It’s nice to have great students!  Here’s a link about some new productions featuring St John’s doctoral student Tara Bradway, and her theater company, the Adirondack Shakespeare Co.

With the “Justice Project,” the company will bring two plays to the St. John’s campus, Measure for Measure and Merchant of Venice, playing in rep the next Fri and Sat nights, first on the Manhattan campus (Feb 10-11) and then at the Law School in Queens (Feb 17-18).  They are also putting on a panel about law and performance on Fri Feb 17 around noon.

More details can be found via Tara’s blog.

Please come!  I’ll be there at least next Sat night for Merchant with my daughter Olivia, who loved their production of The  Tempest last winter.

Alone, masked, and silent: that’s the way to see a play.  For a couple hours last night, while wandering through six stories of a Chelsea warehouse on W. 27th that had been transformed by Punchdrunk into a Macbeth/Hitchcock noir horror fantasy, I was thinking about how elusive the theatrical transaction can be.

The place was full of great stuff, a candy shop, hospital wing, detective’s office/taxidery shop in which a fatal (stuffed) raven was disembowled to reveal a tickertape with one of the few Shakespearean lines I heard all night:

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

There were three distinct sets of people inside: audience members like me, wearing white masks; theater staff wearing black masks and blocking access to certain rooms and stairwells; and maybe 8 or 9 actors, without masks, doing various things.

Audiences want stories, so when we saw actors doing things — dancing, packing suitcases, trying to wash their bloody hands and faces in one of many bath-tubs, or smothering King Duncan with a pile of pillows — we gathered to watch.  The scenes were brief, often powerful, and always fast: when the actors hurried on to the next room, they trailed clouds of awkwardly jostling masked audience members in their wakes.

The set was really the star, because you could play with it.  I picked up pieces of paper, sometimes founds line from Macbeth on them, examined bird skeletons, ate hard candy, played a card game with one of the actors, though he did not choose me to give a shot of (apple juice?) whiskey at the end of the game.  The soundtrack, from old Hitchcock thrillers, was gorgeous.

Some rooms were full of matter, overflowing with detail and debris.  Oothers were airy and empty.  One was a maze of leafless trees, another a spare half-grid of collapsing brick walls, thigh-high, with fake Baroque sculpture.

We wanted to see things happen, all of us in the white masks, & we hustled and wandered and sometimes broke into a jog as we tried to catch up to whatever was going on.  We saw highlight scenes from the play  — mine were the banquet, which I saw twice, the murder, the uncovering of the raven’s prophecy.  We also saw lots of not-very-Shakespearean stuff: men fighting, couples dancing, a strobe-lit orgy featuring nudity and lots of stage blood, card games, and letters being written.

Diffuse and sometimes disorienting, the performance didn’t feel like a performance.  The cast spoke little and seemed more dancers than anything — balletic, physical, intense.  When I think back to this performance I feel certain I’ll remember the McKittrick Hotel more than any of the humans inside it.

 

I just sent off to Shakespeare Bulletin two mini-reviews of my favorite moments in Shakespearean performance of the past decade.  The first was of the opening scene of a Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC from 2009, and the second the closing scene of the Propeller Winter’s Tale at BAM in 2005.  Here’s the first —

We don’t usually picture big, powerful, ponderous, regal old men dancing in public.  Perhaps it’s imaginable as a careful, discreet display.  But when Stacy Keach as Lear high-stepped his way onto the stage in the opening moments of this production, accompanied by a brass band and hurriedly-assembling dance line, he gave a shocking display of theatrical power and audacity.  The old King’s body staked its claim to center stage physically, forcing his way through the party-goers who crowded around in the decadent, faux-Balkan nightclub setting.  This was a Lear who could still dance, who still wanted to display physical power and virtuosity – the legs kicking up well over waist-high – and who still wanted to play the part of youth.  For that moment, as the King came onto the stage, I saw something renewed in this familiar play: a sharper contrast between age and youth, and a new the irony in the purported desire to “unburthened crawl toward death.”  The reviews at the time mostly talked about the Balkan setting and post-Yugoslav mafia staging in Robert Falls’s violent production, including a long abstract scene in which cloth-wrapped bodies of the victims of the kingdom’s wars were slowly lowered into an on-stage pit.  For me the defining moment was at the start, when the King showed off his still-powerful body, his flair, and his belief that he still owned the world.  The bad daughters and courtiers fawned on him, and the good girl, played in black as Goth hipster, retreated in horror at his poor taste.  More than anything, Keach’s body made palpable the King’s protest against time.  We in the audience knew that his dancing body will be buffeted by inner and outer storms for the next three agonizing hours.  But the high, physical, lusty steps managed to create a power beyond age, at least for a stage instant.

