Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Makbet and the Art of Compression

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At the close of a gloriously fast and emotionally powerful ninety minute performance of Makbet-in-the-seminar room yesterday on the St. John’s campus, all five of Dzieci Theatre‘s actors took hands in a circle. “Peace,” each said to the next. “Peace,” to the students and me gathered closely around. “Peace.” The props that had carried the story — Makbet’s hat, Macduff’s scarf, the grey coat of monarchy, Banquo’s beret — descended one by one into the gleaming steel pot.

Makbet at St. John’s

Then — smash! — the lid crashed suddenly down. “The charm’s wound up!” And reality flooded the room, with the flick of incandescent lights. What a show!

That last gesture of clamping down tight on the symbols that had carried the roles during performance captured for me the heart of the Makbet experience. The show’s core overflows with sudden surprises and emotional compression. We didn’t expect it, even though we knew the end was near — and then the smash locked everything into place. I felt that gripping force often during the performance — as the battle scene rattled the bookshelves and shook the door, during the musical refrains, partly inspired, I learned later, by the amazing Song of the Goat company from Poland that I saw in New Haven a few years ago. The wrench of emotional compression slid around the room as the parts and props switched hands. Having seen the show once before, I looked for the spaces between the roles, trying to spot how kings and ladies and murderers and thanes came to be who they were.

The Dziecis very generously talked with us for twenty minutes after, and I could not have been more proud of how the students’ questions got at the heart of the matter, into the forces and pressures of the event.

The question I bit my tongue before asking — since my rule for any guest speakers on campus is that profs should not speak if students are willing to — was about a missing line from early in the play. It’s one of my favorites, an image of human struggle in a hostile environment:

Doubtful it stood

As two spent swimmers, that do cling together

And choke their art (1.2)


I see so much of Shakespeare’s play in that image, from the painful intimacy of the marriage to the windpipe-stifling competition of violent masculinity. The image also fixes the play’s blue or oceanic register, the alien depths it sometimes plumbs.

But in truth, as is almost always the cast with stripped-down Shakespeare productions, I don’t miss any words if the feelings are there. And I’ve rarely if ever seen a more feeling-ful Macbeth than the one the Dziecis create through their urgent, shared game of risk and community. I’m already wondering when I can see them perform the show again!

The company’s next production is an Easter passion, performed in several locations in the New York area from Palm Sunday through Easter. I’m not sure I can make it — my Easter will split itself between the Shakespeare Association Conference in DC and being home in my little beach neighborhood in CT — but I’d like to. They are a group worth keeping an eye on.

Such a treat to have Makbet fill up our little seminar room and transform it into regicide, poetry, magic, and reaching for things you can’t quite grasp!

Revaluing the Ocean (Salt Lake City, Feb 2019)

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When Jeff McCarthy, Director of the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Program and one of our hosts for this great Ocean conference at Salt Lake City, brought us home Friday afternoon with a discussion of “storm ethics” in Conrad’s Typhoon, I realized that what I’d been feeling for the past two days was the buzz of recognition. Here I was in the high desert, watching a storm roll over the Wasatch Range behind our conference room at the Law School, with a group of researchers, writers, and teachers dedicated to thinking with, about, and often in the ocean. My people!

View before the storm

It was a glorious, over-abundant event, spilling over its borders the way the ocean does. Heading home on the overnight flight to JFK Sat night after a day frolicking on the frozen water I had watched darken the plains, I’m tried to fit everything into an orderly pattern. I wonder what will happen if I let go of the program and hash it out as something like a story?

Reality: We started on Valentine’s Day evening above the dinosaur skeletons in the Utah Museum of Natural History with distinguished oceanographer and coral reef scientist Jeremy Jackson‘s opening keynote. He hit us with the hard facts about the Anthropocene ocean and the anthropogenic destruction of the marine ecosystems. The first half of the talk was grim, but then he shifted to a proposed solution in which all the World Ocean outside the Exclusive Economic Zones of each nation would be a Marine Preserve. Allowing oceanic space free from the pressure of industrial fishing would enable fish stocks to recover, so that taking so much away from the fishing industry would not starve the people who rely on protein from the ocean. In some ways it would be a return to the “freedom of the seas” — which made me want to dive into Hugo Grotius and the geopolitics of early modern oceans. The enthusiastic audience was glad to know that I refrained from dragging the Q&A seventeenth-century-ward.

It was a lively, energetic talk, and meeting Jeremy Jackson was a highlight of the trip to Utah. He’s a New Yorker who spent his career in exotic places: underwater on a coral reef in Jamaica, teaching at Scripps in San Diego, and working for the Smithsonian in Panama. Now in emeritus mode, he’s splitting time between coastal Maine and Central Park West. It turns out he and I go to many of the same New York plays. I wonder if he’d enjoy my underwater reading of King Lear before Glenda Jackson in the title role arrives on Broadway this spring?

