Theater

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

Cheek by Jowl & Pushkin Theatre’s Measure for Measure (BAM)

October 17, 2018 by Steve Mentz

Isabella and her brother Claudio

The last dance hit the hardest. After a dizzying, painful, intense intermissionless two hours, she followed his lead. At first, when Isabella received the now-undisguised Duke’s marital offer, she seemed, as in some other recent productions I’ve seen, nonplussed and not interested. Anna Vardevanian, who gave a strong and sometimes enraged performance as the wanna-be nun, seemed a bit stunned. But I knew it was a bad sign when she let her long black hair down out of the nun’s habit she’d worn throughout the play. In the final tableau, she awkwardly folded herself into dance position. The Duke embraced her with the same creepy paternalism that Angelo had cooed when he assaulted her in the second interview scene (2.4). The music carried their bodies together. They skipped around the stage in the same arcs that Juliet and Claudio and Marianna and Angelo had just traced. Everything was in order. No freedom in Vienna, or in the contemporary Russia that it represents in this brilliant production.

One from inside the program

The only one to get away might have been Barnadine, the drunk convict played brilliantly by Igor Teplov. Despite his small role, Teplov got lots of stage time, since the full thirteen cast members spent most of the evening all on stage together, with anyone not speaking in a given scene watching on one side, or zooming about in a group to mark scene changes. When the group was together, Teplov, tall and striking, often stood at the head, in a kind of implicit leadership position. When he refused execution (4.3) and again when he was pardoned by the Duke (5.1), Barnadine staged the direct resistance no one else could quite manage. He struck the Duke-as-friar in the prison scene, and then he was the only one who could escape off-stage in the middle of the Duke’s re-assertion of political control (5.1). It was good to see him get loose, but I wished he’d taken Isabella with him.

Last year, during the #metoo fall of 2017, I saw Measure for Measure twice, in an experimental production by Elevator Repair Service at the Public Theater. The first time was three days before the first Weinstein story broke in the Times, and my blog review was mostly about the experiments. I went back a few weeks later on a cold, wet Election Day night & all I could think about was consent.

The production I saw this past Tuesday night, at BAM for only a week, restaged the legendary collaboration between Cheek by Jowl, one of my favorite London-based companies, with Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre. The Russian-language production debuted in Moscow in 2013, played London in 2015, and ~~is in the US for the first time this year~~ [Correction: it played Chicago in 2016, and in Brooklyn only this week] in our second year of #metoo. Watching it, I wondered if, in these raw post-Kavanaugh & pre-mid-term days in the US, it’s possible to stomach this tale of hypocrisy, power, and women who suffer. It’s not the kind of show that leaves you happy.

Isabella inside the program

Before the show started I was thinking about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, with her right hand raised, swearing to tell the truth. I thought of her quite a bit over the course of the evening.

The men hogged center stage, as usual.

Andrei Kuzichev performed a well-dressed Angelo as a slowly thawing ice cube, pleasingly short, vain about his appearance, at first soothing and then shockingly brutal when he tried to shush Isabella in 2.4 as he began to undress her. When confronted with his long-lost Marianna in act 5, he turned opaque and quiet, as if receding in importance now that the Duke had openly returned to the city.

Alexander Arsentyev’s Duke began the play as the first member of the cast to separate himself from the group, who were at this point all gathered together. In a production that took its politics seriously, the Duke opened by attempting to control over his on-stage companions, with only partial success. The night ended with the Duke organizing a quasi-fascist rally in the final scene, with canned applause responding to all his cues. In between, he presented an odd mix of bully and goofball. He seemed especially foolish when he accidentally showed several people in the prison his hidden identity, but given that the Duke represents authority — an authority that, in this production’s Moscow context, has a particular sinister cast — I didn’t trust my own occasional sympathy for him. When he waltzed Isabella into submission he seemed quite horrid, but as with his political opposite, Barnadine, I wondered at how much this figure kept the spotlight on himself, rather than on the women at the drama’s center.

In the category of men-bef0re-Isabella, I can’t resist one brief mention of Petr Rykov’s Claudio, who when he returned from his supposed execution in the final scene (5.1), refused the open embrace of the sister who had herself refused to sacrifice her virtue for his life earlier. He rejected his sister and turned instead to Juliet and their baby. Isabella’s isolation at that moment was painful. It made her easier pickings for the smiling Duke and his dancing feet.

