Without doubt, it was the wettest shipwreck scene I’ve ever seen, in my many years of seeing productions of The Tempest. Probably the best, too.

Synetic Theater’s game is Silent Shakespeare, no words spoken at all, though Stephano did hum a sea chanty at one point. I’ve heard about this company for a long time, and almost got tickets to a staging of Don Quixote a year or two ago — but I must admit it was the flooded stage that drew me down to DC.  It’s been a great short trip, with a couple of half-days in the Folger reading piscatorial verse, and a happily-timed jaunt over to Foggy Bottom to listen to Will Stockton say brilliant things about Romeo and Juliet. But let’s not kid ourselves: it was the water, 4″ of it all over the stage, that punched my ticket.

When I got to the theater in the basement of an office building in Crystal City, they handed me a poncho to take to my seat. I’m glad I put it on, though it didn’t really  keep me dry.

Liberated from the text, the Synetic production made some interesting decisions about narrative arc. They opened with the arrival of young Prospero and a swaddled infant Miranda on the isle, guided by spirits and music from a piano that spouted an arching waterfall from beneath its waterlogged keys. The piano, perhaps the source of Ariel’s power, was the only prop on stage beyond the water itself. Ariel played it, Ferdinand scrubbed it, Caliban jumped on top of it, and the young lovers first glimpsed each other through the waterfall beneath which Miranda was hiding. Music and water together.

The splashing started with a Gandalf-v-Saruman style fight scene between Prospero and Sycorax, in the course of which he wrested a staff from her and stubbled her with it while I and the other Splash Zoners got our first taste of the water. Sycorax and her son dressed in red body suits, Caliban’s sporting horns, but when he prodded his mother’s still form after she’d been laid low by our hero, the feel of his character — here and elsewhere — was more puppy than devil. As Prospero learned his way around the island, freeing Ariel from imprisonment and looking after soon-teenage Miranda, Caliban, having no choice, slowly warmed to his mother’s killer. Before the Italian ship arrived they were a happy-ish quartet, with girlish Miranda leaping around the watery stage with Caliban.

The play told its story through broad, playful physical movements set to music: a few fights such as the one between Prospero and Sycorax, a few magical light shows, lots of music, but the most compelling set-piece in the early going was the hide-and-seek game between Caliban and Miranda that circled round and round her distracted father. Watching them, you knew what was going to happen — the water-soaked bodies, jumping, rolling, and leaping really could only lead one place, even if you didn’t remember the play’s backstory — but still, watching the game shift by degrees from chase to catch to run away and finally all the way to sexual assault was sadly inevitable. It never became overtly violent, though Prospero did lock Caliban in his cell when he interrupted the game. But clearly something was wakening — and then the Italians came.

The restructured narrative meant that the shipwreck that opens Shakespeare’s play became a mid-production high point  for Synetic, with a disorganized chaos of new characters spilling and splashing their ways onto the stage, kicking water high into the air, miming maritime labor, and generally having a great time. I’m always disappointed with productions of the Tempest’s shipwreck — it’s my favorite scene anywhere in Shakespeare, but so hard to get right on stage. But this show, with no words and even no Boatswain, got to the scene’s disorderly heart. This kind of fracturing is what happens when ships break and bodies get wet. The old rules about weather and politics and fathers and magic and theater start to pull apart. “We split, we split, we split!” — as no one said during this production.

I won’t say that the show went downhill from there, but as the familiar scenes flowed by, the performances were great but never really got back to the intensity and high-jinx of the wreck. For me, at least, that was the slipper top. How do you beat immersion? (By this time I was thoroughly soaked and grinning.)

Some smart stage bits followed, including a touching scene in which Miranda shows up with a set of keys to unlock Caliban’s cell — is all forgiven? — but then drops them in the water when Ferdinand strolls by. It turns out that Caliban didn’t need the keys, because the cell wasn’t really locked. The scene set up the orphan’s flight into the arms of a wonderfully drunken and later cross-dressed Stephano.

There were some interesting changes in casting — both Trinculo and Antonia were played as women, which added sexual tension to the drunkards’ reunion and seductive force to the usurpation of Milan. The performance of Ariel by Don Istrate was brilliant, playful and ice-hard at the same time, shimmering in silver body paint.

Perhaps because we’d seen him young and alone, struggling to care for his infant and ambushed by Sycorax, this Prospero was unusually sympathetic and non-tyrannical. In the end, his drowning of book and  staff (no place to bury anything on this stage) was elegiac rather than terrifying. I thought about Ovid’s Medea, but didn’t really see much of her.