But Jackson’s doom-rich charts weren’t the only doses of reality laid down from the Revaluing podium. Several experts in Indigenous culture, including Josh Reid, Thomas Swenson, and Holukani Aikau, asked us to think about the long history of colonial violence against land, ocean, and First Nations people. Indigenous conceptions of the relationship between humanity and the nonhuman environment, they argued, have special value as we reconsider the human-ocean relationship in the Anthropocene. I was especially taken by Swenson’s depiction of clashes between colonial and Native fishing practices on the Karluck River on Kodiak Island in the mid-twentieth century — partly because I was remembering my own float and fishing trip down that river in early summer 1995, when my father and I were guests of the Koniag Native Corporation.

Theory Entwined around the hard trunks of reality snake the intricate tresses of theory. After Jeremy’s flood of facts, I started a turn toward theory first thing Friday morning by hazarding a dualist Ocean that combines Alien and Core, Other and Us. In the same panel, Margaret Cohen’s analysis of underwater film showed how humans use aesthetic techniques to make the alien environment at least partly legible. Both of us were trying to show how thinking with the ocean can shift our understanding of how humans engage the watery part of the world.

Jeremy Jackson’s first slide

Justice Other presenters challenged us to think about justice for the ocean and for humans. Chris Finlayson, a former Minister from the New Zealand government, and Robin Craig, water-rights lawyer from the University of Utah and one of our co-hosts, showed how legal systems grapple with watery geography and the bi-cultural state of New Zealand. Maxine Burkett, who spoke to us remotely from Hawaii, spoke about her research about emigration from the Marshall Islands to the US, which may perhaps be producing climate refugees already, though many of the individuals in question would refuse that term.

Pedagogy Many presentations emphasized teaching and the ways the ocean can be reshaped into its own best ambassador. Tierney Thys, a film-maker for National Geographic, Brenda Bowman, the head of the University of Utah’s Sustainability Program, and Kate Davis, a scholar of geography recently relocated to Utah from New Zealand, all showed how to teach with Oceans, beaches, garbage, and even computer games. I was struck, as I’m often struck, by how much humans love the ocean, even in its unfathomable and opaque qualities. I want to circulate a version of Kate’s coastal resource planning online game for my coastal CT neighbors!

Solutions? Jeremy Jackson suggested toward the end of the day on Friday that in the sciences you need to point toward solutions, not just open up questions. We laughed in response, because that’s not how the humanities always works. But Jeremy’s vision of the deep ocean as a fishing-free Marine Preserve — an area of maybe 80% or more of the 360 millions square kilometers that Ocean covers — was grand, inspiring, and bracingly nonhuman. “We have to leave most of it alone,” he noted about the ocean on an early slide in his lecture. I wondered about that: I love the Marine Preserve, but I’m less eager to avert my eyes and imagination. In thinking about the economics and ecology of the ocean today, Jackson often demonstrated that the value of, for example, sharks as attractors of tourism dollars produce more income than their price as ingredients in soup. But scuba-driven access to the undersea is a new thing, emerging only in the twentieth century. Seeing the glories of the underwater world is a bit older — Margaret Cohen showed us an image from the late 19c — but that aesthetic access still remains quite recent. I suspect we’re still learning how spending time underwater will change humans.

Cloudy view

Stories? At the end of the trip, after a sleepless Sat night flight into predawn JFK, I was wondering about different kinds of stories. It’s a literature prof’s sort of thing to always be returning to questions of genre, but the difference between tragic visions of what Jeremy calls “Ocean Apocalypse” and a tragicomic/redemptive plan to renew reefs and seas is essentially, from my point of view, a genre question. A fishless and plactic-overflowing ocean is tragedy; a deep ocean global Marine Preserve snatches tragicomic redemption from contaminated jaws. The pedagogic and activist work of many of our speakers attempts to graft a comic or tragicomic turn onto darkening global and local narratives.

One of my favorite ideas in a rich weekend of imaginative speculation came from Holukani’s notion that a research product could be a lexicon, in her case combining Native Hawaiian words for earth and water with scientific terms and processes. Lexicons are hybrid critters, built to translate, clarify, and connect. I wonder what sort of lexicon this group might have developed given a little more time.

Hearing such a variety of perspectives sends me back into plurality in the waters, including new ways of thinking about which I know little. The project of “Revaluing the Ocean” mixes currents and splashes around in foreign waters. I’ve got a lot to think about, which is what I most love about events of this sort.

Draft title page of my Ocean book, which I edited on the flight to SLC

The salty fingers of Ocean touch every coast and rocky promontory, and to some extent the academic’s desire for clarity and unity can’t fit itself all the way around our chosen subject. But story-telling remains among humanity’s most capacious inventions. We’ve been telling sea stories for a long time, from Noah and Odysseus to Jacques Cousteau and Aquaman. The stories of Pacific Islanders and First Nations peoples remain new to me. I’m pleased to have wet my toes on a few unfamiliar beaches in Utah this past weekend.


