Shakespeare

Tempest at the Queens Theater

November 3, 2018 by Steve Mentz

When I left the theater around 10 pm, the rain fell heavy and thick, splashing hard onto my bald head. I darted beneath trees but was pretty wet by the time I got to my car. I missed my exit for the Whitestone Bridge and had to navigate a few treacherous puddles as I made a U-turn around the LaGuardia exits. Allegories abound in wet places: was I replaying the show, or extending it, or asking for a slight variation?

The Unisphere

The skies hadn’t been clear when I got to the Queens Theater a little before 7 pm to meet my students, but my Dark Sky app thought the storm might hold until midnight. I did arrive to an amazing water-show: the fountains surrounding the Unisphere, the 140′ high globe constructed for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, were switched on. I’d never seen them flowing before. I walked partway around the massive orb — the downwind side was torrential — and it was an amazing site. The massive sphere was dedicated in 1964 to “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” — which, come to think of it, makes an interesting comment on the ideological fantasies under examination in The Tempest. The jets of water shooting maybe 75 feet into the air resembled so many wet Ariels, performing the best pleasures of the wizards who built the Unisphere.

I heard a great World’s Fair story last night too: it turns out that a retired man who’s been auditing my Shakespeare classes off and on for the past few years, via a St. John’s community outreach program, had worked as a waiter in the Indonesian pavilion when he was a high school student in the summer of 1964. He described taking a motorized scooter home each night from the Fairgrounds to Forest Hills weighed down with change from tips, which would eventually overflow his sock drawer at home. He wore his marathon entrant’s cap last night, as he was getting ready to run his twenty-fifth consecutive (!) New York City marathon this Sunday.

Astrida Neimanis at Whale Creek

Unisphere motto = “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe”

The highlight of Titan Theatre’s Tempest was Devri Chism’s compellingly nonhuman Ariel. She opened the show by dancing the storm into shipwreck, and throughout the night she repeatedly controlled the audience’s attention. Perhaps her most memorable trick was a subtle practice of holding her face at an oblique angle to the other actors on stage, emphasizing the intensity and partial incomprehension of her gaze. While many of the other performances were open and accessible — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more innocent rendition of Miranda than Ann Flanigan’s — Chism’s Ariel was the one performance who kept us asking for just a little bit more.

About the enter the Nature Walk

I came to the stormy show after an afternoon in post-Nature, walking my favorite toxic pathway on the borderlands between Greenpoint and Long Island City on the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. I’ve not been back for a while, but all my favorites were there: the epochal steps, the sludge barge, the hidden oil mayonnaise deep below. I was lucky to have been able to convince one of my most-admired blue humanities scholars Astrida Neimanis to join me for the walk. She’s a brilliant and inspiring eco-hydro-feminist based in Sydney, Australia who I just learned a few days ago was in New York for a talk on Thursday at the Pratt Institute. I’d got the news too late to get to Pratt, but it was fantastic to finally meet her in person. We talked about Newtown Creek, about post-Nature and the sublime, about an amazing-sounding project she’d put together last summer with Cate Sandilands in Canada. It’s hard to catch up with our fellow environmental humanists who live so far away, and I felt lucky to have managed it. Plus Newtown Creek is where I want to bring all my academic friends — I actually had a plan to drag an MLA panel out to it last winter, but sub-zero temps trapped us in midtown.

Driving home through the storm, I tried to salvage Terry Layman’s Prospero. As a student suggested to me after the show, he looked right — tall, white-bearded, Gandalf-ish. He garbled some lines and stepped on enough of his fellow actors’ cues that I wondered if it was intentional, a way of signaling the bully-Dad’s desire to control his human and nonhuman children. But they played his love for Miranda conventionally, and even Caliban got forgiven in the end. I wasn’t fully convinced: Prospero is a tough part to play well in these ambivalently post-imperial and I-wish-we-could-be-post-patriarchal days. I’m still waiting for someone to hit it just right.

Steps under water at Newtown Creek

The show is up for another week, and very much worth a trip to Corona Park! Go early to walk around the World’s Fair grounds and think a little about the “Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” — it’ll put you in the right mood!

Near Newtown Creek

Othello at the Globe (July 2018)

July 27, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Olivia and I decamped at the interval due to heat, impending murders, and in deference to her desire to see the big city after being cooped up in Stratford all week. So my thoughts of the Globe’s Othello end with 3.3, perhaps the most brutal and brilliant scene Shakespeare ever wrote, which takes the Moor from happy husband to sworn homicide. I would have liked to have seen the close, but I know how it ends!