The magic book itself, which looked like nothing so much as a waterproof MacBook in one of those faux-folio cases, ended up in Caliban’s hands as the ship rowed away. He gazed into its luminous pages, a hopeful, wistful expression on his face. Did he see something? No. Then the lights went down quickly, leaving him alone in the dark.

A great, wet, exuberant show, with a touch of sadness at curtain. It’s amazing what water can do, even now that it’s become almost a stage cliche — though I’ve never seen anything as fully immersed as this show before. The run closes March 24, and it’s quite silly for me to even think about a second trip to DC in that time, especially since I’ll be back in early April for an eco-event at MEMSI. But it’s tempting.

If you’re in or near DC before then, go. And sit in the Splash Zone.

Starting a new grad course this evening with the above title. I wonder if the students will be disappointed that there will be more globalization than Shakespeare? Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, among assorted other literary and historical texts. But tonight, we’re starting with Charles Mann’s 1493 and his explanation of what Alfred Crosby calls the “Columbian Exchange”; with some discussion about the different valences of the terms “anthropocene” (which seems to be catching) and “homogenocene” (which hasn’t, but may be more accurate, and maybe more threatening); and eventually with some gorgeous maps — which probably won’t show up all that well in the blog. First, Wright-Molyneux (1599):

And, of course, Waldseemuller (1507):

The genius started with Virgilia. Virgilia!

She was lounging onstage before the start, as we all tried to figure out how it would work. The stage at the BAM opera house was deep, wide, and busy, full of modular furniture, couches, tables, and at least a dozen large TV monitors. The audience started out seated, looking up at a huge screen above the stage with a gnomic Dylan phrase on it. We also watched a digital crawl that provided translations from the Dutch and other useful facts — 297 minutes to the death of Cleopatra! — for anyone who could see it. Later, when we (the audience) took the stage we stood or sat or craned our necks looking at the action, or taking a break to order at the bars backstage right or left. I asked for a rum and tonic while Coriolanus was dismembered 20 feet away. The stage also contained make up tables for the actors on one side, and public email/twitter terminals on the other side. It got crowded, as the night wore on.

Virgilia started it, before I knew who she was. She sat on the couch as the play opened, staring up at the imposing face of Volumnia, praising her warlike son on the big screen. All the war scenes in Corioles were compressed into strobe lighting, so the first time we see the hero upon his return from the battlefield, he’s caught between mother and wife. His words give priority to his mighty mother over the wife he calls “my gracious silence,” but this performance punctuates Virgilia’s tears with lingering kisses. The deep physical pull between the lonely dragon and the upstaged wife — Virgilia cannot control her husband the way his mother can — activates the agon between sex and politics that finally explodes, almost five hours later, with Cleopatra. During the show I thought these two parts were played by the same actor, but now that I check the cast list, Janni Goslinga played Virgilia and Chris Nietvelt played Cleopatra. The two performances shared an explosive mix of eros and warplay that sits near the heart of director Ivo van Hove’s vision of politics.

Van Hove’s notes call the political vision of his production of these three Roman Tragedies “action in public,” and here the decision to open the stage to the audience — not really a new innovation, as the Village Voice notes — represents not just avant-garde dramatic play but an experiment in seeing what “free action” can mean in practice. Van Hove claims that Shakespeare “shows that politics is made by people.” His set designer and long-time collaborator Jan Versweyveld writes that the set for these plays “transforms the theater into a political conference.” Their show immersed all of  us in political news, with the the digital crawl quoting headlines from Gaza and tweets from the  audience, while a few of the on-stage monitors projected images of 21c century heroes during the show: Barack Obama during Coriolanus’s encounter with the people, Michael Phelps’s 200m freestyle triumph during the ascent of Julius Caesar, and John Edwards (!) when Antony heads back to Rome to marry his rival’s sister.

One of the best tweets on the #romantragedies thread, to which we were all encouraged to post tweets and pictures during the performance, noted, accurately, that the best part of van Hove’s high-concept theatrical flourishes was how well each one embodied the deeper metaphors of the plays. I read that sometime during the production and thought — exactly. That’s how the show worked  I’ll try to explain a few of these moments.