The seated crowd and partying lackeys weren’t the only audience to whom the King was playing in this moment.  Above his head, in a massive gold frame, was a portrait of himself, in full royal regalia, at a younger age.  The contrast between the benevolent, happy monarch who stares down from on high and the charismatic performer strutting below provided a visual touchstone for the play: this old King can never live up to his younger self.  We usually have to wait for Cordelia’s “nothing” to split Lear apart.  In this production, his internal divisions get shown immediately and viscerally.

There were lots of things that didn’t quite work in this high-concept production, and I don’t quite rank Keach among the very top performers of this Lear-filled decade.  But it was probably the best stage entrance I’ve ever seen.

And here’s the second —

What follows resurrection?  The statue has come back to life, the King and Queen reconciled, the two kingdoms resumed their amity, and royal authority even re-constituted so far as to make up a final faux-comic resolution via the marriage of Camillo and Paulina. What’s left?  An awkward pause, perhaps, as the wave of comic unity floats everyone ashore, before Leontes leads away and we can start clapping.

Not this time.  Propeller’s version of “The Winter’s Tale” featured the company’s usual high-jinx, including full brass band numbers for Autolycus’s songs and men in all the female roles, among them the brilliant Simon Scardifield, whose work I’ve greatly missed in Propeller’s recent productions, as Hermione.  This production greatly increased the visibility of Mamillius, who, played by Tam Williams, who later doubled as Perdita, provided a visual through-line in the convoluted story.  In the Sicilian half, he’s everywhere, starting the play alone onstage, listening at doors, playing in corners, watching his father rage and his mother sent to prison.  His toy ship got used to represent his sister’s voyage to coastal Bohemia, and his toy bear eats Antigonus.  The boy who told his mother and her ladies that “a sad tale’s best for winter” became in this production the central figure of narrative continuity within ever-shifting terrain.

He came back, finally, as a ghost.  In a shocking, wordless coda to the performance, the boy Mamillius re-appeared holding a candle after the royal parties cleared the stage for the last time.  His father saw him and returned, his face fractured into disbelief and unlooked-for hope.  As the lights started to dim, Leontes circled across the stage toward the boy, slowly opening his arms for a redemptive embrace.  The King cast a grotesque, large shadow onto the empty stage behind him, looking from where I sat in the balcony like a gigantic bird, spreading wings and opening talons.  Mamillius had his back to the audience, and we could not see his face.  He kept staring at the candle cupped in his hand as his father awkwardly moved downstage toward him.  At the last minute, he looked up at the twisted face straining down at him, and blew out the candle.

Some might think that we shouldn’t cry at the end of this play, but we did.  The play’s loss and disruption flooded out over the shocked audience.  I’ve never felt more palpably the cost of this play’s wayward tale of reunification.  It’s always hard to trust Leontes, who’s too eager to sweep his earlier transgressions under the rug, but it took this stage gambit to make visible the tragic undercurrent for all to see.

Lacking world enough and time, I won’t get to see any of the RSC productions in New York this summer.  But I just read Charles Isherwood’s review in today’s Times, and I can’t resist commenting on the sentimental vision of the play that the paper provides.

I know that the Times reviews dream of a mass audience, not just snarky intellectuals or Bardo-o-philes or even well-heeled Lincoln Center regulars.  But surely we can do better than bromides about Juliet’s “fundamental innocence” or the arrival of “something deeper and purer in her soul”?  Isn’t Juliet more radical, more urgent, more human than familiar platitudes about “transcendent love”?

I’m not a big Rupert Goold fan, and Isherwood’s descriptions suggest a production that shares some of the distractions of his Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart.  I did like Goold’s Arctic Tempest, also with Stewart as the lead, though that one sadly never made it to NYC.  Sometimes the high concept direction preempts strong performances.

If we take Isherwood to represent the Times market, a mass educated audience, I wonder if it’s a failure of modern theater productions or of contemporary Shakespeare culture that he’s stuck in such a Hallmark card-ish view of this play.  He should listen to Juliet commanding darkness and the stars on her wedding night —

Come, night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.

Come, gentle night, come loving, black-brow’d night

Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Transcendence, perhaps, but not much purity or innocence.  Shakespeare’s plays always seems less sentimental than his reviewers.

