Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Creating Nature: Draft program and title

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“Boring the Moon.” Photograph by Rosamund Purcell

The full draft program for Creating Nature: Premodern Climate and the Environmental Humanities, is now online at Folgerpedia.

I’m excited to be co-organizing this event with Owen Williams of the Folger Institute. We’re asking how the premodern environmental humanities can speak to the eco-disorders of our past and present. The event will also work to expanding our cross-disciplinary capacities: the plenary will be co-delivered by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a medieval literature scholar who’s recently crossed over to the Dean side, and Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Principal Investigator for NASA’s planned mission to the asteroid Psyche. These two, who recently co-wrote the Object Lessons book Earth, will speak to a group that includes not only scholars working actively in early modern and medieval eco-studies but also practitioners of paleoclimatology, legal studies, philosophy, and anthropology.

Here’s the description of the event from the Folger site:

In the premodern past, weather was never just weather. Storms expressed the rage of gods, drought punished human sinfulness, and fires provided revelations straight from divine mouths. To suffer in hostile environments meant encountering more-than-human forces with merely human flesh. The inhuman power Shakespeare calls “great creating Nature” touches and sustains human bodies, but opaquely, and sometimes painfully. Nature is creator and created, force and object, destroyer and home.

This conference will bring together premodern environmental humanities scholars to explore the long and varied history of how humans have conceptualized their environment. Its invited speakers will explore historical and cultural forms in which humans have come to terms with their love for, dependence on, and need to manipulate the nonhuman world.

The distinguished speakers will cluster their conversations around four environmental keywords: “storms,” “sustenance,” “shelter,” and “spirits and science.” Together with the conference-goers welcomed into conversation, “Creating Nature” will provide insights into premodern ideas about human entanglement with the nature they knew themselves to be creating and the nature that created them.

Over the six months remaining before we convene in Washington in May, I’ll intermittently blog about the conference. I’ll also link to related subjects, including the amazing eco-talk by Bruno Latour I saw in mid-town just before Halloween. Eventually I’ll gather the posts together on a Creating Nature webpage.

My opening post investigates the conference title.

It’s at the Folger and I’m co-organizing it, so it’ll surprise few people that the title comes from Shakespeare. But after however many years as card-carrying Shakespearean, I still find the phrase “great creating nature” hard to parse. I’ve been wrestling with the lines and the dynamic idea of Nature they imagine since grad-school in the ’90s. Back in 2015 I was fortunate to explore the exchange with the help of brilliant actors and directors at Loyola University of Chicago’s McElroy Shakespeare Celebration. After that talk-and-performance, I remember feeling “unsettled” about the “creating nature” exchange. I wanted to dig more into it — and I’m eager to do so with another amazing group of collaborators in DC this coming May.

In the sheep-sheering festival scene in The Winter’s Tale (4.4), King Polixenes debates Art and Nature with not-really-shepherdess Perdita. The King wonders why the foundling we know to be a princess refuses to plant streaked carnations, a popular hybrid species, in her garden. Perdita rejects them because

There is an art which in their piedness shares

With great creating Nature (4.4.87-88)

In an argument that has engaged and baffled literary critics for centuries, Polixenes counters Perdita’s anti-hybrid position with the claim that “the art itself is Nature” (4.4.97). Perdita’s desire to prohibit “Nature’s bastards” (4.4.83) from her garden seems an error of exclusion, and perhaps also an aesthetic narrowing. She craves simplicity while Polixenes champions complexity. Both believe they speak for natural truth, even though both arrive on the scene with their identities hidden. But neither regal authority nor youthful promise accurately maps the sinuous path creation takes in the redemptive second half of this play. At the heart of the exchange lies the unfathomable creative pressures of nonhuman Nature, the powers that make flowers and words, gardens and kingdoms. What happens when we can’t separate creators from created?

Our conference takes Shakespeare’s “creating nature” to limn the core paradox of environmentalism: that the ecosphere in which we live creates us while we re-create it. The shock of anthropogenic climate change in the present sometimes obscures the long cultural and physical histories in which humans have imagined, not always mistakenly, that climate responds to human actions, sinful or hubristic or fortunate. The ecological devastation of tropical island paradises from the Canaries to Easter Island provides a historical view onto today’s global environmental crisis. Weather emerges on the borders of understanding and experience. Systemic visions of climate from Aristotle to the Weather Channel posit structural forces that govern daily fluctuations. These changes carve themselves into human experience through the rawness of exposed skin in a storm, or the softness of a spring breeze.

We hope you’ll join us to explore how “Creating Nature” can help us understand the changes we are witnessing in our creating and created environments.