One thing I love about the Globe in London is the differences among the various seats. Seeing Othello on the first week of Mark Rylance’s return to the Globe as Iago meant we were up in the corner of the second balcony, looking often enough down at the bald spot on Rylance’s head and missing “I am not that I am” (1.1) entirely because he was standing behind one of the on-stage columns at that point. But we had a great view of the upper stage, and we weren’t roasting in the yard, nor at risk of being run down by either of two fantastically bulky boat-wagons, complete with masts and sails, on which first Iago and Desdemona and later Othello made ship-born entrances to Cyprus in 2.1. I usually love standing at the Globe, but it wan’t bad to be under cover in the blazing heat.

(I wonder if the sudden downpour that caught Olivia and me on our way back to Southwark might have caught the play not yet finished. What would torrential rain do to Othello’s putting out the light?)

Andre Holland and Mark Rylance

We rushed down from Stratford so I could see Rylance’s Iago, and I was intrigued by his performance. Two decades older than Andre Holland’s dashing Othello, Rylance’s Iago emphasized service and humility — though the audience hissed back at him when he protested, “what’s he that says I play the villain?” (2.3). Rylance played the audience expertly, and especially in the long & doom-laden 3.3, his patient construction of Iago’s false reluctance — his echoes, negations, leaving the stage and then returning to it — built into devastating power. I’ve always felt that the line with which Iago closes 3.3 — “I am your own forever,” he says to his general — carries the full weight of all the broken lives to come. In Rylance’s delivery, the ominous force of that line deepened and made palpable the slow, at times delicate, always careful, even fragile, playing that grew up into the over declaration.

Andre Holland was one of the most winning Othello’s I’ve half-seen. In particular in the long speech about his adventures with the Anthropophagi and the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders (1.3), he played the crowd as expertly as Rylance’s Iago. I wondered about whether Holland was too beautiful to be fearsome in his murderous guise — maybe some later reviews will answer that for me — but I loved his charisma and open-ness, which things, of course, make him vulnerable to Iago.

I thought quite a bit, perhaps in a slightly political way, about youth being preyed upon by age: Steffan Donnelley’s Roderigo, like Holland’s Othello and also Aaron Pierre’s Cassio, were so much younger that they seemed to depend on Iago as the voice of experience. Like the youth of 2018, these figures are poorly served by their elders. Both Cassio and Roderigo may well be young, depending on casting, but in the text the Moor starts to complain about having “declined / Into the vale of years” (3.3), before admitted “but that’s not much” (3.3). I loved what I saw of Holland’s Othello, and I wonder how he transformed himself into the irrational madman of act 4 and the focused killer of 5.1.

The other performance that I feel I can’t well judge based on the first half only is Jessica Warbeck’s Desdemona. Before she recognized her husband’s jealousy and got thrown into a tragedy, Desdemona presented herself as a very successful comic heroine, choosing her husband, avoiding her angry father, even talking her way through the Doge’s desire to employ her husband on his wedding night. I liked Warbeck’s performance, but again I wonder what happened with it when everything shatters.

I’ll not get to see that second half this summer, I’m afraid, since we go home on Sunday — but there’s always GlobeTV!

Duchess of Malfi (RSC July 2018)

July 27, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Joan Iyiola as the Duchess of Malfi

The non-Shakespearean plays are always the highlights. I don’t know if it’s that the RSC feels constrained by its status as the official company performing the national playwright, but the Shakespeare can feel cramped, at times awkward, and always over-familiar. But even a fairly often-played also-ran like John Webster’s bloody Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi has a freshness to it — not to mention the bizarre charm of some over-the-top stage business in the second act that involved pouring out a great pool of wild boar-or-bull’s blood onto the stage, in which expanding puddle every cast member splashed, slipped, and nearly drowned. Metaphors, anyone?

Joan Iyiola’s performance as the Duchess earned her ovation at night’s end with a thrilling, physical, charismatic performance that included glorious singing after (she thinks) her husband and son have been murdered by her evil brother. I could not tell what she was singing — Catholic chants would have been period appropriate, or African laments would express the implicit multiculturalism in the RSC casting. Iyiola anchored the production, and after her death in act 4 the men in her orbit — her non-aristocratic husband, the two brothers from whom she concealed the marriage, and the clever but duplicitous servant Bosola — tore themselves to pieces without her.