It was supposed to be a play-filled weekend.  Friday night I was meeting my summer grad class for a production of “Much Ado” by Shakespeare on the Sound.   The rain came & washed us out.  I think one of my students made it Saturday night.

But I was in Manhattan with the family on Sat night, hoping to catch the ferry to Agincourt with New York Classical Theater’s roving production of Henry V.  The web blurb said get to Battery Park between 5 and 6:30 to get free ferry tickets, but it seems the radio publicity drove some crowds to them.  At 6 when we got there, after fighting through a closed southbound 1 train that would not get us to South Ferry, there were not seats on the boat.  Not really what I wanted to tell my hot, frazzled kids — though we salvaged with a long taxi ride and another great visit to the Met.

We’re back home now, looking forward to a swim at the evening high tide.

“If I get so carried away with a spider web covered with dew,” says one of the great writers of the 20th century, “what will I do in the evening when we are going to see King Lear?” It’s a good question: how do we make space on an ordinary Thursday night in May for the relentless freight-train of this play?  For a fast-paced performance,  just a hair over 3 hours with intermission, that opens up the mad, bad, dangerous King’s agony and pours everyone in the building inside it?

It’s properly billed as a tour de force for Derek Jacobi, which is certainly right.  I’ve never been more moved by this role or felt more completely inside one man’s emotional whirlwind.  Red-faced and needy, in a few cases breaking into a high-pitched whine — “Where’s my Fool?” — this King occupies the reckless, playful, disorderly heart of loss.  In a clever trick I’ve not seen staged before, he makes it clear that the love-test is something the King just thought of as he walked onstage with the already-divided map.  The contest of wills with Cordeila casts the old man as the child.  In fact, as I sat there, feeling the emotions roll over and through me, I spent a lot of time during the play being reminded of my children.  My daughter Olivia, who’s 8, shares in certain moods something like the King’s monomaniac urgency, his inability to seen past or beyond the contours of selfhood.  Thinking about her rage and her growing ability to master it, I wondered if Jacobi’s performance could stand to be so deeply immersed in the quicksand of child-egoism.  I think the question’s still a bit open — but watching the play, as with watching a child, it was impossible to doubt the truth of the pain.

The high point of the breakneck first half of the show was Lear’s speech to his cruel daughters: “Reason not the need…” (2.4).  The emphasis fell not so much on the satire of courtly clothes or adornments as on naked human emotional hunger: “But, for true need / You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.”  The patience to endure might be found in Cordelia’s sacrifice, or Kent’s stoicism, or Edgar’s dirt-wallowing — though none of those roles were performed especially powerfully, except perhaps Kent.  At that still point in the center of the play, when the King prefers need to reason, it is clear that no daughters or followers or even Fools could touch him.

Something gets lost in the emotional maelstrom, and interestingly I think it was precisely what Ian McKellen got right his big-man Lear that I saw at BAM a few years back: majesty.  Jacobi was so tormented and so psychologically available — so able to broadcast his pain throughout the theater — that he didn’t seem quite as powerful as a pre-modern king might.  The curses on the daughters were potent, esp on Goneril, who, as performed by Gina McKee, gave the most majestic performance of the night.  But the sense that McKellen gave of really being larger than life, “the King himself,” leached out of Jacobi’s emotionally draining performance.  Is it possible to have both things at once?

The second act, which opens with a long string of scenes without the King, revealed how much Jacobi’s urgency carried the action forward; only Alec Newman’s swaggering, charismatic Edmund could really pull off a scene in Lear’s absence. Justine Mitchell’s Regan overplayed her joy during the blinding of Gloucster, and her hysteria sat badly after Jacobi’s richer emotionalism.  While watching all these scenes, including Goneril’s great laugh line about “the difference between man and man” and the Dover cliff pantomime, I kept thinking about Jacobi backstage, the King trapped in his body, waiting.  His madness when he at last re-emerged wasn’t wildly showy — the staging throughout was restrained, with a minimalist set and a great coup de theatre in which Lear whispers “Blow, winds” on a suddenly silent stage — but the emotional force of the night only started up again once he came back to the action.

The only thing you can want after such agony is rest.  At the play’s end, when all the family is dead, Jacobi’s red, exhausted face lies cradled in Kent’s paternal arms.  Like a sleeping child, for whom the only medicine is rest.