After #mla19: Generosity, Imagination, Rage

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[I started writing this post with the MLA embers still hot, but then got swept away from it in the maelstrom and deep freeze of early Jan. Not all of what I wanted to say is recoverable — but some of it is here.]

Home again! In post-MLA afterglow, in which I have lots of work to do before the spring semester launches, but it’s also clearly a day to take the puppy on a long walk into the salt marsh, to make dinner for the family, and maybe to sketch out a blog post. Catch those sparks before they fade!

The older I get the less traumatic MLA becomes, which almost certainly says more about my own obliviousness than about the conference itself. The MLA conference feels to be in a kind of transition, at least to me — the rise of Skype interviews is somewhat displacing its former centrality, for the better certainly. Last year when the MLA was in tornado-snowed New York, lots of our SJU grad students were around, and we even hosted the only MLA cash bar my University has ever (and will ever, I’m sure) paid for. My past weekend in Chicago was mostly the oldsters, except for one great blue humanities panel in early American studies chaired by Marty Rojas.

Flying Delta’s steel birds home via Detroit back to CT I wolfed down two morsels that I’d picked up at the Book Exhibit: Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking. They concentrated my mind, as books do, and I’m going to use them to think through #mla19.

Fitzpatrick’s book, subtitled A Radical Approach to Saving the University, argues that a turn away from competition for prestige and into more generous kinds of “conversational practice” (56) can strengthen the humanities in our time of struggle. I like her suggestions and mantras, from support for open-access publishing to the somewhat more radical open peer review. I also like the ideas of “working in public” (135) and “giving it away” (152), which basically amount to a conception of academic labor that’s not about hoarding precious knowledge but managing flows of information. She writes well about the contrast between inquiry (good!) and mastery (not always good!), about conversation as a scholarly value, and — in my favorite part of the book — about Simone Weil’s more or less theological understanding of attention as the “rarest and purest form of generosity” (46):

Attention requires letting go of the self, relinquishing will, and finding instead a position of radical receptivity that creates the ground for learning, for connection. (76)

There are things about attention, perhaps especially in the context of MLA, that feel more aggressive that Fitzpatrick’s Weil-inflected description. But attention’s insistent tug also defined the best parts of #mla19 for me. Maybe attention is both what we give each other and what we give texts — attention as a pressure and receptivity that re-contextualizes, brings something forward into new view, that startles and reimagines.

Like her brilliant and searing short New Yorker piece in the aftermath of the November 2016 election, Origin combines insight, anger, and ice-eyed clarity.

Morrison’s Origin of Others, drawn from her 2015 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, commands the attention her brilliant career has earned. Reading it brought me back to the one time I’ve heard her speak in public, in an overcrowded lecture hall in Princeton around 1988, when she dazzled us by exfoliating the opening lines of each of her novels. Her Norton lectures explore the perverse imaginative leaps required by slavery and Other-creation. It made me want to re-read the novels, starting again not with my favorite (Song of Solomon) but with Paradise, which I’m not sure I fully grasped when I read it back in 1998.

[That’s as far as I got on the other end of this month. With more time I might have more to say about Fitzpatrick’s inspiring book, and Morrison’s gorgeous and troubling vision. But I think I’ll post now, with what I have: the generosity that Fitzpatrick conjures, the rage Morrison projects, the imagination that links both to the best parts of academic life.]

Another stop on the #mla19 tour

Next, I’ll probably have some things to say about the spring 2019 semester!

Eco-Thoughts from Oaxaca to Chicago

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In between Christmas in snowy Short Beach and MLA in chilly Chicago, I snuck away with family from both the east and west coasts to spend a glorious few days in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. The full tale of food, Zapotec ruins, hiking, wood carving, mezcal, mole, tacos, fiestas, and other wonders would be long to tell.

New Year’s Fiesta at Casa Colonial

A welcome and unplanned part of our almost-week at the Casa Colonial on the outskirts of downtown was visiting with the other guests. Breakfast and dinner each day at the Casa was a kind of pop-up salon, featuring an amazing group of people, including an Australian expert in Indonesian textiles who works at the Fowler Museum in LA, a master guitar craftsman from Chelsea & Woodstock, a painter from Manhattan and Brooklyn, a Methodist minister from Chapel Hill, and – to my particular interest and pleasure – a climate change activist named Larry Gussin. Larry’s a co-founder of Nest, one of the first companies to use computer technology to increase energy efficiency. After Google bought Nest, he has become since 2012 a full-time activist working in support of carbon pricing initiatives, mostly, and managing a donor advised fund at the Sierra Club Foundation .

Mr. Angry Pants burning out 2018

After we met, I sent Larry a link to my website. To my great pleasure, he came to the New Year’s Day Fiesta armed with a great question I’m still mulling: “Is shipwreck” [in my eco-theory sense] “an elaboration of technological incrementalism in the face of environmental hostility, or is it part of the ‘burn it all down’ radicalism” that Larry in his own work been struggling against in recent years? He describes himself as a leftist who in recent years has been mostly fighting with the left, because he supports market- and technology-based mitigations. I believe he was a supporter of the failed carbon pricing initiative in Washington State this past fall.