More soon!

 

Tempest at the Queens Theater

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When I left the theater around 10 pm, the rain fell heavy and thick, splashing hard onto my bald head. I darted beneath trees but was pretty wet by the time I got to my car. I missed my exit for the Whitestone Bridge and had to navigate a few treacherous puddles as I made a U-turn around the LaGuardia exits. Allegories abound in wet places: was I replaying the show, or extending it, or asking for a slight variation?

The Unisphere

The skies hadn’t been clear when I got to the Queens Theater a little before 7 pm to meet my students, but my Dark Sky app thought the storm might hold until midnight. I did arrive to an amazing water-show: the fountains surrounding the Unisphere, the 140′ high globe constructed for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, were switched on. I’d never seen them flowing before. I walked partway around the massive orb — the downwind side was torrential — and it was an amazing site. The massive sphere was dedicated in 1964 to “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” — which, come to think of it, makes an interesting comment on the ideological fantasies under examination in The Tempest. The jets of water shooting maybe 75 feet into the air resembled so many wet Ariels, performing the best pleasures of the wizards who built the Unisphere.

I heard a great World’s Fair story last night too: it turns out that a retired man who’s been auditing my Shakespeare classes off and on for the past few years, via a St. John’s community outreach program, had worked as a waiter in the Indonesian pavilion when he was a high school student in the summer of 1964. He described taking a motorized scooter home each night from the Fairgrounds to Forest Hills weighed down with change from tips, which would eventually overflow his sock drawer at home. He wore his marathon entrant’s cap last night, as he was getting ready to run his twenty-fifth consecutive (!) New York City marathon this Sunday.

Astrida Neimanis at Whale Creek

Unisphere motto = “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe”

The highlight of Titan Theatre’s Tempest was Devri Chism’s compellingly nonhuman Ariel. She opened the show by dancing the storm into shipwreck, and throughout the night she repeatedly controlled the audience’s attention. Perhaps her most memorable trick was a subtle practice of holding her face at an oblique angle to the other actors on stage, emphasizing the intensity and partial incomprehension of her gaze. While many of the other performances were open and accessible — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more innocent rendition of Miranda than Ann Flanigan’s — Chism’s Ariel was the one performance who kept us asking for just a little bit more.

About the enter the Nature Walk

I came to the stormy show after an afternoon in post-Nature, walking my favorite toxic pathway on the borderlands between Greenpoint and Long Island City on the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. I’ve not been back for a while, but all my favorites were there: the epochal steps, the sludge barge, the hidden oil mayonnaise deep below. I was lucky to have been able to convince one of my most-admired blue humanities scholars Astrida Neimanis to join me for the walk. She’s a brilliant and inspiring eco-hydro-feminist based in Sydney, Australia who I just learned a few days ago was in New York for a talk on Thursday at the Pratt Institute. I’d got the news too late to get to Pratt, but it was fantastic to finally meet her in person. We talked about Newtown Creek, about post-Nature and the sublime, about an amazing-sounding project she’d put together last summer with Cate Sandilands in Canada. It’s hard to catch up with our fellow environmental humanists who live so far away, and I felt lucky to have managed it. Plus Newtown Creek is where I want to bring all my academic friends — I actually had a plan to drag an MLA panel out to it last winter, but sub-zero temps trapped us in midtown.

Driving home through the storm, I tried to salvage Terry Layman’s Prospero. As a student suggested to me after the show, he looked right — tall, white-bearded, Gandalf-ish. He garbled some lines and stepped on enough of his fellow actors’ cues that I wondered if it was intentional, a way of signaling the bully-Dad’s desire to control his human and nonhuman children. But they played his love for Miranda conventionally, and even Caliban got forgiven in the end. I wasn’t fully convinced: Prospero is a tough part to play well in these ambivalently post-imperial and I-wish-we-could-be-post-patriarchal days. I’m still waiting for someone to hit it just right.

Steps under water at Newtown Creek

The show is up for another week, and very much worth a trip to Corona Park! Go early to walk around the World’s Fair grounds and think a little about the “Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” — it’ll put you in the right mood!

Near Newtown Creek

 

Bruno Latour “Inside” (plus French Natures!)

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In the final phrase of his dazzling “anti-TED talk” “Inside,” which I saw at the Linney Courtyard Theater on West 42nd St Friday night, Bruno Latour named his vision for the future as something that might “merit the term Renaissance.” I was surprised enough that I had to ask the person next to me, an eco-modernist from City College, if I’d heard the R-word correctly. Has the man who denied modernity gone over to the side of Rebirth?