In one of the particular pleasures of Stratford, I bumped into Iyiola after the show at the Dirty Duck pub and was able to tell her how much I enjoyed her work. She seemed smaller out of costume.

The Twins (Joan Iyiola as the Duchess and Alexander Cobb as Ferdinand)

The other blazing performance in the show was Alexander Cobb in his RSC debut as Ferdinand, the Duchess’s twin and nemesis. In some ways I thought his performance the most powerful of the night, and his ability to match the Duchess was the core of the show’s success. His rage at his sister’s remarriage seemed inexplicable until, staring at her blood-soaked corpse on the low bed that was the main feature of the stage, he admitted to being her twin and bound to her for life. The play didn’t over-emphasize the Freudian incest theme — Webster’s play makes such psychological explanations seem both too pat and radically insufficient for the horrors on stage — but in that moment, especially, Cobb found a painfully human feeling inside the ultra-villainous brother. I look forward to seeing him in other roles!

The cast was universally strong, especially Chris New as the Duchess’s other brother, a sexually predatory Cardinal, and Nicholas Tennant as Bosola, who ultimately kills the Duchess’s husband in error and then dies last at the show’s messy conclusion. The male chorus, who alternately perform as a gathering of madmen outside the Duchess’s window and an assault team, were also engaging dancers.

It’s hard to know what to make of Webster’s painful anatomy of human self-destruction. The attack on toxic masculinity seems almost too obvious, not to mention undercut by the obvious pleasure the play (and audience) take in the super-violence. There’s a dark misanthropic core to this play, and in some other Jacobean tragedies, perhaps including Shakespeare’s. But the pleasure of this lucid production includes both the Duchess’s doomed bid for female independence amid patriarchal horror and the converse terrors of being caught inside that doomed world when you think, wrongly, that you may be in control of it.

Off to London today!

Macbeth (RSC July 2018)

July 26, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Image result for rsc macbeth stratford The moment when Christopher Eccleston’s open and engaging Macbeth most powerfully connected to Niamh Cusak’s fierce and powerful Lady Macbeth came with his most direct reference to the child this production assumes they had together and lost:

Bring forth men-children only!

For thy undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing but males! (1.7)

At that line, Lady Macbeth shatters, and her head falls into her husband’s chest. For a second, it’s possible to glimpse the marriage that once stood behind these “dearest partner[s] in greatness” (15). It was a welcome view into that emotional core in a production in which the two lead roles were powerfully played but mostly in parallel to each other. I tend to like Macbeth productions that emphasize the marriage bond early, so that part of the play’s tragedy lies in its dissolution. (The best example I’ve seen was by Cheek by Jowl in 2013.)

Eccleston’s performance of the tyrant emphasized physical power and charisma. He did a great job reaching all sides of the RSC theater, and often conveyed a gruff charisma that seemed most appropriate when, in the first and last acts, he wore a (modern) soldier’s costume. He started the early speech “If it ’twere done, when ’tis done…” (1.7) too fast, but he fell into compelling rhythm as he paced through the lines. The only big speech that he seemed to scant was, oddly, the familiar cadences of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” (5.5), though whether he was simply playing Macbeth’s own exhaustion or the progression alienation of the central couple from each other left no force behind “She should have died hereafter” (5.5) was hard to tell. Image result for rsc macbeth stratford witches

Cusak’s Lady Macbeth showed her strength in evening gowns and high heels, in particular when she held together the party of nobles while he husband gaped at Baquo’s ghost (3.4). In the moment of her highest melodrama — “Unsex me here” (1.5) and “I have given suck” (1.7) — she acquired a kind of stately authority in extremity, so that Macbeth’s “men-children only” seemed to be a counter-blow in response to her overwhelming attack. I thought about the meddle/metal and male/mail resonances as he spoke his lines: did he want his wife to be made of steel, or does he fear that the lost child has made her steely? What lasting monument does the doomed couple really want? I though also about the other play the RSC is doing this summer, Romeo and Juliet, in which the two lovers end up as dead statues. Something in love wants to freeze people into art?

