I may have more to say about my first International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford this past week: it’s a fascinating socio-cultural-academic event, bringing together a thoroughly global group of scholars and two separate academic institutions, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Shakespeare Institute, in a setting that weirdly combines authenticity – the house where Shakespeare was born! – with Euro-Disney. But first I’m going to think through the plays.

We saw three shows in the three main Stratford theatres. Part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, they each open differently onto the global nature of current Shakespearean performance practices.

So, here was my week:

Wednesday night: RSC Much Ado at the Courtyard

Opening night was a high-spirited Bollywood Much Ado, featuring Anglo-Indian star Meera Syal as a Beatrice who stole the show even more than this character usually does. Syal has wonderful physical comic force, and she clearly loves the spotlight. Much of what I’ll remember about the performance is her smiling mischief and charisma: singing “Hey nonny nonny” after the interval, toying with Benedick in 1.1, raging against Claudio after the broken marriage. Benedick, as played by Paul Bhattacharjee, never stood a chance. I kept hoping, somehow, that Simon Russell Beale, who I saw play a wonderfully big-bodied Benedick at the National Theatre a few years back, could have transported himself to the stage for a battle of the titans.  Certainly nobody on the stage last week could match Syal.  (Beale, alas, was busy playing Timon in London, in what by all reports is a great production, perhaps overshadowed by the Olympics.)

The richly Indian staging was fun – bicycles in the lobby, bright colors, elaborate clothes of carefully varied degrees of Eastern- and Western-ness. Especially in the second half, in the two wedding scenes, the spectacle was good to the eyes. But there was an odd sense of the over-ripe also. Most of the actors, including Syal, are not Indian-born, but native to the UK. Their Bollywood accents, most noticeable in act 1, were assumed, and then, especially in Benedick’s case, slowly sloughed off as the play continued. A parable of assimilation? A way of poking fun at non-Anglophone Indians? Or maybe my ear just got trained to their accents? It was hard to shake a slight feeling of excess, both the sweet excess of Bollywood itself and, possibly, a less comforting kind of cultural friction through appropriation. The show was fun; easy to watch and listen to, a perfectly enjoyable evening, but perhaps it missed an opportunity to explore the relation between the UK and subcontinental Anglophone Indian communities? Though of course not every play need reach for high political resonance.

Not everything in the show captivated as much as Beatrice. Dogberry in particular was a dud, funnier in fact when garbling pre-show instructions to be sure to talk loudly on your cell phones during the performance. Borrachio was more fun and outrageous, including when he urinated on his long-suffering buddy Conrad before being nabbed by the idiot watch. Don Pedro’s proposal to Beatrice was played seriously, and given how much this Beatrice overshadowed everyone else we could understand his choice. Beatrice’s choice of Benedick was harder to explain.

Wooster Group/RSC Troilus at the Swan

This was the one that divided the Shakespeareans, with most of the gang of professors not enjoying what I thought was the best production of this play I’ve ever seen. Notoriously, at least in the hothouse gossip of the ISC, both Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson of the Birthplace Trust walked out at the interval, and they certainly weren’t the only ones. (It ran 3.5 hours, which was perhaps a factor.) But mainly I think people did not want to play the Wooster game, which I think is one of the strange triumphs of 21c theater. Billington’s cranky review in the Guardian didn’t even try to make sense of it.

The name of that game is mediation, and the short version is that they rehearse for an absurdly long time – 18 months for this production, I think – in order to cue every physical motion they make on stage to a series of film clips that they play during the show. In fact, rather than looking at each other for much of the time on stage, they look up at the 4 video monitors placed around the stage, which were playing clips from three films:

(Update: this cinematic knowledge reached me via Tom Cartelli)

Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals, a 2002 self-aware parody that imitates the look of American Indians in classic Hollywood Westerns, The Fast Runner, a 1998 film that resembles a documentary about Inuit life, and the very young and gorgeous Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in a 1961 black and white classic of doomed love, Splendor in the Grass. The Wooster Group played the Trojans, with the RSC taking the Greek parts in a very different manner. By slowing down their voices and making them artificial, almost mechanical – Marin Ireland’s Cressida in a sometimes robotic sing-song, Scott Shepherd’s Troilus with monotonal flatness – the Woosters forced us to watch and listen through two media at once. Film and live theater: not fighting each other but supermposed.