An image from Inside

After joining everyone on my twitterfeed in reading an engaging profile of Latour in this week’s Times, I was excited for the “lecture-performance.” Latour’s part of the show was mostly lecture, but in front of him on the stage electronic images and graphics designed by Frédérique Ait-Touati  superimposed themselves. The pictures started with a vision of the polar ice caps, which Latour said spoke to him on a flight from France to Calgary, and ended with a four-way image of the polarities of modern politics. One axis angled from the local to the global; its partner crossed between an empty circle that Latour associated with the current US President, matched against his hopes for what he calls “terrestrialism,” a way of living that engages with our shared planetary system in its era of stress. At its odd angle, terrestrialism represents Latour’s off-kilter optimism, his belief that ways of imagining our world — what he called “representations” throughout the lecture — can change political reality. Like his earlier notion of a “Parliament of Things,” his utopian future hinges on a radical expansion of representative democracy.

Much of “Inside” critiques traditional ways of thinking that Latour wants us to move beyond. Whatever his reservations about critique as a methodology, he ran through a litany of ideas he believes have distorted Western thinking. Here’s a partial list of Things Latour Doesn’t Like:

  • Plato’s Cave, which insists that true reality lies Outside, rather than before our eyes on the surface of the planet where humans and “everything we have ever cared about” live.
  • The desire to escape, which he suggests comes from, among other things, Plato’s cave. His hope throughout the lecture was to re-value being “inside,” rather than wanting to escape to an idealized or imaginary “outside.”
  • The sublime as a way to relating to nonhuman nature, which he associates with imperialism and global conquest. He’s not wrong about intellectual history, but his comments on the sublime made me think that an important project for the environmental humanities might be to conceive a non-imperial, non-racist, non-sexist sublime. That project means recognizing and refusing the imperial dreams of mountain peaks and storms at sea, but maybe also salvaging something of the sublime’s open-ness to nonhuman experience. My money is on swimming, not rock climbing.

    Stratigraphy

  • The blue marble image of the planet seen from orbit, which Latour associates both with NASA’s drive to escape our terrestrial “inside” and with the global view, which he, in a moment of uncomfortable agreement with nefarious forces in our current politics, wishes to reject. He reads the globe the way Peter Sloterdijk does, as Western culture’s dominant image of totality, abstraction, and global conquest. He seeks a different model to understand our planetary home.
  • Stratigraphy, which in a moment that surprised me he read as a problem, a lure into inhuman “deep time” which distracts and disorients human attention away from the terrestrial engagement at hand.

These elements all share a fundamental disorientation that historicist thinkers from Petrarch to Burckhardt to Foucault have associated with the sense of being “modern” that Latour has famously claimed we “have never been.” Disorientation, as I understood his lecture, emerges from the desire to escape from “inside” into a vastness and perspective from which we can see either the globe as a marble or human history as one more layer in the rock. He asked for a different response to disorientation, a burrowing into rather than escaping from the bounded experience of living on our planet. Trying out the thought experiment, I thought — as I often do — of a line from one of my favorite novels: “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into –”

A diagram of the local and the global

There are some things that can help. In its second half, “Inside” turned toward politics and also toward hope. Latour asked us to re-imagine being “inside” as a place of connection. The physical space he asked us to imagine was neither the globe as blue marble when viewed from orbit nor the deep layers of rock leading down toward the planetary core. Instead, he asked that we focus on what scientists call the “critical zone,” the narrow splash of “biofilm” that spreads across the earth’s surface and extends just “a few kilometers” above and below. Only on this thin, permeable layer, Latour reminded us, does life exist. It’s the space where living and nonliving things and systems interact. It’s where our bodies are, and where our attention should be.

He mentioned the word “Anthropocene” only one or two times in the lecture– he’s previously suggested that he doesn’t like the term — but when he talked about the Critical Zone I could not help thinking that he was asking Old Man Anthropos to look around his aging and broken body and remember that he’s only been in one place all this time. In a cave, on a thin membrane, inside the atmosphere, standing on rock, with wet toes on the edge of the sea —  these are all the same place, from a certain point of view. Have we always and only been Inside?

By chance — we were two among 4+ million riders the subway last Friday — I bumped into my sister in the West 4th St station when I was moving between NYU and Latour’s lecture. She lives in Florida and I live in Connecticut. Coincidences happen!

I wondered if it matters, from the point of view of Inside-theory, that roughly 70% of the Critical Zone is covered by salt water.