Beyond the two strong if perhaps not entirely connected performances at the center, this production distinguished itself in several high-concept ways. A trio of very young girls played the Weird Sisters, who appeared much more often than the few scenes they have in the play and in fact presided over the final scene. Dressed in pink pajamas and sometimes carrying dolls, the girls carried the desired creepy horror-movie vibe.

The Porter, played by Michael Hodgson, also stayed on stage for nearly the entire show, keeping a chalk tally of the body count and setting a countdown clock to 2:00 at the death of Duncan than hit 0:00 exactly as Macbeth gave his final “enough” and fell anti-climactically to Macduff’s sword at the play’s end. In a cyclical gambit that’s now somewhat familiar, the clock started again for the final tableau, as Banquo’s son Fleance appeared ready to challenge Luke Newberry’s boyish Malcolm for the throne.

The other standout performance was Raphael Sowole as Banquo, who nicely combined tenderness toward his son with a soldier’s bearing. During the banquet scene, Macbeth several times appeared to be afraid of empty air, but when Banquo’s ghost at last appeared, face covered in blood, Sowole managed, despite how many times I’ve seen this play, to be shocking. Sowole, another debut actor for this RSC season, also played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, who appeared as an extra-textual ghost late in that play. I saw Sowole at the pub after the show last night, and almost asked him how the double ghosting brought together the two doomed soldiers. But it was late, and I didn’t want to bug the performers.

Duchess of Malfi tonight!

Romeo and Juliet (RSC July 2018)

July 23, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Image result for rsc romeo and juliet 2018

Bally Gil as Romeo and Karen Fishwick as Juliet

The two best performances of the night were by the pros Ishia Bennison as the Nurse and Andrew French as Friar Laurence. Bennison combined humor with deep emotional connection, especially to Juliet but also to Romeo and even to Capulet, who lashed out at the old family servant as he tried to bully his daughter into marrying Paris. French’s Friar was another ambivalent part — the Nurse and Friar are empathetic figures but bad counselors — who brought out the best in the performances of his young charges. The Friar’s somewhat inexplicable cowardice in the final scene wasn’t really solved by French’s performance, but I’m not sure that plot-awkwardness is fully resolvable.

Charlotte Josephine as Mercutio and Josh Finan as Benvolio

The heart of the RSC’s summer show of Romeo and Juliet, though, was the young actors in the leading roles, especially Charlotte Josephine’s shadow-boxing Mercutio and Karen Fishwick’s Scottish-accented Juliet. Both women made their RSC debuts in this show. Bally Gil as Romeo isn’t quite as new to the RSC, but his open-hearted and open-armed lover-boy fit the show’s youthful core, along with debut actors in the parts of Paris (Afolabi Alli), Peter (Raif Clarke), Samson (Steve Basaula), and Benvolio (Josh Finan)

At halftime I chatted with some very distinguished Shakespeareans whom I won’t name but who have seen generations come and go on the RSC stage. They complained about Fishwick’s verse speaking, and about Josephine’s overly athletic and mannered Mercutio. They were right, on some level — technically right. The boxing distracted from the pentameter. But I couldn’t help feeling that they didn’t quite catch the vibe.

I’m here in Stratford with my daughter Olivia, who I always count on to give me the teenager’s report on these productions. (Her all-time favorite was Oscar Isaac’s four-hour Hamlet in the Public Theater last summer — which means she doesn’t mind long plays or tragedies, but is a bit susceptible to actors who also play the rebel pilot Poe Dameron in the latest Star Wars trilogy.) I would have liked to have gotten her read on Charlotte Josephine, but she’s still working on her jet lag and passed on this one.

I’ve seen Karen Fishwick before, in the impressively potty-mouthed musical “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour,” the darling of Edinburgh Fringe that visited New Haven in the summer of ’16. As in New Haven, I wasn’t entirely convinced by Fishwick as Juliet. She was in places a bit overmastered by the verse: Juliet’s “Come night” monologue in 3.2 is some of Shakespeare’s most blazing poetry. Fishwick didn’t pace the speech right — though she did wonderfully throw herself back into her bedding to emphasize the childishness of the speech’s last moment, when Juliet likened her wait for Romeo to “the night before some festival / To an impatient child that hath new robes / And may not wear them” (3.2). There were some better moments, including most of her scenes with the Nurse, but Juliet’s the heart-core of the play, and Fishwick didn’t quite get all the way there.