Isabella herself was the supreme athlete of virtue that Angelo imagined himself to be before he failed his own test. In their first scene together, the impassioned Isabella grabbed Angelo by his starched collar and accused him of what she did not yet know he was guilty of:

Go to your bosom / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault (2.2)

The panic on Angelo’s face would later bleed into cruelty and desire. Isabella’s power showed itself in a few other moments, including her public introduction of Marianna and her initial turn away from the proposing Duke in the final scene, but unlike Barnadine she couldn’t get away.

It’s hard to watch this play, though it’s clearly the play that speaks most directly and painfully to #metoo and what I desperately hope is a last gasp of visible misogyny in our public culture.

In October 2016, when I didn’t yet know that the world was about to end, I took a group of students to see a stage play based on The Rape of Lucrece a few days after we all heard the Access Hollywood tape in which our future leader bragged about committing sexual assault. I was worried about it all being too much, but the show, the students, and maybe even the deep artistic bones of Shakespeare rose to the challenge. Something similar happened last night at BAM. Art speaks to power, misogyny, and violence. It hasn’t managed to stamp out those things yet, but I suppose that’s our job.

The Pushkin/CbJ Measure is only at BAM for one week. Get to the Harvey Theater!

Inside the lobby at the Harvey Theater

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!

The Winter’s Tale @ Tfana

April 9, 2018 by Steve Mentz

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

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

1. Dancing Bear / Thief in Snow

Arnie Burton in a bear suit

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

2. How tall is heroism?

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

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

3. Hermione and the shapes of female power

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

John Keating and Ed Malone as wet clowns

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

4. Time, the Oracle, the Statue

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

Arnie Burton as Autolycus looking for clothes to steal

5. Clowns and other responses to the storm

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

6. Mamillius

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

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

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

Field Guide at Yale Rep (1/26-2/17 2018)

January 29, 2018 by Steve Mentz

When I was a teenager, just about my son’s age now, I churned through a bunch of the big Russian doorstopper novels: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol. (I didn’t get to Bulgakov until much later.) What I remember most about The Brothers Karamazov was the humor: a goofy, earnest melodrama that finally turned into a near-spoof of a trial scene, in which the unsuccessful defense lawyer’s arguments on behalf of the (technically innocent but morally guilty) Dmitri rotated around some quite silly chapter titles: “There was no money, There was no robbery” (4.12.11) and “And there was no murder either” (4.12.12).

So I should have been pretty well suited to see Rude Mech‘s world premiere of “Field Guide,” a theatrical transposition of the novel that features bear costumes, stand-up comedy, and the Grand Inquistor exchange taking place in a hot tub. Why didn’t I dig it?

I saw the show on the second night of previews, and maybe it’ll tighten up as they go forward. But the pacing felt off to me: Dostoyevsky overflows with melodrama and intensity and excess, but the comic aesthetic here was understated, and sometimes oddly silent. The various stand-up routines, including the one performed in a bear costume, fell flat, at least to me, not only because the only really funny line was the topical one about “how many Russian bears does it take to fix a U.S. Presidential election?” The real problem, for me at least, was flagging energy: the novel’s about existential uncertainty, but more than anything it loves to speak, to argue, to polemicize!

There were some decent performances, including Thomas Graves as a commanding Ivan who introduced himself by quoting Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Lana Lesley’s Dmitri showed real emotion when pleading with the patriarch for money, but Lowell Bartholomee as big daddy Fyodor K. was oddly too charismatic, or perhaps too well-loved by the cast and performers, to show himself as the monster who all of his sons want to disavow if not murder. Mari Akita’s Aloysha can perhaps be forgiven for not accomplishing the impossible task of finding a way to stage spiritual longing, but the insertion of a solo dance routine in response to Father Zozima’s death, while accomplished, felt unconnected to the bulk of the action.

It’s can’t be easy to compress an 800-page novel into 90 minutes of theater, and the Rude Mechs’s announced theory — that The Brothers K can serve as a “field guide for living” — might not make it any easier. I love ambitious experimental theater, and I’ve seen at least one brilliant staging of a Russian masterwork (Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, also at Yale Rep in 2014). Maybe this show will struggle into coherence in performance?

Toward the show’s end, when Dmitri has been convicted and sent to Siberia, the remaining living family members plus the dead Fyodor sat together and passed around a fat copy of the novel. Ivan, Katya, and Alyosha read short extracts. It made me wonder if it would have been possible fully to translate Dostoyevsky’s mad genius into physical theater. What might that look like? Another time, perhaps.

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.