I also wondered if Latour’s vision of science as a technique for re-enchantment, for revealing the nearly infinite richness of the limited and in a cosmic sense tiny world Inside, might prove useful in re-structuring an eco-sublime for our broken world. He spent some time, when talking about the science of measuring the Critical Zone, engaging with Thoreau’s Walden. (He also got some comedy out of pronouncing the American writer’s name in several different ways in his French accent.) I wondered not only about the canonical pond in Massachusetts, but also about Thoreau’s wilder and less settled spaces, from the shipwreck beaches of Cape Cod to his failed attempt to scale Mount Katahdin in Maine. The mountain that repulsed him generated some ecstatic language:

Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!

The mountain-top sublime bears many too-familiar Romantic and imperialist flaws, including a worship of masculine power and solidity, a rejection of social and feminine spaces down below, and the belief in a super-reality — “Matter” — that exists only in solitary splendor at the uttermost edge of things. But I wonder, too, if the matter-of-fact-ness of Thoreau’s matter, its “rocks, trees, wind” and “solid earth,” might lend itself to reconceptualization via Latour’s networks and actants and desire to find all the imaginable riches Inside. Is there a salvageable sublime still to be found? Might that project be what Latour enigmatically called a “Renaissance”?

Bruno Latour

It was a stunning lecture, and a pleasure to attend with many of the amazing people from the French Natures  “conference-festival” (shouldn’t all conferences also be festivals? an excellent idea!) that I caught a bit of at NYU earlier on Friday. Thanks to Phillip Usher, Frédérique Aït-Touati, and the other organizers, and also to Hannah Freed-Thali for a lively blue humanities-flavored talk about the modernist beach in French literary culture.

I’m looking forward to the English translation of Latour’s new book, Down to Earth, which should expand on many of these ideas!

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

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Isabella and her brother Claudio

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

One from inside the program

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

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

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

Isabella inside the program

Before the show started I was thinking about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, with her right hand raised, swearing to tell the truth. I thought of her quite a bit over the course of the evening. 
The men hogged center stage, as usual.
Andrei Kuzichev performed a well-dressed Angelo as a slowly thawing ice cube, pleasingly short, vain about his appearance, at first soothing and then shockingly brutal when he tried to shush Isabella in 2.4 as he began to undress her. When confronted with his long-lost Marianna in act 5, he turned opaque and quiet, as if receding in importance now that the Duke had openly returned to the city.
Alexander Arsentyev’s Duke began the play as the first member of the cast to separate himself from the group, who were at this point all gathered together. In a production that took its politics seriously, the Duke opened by attempting to control over his on-stage companions, with only partial success. The night ended with the Duke organizing a quasi-fascist rally in the final scene, with canned applause responding to all his cues. In between, he presented an odd mix of bully and goofball. He seemed especially foolish when he accidentally showed several people in the prison his hidden identity, but given that the Duke represents authority — an authority that, in this production’s Moscow context, has a particular sinister cast — I didn’t trust my own occasional sympathy for him. When he waltzed Isabella into submission he seemed quite horrid, but as with his political opposite, Barnadine, I wondered at how much this figure kept the spotlight on himself, rather than on the women at the drama’s center.
In the category of men-bef0re-Isabella, I can’t resist one brief mention of Petr Rykov’s Claudio, who when he returned from his supposed execution in the final scene (5.1), refused the open embrace of the sister who had herself refused to sacrifice her virtue for his life earlier. He rejected his sister and turned instead to Juliet and their baby. Isabella’s isolation at that moment was painful. It made her easier pickings for the smiling Duke and his dancing feet.
Isabella herself was the supreme athlete of virtue that Angelo imagined himself to be before he failed his own test. In their first scene together, the impassioned Isabella grabbed Angelo by his starched collar and accused him of what she did not yet know he was guilty of:
Go to your bosom / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault (2.2)
The panic on Angelo’s face would later bleed into cruelty and desire. Isabella’s power showed itself in a few other moments, including her public introduction of Marianna and her initial turn away from the proposing Duke in the final scene, but unlike Barnadine she couldn’t get away.
It’s hard to watch this play, though it’s clearly the play that speaks most directly and painfully to #metoo and what I desperately hope is a last gasp of visible misogyny in our public culture.
In October 2016, when I didn’t yet know that the world was about to end, I took a group of students to see a stage play based on The Rape of Lucrece a few days after we all heard the Access Hollywood tape in which our future leader bragged about committing sexual assault. I was worried about it all being too much, but the show, the students, and maybe even the deep artistic bones of Shakespeare rose to the challenge. Something similar happened last night at BAM. Art speaks to power, misogyny, and violence. It hasn’t managed to stamp out those things yet, but I suppose that’s our job.
The Pushkin/CbJ Measure is only at BAM for one week. Get to the Harvey Theater!

