Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Red Bull’s Witch

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Over the years, I’ve come to expect good things from the Red Bull Theater company.  Founder and Artistic director Jesse Berger’s mission is to revitalize seldom-performed Jacobean plays, and they do some of the best early modern productions in New York.  This year, with “The Witch of Edmonton,” they’ve taken a somewhat obscure three-author masterpiece & turned out  the best night I’ve had at the theater this year.

Jean Howard’s notes suggest that Thomas Dekker probably wrote the Mother Sawyer/witch and demon Dog scenes (pictured above), William Rowley probably wrote the Cuddy/clown subplot, and John Ford probably wrote the Frank Thorney/bigamy-and-murder main plot.  But what’s amazing about the show is how well it all coheres, even as the three plots and modes fight to one-up each other.

The Frank Thorney subplot, with its two wives, paternal blackmail, and echoes of both Hamlet and Lear, sounds like straightforward 17c melodrama, but Chris McCann plays the lead part with a wonderfully opaque quality.  Even his connection to his serving-girl first wife, for whom he murders his yeoman’s daughter second wife, gets occluded by his evident desires to play all the parts before him.  The plot-knots of his narrative see him try to please his father by marrying wife #2, his aristocratic former master by covering up marriage #1, and even the devil-Dog, by murdering the second wife who’s unwisely followed him into a lonely field.  The Times review doesn’t think he was quite up for the tragic heroic verse he performed in act 5, but I think he was always playing a man slightly opaque to himself.  A great, oddly compelling performance.

The stars of the show, of course, were the Witch and her big black  Dog, who is the Devil.  Derek Smith plays a stage-dominating Dog, heaving his massive frame around, using sticks for front legs, & often inhabiting those dog-human postures — tummy rubs, panting, nuzzling, humping — that we all know well.  The Witch-Dog relationship, in physical and theatrical intensity, upstaged and commented on the mercenary and manipulative marriages of Frank’s plot:  the Witch and Dog show what really happens when bodies come together.  Mother Sawyer, the poor woman who turns ambivalent witch, was brilliant, charismatic, and compelling.  Unlike Frank, she knows herself too well, and turns to the Dog because she has only too clear an idea of her place in the village.

Cuddy the clown’s part got trimmed somewhat, though Adam Green gives him an engaging turn.  Ben Brantly says the acting was “uneven,” but I didn’t think so.  Frank’s two wives, his sister-in-law, and various suitors were all strong.  Sam Tsoutsouvas played a powerful, plain-spoken yeoman father — an audition for someone to cast him as Lear?

I’ve always loved Red Bull’s intense, fast pacing and their commitment to an ensemble method, in which no one star outshines the rest.  (Perhaps that’s why was slightly disappointed by their Duchess of Malfi last year, which needs a real star.)  Jesse Berger has really built something great with this company.

When I find out what they’re playing next winter, I’m going to build my spring syllabus around it.

Throne of Blood

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I read Christopher Isherwood’s review in the Times after taking my class to see the stage-play of “Throne of Blood” at BAM last Thursday.   What a deeply lazy, inattentive review.  I love Kurosawa’s film too, and of course the play couldn’t work with Mifune’s “bat-wing eyebrows,” but surely we can say something about the play itself, rather than wishing we were at home with our Critereon Colletion edition of Kurosawa?

There can be something liberating about foreign language films of Shakespeare, which don’t run the risk of suffocating beneath the hyper-famous soliloquies or too-familiar performances.  What my students saw in this play, which retranslates the action and the words back into English, with a few lines in Japanese for flavor, is that it helped make the narrative strange again, in some ways even stranger than the all-Japanese film with subtitles.   It asks us what’s left of Shakespeare when the words all change.

As Isherwood offhandedly notes, there were a couple of Shakespearean lines in the play.  Asaji, the Lady Macbeth character, said that after they murder the king and assume the throne, “all’s well that ends well.”  Another character — Macbeth, I think? — insists that he will have his “pound of flesh.”  These  may be laugh lines, or reminders of the strangeness of the semi-Shakespearean performance.  But I also think they connect to a specific genre in Shakespeare, the “problem comedy” or unresolvable comedy, in which not even the comic miracle of marriage can fully salvage the forces that have erupted onto the stage.  That’s true of The Merchant of Venice (as another Times review recently noted) and also of All’s Well. One insight of this flawed but intriguing production of “Throne of Blood” was to remind the audience that it’s true of Macbeth also.