Unless Charlotte Josephine’s Mercutio was the real heart, which got stabbed by Tybalt just before intermission. Josephine’s hyper-activity, which dismayed and distracted some members of the audience, also enlivened the part. The gender noncomformity in Josephine’s casting (Mercutio is one of the toxic swordfighting men of Verona) and in her buzz-cut faux-macho affect were compelling. Mercutio’s poetic playfulness and constant willingness to risk anything make it a hard part to contain, and the role can, as in this performance, put Romeo in the shade in the first act. When Josephine sputtered out Mercutio’s dying one-liner — “ask for me tomorrow, and you will find me a grave man” (3.1) — I wondered if the show could keep its fires burning without its brightest lamp.

The answer was partly that it could not, though Afolabi Alli’s Paris did his best. The second act felt the loss of possibility and of Mercutio’s reckless optimism. I’m not sure this young cast was all quite ready to carry the tragedy, but I look forward to seeing them try other roles in the future.

#radicalmischief and Shakespeare: July 2018

July 20, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Heading off to JFK this evening for a night on Delta’s big steel bird, but the #radicalmischief begins today. I’m hoping, after a sleepless night & quick jaunt across the Midlands, to throw myself into the mix for a few hours tomorrow afternoon. But who knows what Hermes the god of travelers & interpretation will have to say?

It’ll be my fourth trip to the International Shakespeare Conference, counting two years ago in 2016 when the tiny ISC was swallowed by the great every-five-years whale of the World Shakespeare Congress, which was split in the anniversary year of 2016 between Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Singapore in 2021!

The highlight of these trips is the chance to see theater with a gaggle of my favorite Shakespeare nerds, plus my intrepid daughter Olivia, who joined me in 2016 and is back in 2018 at the age of fifteen. We’ve got tickets to three at the RSC in Stratford: Romeo and Juliet on Monday, Macbeth on Wed, and Duchess of Malfi on Th. Then we shift to London for Othello at the Globe (with Mark Rylance as Iago!) and an outdoor Tempest in Covent Garden. Plus a side-trip to Oxford to see the J.R.R. Tolkien exhibition at the Bod, not to mention high tea at the Berkeley Hotel!

Looking forward to seeing some Shakespeare friends in the UK!

Risk, Anxiety, Generosity: Money-Culture in Merchant (Yale British Art Center 6/19/18)

June 20, 2018 by Steve Mentz

The stage awaits…

I’m an enthusiast, and I enjoy all manner of academic events, from specialist conferences on Thomas Nashe to public round-tables for World Oceans Week. But it’s rare to be part of an event that draws all its threads together as powerfully as did last night’s Risk, Anxiety, and Generosity panel for New Haven’s Festival of Arts and Ideas.

Part of the joy for me was bringing together many different perspectives in and beyond academia, including various kinds of expertise and — not least, though perhaps not as clearly known by everyone in the auditorium — different phases of my own life. Starting with a two hour lunch-as-seminar pregame in my living room yesterday afternoon and extending through a leisurely dinner at our favorite local place on Chapel Street, it really was an ideal event. I’m so pleased the Festival helped us put it on!

There’s a full recording on Facebook live video on my public FB page and on the Festival’s page, and I think after a few weeks it’ll be archived on the Arts & Ideas website. (I’ll update this post with a permanent link when it’s available.)

In today’s afterglow I’ll sketch out more personal introductions to the four amazing people who shared the stage with me last night. Bios and links are on the Arts & Ideas page, and of course google knows all these folks very well. But the group also comprises my own shadow biography, and bringing them together last night brought together fragments of my past selves, from my rugby playing college days to more recent stints as Dad and academic advisor. I’ll re-introduce them here in the order in which I met them, starting more than 30 years ago.

I met Erik Blachford in fall or winter of 1985-86, when we were classmates in our first year of college. We played rugby together and were both English majors with creative interests: Erik remains an actor and theater person, and I did creative writing. But when I took a post-college academic turn, Erik headed off to Microsoft in Seattle, where he was part of the group that founded Expedia.com, for which he later served as CEO as part of his distinguished Silicon Valley / dot.com career. He gave our event the venture capital take on risk, and the perspective of someone who’s seen companies thrive or fail in rapid succession.