Inside the lobby at the Harvey Theater

Makbet in a shipping container

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Dzieci Theatre’s Makbet

Our world floats inside containers.

The familiar steel boxes, with their 8 x 8.5-foot openings that lengthen into 20 or 40-foot segments, are just right for stacking on cargo ships or hauling down the highway on trains or trucks. Containers have transformed global commerce since the American businessman Malcolm McLean patented the design in 1956. It’s not an exaggeration, as Craig Martin says in his excellent Object Lessons book Shipping Container, that “our everyday lives are utterly determined by these metal boxes” (8). Almost everything I can see in my house right now — wood, drywall, metal and other building materials, furniture, the clothes I’m wearing, the MacBook I’m typing on, the dog toys on the floor, the leash still attached to the sleeping puppy’s collar — everything except the puppy himself, really — traveled here in a container, over waves, rails, or highways. #worldinabox

I’m been obsessed with shipping containers for years. So when my friend Liza Blake social media’d the news that the Dzieci Theatre Company was producing a slimmed-down version of Macbeth inside a shipping container, I got there two nights later. Such a glorious, intense, musical, & powerful performance! Now I want to put all my favorite plays inside boxes.

Malcolm McLean at Port Newark

When I showed up at the Sure We Can recycling center in Bushwick about 20 min before the 7 pm showtime, I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. The mostly-open lot is a maze of stacked pallets and piles of aluminum cans packed up in clear plastic bags. I didn’t see anyone who looked theatre-bound, but it was an intriguing space with colorful graffiti art, so I wandered around in the lingering twilight. Someone found me and asked “Are you here for Makbet?” He threaded me through the maze to an open fire in a half-sized oil drum, around which the members of the company were gathering on what was the first chilly evening of October. One member of the group, after checking her phone, addressed me by name. I plead vegetarianism when they offered kielbasa wrapped in newspaper, but I accepted a small glass of vodka. Mostly the people there were members of the company; clearly the container would not be full on a Friday night. They remembered Liza and her mom from last week. It was odd but good to share a drink before we all went inside.

Sure We Can Recycling Center

The rules of the game for Makbet-in-a-box stated that the main roles would announce themselves through a series of costume props: a black hat for Makbet, red shawl for his Lady, berets for Banquo and Fleance, spectacles for Prince Malcolm, a bandanna for MacDuff. A trenchcoat would be worn in succession by three kings of Scotland: Duncan, Makbet, and finally Malcolm. Three members of the company alternated these props as they exchanged the principal roles. I’m pretty sure the three members who took the main parts shift from night to night; the trio I saw included Matt Mitler, the founder of the company; Megan Bones; and Ryan Castalia. After the three chanted the Weird Sisters’ opening, Mitler wore the Makbet hat for the warrior’s meeting with the Sisters in the wood — but as the play proceeded all three actors played all the parts. We were treated to three different Makbets inside the narrow metal box — Mitler played him as speculative and deeply focused on the air-drawn dagger; Bones was manic and expressive; Castalia intense and withdrawn, especially when he was wearing the monarchal coat in the second half of the play. Watching the actors pass the roles among themselves highlighted the play’s recursive focus on ambition, violence, loss, and the lure of visionary knowledge. I’ve seen a lot of good productions of this play, but none quite like this one.

An out of focus pre-show fire

Working with a compressed script and taking advantage of the narrow steel walls for sound effects and a claustrophobic mood, the company generated a powerfully ritualized version of Shakespeare’s dark tragedy. Being inside the container focused and compressed the play, as Mitler recognized. I missed a few cut lines — the “two spent swimmers, that do cling together / And choke their art” (1.2) are particular favorites — but I loved the abrupt turns of the role-switching. And I loved that it all fit inside the box.

Before the showed started but after we were seated on milk crates inside, Mitler offered to provide readings from the spirit world for members of the audience. Mine was a vision of bowling pins, just one of which I managed to strike with a rolling ball in the vision. That one pin fell onto its neighbor, and that one onto the next and the next. Not all the pins fell down, but the ones that fell opened up a line, or opening, through which it might be possible to advance.

I’m still thinking about this vision: a path, but inside the container?

After the final battle and the tyrant’s death, wonderfully staged and punctuated by the rattle of human bodies crashing into steel walls, the trio ritually re-packed the costume props inside a large pot. I had a long drive home to CT, so I could not linger, but I stayed for a minute around the fire to break bread, and to talk about maybe bringing the company out to St. John’s sometime. I wonder if they travel with a container? 