It’s not easy to watch, though one of the things I love about this practice is how it makes you hyper-conscious of where your attention goes on the stage. With the actors looking variously at the video screens and very seldom at each other, viewers need to choose, and to parcel out their attention across the complex set, filled with red Indian kitsch. (The program mentions Karl May, a 19c German author of Wild West Indian stories, massively popular in Europe, who wrote his dime-store novels without going to American at all. They are full of obvious errors – but the Indian chief on the high plains is a mythic figure, after all, especially in Europe.) Watching live theater is fundamentally about apportioning attention, and the Wooster method emphasizes that in a way that no other company I know does.

The RSC’s Greeks was more predictable and colonial: a heavy-metal Ajax who practiced WWF moves on enemies and friends and also danced the haka like New Zealand’s All Blacks; a Crocodile Dundee-esque Diomed, who got a bit under the skin of some of the Ozzies at the conference; a brilliant and abrasive Thersites who stripped down to his skin in the second act. (The family with two little girls sitting near me had wisely departed by then.) Achilles played almost the whole play with a towel around his waist and no shirt, except for one scene in a red dress; he was alternately needy, childish, ferocious, and, when asking his Myrmidons to help kill the unarmed Hector, suitably ignoble. The whole RSC cast was solid, though the somewhat dull Ulysses seemed to substitute eyeglasses for intelligence. But all the action was on the Trojan/Wooster side, at least for me.

They played the Trojans as Red Indians, an interesting contrast with the Bollywood India of the night before. In their strange way, they presented both a caricature of the image of the American Indian we know from old movies and an affecting portrait of a culture that, even more than most past cultures, we only know through the imagination. Modern Stratford is widely different than the town that William Shakespeare grew up in, but the continuity between 16c and 21c England is greater than the worlds of the Lakota and the Inuit over that span. These worlds were  largely wiped out by European germs and other pressures. In a sense, the choice to play Trojans as Indians makes Pandarus’s final line about bequeathing “my diseases” into a painful world-historical truth. Like Troy itself, I found myself thinking, American Indians are one of our great shared myths of a doomed culture, a people whose glories burned bright but are gone forever. I thought about Kafka’s Red Indian, and I found – this is what happened to me at the Wooster Group Hamlet also – that the stilted dialogue and staging became more, not less, emotionally affecting.

I winced at the pub & conference table the next few days when people sneered at the show. Taste is a variable thing, of course, and it’s fine with me if people like what they like. But there’s nothing on stage quite like Wooster Group, and I hope they keep doing Shakespeare. I also wonder if they’ll bring this strange hybrid Troilus to New York sometime.

Russian Midsummer at the RSC Theatre

The cherry on top was a delightful, experimental Midsummer done by Dimitry Krymov and a Russian Chekov company with fifteen-foot tall marionettes, a very large cast including a dozen of so people in evening dress playing the audience – they only did the Mechanicals’ play, insofar as they followed the text at all – and a Jack Russell terrier who was on stage for the whole hour and 45 minutes. Pure weird pleasure – not intellectual and divisive like Troilus, but simply the sort of thing that you don’t expect to see and that makes you happy. We happened to see it on its premiere in Stratford, so no one had any idea what to expect. (There’s a little summary on the website now, but I don’t think it was there before the first show.)

The title said the play was also, sort of, As You Like It, but unless that referred to a kind of pre-play in which the mechanicals – about a dozen or so – manhandled a 20-foot tall fake tree through the seats and onto the stage, turned it around a few times, then took it out the back of the stage, I don’t know what it means. There wasn’t a lot of Midsummer there either, though the giant marionettes were clearly Pyramus and Thisbe.