Update: I garbled that last point a bit. Larry emailed to clarify his stance on the WA carbon pricing initiatives. He writes: “I supported the 2018 WA carbon tax effort in 2014-15 with $45,000 in seed $ and volunteering, but opposed the proposal from 2016 on as I thought it was being written to only appeal to the left in a purple state. In the end 1 in 4 of the voters for the reelection of liberal senator Maria Cantwell voted against the carbon tax: I was right.”

He’d read my manifesto-ish PMLA article “After Sustainability,” and we talked about what counts or does not count as a “pastoral” or a vision of stasis in environmental thinking. We also talked about what counts as radical or revolutionary, and whether climate change activism can avoid the vortex of partisanship in our Trumpy present. I suspect it can’t over the next two years of highly polarized political conflict in the US – but in a post-orange menace medium term, I agree with Larry that we need a climate solution that isn’t only partisan. I don’t believe that in the US it’s possible to have the left “win” in a permanent or decisive way – though I certainly think the current version of the right deserves to lose.

Mi familia en Oaxaca

I didn’t quite figure it out enough to say it over mezcal & grilled cactus on New Year’s Day, but Larry’s technological and carbon-pricing-based vision might be better thought of as georgic rather than pastoral. He presents a vision of skilled human labor – the sort of skill that built Nest and Google – engaging technically and carefully with our dynamic environmental conditions. There are things not to love about the georgic tradition, including the settler colonialism legacies that flow from both its Virgilian / Roman sources and from its early American rearticulations. But a solar and renewable georgic might be just the thing in 2019. (On my MLA panel yesterday, Jesse Oak Taylor & I were talking about Jedidiah Purdy’s After Nature, which also makes a quasi-georgic argument about American history.)

Larry has been jousting recently with what he calls the “burn it all down” anti-capitalist left, which for him seems represented in part by Naomi Klein, and perhaps also by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and at least some maximalist versions of the “Green New Deal.” I didn’t let on that, though I’m ambivalent about Klein’s melodramatic view of history, I kinda love AOC, and have some hopes for what she’s bringing to Washington. Leftist radicalism seems to him both politically impossible and perhaps also environmentally counterproductive, because it rejects the expertise and techno-precision that he believes in. Given that I’m mostly immersed in leftier-than-me academic culture, it was an interesting perspective.

With Olivia at Monte Alban

So — to answer Larry’s question — where do my ideas about shipwreck and swimmer poetics fall in the spectrum between burn it all down and tecno-incrementalism? I guess a bit on both sides: shipwreck stories attract through their implicit radicalism, in which great ships go down and human hopes are dashed. But the survival narrative, which includes the story of shipwrecked swimmers and the sailors who cling to broken spars, relies on expertise, labor, patience, and perhaps a bit of luck. The break-plus-recovery narrative that I wrestled with in my book Shipwreck Modernity has feelers in both technical and radical discourses.

It was a great afternoon of food, drink, and eco-conversation. We talked about Odysseus, who goes home to stay in Homer, but who is later goaded out into the open sea by Dante and Kazantzakis. What is it about home that resists narrative? Why can’t we let heroes rest? Why are human stories so impatient?

With Ian above San Augustin Etla

We also talked, with contributions from all the generations of the family, about Tolkien’s hobbits and the Shire as eco-vision: a precious spot, a place that does not know its own peril, and a community worth sacrificing oneself to preserve. The Shire remains a bit green for my blue/oceanic tastes, especially in the films, but that short glimpse of the Scouring of the Shire that Sam sees in the Mirror of Galadriel (films only) might represent a painful near-future today. I wonder also about the sea that cradles Middle Earth and the brief hints of oceanic voyages in Tolkien’s mythology.

We talked about the “Creating Nature” symposium I’m organizing for May 2019 at the Folger, and my hopes to foster dialogue between eco-literary types and scientists, legal scholars, philosophers, and other interested parties. The entanglement between what we call “human” and what we call “Nature” has a long and complex history; part of my project as historicist and Shakespearean ecocritic seeks to surface premodern ways of understanding the relationship between humans and our nonhuman environment in ways that speak to today’s shifts and changes.

In the library of Casa Colonial

After the New Year’s Fiesta came 18+ hours of travel out of Mexico on Wednesday and a very full day at MLA yesterday. With the conversation at the Casa very much on my mind, I spoke yesterday on a great panel, “Climate Humanism and the Inhuman Turn,” organized by eco-Gandalf Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. I started writing this post amid chaos and bad wifi at the Mexico City airport, thinking about the talk I was about to give in Chicago and about the past few days of conversations in Oaxaca. It turns out family vacation makes a great prelude to academic conferencing!