You’ve still got a few days to see this one! Closes 10/21. Get down to the recycling center and get inside the box!

Imagining the Coast in Mystic and Enders Island

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Day 1 at the Greenmanville Church

I’m back home after a glorious two days at the Imagining the Coast symposium organized by Nels Pearson and the Fairfield Humanities Institute. I come away buzzing with ideas about coastal retreat and the need to face our shared history of human and environmental injustice. Turning it over, I’m mulling two semi-inverted questions about coastal ecologies and societies:

  1. How will it be possible for us to retreat from the over-development that puts coastal areas at risk while still facing and learning from the sea ?
  2. Can we face our shared history of prejudice and injustice while also remaking the cultural and physical systems we have inherited?

In other words — can we learn from our engagement with our coasts and oceans? Can we transform ourselves into that combination of unlike things Melville calls “terraqueous”? How might we swim in these coastal waters?

The Vinland Map (a forgery)

At the end of the event some eloquent answers came from Barbara Hurd, who at sunset on Saturday afternoon on Enders Island, as we watched a three-masted sloop disappear behind the silhouette of Fisher’s Island, read  from her dazzling memoir Walking the Wrack Line while also getting to the heart of the matter.

“We live in more than one world at a time,” she insisted. We need the project of attention — which is the project of art — to help us to “glide easily between the scales.”

In listening to her in golden afternoon light pronounce the dual imperatives to embrace all the scales (physical, temporal, human) and to cultivate attention as the engine that drives language and narrative, I found myself more hopeful than I often am at environmental events. More hopeful, also, than I allowed myself to be after my own talk on Atlantic hurricanes past and present.

So many riches in this dense and friend-filled weekend! I’ll skate through some highlights, with apologies in advance for mis-statements and omissions —

Nicholas Bell of Mystic Seaport opened the weekend by leading us through Mystic’s current exhibition on the Vinland Map, a forgery that Yale University was attacked for exhibiting as truth in 1965, though one of the ironies of the story is that while the map has been conclusively exposed as a fake, the underlying claim that Viking traveled to the Americas around 1000 CE — the fact that outraged Italian-Americans just before Columbus Day in 1965 when Yale unveiled the map — seems unquestionably true. There’s a lesson in the Vinland Map story about secrecy and the hubris of elite institutions, and also one about why certain kinds of evidence — maps you can photograph — count for more than, say, Viking artifacts found in archeological digs.

Working aloft on the Joseph Conrad

The first panel that afternoon include information about the fantastic Blue Heritage Corridor Project, a work-in-progress presented by Nat Trumbell, Syma Ebbin, and the Maritime Studies faculty at UConn Avery Point, and a presentation by John Buell about the Sound School in New Haven, where my kids used to go to summer camp. It turns out, not surprisingly I suppose, that I share some common ground (and water) with the folks from the Sound School.

Next I shared a plenary stage with my long-ago teacher Glenn Gordinier of Mystic seaport. I talked about American hurricanes and the violent weather of the Western Hemisphere, and I used the disorienting experiences of early modern Europeans encountering this weather system for the first time as a way to imagine our own era of increasingly unfamiliar storms. Glenn talked about the long history of Connecticut and the sea, starting with the last Ice Age.

After a festive dinner including oysters and local craft beer, the next morning started early with a panel on Long Island Sound featuring talks by Jason Mancini of Connecticut Humanities on Native American mariners, Glenn Gordinier (again!) on Yankee whalers, and Andrew Kahrl of UVA with a close-to-home discussion of coastal development in Shoreline CT towns after hurricanes Sandy and Irene.

(One personal undersong of this short trip was me getting lost driving around Mystic with a car full of visiting scholars from Ireland, England, and Spain. I spent six weeks in Mystic as an NEH fellow in 2006, came back regularly over the next couple years to work on the demo squad, guest-taught for the Williams-Mystic program, and brought my then-young kids to the Seaport and Aquarium — so I think of myself as someone who knows my way around the area. But I’ve not been back much in the past half-dozen years, and to be honest I was sometimes distracted by coastal academic chatter. So my car took some roundabout routes. But the good news was that we discovered the new home of my long-ago favorite breakfast spot, Kitchen Little, which is now out by the harbor on Mason’s Island. The Portuguese Fisherman scramble with chorizo, just as I remember it from 2006, tempted me into sliding off the vegetarian wagon just for one meal.)