 

I liked this production a lot more than Charles Isherwood does in the Times.  I’m much closer to feeling the way Michael Billington does in the Guardian, when he calls it “an archetypal Cheek By Jowl production: spare, disciplined, purged of gore and gratuitous spectacle.”  But more than anything I was fascinated by the two lead players.  Billington complains, rightly, that it was hard in this production to tell Banquo from Macduff from anyone else, as they were all smothered in bland black.  But I didn’t care much, because all the action was in the marriage.

I mostly don’t like Harold Bloom’s pontifications on Shakespeare, but this production reminded me of his joke about the Macbeths being “the only happy marriage in Shakespeare.”  The tension and chemistry between Will Keen’s diminutive Macbeth and his tall, blond, physically expressive wife, played by Anastasia Hille, drove this spare production.  I left thinking that it would be a great challenge to put the show on with just two actors, him and her.
Part of that intensity was created by what the production left out: no visible witches or daggers or blood.  The staging was abstract but also fast, with the next scene starting often with the last scene still on stage, which made for some great juxtapositions, including having a silent Lady Macbeth still on stage for the “cry of women” that announces her death.

These two performances made this Macbeth a rather brutal explosion of a marriage that can’t heal itself.  Will Keen’s contained fury and trembling hands grasped eagerly for his wife during their first scene together, which featured more kissing that you might expect of an assassination plot.  Keen’s soliloquies were often inventive — including an odd but resonant pause before “quickly” in “If ’twere done…” — but the best scenes, always, were between the couple, who always acted, even during public events such as the banquet scene, as if no on else mattered.

Some of the things left out you miss — the Weird Sisters, the dagger, more distinctive roles for Duncan and Banquo and the Macduffs.  But the manic focus of this production revealed something about the play, about Cheek by Jowl, and about Keen and Hille.  They need this murder, but Lady Macbeth is talking about more than just that —

Nor time, nor place

Did then adhere,   and yet you would make both…

I won’t speculate about children or anything else.  But it was fascinating to see a show that really takes the relationship between these two as the play’s heart.  Shakespeare’s play mostly separates husband and wife after act 3, but this production insisted on keeping them together, right up until Macbeth’s “She should have died hereafter…”

The dead couple, in a slightly sentimental touch, lie together at the play’s end, toward the front of the stage, in front of the newly assembled Earls of Scotland.  (No decapitated head gets shown off in this production.)  An interesting touch.

Olivia & I braved the storm of wind on Saturday night to go to the St. John’s campus, where we had the great pleasure of seeing my student Tara Bradway’s theater company perform The Tempest “in the raw.”  That means minimal staging and props — we sat in chairs in a circle in a classroom space in D’Angelo Hall — and only a few hours of rehearsal time before the live run.  What the company tries to do is “return to the most basic aspects of the theater: the actors, the audience, and the words.”

The best thing about the show was watching the young actors hurl themselves into the play.  It’s a story of salvaging order from disorder, and the performers dove down with perfect abandon and trust is the theatrical transaction — that they could make us believe in storms & fairies & mooncalfs with words and motion and a few well-chosen musical instruments.  A good bet, as it turned out.

I’m a sucker for this play on almost any occasion, but I wasn’t sure how Olivia, age 8, would do on her first Shakespeare in New York.  She seemed a bit nervous too, at first, and perhaps a bit tired.  I didn’t expect her to follow all the words, but would she find enough in the story of the magician, his daughter, and the prince?  I shouldn’t have worried.  When Prospero sat down on the empty chair next to her during the show to spy on his daughter, and when I heard her laugh during the Stephano-Trinculo scenes, I could see in her face that she’d caught the theater bug.  She’s interested in a trip up north to the Adirondacks for the summer season.

Some things get lost in rawness.  A fair number of dropped lines, though the only one that I really missed was “sailor” for “tailor” in the punch line of Stephano’s first chanty, and I’m sure that bothered only me.  (In the song, mistress Kate “loved not the savor or tar nor of pitch, / But a tailor might scratch her where’r she did itch.”  You lose the land-sea joke if a sailor is the scratcher.)  Fairly often actors stepped on each other’s cues, but the recoveries came fluidly.   I did think that Prospero’s staff, at about 8′ of curved wood, was too tall & a bit ungainly.

But the pleasure of watching theater happen — watching actors trust that  words and actions create dramatic pleasure — was real and raw and moving.  A great way to spend Saturday night, well worth a late-night drive home with Olivia sleeping & the winds howling.

Next weekend in lower Manhattan — I can’t be there, but I do recommend it.