I’m not sure at what point in my career as academic Shakespearean I first met Holly Dugan, who teaches at George Washington University in DC, but probably in the early ’00s. She’s one of my favorite people to see every year at the Shakespeare Association of America’s annual meeting. I was especially eager to have her join the Merchant panel because I know she’s been collaborating with GWU’s Business School and teaching undergrad business students. In the panel, she spoke eloquently about utopian spaces from the classroom to the Rialto, and she also explored the way this play forecloses the hopes raised by such spaces. She also talked compellingly about how teaching such difficult plays beyond our home-team audience of lit majors can enliven and expand our senses of why great art matters in the world.

I met Judy Chevalier, a professor of economics and finance at the Yale School of Management, through my son, who has been going to school with her son since both of them were little kids. It’s been a somewhat sideways way to enter into a professional conversation; I’m pretty sure that almost the entirety of the first couple years of our dialogue was about pick-up and drop-off times and each of us checking that our son had not overstayed his welcome at the other’s house. (I don’t think either ever did; I know we loved having Judy’s son with our family for part of our beach vacation last week.) Her perspective as a professor of Economics and Finance connected Shakespeare’s dramatic presentation of usury and dealmaking with longer histories of money and culture in and beyond Europe. She helped conclude our session with a brilliant exploration of why the Venetian state feels compelled to uphold the bond even when it clearly does not want to — her ringing description of the state’s role in structuring and enforcing legal contracts was one of several moments in our conversation that felt somewhat ripped from this year’s headlines.

I think my most recent acquaintance on the panel was Dr. Tara Bradway, a recent English PhD graduate from St. John’s who was a student in my “Intro to the Profession” class very early in my time as Director of Graduate Studies, probably around 2011. She’s a brilliant performer as well as researcher and writer, and I designed the format of our presentation with her acting gifts in mind. As she has been demonstrating for the past several years in her striking dissertation, “The Actor as Critic,” she showed all of us yesterday the particular insights a working actor can provide that sometimes other readers avoid or brush past. Arguing for an in-the-moment Portia who is surprised into the “quality of mercy” speech through her own argumentative error, Tara helped us uncover a more human heiress than sometimes textual analysis produces.

[To round out the hidden ties among the family of our panel with a slightly Jane Austen-ish note, I’ll also mention that Erik and I are married to two inspiring women who grew up together in Mill Valley, CA, and have been friends since the second grade — and whose professional perspectives as trial lawyer and ex-VP of Site Development at amazon.com might have added much to our conversation about Merchant, had there been more room on stage!]

Together we talked about risk through the emergence of financial and political institutions and in terms of decisions about venture capital in Silicon Valley today.

We explored anxiety by thinking about the often masterless young men and women who overpopulated Shakespeare’s London and the precarious futures facing the rising generation of today’s America.

We imagined generosity as a semi-magical attribute of Portia’s limitless wealth, as a means to shift from a logic of scarcity to one of abundance, and — in dialogue with a great last question about Antonio’s lost-then-found ships from Mike Shea — a short-circuiting of the structuring mechanisms of the play.

Such a pleasure to think, talk, and imagine with so many brilliant and generous people! I want to bring everyone back to the Festival again next June!

Thanks to everyone who came out, everyone who asked questions (including Jeff Sonnenfeld of Yale’s School of Management, who started us off with a rousing attack on Portia as faux-Trumpian fraud), and all who watched the livestream! Hope to see you at the performance in New Haven this week!