Some great inventive stage moments: a symphony of funny noises, maybe 8 people strong at its height; a man doing a handstand on another man’s head (!); the dog leaping up and onto his trainer, who wasn’t much in evidence for the first hour or so, during which time it seemed as if the dog was doing his own thing; a strange scene in which the Thisbe-giant urinated into a large tub; four ballerinas who appeared just before the epilogue; and some witty absurdist banter between the lead mechanical – Bottom or Peter Quince? – and the aristocratic audience. Also a great face off between fake lion and real dog.

This was the crowd pleaser of the week, certainly. It ended fairly early, at 9 pm, sending us off to the Dirty Duck for a few pints and happy discussions. I had to leave early-ish, with a 6 am cab to the airport waiting for me the next day. But it was nice to have good & fairly unified vibes as we left the theater.

I’m flying into the center of the supernova on Sat night, then scurrying out toward darkness as fast as I can.

Though I’ve been beaten to the punch by Jeffrey Cohen, I wanted to post about the Sustainability cluster in PMLA. And maybe a little bit about the eco-issue more generally.

What strikes me most about reading this issue is how wide a range of meanings sustainabilty has.

There are three main modes in these essays: institutional (Alaimo, LeMeneger and Foote), literary (Brayton, Keller, and me), and critical (Nixon and Zimmerer). There’s some overlap in a few of the pieces, esp. in Keller’s which covers both institutional and literary material, but less than you might think.

There are three theorists who many of us invoke: Latour, master of assemblages, Tim Morton, ecologist without nature, and Ursula Heise, theorist of localized globalism.

Here’s what I think we think:

Stacy Alaimo: Writing out of her experience as academic cochair of the Sustainability Committee at UTA as well as posthumanist theorists of trans-coporality, Alaimo sees sustainability as a “sanitized” corporate term, “frequently invoked in economic and other news stories that do not in any way question capitalist ideals of unfettered expansion” (559). She wants humanities scholars and scholarship to displace this “technocratic, anthropocentric perspective” (562) — and she wants the new materialism about which she, and others, write so well.

Dan Brayton: One of several of us who explore sustainability through literary “narratives of…catastrophe,” Dan turns to Peter Mathiessen’s experimental novel Far Tortuga, an old favorite of mine as well. It’s a compelling, tragic, artistic response to “an apocalypse that [has] already happened” (370).

Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote: Turning back like Alaimo to practical and administrative questions — the cluster as a whole see-saws between poetics and administration as thematic cores — these authors ask that humanities scholars contribute to the dialogue, perhaps via a new term, “the sustainable humanities.” “At the risk of sounding grandiose,” they write, “Earth needs the humanities” (575). They also write movingly about classroom practice, that secret heart of activist pedagogy: “literature models new wells of collectively understanding the possible” (577).

Lynn Keller: While noting that “sustainability is everywhere these days” (579) — even in PMLA! — but it’s often subsumed by capitalist models of expansion, she asks humanities scholars to help reclaim the term from the “blurry, feel-good realm of corporate advertising” (581). Like Brayton, to some extent, she sees value in tragic forms, in this case “environmental apocalyptic writing” (581) like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Tim Morton’s “ecology without nature,” and the contemporary poetry and art of Ed Roberson, Angela Rawlings, Evelyn Reilly, and Juliana Spahr, none of whom I’d known before reading this article.

Steve Mentz: [I may come back to my article at the end — basically, I ask that we stop being boxed in by fantasies of sustainability: “It seemed like a good idea while it lasted, but we should have known it could not last.” I mostly talk about literary questions; perhaps showing my early modernist roots, I think sustainability is another version of pastoral.]