Coriolanus’s melt-down press conference, in which he denounces the manipulative Tribunes in front of a TV audience, was a study in anger. “You speak as a punitive god,” protest the Tribunes, at which the general rages further. His denunciation of the corrupt “two-party system” drew applause from the high-minded Brooklyn crowd, but I kept recalling the opening kiss his mother had prevented him from enjoying with his wife after the battle at Corioles. The military hero raged against all distraction, against anything that moved away from his solitary warrior self — but on this stage there was no single center, only competing forces, mothers, wives, children, Tribunes and Senators and even the talking head of Barack Obama backstage. Plus lots of extras, including me.

The political world eats up this kind of solitude — this is what I take to be the meaning of the implied connection between Coriolanus and Obama, though our President seems to have managed the dissolution of his solitude better than the Roman general. Aufidius, who appeared twice on stage being interviewed by a Roman TV station, the second time when his armies were outside the gates of the city, was impassive and implacable, biding his time before consuming his ally-enemy at last. In a play about political failure and consumption, Virgilia’s almost-silent stage-plea for a more feeling world cannot stand before her mother in law’s dictum: “Anger’s my meat. I sup upon myself.”

From the inchoate rage of Coriolanus the production moved seamlessly — no set change between the death of Coriolanus and start of Julius Caesar  — to the high-stakes competition of Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar. Playing Cassius as a woman and then later playing Octavius Caesar as a woman in the final play suggested the slow integration of the Roman political world, from the violent masculine prehistory of Coriolanus’s Republic to the quasi-matriarchal empire of Octavius that follows the death of Cleopatra. The middle play, Julius Caesar, highlighted its female characters with a great stage coup, in which the tete-a-tete scenes of Caesar and Calpurnia and Brutus and Portia were played simultaneously across each other, such that each actor appeared to be answering both conversations at once. Calpurnia, played by Janni Goslinga, the actor whose Virgilia had failed to re-claim Coriolanus in the first play, was no more successful here in keeping her husband from being killed, but she and Portia provided a powerful template against which the Roman super-heroes measured themselves.

But the show-stopper in the middle play, perhaps predictably, was Mark Antony’s funeral oration. After a measured, polished, really quite beautiful speech by Roeland Fernhout’s Brutus — I was sitting about 5 feet behind him at center stage — Hans Kesting’s Antony swaggered to the podium, looked at the audience (I watched via video feed, since I was behind him), picked up his notes, and threw them away. Then he slouched around to the front of the podium, fell down, and sat still for almost two minutes.

We stared in near-silence at his stricken face, and I was thinking about media resources. In most plays, watching from seats, you can’t see close facial expressions unless you’re in the front row. But the video screens enabled this production to use the emotional resources of the close up as well as the shared emotional power that only crowded theaters can produce. Antony drew us to him by sitting exhausted and quiet, so that when he took up the microphone — “Friends, Romans…” (the words were in Dutch, of course, which meant I mostly couldn’t understand them, though a few old Germanic roots carried through) — we were all with him. And then he did with rage what Coriolanus hadn’t been able to do: he brought all of us all along with him.

I don’t think my description can do justice to the rippling force and mania of the speech: Antony ran through the theater screaming his lines (in Dutch), he carried the body of Caesar back on stage, he marked up a photo of the corpse with a red sharpie (which almost hit me when he discarded it behind him), he spat and dripped and cried. He waved around the paper with Caesar’s will.  And we were all with him — because we were on stage, most of us, we were the plebeians. We were the ones who wanted the honorable Brutus to pay, the ones who, deep in our stomachs, felt that being reasonable makes a poor politics.

A six-hour production needs multiple high-lights, and Antony’s funeral oration wasn’t the only one. I’ll hit two from Antony and Cleopatra: the night before the battle of Actium, and the death of Enobarbus.

Before the battle, on Cleopatra’s birth-day, she and Antony perform “one other gaudy night” (3.13) as an elaborate kiss-and-dance that fulfills the erotic promise that Virgilia had offered some 270 minutes before with her husband Coriolanus. The “soldier’s kiss” and the reunion of the lovers — Antony has spent a fair amount of the play thus far making and breaking a political marriage with Octavia, Caesar’s sister — gestured toward a theatrics of personal connection, one that didn’t care much about world-shaping battles just a few hours away. As we looked at their happy faces explaining to a furious Enobarbus that they would fight by sea, not by land, no matter what “absolute soldiership” Antony had on land, it didn’t matter that they were throwing away the world. The soundtrack was lovely late Dylan: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s, gettin’ there…”