During a very busy Saturday I heard some concurrent panels featuring Kurt Schlichting of Fairfield U on the Manhattan Waterfront; Richard Greenwald, also from Fairfield, on the containerization revolution and the New York’s longshoreman’s union’s connections to the shift of the port to Newark, NJ; Mary Murphy of Fairfield on Newport; Shawn Driscoll of Becker College on Nantucket separatism during the War of 1812; Ken Reeds from Salem State U on Kipling’s poetics of (American) empire); and Elizabeth Rose from the Fairfield Museum on their great exhibition on Rising Tides on the CT coast.

The Featured Panel in the afternoon brought together three stunning papers about Atlantic connections. Hester Blum of Penn State, a leader in oceanic literary studies, presented her research on Inuits who were buried in Groton, CT, in the 19c in a way that demonstrated both the powerful local New England connections of some well-traveled Inuits and also their continued longing for the land of ice. Nicholas Allen, who runs the Wilson Center for the Humanities at the U of Georgia, spoke compellingly about an Irish revolutionary whose portraits of his home superimposed themselves onto American landscapes from Taos to Stonington, CT. John Brannigan, who’s recently been directing an interdisciplinary Coastal project at University College Dublin, juxtaposed nuclear power plants in Connecticut  and Cambria and showed how these environments reflect and are reflected in site-specific poetry. All three papers wrestled with how oceanic connections allows us to think plurality and human individuality at the same time. All coasts are particular and the tidal circulation of winds and currents makes coastal experiences at least partly mobile and shared.

Our final shared event Saturday was Barbara Hurd’s keynote about scales of time and poetic attention, wrack lines and artistic visions. After so many dense academic papers, it was a pleasure to hear from a writer whose directness squarely faced the challenge of loving and attending to our beautiful broken world as it breaks and dazzles us and our communities.

I’ll be thinking about what I learned this weekend at Mystic and Enders Island for a long time. I’ll also be thinking about what Barbara Hurd said to me when I thanked her for her words, and for bringing together the challenge of thinking across many scales with the imperative to focus our attention.”I think swimming has something to do with it,” she said.

I said that I think so, too.

View from Enders Island

Thanks to the Fairfield University Humanities Institute, Mystic Seaport and Enders Island, CT Humanities, the SeaGrant Program, and all the interlocutors of the weekend! I look forward to seeing these thoughts and words continue their circulations.

Another view from Enders

Othello at the Globe (July 2018)

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Olivia and I decamped at the interval due to heat, impending murders, and in deference to her desire to see the big city after being cooped up in Stratford all week. So my thoughts of the Globe’s Othello end with 3.3, perhaps the most brutal and brilliant scene Shakespeare ever wrote, which takes the Moor from happy husband to sworn homicide. I would have liked to have seen the close, but I know how it ends!

One thing I love about the Globe in London is the differences among the various seats. Seeing Othello on the first week of Mark Rylance’s return to the Globe as Iago meant we were up in the corner of the second balcony, looking often enough down at the bald spot on Rylance’s head and missing “I am not that I am” (1.1) entirely because he was standing behind one of the on-stage columns at that point. But we had a great view of the upper stage, and we weren’t roasting in the yard, nor at risk of being run down by either of two  fantastically bulky boat-wagons, complete with masts and sails, on which first Iago and Desdemona and later Othello made ship-born entrances to Cyprus in 2.1. I usually love standing at the Globe, but it wan’t bad to be under cover in the blazing heat.

(I wonder if the sudden downpour that caught Olivia and me on our way back to Southwark might have caught the play not yet finished. What would torrential rain do to Othello’s putting out the light?)

Andre Holland and Mark Rylance

We rushed down from Stratford so I could see Rylance’s Iago, and I was intrigued by his performance. Two decades older than Andre Holland’s dashing Othello, Rylance’s Iago emphasized service and humility — though the audience hissed back at him when he protested, “what’s he that says I play the villain?” (2.3). Rylance played the audience expertly, and especially in the long & doom-laden 3.3, his patient construction of Iago’s false reluctance — his echoes, negations, leaving the stage and then returning to it — built into devastating power. I’ve always felt that the line with which Iago closes 3.3 — “I am your own forever,” he says to his general — carries the full weight of all the broken lives to come. In Rylance’s delivery, the ominous force of that line deepened and made palpable the slow, at times delicate, always careful, even fragile, playing that grew up into the over declaration.

Andre Holland was one of the most winning Othello’s I’ve half-seen. In particular in the long speech about his adventures with the Anthropophagi and the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders (1.3), he played the crowd as expertly as Rylance’s Iago. I wondered about whether Holland was too beautiful to be fearsome in his murderous guise — maybe some later reviews will answer that for me — but I loved his charisma and open-ness, which things, of course, make him vulnerable to Iago.

