conference room.”  He loves the place, but doesn’t want to leave Our Town.

(Side note #1: I’m blogging from Mars right now, on a sunny spring morning.  I commute from here to the outskirts of Our Town in pre-dawn dimness, but I’ve come to like Mars.  It’s not as dry as you might think.)

He tells us that his master plan is a life in which there’s “time to make up stories while also eating,” and this brilliant, funny show performs in the wide gulf between economic reality and artistic imagination.  The fantasies keep on coming.  “When we move in with my aging middle-class parents” leads to “I’m gonna incorporate,” a nostalgic lefty hymn, “Did you hear what they did at the WPA?” — even artists, this song tells us, have to eat — and then the title song, “No Place to Go.”

My favorite parts evoke the NYC office culture I’ve not worked in since I left Random House back in ’92.  The dark guttural of the last sandwich in the conference room growls, “Somebody wants me!”  The center fullback of the soccer team keeps everyone organized.  “Do they still make men in Brooklyn?” asks a strong sentimental ballad.

(Side note #2: The competitive spirit in the soccer song made me think back to the last time I saw Ethan Lipton in person, playing ultimate frisbee at UCLA with the Buffalo Nights gang.  I remember he was pissed at me for not throwing the disk his way.)

The closer was “Nothing but a comeback in my wallet,” with supporting vocals from the brilliant three-piece “orchestra,” the highlight of which, from where I was sitting anyway, was Vito Dieterle’s gorgeous saxophone.

We might not be able to believe that saxophones and songs can break corporate power.  But somewhere above Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie smiles down on this one.

Again, if you’re in New York this weekend, get thee to Joe’s Pub. 

 

‘Tis Pity at BAM

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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.