Even better, perhaps, was Enobarbus himself, played by Bart Siegers, who’d also been the inexorable Aufidius. Having betrayed Antony, returned to Caesar, and then had his treasure sent after him by his former master, Enobarbus runs mad. He also ran through the theater out onto Lafayette Ave. around 11:15 pm, howling and writhing his Dutch rage at the taxis and bike messengers. Again, it was both a great theatrical coup and a brilliant reading of the dramatic metaphor: the great Roman soldier, who knew to leave Antony because he knew Antony had ceased to be an effective leader, has found back in the Roman camp that the world of emotions and passion, of bodies and feelings, that he loved in Egypt has gone. So he ends up lying on cold pavement, with cars and pedestrians ignoring his madness, walking by him. So fares the feeling man in the cold Roman world. You taxis, you cyclists, you worse than senseless things!

I could go on about this show, talking about the brilliant bits of humor, as when Mark Antony almost forgets his new wife’s name, or the backstage hi-jinx, as when Octavia spilled a beer at the bar between scenes. But the full force of the production seems to me best captured by that image of Enobarbus on Lafayette Ave, crying out his pain to the uninterpreting streets. A brilliant metaphor for politics at an impasse.

If and when Toneelgroep does Shakespeare’s Histories, 8 plays in 12+ hours, I’m buying a ticket to Amsterdam.

“Shakespeare thought in pictures,” reports Mike Witmore in his oracular voice, and a swirling array of books, photographs, and objects that have grown out of that perception are now overflowomg the Folger gallery. I made a quick trip to DC last Monday for the opening of the show he’s co-curated with Rosamond Purcell, “Very Like a Whale.” Now I’m speculating about whether I can get back there before the show closes in early Jan 2013.

I knew what to expect because I taught an undergraduate class last spring using their collaborative book of photographs and Shakespearean snippets, Landscapes of the Passing Strange. The magic, as Rosamond explained to the audience in the Folger theater, is in the bottles. Her large framed photographs, which were on display throughout the hall, were all taken of the reflections of ordinary objects in these old mercury-lined glass bottles, which were originally used to store light-sensitive dyes. The results dance right up to and past the line between representation and abstraction: they are photographs, which is to say real visible things, but also changed, sometimes beyond recognition.

The book contains just the images and fragments from Shakespeare  but the show adds objects from assorted collections and from the Folger Library. Highlights include a case entitled “All the Whale’s a Stage,” which gets its title from an image of a man playing bagpipes on top of a massive cetacean body, a burned page of The Tempest from one of the Folger’s many Shakespeare Folios, an automaton (!), and many other things.

“Wood from Shakespeare’s house in the Caliban case,” claimed Rosamond during the curators’ talk. “From the property behind the house,” clarified Mike. Which led to a wonderful exchange in which Rosamond admitted her own identification with the poetic monster who finds scamels in the rocks, and suggested that Mike be cast as Prospero. 

After discovering the book at MLA back in Jan 2010, I built an undergrad Shakespeare course around these strange images during the fall of 2011, including setting up an exhibition of photographs at St. John’s and having Mike and Rosamond come for a memorable visit in October. The charge of these images is the strange push they give to your imagination as you look at them, the mobile and unexpected ways they ask us to reconsider Shakespeare’s language and the imaginative art of seeing. As I said when reflecting on the visit to Queens last year around this time, it’s good to share strange things.

That sense of radical play dominates the larger exhibition at the Folger right now. It’s a hard show to take in, especially on opening night when the hall is full of people to catch up with, meet, and congratulate. But when I stood there making academic small talk and looking at the automaton, or peering into the gorgeous array of books on objects in the “Wind” case,” I considered the larger project of putting such strangeness inside an academic institution. I remember my students being at first amazed, then a bit bewildered by the photographs in Passing Strange. But when we lingered in front of an image — I remember a great liquid desert portrait paired with lines from Antony & Cleopatra, which I did not see at the Folger Monday — things would swim into the imagination. The gambit is that such strangeness speaks to the same part of the mind that’s moved by Shakespeare, and it certainly works for me.

You could make a case that the Folger exhibition hall is overfull right now, with photographs and objects spilling out of every window-nook. But if you have all this wonderful stuff, why not give us excess of it, and more besides, and something else we’re not expecting?

If you can’t get to DC during the rest of the fall, here’s the mobile tour of the show. But you really should get there if you can.