Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Tempest at the Queens Theater

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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

 

Are you not my mother?: Taymor’s Tempest

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I’d heard about it already, so I took my grad students to Taymor’s Tempest last night with low expectations.  Lots of overly sweet stuff was already baked into the cake — the Harry Potter sound-and-light show, the distracting CGI versions of Ariel, the utter failure of the universal geometry she subbed in for the masque.  Plus I’ve never seen a really good Miranda, & I wonder if that version of innocence simply isn’t playable today.  Felicity Jones did not change my mind.

The good things were also mostly expected — the clowns were great fun, esp Alfred Molina’s drunken sea chantey, Russell Brand’s Trinculo was manic, and the island set was stunning.  I’m somewhat on the fence about Djimon Hounsou’s Caliban.  Cvered in earth & moonshine, he was visually overdone, but he projected real energy & physical charisma.  The conspiracy scene was impressively dramatic.  I liked watching the sailors go overboard in the shipwreck scene.

But what I didn’t expect was seeing Helen Mirren, a wonderful actor, fail so miserably.

It’s a play about power, & she didn’t project it.  She had the wand, raised the storm, drew the flaming circle, stage-managed the lovers, bossed around the spirit, but she didn’t wield power.  It’s pedantic to carp overmuch about cuts — any film has to cut some of Shakespeare’s language — but when she faced off with Caliban at the end, it seemed meaningful that he did not speak h is final line about needing to “seek for grace.”  He just turned his back on her and left.   She had nothing he wanted.

It doesn’t make sense that Prospera should be weak because she’s a woman, though Taymor’s film seems, according to her interviews anyway, to be bound up in cultural fantasies about motherhood.  But mothers, as Shakespeare certainly knew, are plenty authoritative and plenty scary: remember Gertrude and Volumnia.  Taymor ‘s film defanged her magician, minimizing her political delinquency in Milan and downplaying her aggression toward Ferdinand & her other dependents.  The camera also shot Mirren mostly from above, making her seem frail.  (Caliban, by contrast, was shot mostly from below.)

I like the idea of a female Prospero.  But I’ve never seen a version of The Tempest before where the bits without the wizard were always best.

The Breakdown of the Multiple Parts in the Cutting Ball Tempest

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I mentioned in my last entry that three actors play all the roles in our version of The Tempest. The breakdown of the parts are as follows:

David Sinaiko – Prospero, Alonso, Stephano

Donell Hill – Ferdinand, Caliban, Antonio

Caitlyn Louchard – Miranda, Ariel, Gonzalo, Sebastian, Trinculo

The first scene with the Boatswain we have staged as a kind of collage of voices, and Adrian and Francisco’s lines have been redistributed amongst the other lords.

Our director, Rob Melrose, is working with the concept that there are three meta-roles – Prospero, Ferdinand, and Miranda – and that the other doubled characters may be understood as fragments of their personalities and psyches or how they are perceived by another character. Other three-actor productions, such as the London Globe’s 2005 Tempest, have used a similar conceits to ground their actors (in their case, Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel instead of Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand). Critics like Marjorie Garber have noted that the, with the abundance of similarities between the sets of characters, that the story may be reduced to a story involving certain key figures or types.

With this understanding, the actors change characters not simply when there is a need manifested by the plot (i.e. it’s now time for the Stephano scene, so the actor playing Prospero has to turn into Stephano), but when there is a need created within the meta-character (Prospero is turning into Stephano because something in the last scene has triggered the Stephano aspect of his conscience).

To give an example: we begin the first scene between the shipwrecked lords with Alonso drinking from a bottle out of despair from the loss of his son. By the time this scene comes to a close, Alonso has drunk so much that the Stephano aspect is able to appear. Stephano and Alonso share many of the same defining traits as Prospero – they are, each in their own way, leaders and masters, but with varying levels of sophistication and mastery. In the case of Ariel and Miranda, the first instance of the change is manifested when, after Prospero lulls Miranda to sleep, he awakens the latent Ariel personality within her almost by means of a kind hypnosis. In some instances, we need to get a little creative with the narrative. Sebastian and Gonzalo cannot be onstage at the same time, so the Sebastian aspect only awakes when Gonzalo is asleep.

It may appear from my account that we are taking quite a bit of liberty with the text. True enough, our production is not as strict as a more “traditional” interpretation (whatever that means), but I feel that a lot of the logic we have created for the transition between characters is more for the benefit of the actors than the audience. When they are able to make sense of why they change characters, the audience can make sense of the transitions as well. Once again, we are not trying to force a new narrative down the audience’s throats that warps The Tempest, we are telling the story of the play.

The actors have all taken great pains to significantly differentiate the characters through their voice and physicality and those choices, with the aid of certain costume choices (glasses for Ferdinand, sunglasses for Antonio, etc.), but, with the same three actors playing all the roles, it is impossible to dupe the audience into believing that the characters are entirely distinct. Shakespeare was undoubtedly conscious of these similarities when he wrote the play, and if those similarities are expressed so clearly with three actors, we would be doing ourselves a disservice by trying to mask it.