Rob Nixon: Doing a job that’s long needed doing, this article exposes the influential “tragedy of the commons” model for the neoliberal polemic that it is. Suggesting that Hardin’s thesis relies on literary forms — tragedy and parable — for its political force, Nixon suggests that rejecting this model for a more nuanced notion of governance of the commons, via Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, can reframe political notions of sustainability so that the villains are no longer old-fashioned collectivists but “unregulated, voracious emissaries who have no respect for limits and no sustainable, inclusive vision of what it means, long-term, to belong” (598).

Karl Zimmerer: Probably the most unusual article in the cluster, this article approaches sustainability through the untranslatable Native American term “kaway,” which might mean “established way of life” or “customary diversity” (601) or, perhaps, something better than what we now mean when we say “sustainability.” Arguing that Quechua philosophical frameworks lack the “separteness of nature and culture in classical traditions of modern Western thought” (603), Zimmerer suggests that kawsay can reeducate us, such that we see “an ideal of nature as humanized landscapes of indigenous food-producing environments and technologies” (604), rather than any full separation of nature from culture.

I’d add to the mix Tobias Menely’s great article on Cowper and “the Time of Climate Change,” because I think he comes at sustainability from the other end, by way of crisis. Like Brayton and Keller (and me), Menely juxtaposes catastrophe experience against fictions of sustainable stasis — and does not assume the latter must always win.

The question remains: what next? What happens “after sustainability,” to repurpose my own title? I certainly hope, like Alaimo and LeMeneger and Foote, that humanities scholars can reclaim eco-speak from capitalist and corporate lexicons — and I think that, esp. in our capacities as faculty, administrators, and organizers inside and outside academia, we can help move that needle, to some extent. I also think, like Brayton and Keller (and Menely), that tragedy speaks most richly to this project, though, like Nixon and Zimmerman, I agree that we should not accept existing economic/cultural  models, and we should not be shy about promoting non-traditional alternatives.

But still: what do you do inside an ecological catastrophe? That’s the question I think we need to work out, the question I’ve been burrowing into at least since “Strange Weather in King Lear.” How do you live inside the storm?

I don’t have a terribly good answer in the institutional or critical modes, at least not yet — though I think para-academic pressures and non-Western critiques can help a lot. But I have been looking for a while for a “swimmer poetics” to help on the literary side. A couple paragraphs of this appear in the PMLA essay. More to follow —

Last week I went to Jupiter Island, FL, where the Quaker merchant Jonathan Dickinson was shipwrecked in September 1696. After getting separated from her convoy near Cuba, the barkentine Reformation followed the Gulf Stream up the east coast of Florida into a northwest storm. During the night of the third day, the vessel struck sandy ground that, once the sun came up, looked something like this — 

 

Jupiter Island is a long flat barrier island, running from Jupiter Inlet north to the town of Stuart. at the St. Lucie inlet near when the Mets play in the spring. Public access to the beaches is now limited to a scattering of state parks, including the one at the town of Jupiter where I swam every morning during my visit. You walk through a dense, inhospitable patch of undergrowth to emerge onto a flat empty beach. We think of this land- and sea-scape as beautiful and relaxing, but for Dickinson’s party is was barren and inhospitable.

It’s hard to tell where exactly on Jupiter Island the ship wrecked — there’s nothing to see today — but it might have been on the rockier stretch of the coast, about 2-3 miles north of the town of Jupiter today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dickinson’s party was met by the Jobe (or Jeaga) Indians, who brought them south to their settlement in Jupiter before assisting them to travel north to St. Augustine. The shell-mounds from their settlement still exist, now occupied by an 18c pioneer cabin built on top, in the usual manner of European settlers building on former native sites.

Dickinson’s journal describes the English castaways’ attempts to deceive the Jobe Indians by pretending to be Spanish, with whom the Jobe were allied. The Jobe do not seem to have been very fooled by the one member of Dickinson’s group, a crewman named Soloman Cresson, who was “speaking the Spanish language well” (7). The Jobe called Dickinson’s group “Nickaleers,” which they pretended not to understand meant English.