I’ll close with the ending of yesterday’s talk, which I am starting to think of as a way to imagine the oceanic encounter as break-and-continuity, a way to preserve some aspects of the “human” while recognizing the inhuman vastness and dynamism of the climate in which we live. I was talking mostly about Jonah, and about what his story means today. But I wonder if there are political and strategic implications for eco-activists and their fellow travelers.

Here’s the last bit  –

We must combine our human need to reform the great city with our awareness of the nonhuman plurality that environs our bodies.

The human in the prophet preaches repentance, change, and survival. (Good eco-georgic values! Good swimming virtues! The technology of human endurance!)

The nonhuman into which the prophet dives promises shock, disorientation, and possibilities we cannot contain. (The revolutionary urge! The lure of change and difference!)

We need both.

I wonder if Larry would agree with me?

Seven Thoughts on the Seven Seas (Aquaman: The Movie)

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Plenty to laugh about in the car home from Branford Regal Theaters last night after a family trip to see “Aquaman.” But my sea-fever makes me susceptible even to the underwater glimmer of the DC logo in the opening credits. So I’m going list the things I enjoyed about this $200 billion dollar and two-and-a-half hour romp.

Nicole Kidman as Queen Atlanna
  1. The first spoken words, in voice-over from Jason Mamoa, were “Jules Verne,” and then the quotation, “Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and at last they will come together.” The phrase glosses the Atlantan queen-lighthouse keeper romance of Aquaman’s parents, but I was happy just to get Verne’s name up front where it belongs.
  2. Pollution: The bad brother / Ocean Master Orm, played by Patrick Wilson, wants to attack the surface in revenge for centuries of pollution. At one point he causes the sea to vomit up plastic and sunken warships on all the world’s beaches. He’s not the good guy, but it’s not a bad idea.
  3. The movie opens on a remote lighthouse on the Maine Coast, and a running vision imagines this place as a maritime edge, jutting out into the rocky coastline. Maybe my favorite CGI spectacle moment saw a massive wave surge over this coast, with our guy Aquaman trying to drive his father’s pickup truck ahead of the storm, with his sleeping-it-off father snoozing in the passanger seat. Spoiler alert: they don’t make it, but Dad ends up OK.
  4. Among many A-list actors in what doesn’t always feel like an A-list movie was Nicole Kidman as Queen Atlanta, undersea royalty who flees from an arranged marriage, falls in love with the lighthouse keeper, has a half-human son, and then returns when she realizes she can only keep her human family safe by going back to Atlantis. Why she leaves her son on land is never clear — but in the end she comes back to the lighthouse keeper, which makes a nice twist on the siren/selkie stories of feminine sea-creatures who lure sailors to their doom.
  5. Jason Mamoa’s a fun actor and physical specimen, though I’ve always seen him as a bit too musclebound to be a swimmer. They kept his comic side mostly reined in by melodrama and action scenes, though I did enjoy a goofy moment where what looked to be a developing bar fight became instead a series of selfie poses with burly locals and the “Fish-man.” But mostly I loved Mamoa’s tattoos, which make me think of my favorite maritime Pacific islander, Queequeg. As the Captain says when looking at the body art, “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”
  6. It’s hard not to love the giant crab-god Karathen, voiced by Julie Andrews, who joins up with the good guys after Aquaman secures the ancestral Trident. I admit I wanted the ocean-liner sized beastie to burst out into the crab-song from Moana, “Shiny,” and in fact at various points I started thinking that a Moana-Aquaman mashup might really be an excellent thing. “I was a drab little crab once…”
  7. King Arthur of Atlantis! The plotline was basically sword from the stone-familiar, which maybe supports longstanding fantasies about the sea being the “English national chemical” (Ezra Pound) or England having some special connection to the ocean (Joseph Conrad). Or maybe they could not think of a more original plot? But in any case — what’s not to like?
Amber Heard as Mera
There was some discussion in the car home about whether this costume counts as shirtless or not

Maybe I’m just in the holiday spirit, but I’m tempted to go see it again.

Happy watery holidays to all!

Karin Coonrod’s Merchant of Venice at Yale Law School (6/22/18)

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Are you answer’d? (4.1.61)

At the rousing close of the Compagnia di Colombari’s moving production of Merchant, originally staged in the Venice ghetto in 2016 and reprised this week in the courtyard of Yale Law School, the five actors who played Shylock in his five different scenes stood together and confronted the audience. They presented distinctive faces: an Indian man who also played Gratziano (1.3), an Uraguayan man who also played Aragon (2.5), an American woman cross-cast as the Duke (3.1), an African-American man who played a compelling Morocco (3.3), and an American man who doubled as Tubal (4.1). They reprised Shylock’s speech from the trial insisting that he need not explain his refusal to show mercy to the Christians who had mocked him, stolen his daughter and his ducats, and spurned his offers of professional friendship. “I’ll not answer that,” he/they intoned. “But say, it is my humor.” The acting collective stood for the Jewish identity that Shylock embodied both within the play and in the past four centuries of Western cultural history — but the speech they collectively spoke asserted, with Shakespearean doubleness, an individual’s refusal to submerge his particular selfhood in service to an ethically compromised public good.