RSC King Lear @ BAM

April 11, 2018 by Steve Mentz

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

#shax2018: Conversations & utopias in LA

April 2, 2018 by Steve Mentz

The Hotel Postmodernism

Her small grey head peaked out of the swell about twenty feet away from us. The curve of her back echoed the small waves rolling in through the slate-green Pacific off Venice Beach. In all the years I’ve been swimming in this little slice of ocean, down the street from where I lived in 1993-1994 right before grad school, I’d never had one of these creatures swim with me before. A selkie totem for #shax2018, the seal’s nearness startled us and calmed our shivering flesh. She swam between where we splashed into the water and where neoprene-armored surfers caught a few small waves. I lost sight of her after I body-surfed one little roller into shore. I don’t have a pic — I was phoneless in the water when we saw her — but that seal is my utopian totem for #shax2018. The benediction of nonhuman presence in the ocean!
The last of four conversation topics in “The SAA, Shakespeare, and Us,” the seminar I co-lead with Carla Della Gatta, with incisive and generous respondant-ing by Erika Lin, asked the room for possible SAA-utopias. The floodgates of the wonder-world gushed forth: we sought communities of labor, changes in infrastructure and scale, “psychosocial mentoring” (which clarifying term Erika brought to us via Tracy Davis of Northwestern and ASTR) , recurrent seminars, more streamed or recorded sessions, “Half-assed Shakespeare,” the value of allowing ourselves to be wrong, “radical hospitality” (via Becky Fall and the Public Theatre, though I also thought of the glories of the BABEL Working Group), stewardship, service, public-facing events, “conflict is part of community” (paraphrased from Erika). What is “Shakespeare”? Who is “us”? What can and should the SAA become? So many good questions to keep asking!
Inside the Bonaventure
My core takeaways from the two hours traffic of our seminar swirled around support and especially mentorship, how it happens and what it could be. The topic came up again in the brilliant and necessary “Shakespeare beyond the Research University” session on Saturday, the second iteration of the “Shakespearean Futures” initiative that started with “The Color of Membership” last year in stormy Atlanta. I personally feel deeply fortunate to have been mentored by the SAA, both by many discrete individuals and more diffusely by the organization itself, since I started coming to the conference in the mid-1990s. Drafting this post Sat night as I wait to board a red-eye back to JFK while #shax2018 still dances, I’m abuzz with ideas to extend and support that process in the new & larger 21c SAA. We don’t need to start from zero: RSA and ASTR have ongoing mentorship programs, both among members (I have been in touch this year with two early career mentees via RSA) and at the conference itself (a student of mine was lucky to be matched with my co-seminar leader Carla Della Gatta at ASTR this past fall). We should formalize something, perhaps in time for #shax2019 in DC. #mentorhappyhour (with EANABs = “Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages”)?
Thursday afternoon’s NextGenPlen set the bar high for two reasons that I suspect are interwoven: the five early career speakers presented brilliant and innovative projects in queer theory, theater history, race theory, drag, and transgender rhetoric — and all five kept to time and dazzled the room with precise & powerful language. It made me think that ten minute talks are always better than twenty, because the short form prioritizes direct argument. It also made me eager to watch these young scholars develop their work and change our field!
I suspect that few Native American languages have previously been spoken from the plenary stage at SAA. I found the Friday morning session with Scott Stevens, Lehua Yim, Terence Reilly, and James Lujan powerful and moving. The cultural and global dominance of Shakespeare represents, in a troubling way that the panel helped reveal, a global-cultural settler colonialism, in that the Bard goes everywhere and never leaves. There’s a lot of great scholarship on Global Shakespeares today — but I’d not encountered indigenous responses and approaches at the SAA before. During the panel I remembered my post-undergrad summer of 1989, when I was in Windy Bay, Alaska, laboring in the vain clean up of Exxon Valdez oil and sharing a fishing boat with perhaps two dozen members of an Athabascan community, mostly from English Bay. I’m embarrassed to say that I now can’t remember any of the tiny vocabulary I developed in Athabascan that summer.
The first question we asked in our seminar was “What is Shakespeare?” And — importantly, I think — we supplemented that question with “Do we all have to agree about the answer?” The first question was hard to contain, but I think the answer to the second question must be no. Too much agreement is bad for conversation.
A substantial pageant
Our seminar’s second major exchange took up another key word in our title: “Who is ‘us'”? We had lots to say again, and our discussion balanced honesty and generosity in ways that made me really happy. For me, I think the best possible answers to both “Shax” and “us” emerge from conscious and cultivated differences: we and our symbolic center must be many things, multitudinous things. It’s through allowing differences in all their discomfort, challenge, and surprise that we navigate our seminars, conferences, and oceans. I also recognize that myriad-mindedness has long been a canonical & perhaps even neoimperial cliche, effectively confining while purportedly open. Does it make sense to ask now for different and tangible differences, rather than just the same old infinite variety? That’s a project I’d like to continue exploring, and I hope the members of the seminar will continue to pursue it also.
The 8 am ocean swim on Saturday morning kept me from the “End of Study,” alas, but my adventure with surfers, seal, and maritime companion Lowell Duckert drew me back to my early ’90s haunts in Venice Beach, from which locale I launched myself into graduate school and the professional life I’m living now. In some sense Venice in those days was my last stop before Shakespeare, the moment at which I found a fork in young adulthood and turned. I loved being back there, and I no doubt bored Lowell by showing him my favorite coffee shop (the Rose Cafe), my old apartment building on Westminster Ave, the sandy bike path on which I roller bladed and where musicians, artists, and hippies were setting up in the early morning mist. We ate breakfast at the Sidewalk Cafe, my old local, where I ate with my neighbors during the eerie dawn just after the Northridge MLK Day earthquake of 1994, which had jolted us out of bed. The electricity was out that morning but the gas stoves worked, so the Cafe made us all omelettes that we paid for later. We watched the sun come up behind the beach and hoped the ground would stop shaking. #anothermetaphor?
What should the SAA become? I loved the “Lena Orlena” pageant and Wendy Wall’s multi-genred luncheon speech. No scholarly gathering makes me feel so at home and so eager to engage with people I don’t know yet as well as old friends and colleagues. “Beyond the Research University,” organized by Sharon O’Dair and Deborah Uman, seemed to me to get close to the heart of the matter. The diverse populations of SAA have much to learn from each other. Highlighting the worlds and labors of colleagues teaching at HBCUs, community colleges, and other non-elite places seems to me an essential step forward. Looking back now through the #shax2018 hashtag reveals outflows of generosity, curiosity, and playfulness. More of this, please! Excess of it!
A surfer of Venice