A review of the Bridge Project Tempest

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A slightly edited version of this review will appear this winter in Shakespeare Bulletin, alongside reviews of As You Like It (Bridge Project) and Measure for Measure (Theatre for a New Audience).  Anybody see any of these productions last winter?

How many versions of Prospero have we each seen or imagined?  Even though we no long believe the old stories about the play as Shakespeare’s self-portrait, there’s something about this familiar figure—magician, teacher, slave-holder, father—that carries the over-ripe taste of the familiar.  Even very strong performances by big-name actors—Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan—can, in retrospect, fade into the role rather than putting an individual stamp upon it.  Stephen Dillane’s Prospero, while very faithful to the text, was probably the most distinctive I’ve seen.  He played the magician as threadbare and scholarly, deeply engaged with his inner spirits.  He arrived on stage for the first scene before the house lights went down and was distractedly reading a book.  Sam Mendes’s direction emphasized Prospero’s control of the island by having all the play’s action take place inside the sand circle of his art, with the actors not performing in each scene sitting motionless around the edge of the stage like marionettes without strings.  Despite his control inside the circle, Dillane’s Prospero didn’t feel all-powerful.  He paced urgently around the circle in the storm scene (the impact of which was slightly muted by having the wizard visible from the start); he seemed angry and impatient in the “great globe itself” speech (4.1); and he needed to blindfold Miranda in 1.2.  The production emphasized both Prospero’s power and his human frustration with that power. He controlled everything inside his circle, but that circle itself, which seemed to represent a navigator’s compass and a child’s sand box as well as a conjuror’s circle, was frustratingly small.  There was a lot outside that Prospero could not dominate.

The empty recesses of the stage, filled with the slumping figures of actors not participating in Prospero’s action, testified to the limits of his power.  This part of the stage contained perhaps two inches of water, as if it were the edge of the ocean itself, the shores of which marked the limits of human and dramatic magic.  This opacity and emptiness helped explain Prospero’s sometimes perplexing anxiety, his worries about managing a series of events that he seems always to have well in hand. In Mendes’s production, there was always something visible on stage outside of his control.  The emotional urgency of Dillane’s performance finally burst through in the epilogue, for which he stripped himself down to an undershirt and boxer shorts and spat out his lines in a mixture of contempt and deep need: “Let your indulgence set me free.”  I’ve never been so moved by those very familiar lines, never seen a Prospero who so desperately needed indulgence.

Not everything in this production was as strong as Dillane’s performance.  Juliet Rylance’s Miranda seemed a bit insipid, as if, lacking the physical and dramatic range of her Rosalind, she could find little to do with the part.  Edward Bennett, who was so striking as Oliver, played Ferdinand with much less punch.  Christian Camargo’s Ariel wore some great costumes, especially a striking full-sized harpy get-up with black wings, but even though the relationship between Prospero and his magical servant seemed to be at the heart of the production, the spirit himself seemed static.  Ron Cephas Jones’s Caliban presented himself, uncomfortably, as a kind of natural slave, ceding the play’s emotional center to Ariel’s claims upon his master.  It was, above all, a production that revolved around its lead actor; any Tempest must be Prospero-centric, but none of the other actors, not even the fine Alvin Epstein as Gonzalo, managed to escape his overshadowing presence.

The one element of the production that rivaled Dillane was the set design and the lighting.  The circle-plus-ocean design of the stage managed to convey Prospero’s near-omnipotence inside his magic realm and also the vast emptiness outside it.  The staging of Ariel’s song (“Full fathom five…”) in 1.2 was especially memorable.  The stage lights glimmered on the water that surrounded the sand circle.  Prospero’s urgent pacing around his circle slowed down.  Inside, at the center, Ariel gathered Ferdinand in a seductive and constrictive embrace, while the spirit, along with the on-stage chorus of women who would later play the goddesses in the masque, sang to him.  The effect was other-worldly.  It was as close to a vision of the bottom of the sea as I’ve ever seen on stage.  Five fathoms down, with a King’s body that is not really there, Prospero showed the prince and the audience a vision of dramatic transformation and its threatening consequences.

Scrambling for the Duke

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Theater for a New Audience’s strong and imaginative interpretation of *Antony and Cleopatra* is playing at the Duke Theater on 42nd Street until May 2.  It’s set in the nineteenth-century , during the so-called “Scramble for Africa,” when European colonial powers like England were dividing up the continent.  Discount tickets available for anyone under 25.

www.tfana.org