The play and this production partly admire Shylock for his desire to stand for himself, “as if,” to quote another Shakespearean anti-hero, “a man were author of himself.” But the play destroys him for his individuality, while making the audience complicit in that destruction.

Linda Powell as Portia (Arts & Ideas)

I sat in the on-stage seats in the courtyard last night, which meant that at the end of the trial scene, after Linda Powell’s commanding Portia-as-Balthazar pronounced forced conversion and financial ruin on Shylock, I was required to stand, drape the red sash of Christianity on my left shoulder, and clap and smile along with the full cast at the Jew’s solitary departure. I didn’t feel good about it — except that I like it when art gets under my skin.

The most emotionally wrenching moment of the night came the only previous time all five Shylocks appeared on stage together, when they discovered that his/their daughter Jessica had run off with pretty-boy Lorenzo, played with a you-can’t-touch-me smile by Paul Spera. The lines in which Shylock lamented the loss of his daughter and his ducats were parceled out to the Christians who surrounded, jeered at, and taunted the moneylender. (The winning side of the cast carried an oddly appropriate whiff of the scions of the American political elite: Linda Powell is Colin Powell’s daughter, and Paul Spera is the grandson of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.) From the scrum of yellow-sashed Shylocks emerged Trezana Beverley’s female version of the role — Shylock as mother, in Coonrod’s phrase — to stun the courtyard with her keening cry. When she modulated later in the scene into “Hath not a Jew eyes,” she captured the night’s emotional core, as she would later reimagine the individual in the collective by playing the relatively small part of the Duke (4.1) as a figure of pathos and constrained power.

This production was deeply Shylock-centric, as you might expect when that part was quintuply cast. In an Ideas panel earlier in the week, I’d assembled a panel to think about “money-culture” in Merchant in which we consciously explored “Risk, Anxiety, and Generosity” through some of the less central figures, including Bassanio and the clown Launcelot Gobbo. Coonrod’s streamlined intermissionless production (I love Shakespeare without intermissions!) cut Bassanio’s arrow speech (1.1) and translated Launcelot into a commedia del’arte clown, played dazzlingly by Francesca Sara Toich, who performed in Italian a version of the speech about the fiend that my panel had discussed. 

The focus on Shylock made it hard for the play’s romantic comedy to carry much balancing force. Flying the comic flag were a strong performance by Linda Powell as Portia and a lively opening bawdy dance number in Italian led by Loncilotto, adapted from an early 16c ballad on “amore.” “But who the devil,” asked the ballad, “would that devil be who wanted to speak of anything but love?” The play provided some disturbing alternatives.

Shylock did speak about love, and his lament on the loss of the ring his daughter spent in Genoa for a monkey highlighted his devotion to his deceased wife. “It was my turquoise,” he said to Tubal. “I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor; / I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.1) But the core of Shylock’s relationship with Venice and with the social and political worlds of the play flowed through money, debt, and exchange.

In the play’s crucial moments at trial, Shylock’s refused Portia’s offer/command/entreaty to submit to what she famously calls the “quality of mercy.” It might be that I (and some of my companions last night) were still under the spell of Tara Bradway’s wonderfully empathetic performance of that speech at our panel on Tuesday, but Linda Powell’s rendition of those familiar lines didn’t hit me in my gut. She seemed too clearly to know that Shylock would refuse; perhaps she was already thinking of her next move, the hyper-literalism in which she allowed him no blood to go along with his pound of flesh and thus broke him on a technicality.

Portia’s a tricky character, and much of our panel, not to mention its pre- and postgame discussion and my summer online class, has been trying to make sense of her. Does she represent feminist badassery, shrewdly negotiating a world of suitors who mainly want her money, not to mention the controlling hand of her dead father? Or does her behavior toward Morocco and Shylock display racism and inability to empathize beyond her elite circle? Some of our panelists have been batting around a theory in which Portia mirrors Ivanka Trump, another heiress whose beauty sometimes gets mistaken for a moral compass. In Coonrod’s production, Powell’s African-American identity counter-acted Portia’s textual whiteness and perhaps also subtly modified the figure’s relationship to Shylock. But the ethically unsettling feelings that emerged from the ring test (5.1) came through strongly in this production, especially as the five Shylocks took center stage for the closing moment.

In Venice in 2016, according to a review by Kent Cartwright in The Shakespeare Newsletter, the final tableau also highlighted Jessica and projected the word “mercy” in many languages onto the walls of the ghetto. In New Haven, Michelle Uranowitz, who played Jessica in both places, had injured herself during a nasty fall on Wednesday night, but I’m not sure if that’s why I didn’t see her closing move last night. Instead, we sat in the courtyard of one of America’s elite institutions of justice — Yale Law School grads currently comprise one-third of the United States Supreme Court — faced with five Shylocks pleading for inclusion and recognition. I want better answers for them, if not inside the play than in our increasingly unsettling history.