Relations with the Jobe were ambivalent; Dickinson and his group lost most of their clothes and goods, but a Jobe woman suckled Dickinson’s four-month old son, who survived the voyage and went on to a prominent life in trade in Philadelphia. The modern edition of Dickinson’s journal that I have on my desk, published by Florida Classics Library, subtitles it

A true story of shipwreck and torture on the Florida coast in 1696

but the torture part seems exaggerated. The Jobe started Dickinson’s party in their journey north, which took them through several different Indian groups, to St Augustine by mid-November, where they were helped, not persecuted, by the Spanish governor, and eventually to Charles Town on Dec 26. From their they took sail to Philadelphia, their original destination, where Dickinson’s memoir was published in 1699.

Dickinson apparently wasn’t discouraged by his shipwreck, since he made several more sailing trips to Jamaica, where he was born, to tend to his expanding trade network. He was twice Mayor of Philadelphia, in 1712-13 and 1717-19, before dying in that city in 1722 at the age of 59.

Spending a couple days near the shipwreck site gave me a taste of the hot and inhospitable coast of south Florida. Dickinson’s party split up on the voyage north, with the weaker members in a small boat and the bulk of the party, including Dickinson’s slaves, trudging up the beach. The water is clear, warm, and full of light. Every time I swam I saw schools of bait fish, and the local pelicans clearly were getting bigger game. Plenty of seaweed, and the 20′ high oyster middens of the Jobe settlement testify to a wealth of seafood that’s not very visible on the bottom today.

It’s an empty, inhuman space, now occupied by mansions, air conditioning, and power boats. Hard to imagine a party of Quakers on that beach today.

 

A few minutes into the show, when Damian Hudson (above) started belting out “In fair Verona..,” my nine-year old daughter Olivia leaned over and whispered to me, “Is this a musical?” And truth to tell, it was — a R&J for the Glee generation.

They opened with a clever frame that accented the elaborate wooden set, built with ramps and slides like a cross between a skateboard park and a huge summer house deck. Tony Torn*, who would also play Capulet, came on stage to throw a big cocktail party, which naturally devolved — this happens all the time — into a reading of Romeo and Juliet. Some nice framing tension when it turns out that his wife cast herself as Juliet, her husband as Capulet, and an old flame as Romeo.

The best part was the music, produced by Stew who has worked with Shakespeare on the Sound for the past four years. A lively bass line choreographed almost every moment on stage, and many of the longer speeches — Queen Mab, etc. — were presented with full musical accompaniment. Given how hard it can be to freshen up lines we’ve all be reading since junior high, it was a great gambit.

The best vocal performance I saw was by David Cale as Friar Lawrence, who turned the Friar’s opening speech about the moral ambivalence of nature (“The earth’s that’s nature’s mother is her tomb”, 2.3.1-30), into a gorgeous fusion-backed song, turning the phrase, “Many for many virtues, excellent” into a refrain. Really great stuff, and that’s a speech I often teach: I wonder if they play to record or distribute any of the songs as songs.

(I remember, a few years back, a brilliant performance of Sonnet 129 done by the actor playing Othello just after the intermission: as good a rendition of the hero’s sexual anxieties as I’ve seen staged.)

I didn’t get all the way through this one — Olivia was tired by halftime — but I’ll be back with students later in July, and I’m looking forward to seeing if the frame recurs, and if the actors playing the leads are up to the second-half reversals. But I liked what I saw so far.

*Tony Torn, for all the STJ folks reading this blog, is married to my English dept colleague Lee Ann Brown, with whom Olivia & I sat last night. Olivia and their daughter Miranda also had some good mask-making and tree-climbing before the show started. They run a great family event at Shakespeare on the Sound! 

 

Here’s a great e-resource: free downloads of all the Loeb classics that are in the public domain. Really great stuff. Both the green Greeks and the red Latins! Via In the Middle.

Lithographic print via Shakespeare Birthplace Trust