My only moment of real discomfort all weekend, other than fatigue, came when I considered the symbolism of matching the roundtable on “Beyond the Research University” against a brilliant research panel on “Slavery, Service, and Fictions of Consent” in the Saturday 11 am slot. What does that choice represent for the SAA as a collective: must we choose between research and beyond-research? I have deep regard & affection for the leadership of SAA and recognize the challenge of too many sessions angling for finite time — but I believe it was a mistake not to make the Futures session, which spoke to the experience of the majority of the SAA membership, a Plenary with no competing sessions. For most of our near half-century as an organization, the SAA has imagined the R1 experience as at least aspirationally normative — but as much as I value humanities research, that’s an error we should have the honesty to stop making. One striking moment in the Roundtable called for the demolition of the “myth of academic meritocracy.” We need that demolition so much — and, if we could do it, or even begin to unravel that foundational myth of academia, it could lead, I believe, to better things, even in hard times.
The Futures session was well-attended, including by the incoming Executive Director, though I was sorry that only a small fraction of the Trustees were there. I don’t mean to blame the people who were next door. I’d previously heard a snippet of one project on early modern slavery that was presented in that session, and I think it’s as brilliant as any new project I know in our field. But that’s why I think it was problematic to force that choice on the membership. A session on the careers that the majority of SAA members present and future live “beyond the research university” should not have to compete for its audience with the fruits of research. The SAA can, does, and should support both cutting-edge research and inquiry into state of our profession. We don’t need to put th0se conversations in competition with each other, even implicitly. Or at least that’s what I think.
I’ll wrap up this overlong blog post with another story of nonhuman intervention. This second encounter will provide an alternative allegory for our gathering. As our pomo architectural sage Fredric Jameson didn’t say, #alwaysallegorize! This one erupted during the “Shax and Us” seminar, just before we opened the conversation to the full room of auditors. It wasn’t a seal in the surf but a cockroach on the table: I don’t know if the bug actually crawled out from beneath a pile of seminar papers, or if that image of reading as unearthing the hidden is just the way I like to imagine all seminars. Carla moved fast when she saw it, and I think she swept the roach onto the floor. I jumped out of my chair, but by the time I got to the other side of the long table the beastie had scuttled away & besides what would I have done with or to it?
One afternoon, as our conversation turned toward anxious visions of futurity, #shax2018 woke to discover that while we sat together around the table our collective conversation had been transformed into a monstrous bug.
#shaxfutures #whatwillwebecome? #metamorphoses!
Post-immersion selfie
It’s our task to love the nonhuman, to welcome interruptions, and to imagine capaciously in the face of challenges. Which creature best represents Shakespeare as settler colonialist and superlative poet? The graceful seal gliding through Pacific waves, or the impervious bug whose resilient carapace will outlast nuclear and ecological catastrophes? Which do we want our bald playwright hero to represent? #sealorbug?
We know what the answer must be.
Both seal and roach, utopia and dystopia. #forward!
See everyone in DC!

Alan Cumming’s Macbeth

May 22, 2013 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

This 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?

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.

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?

In 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.