Update: Via Diana Henderson, whose front row seat had a better angle than my on stage seat, I’m told that the projection of “mercy” did happen at Yale, though in English only, rather than also in Hebrew and Italian in Venice.

Francesca Toich as Lancilotto (Arts & Ideas)

Are you answer’d?

Money Culture and The Merchant of Venice: June 19 in New Haven

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As we turn into summer, I’m especially looking forward to having Karin Coonrod’s Merchant of Venice come to New Haven for a week in June, with performances 6/19-22 in the courtyard of Yale Law School.

At 5:30 pm at the Yale Center for British Art on Tuesday 6/19, I’ll be leading a conversation about money culture in the play:

Risk, Anxiety, and Generosity: Defining the Culture of Money from Shakespeare to Today

Here’s a short description of the event, which features the insights and contributions of

  • Erik Blachford, venture capital investor and former-CEO of expedia.com
  • Tara Bradway, Artistic Director of the Adirondack Shakespeare Company
  • Judy Chevalier, William S. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Economics at Yale’s School of Management
  • Holly Dugan, Professor of English at George Washington University

The Merchant of Venice represents Shakespeare’s most searching investigation into the monetization of human relations. The drama of merchants, moneylenders, profligates, servants, and heiresses shows how financial exchanges interweave themselves into all human systems, moving beyond mercantile interactions to influence families, love, politics, and religion. With attention to the play’s portrayals of risk, anxiety, and generosity – feelings most of us still have regarding money today – our panel of experts will explore how Shakespeare’s play reveals the unsetting effects of living in a money culture.

We’ll be engaging with three moments in the play: Bassanio’s fantasy of risk management and the finding of a lost arrow (1.1); Lancelot’s anxious monologue about whether he should or should not leave Shylock (2.2); and Portia’s famous “quality of mercy” (4.1) speech.

Please join us on June 19! The event is free, and you can register at the link above — and also buy tickets to the performance of Merchant later that night.

Twelfth Night @ Tfana (The Acting Company)

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 Maybe it’s just that I’ve seen Fiasco’s sea-shanty-filled Twelfth Night recently, or perhaps that the end of this particular spring semester brings the melancholy close of my research leave rather than joyous release from spring term classes, but I kept toggling between two thoughts last Thursday night as I watched the opening preview of The Acting Company’s Twelfth Night at Theater for a New Audience.

Mostly I thought that this play, maybe more than any other Shakespearean comedy, really can’t miss in performance. It’s so fun to watch!

And sometimes I wondered whether some of the hits were more glancing than they might have been. What lies beneath laughter?

The stand-out performances were Kate Forbes as a brilliantly conspiratorial and triumphant Maria who stole almost every scene she was in, and Joshua David Robinson as a soulful Feste. Both of these actors performed an emotional knowingness that left some meanings unspoken. The most resonant exchange of the night, it seemed to me, was Feste’s teasing suggestion to Maria about her prospects for making an elite marriage: “If Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert as witty a piece of Eve’s flesh as any in Illyria” (1.5). Neither needed to say more; overflow of feeling was left to Lee Ernst’s red-bearded Toby, Matthew Grier’s barely-contained Duke Orsino, and Susanna Stahmann’s wide-eyed Viola. 

The comic bits were wonderfully lively, especially the physical interplay between Viola-as-Cesario and the Duke. Elizabeth Heflin performed a stately Olivia whose costume changes structured her transformation from withdrawn mourner to eager bride.

In recent months I’ve been thinking a lot about romantic comedy and consent, ever since I found myself teaching Measure for Measure‘s depiction of sexual harassment and bed-trick near-assault, at the start of the #metoo moment last fall. (I wrote a bit about this after seeing Measure twice at the Public last fall.) Twelfth Night gently satirizes the erotic willfullness of overwhelming love, played mostly-sympathetically by Olivia and Viola, only partly disciplined in the case of Orsino, and cruelly mocked in Malvolio. None of these relationships really comes close, here or in the other comedies, to a courtship of consent, conversation, and mutuality. Perhaps Maria and Sir Toby, who play jokes together, come closest?

“Fate, show thy force,” says Viola in act 1, “ourselves we do not owe.” More than the conniving heroines of As You Like It or Merchant of Venice, Viola stages the fundamentally passive heroine of classical romance, enduring tribulations and anticipating the renewals of tide and time. Such an attitude of submission doesn’t mesh well with Enlightenment understandings of selfhood and reasoned choice. Reason and love aren’t often bedfellows in Shakespeare.