-Bennett Fisher, Dramaturg

Cutting Ball Theatre’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest opens November 5 at the Exit on Taylor in San Francisco. More info at www.cuttingball.com

Julie Taymor’s Tempest

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The trailer for Taymor’s forthcoming sound-and-lights extravaganza Tempest is now on YouTube:

Tempest Trailer

It’s supposed to open Dec 10.  Maybe the class should all go together on our last night, 12/14?

Thanks to Tara for the link.

Update: Watched it again today & it looks fun, if perhaps a bit over-the-top.  Sorcery. Passion. Stupidity.  Treachery. Revenge — so go the subtitles.  An interesting summary, I suppose?

We certainly should go on 12/14.  Anybody know a movie theater close to campus?

Cutting Ball Theatre’s Three Actor Tempest in Rehearsal

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In my dramaturgical research for The Tempest, I was delighted when I stumbled upon blog entries written by actors during the rehearsal process for Globe Theatre in London’s three-actor production of the play in 2005.  I found those entries profoundly informative, since the actors not only discussed their interpretation of the characters and their understanding of the play’s meaning, but addressed the challenges of manifesting those ideas physically in the production. So, when Professor Mentz offered to have us blog about our production at the Cutting Ball Theatre in San Francisco, which begins previews on November 5, I was delighted. I hope that these entries provide an interesting and worthwhile supplement to the course.

Our director, Rob Melrose, has chosen to stage the play with three actors – David Sinaiko, Caitlyn Louchard, and Donell Hill – playing all the roles, hoping that it will give “an up close and personal look at the monsters lurking inside all of us.” Our staging includes video projection, original music, and other surreal elements that I hope to describe in more detail in future entries.  Most dramaturgs are justifiably wary of more experimental stagings, but I believe theater is a living organism, and just in the way modern critics have been able to read everything from Freud to Fanon into The Tempest, so should we freely though heedfully dive certain fathoms into a piece to find what may be buried at the center. Combing through some critical writings on The Tempest and seeing the actors on their feet in rehearsal, I feel that this production succeeds in uncovering compelling and essential aspects of Shakespeare’s play that may not be as readily apparent in a “traditional” staging. Overlapping groups of threes abound in the play – the Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand trio, the Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban trio, the Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo trio, and so forth. Seeing the same actor in a different role a few pages creates wonderful, unexpected moments of revelation. Prospero’s line to Miranda that “to the most of men this [Ferdinand] is a Caliban/And they to him are angels” is deliciously curious when the actor playing Ferdinand has just minutes before left the stage as Caliban: the audience is left to question whether or not there is any fundamental difference between the two. Just so, when Stephano (played by the same actor playing Prospero) shows affection for Caliban, we are reminded of that missing episode before the events of the play when Prospero was loving and compassionate to his sole subject on the island. Moments later when Caliban entreats  “Prithee, be my god”, we are viscerally made aware that this new allegiance, like Caliban’s allegiance to Prospero, is not much better. Oddly, by reducing the number of actors, we have revealed more about the similarities and differences between each character than one might be able to do with a larger cast.

Innumerable critics have talked about the relationship between The Tempest and psychology – likening the island to the human mind, arguing Ariel and Caliban are Prospero’s Superego and Id respectively and that the play is the story of reconciling these aspects of his conscience. Melrose is interested in exploring the play in this light, but also sees it as a deeply personal story about a father letting go of his daughter, a man forgiving his enemies, and the universal desire shared by all men and women to be “released.” I think this focus on the human element has helped keep our production grounded in the story, and, ultimately, is what preserves, what is, in my opinion Shakespeare’s most essential messages in the play, that “the rarer action/Is in virtue than in vengeance.” Freud and Jung are there, and plentifully, but the audience is not held hostage by the concept but given freedom to draw their own meaning. Our Island may be more surreal at moments, but we’ve built a bridge to the mainland.

-Bennett Fisher, Dramaturg

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.

An Interested Void

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Yesterday we were talking about how grad students need to be self-interested readers, looking at least as much to advance your own projects as to be a good student who reads what he/she is supposed to.  (I know we’re all “good students” in this group.)

Thinking back, I realized I had a perfectly good example of that sort of self-interested classroom behavior on my side.  When we were talking about emptiness in “our revels now are ended,” I was (not quite consciously) thinking about the paper that I’m presenting at the end of the semester as George Washington U’s “TemFest II” event on Dec 3:

http://www.gwmemsi.com

(Scroll down a little to get to TemFest II.)

Maybe I’ll use this paper as my “work in progress” for the seminar.  I’m going to talk about gaps and vacancies in the play and its after life — my opening line will be, “The Tempest is full of holes” — with some attention to the Roman poet Lucretius and his “atomist” theories of matter and empty space.

I also note, if anyone wants to make a field trip, that the Dec 3 event in DC is open to the public & should be lots of fun.

A Different Salty Allegory: The Mariner’s Mirror

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Last week we talked about the chaotic opening scene of The Tempest as a representation of the educational process.  I’ll suggest a different, and perhaps more palatable, image this week.  The Mariner’s Mirror was a Dutch atlas translated into English in the late Elizabethan period, in order to advance English navigation and cartography.  The Folger copy was hand-colored at some later date —

For some more information on the Mirror, you can look at the entry in the Lost at Sea website

Mariner’s Mirror Website

and also listen to my 90-second description of it on the Audio tour

Mariner’s Mirror