“What is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve”: Viola’s language, spoken by a disguised women to a withdrawn woman on behalf of an elite man, mirrors the phrasing of harassment. It’s no surprise, of course, to find sexualized violence lurking in Elizabethan comedies: not all of these plays are as overt as The Taming of the Shrew, but the undercurrent flows through them all. It’s a good thing that such patterns of male action and female passivity are becoming visible and problematic in this #metoo moment. I’m still working out how it’ll change my teaching, and all of our lives.

Go see this one before it closes on May 27!

 

 

Father Comes Home at Yale Rep

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Stephen Anthony Jones as the Oldest Old Man (Part 1) Photo by Joan Marcus

When Suzan Lori-Parks’s Civil War-era rewriting of the Odyssey first played at the Public in 2014, I didn’t make it — despite reading Christopher Isherwood’s rave that it was the best new play of the year. I was holding tickets to the Saturday preview in New Haven for March 17 this year, but that show was cancelled b/c a storm delayed moving the set into town. But I was — finally! — able to see the three-hour epic last night at Yale’s University Theater. I wondered if it could possibly live up to the hype.

It did. Almost entirely, and especially in the incandescent, hilarious, shocking third act. What a show!

I’m in the middle of a dense three-play run of my own right now, with Theater for a New Audience’s Winter’s Tale in Brooklyn tonight and the RSC Lear on Tuesday at BAM. So just a few quick notes about this amazing, inventive Beckett-meets-Homer-as-history-play masterpiece.

Part 1: The Measure of a Man

The slave Hero, played with charisma and power by James Udom, sat in the Odysseus role, but in the first part he’s faced with the choice of Achilles: will he or won’t he go to the wars? His decision revolved around the conflicting advice of his adopted father, “The Oldest Old Man,” played by Stephen Anthony Jones, and his de facto wife Penny, played by Eboni Flowers. The Old Man advised Hero to go for glory but Penny wanted her man home. This triangular debate got disrupted by the wild card of a maimed character named Homer, played by Julian Elijah Martinez. Homer’s connection to his Greek namesake wasn’t yet clear, but it turned out that Hero was the one who cut off Homer’s foot years ago, when the “boss master” forced him to cripple his friend after Homer had tried to escape. The threat of violence — including a scene in which Hero’s naked foot waits for the knife — lingered.

Part 2: A Battle in the Wilderness 

James Udom as Hero and Tom Pecinka as Smith (Part 2) Photo by Joan Marcus

The second part, set during the war, featured a triangular conversation between the boss-master Colonel, played with comic and moving gusto by Dan Hiatt, Hero, and Union prisoner Smith, played by Tom Pecinka. Punctuated by cannon blasts that indicate the near arrival of both armies, the three men explored service, loyalty, and race, with banjo accompaniment. The Colonel’s hymn to whiteness seemed as if it would mark a painful high point for this episode — but then Smith’s attempt to woo Hero into escaping to a black Union regiment topped that.

Part 3: The Union of the Confederate Parts

After an intermission and already two hours in, I recognized the pattern the play was building: long, somewhat leisurely scenes that grew into crescendo. The second Part topped the first, and while I figured that for Part 3 we’d be back at the slave cabin where we’d started, it wasn’t clear how Lori-Parks could exceed the intensity of Part 2, framed by cannons and with Smith’s wounded and festering leg as a dramatic focus. I should not have worried.

The last part started back home, and Homer — whose parallel in Greek epic wasn’t clear in part 1 — turned out to be the Suitors! But, in a twist, he’s a loving suitor and real alternative to wandering Ulysses. The go-or-not choice in Part 3 belonged to Penny. Homer convinced her at one point to escape with him and other runaways to the north and freedom. But then the returning warriors came home, starting first not with Hero but Odd-sea Dog, played brilliantly with comic excess, frequent requests for belly rubs, and shaggy dog-storifying by Gregory Wallace. The dog kept everyone guessing about whether Hero survived the war that killed the boss-master for so long that I thought maybe the twist would be that only the dog made it home — but no, Hero, who had now taken the name Ulysses after the Union general, returned. The third of three triangles featured Ulysses, Homer, and Penny. I won’t spoil the surprise, or the joy, of the ending — except to say that the story will go on.

Gregory Wallace as Odyssey Dog (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Lori-Parks says she’s going to write six more parts of this epic for a total of nine, so we should get to hear more about Penny, Homer, Ulysses, Odyssey Dog, and the rest. I can’t wait! We’re lucky to be living through the production of great art.

#shax2018: Conversations & utopias in LA

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  1. 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!

  2. 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

  3. 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”)?
  4. 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!
  5. 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.
  6. 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

  7. 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.
  8. 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?
  9. 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!

  10. 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.

  11. 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.
  12. 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?

  13. 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.

  14. #shaxfutures #whatwillwebecome? #metamorphoses!

    Post-immersion selfie

  15. 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?
  16. We know what the answer must be.
  17. Both seal and roach, utopia and dystopia. #forward!
  18. See everyone in DC!