I thought quite a bit, perhaps in a slightly political way, about youth being preyed upon by age: Steffan Donnelley’s Roderigo, like Holland’s Othello and also Aaron Pierre’s Cassio, were so much younger that they seemed to depend on Iago as the voice of experience. Like the youth of 2018, these figures are poorly served by their elders. Both Cassio and Roderigo may well be young, depending on casting, but in the text the Moor starts to complain about having “declined / Into the vale of years” (3.3), before admitted “but that’s not much” (3.3). I loved what I saw of Holland’s Othello, and I wonder how he transformed himself into the irrational madman of act 4 and the focused killer of 5.1.

The other performance that I feel I can’t well judge based on the first half only is Jessica Warbeck’s Desdemona. Before she recognized her husband’s jealousy and got thrown into a tragedy, Desdemona presented herself as a very successful comic heroine, choosing her husband, avoiding her angry father, even talking her way through the Doge’s desire to employ her husband on his wedding night. I liked Warbeck’s performance, but again I wonder what happened with it when everything shatters.

I’ll not get to see that second half this summer, I’m afraid, since we go home on Sunday — but there’s always GlobeTV!

Duchess of Malfi (RSC July 2018)

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Joan Iyiola as the Duchess of Malfi

The non-Shakespearean plays are always the highlights. I don’t know if it’s that the RSC feels constrained by its status as the official company performing the national playwright, but the Shakespeare can feel cramped, at times awkward, and always over-familiar. But even a fairly often-played also-ran like John Webster’s bloody Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi has a freshness to it — not to mention the bizarre charm of some over-the-top stage business in the second act that involved pouring out a great pool of wild boar-or-bull’s blood onto the stage, in which expanding puddle every cast member splashed, slipped, and nearly drowned. Metaphors, anyone?

Joan Iyiola’s performance as the Duchess earned her ovation at night’s end with a thrilling, physical, charismatic performance that included glorious singing after (she thinks) her husband and son have been murdered by her evil brother. I could not tell what she was singing — Catholic chants would have been period appropriate, or African laments would express the implicit multiculturalism in the RSC casting. Iyiola anchored the production, and after her death in act 4 the men in her orbit — her non-aristocratic husband, the two brothers from whom she concealed the marriage, and the clever but duplicitous servant Bosola — tore themselves to pieces without her.

In one of the particular pleasures of Stratford, I bumped into Iyiola after the show at the Dirty Duck pub and was able to tell her how much I enjoyed her work. She seemed smaller out of costume.

The Twins (Joan Iyiola as the Duchess and Alexander Cobb as Ferdinand)

The other blazing performance in the show was Alexander Cobb in his RSC debut as Ferdinand, the Duchess’s twin and nemesis. In some ways I thought his performance the most powerful of the night, and his ability to match the Duchess was the core of the show’s success. His rage at his sister’s remarriage seemed inexplicable until, staring at her blood-soaked corpse on the low bed that was the main feature of the stage, he admitted to being her twin and bound to her for life. The play didn’t over-emphasize the Freudian incest theme — Webster’s play makes such psychological explanations seem both too pat and radically insufficient for the horrors on stage — but in that moment, especially, Cobb found a painfully human feeling inside the ultra-villainous brother. I look forward to seeing him in other roles!

The cast was universally strong, especially Chris New as the Duchess’s other brother, a sexually predatory Cardinal, and Nicholas Tennant as Bosola, who ultimately kills the Duchess’s husband in error and then dies last at the show’s messy conclusion. The male chorus, who alternately perform as a gathering of madmen outside the Duchess’s window and an assault team, were also engaging dancers.

It’s hard to know what to make of Webster’s painful anatomy of human self-destruction. The attack on toxic masculinity seems almost too obvious, not to mention undercut by the obvious pleasure the play (and audience) take in the super-violence. There’s a dark misanthropic core to this play, and in some other Jacobean tragedies, perhaps including Shakespeare’s. But the pleasure of this lucid production includes both the Duchess’s doomed bid for female independence amid patriarchal horror and the converse terrors of being caught inside that doomed world when you think, wrongly, that you may be in control of it.

Off to London today!

Macbeth (RSC July 2018)

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Image result for rsc macbeth stratfordThe moment when Christopher Eccleston’s open and engaging Macbeth most powerfully connected to Niamh Cusak’s fierce and powerful Lady Macbeth came with his most direct reference to the child this production assumes they had together and lost:

Bring forth men-children only!

For thy undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing but males! (1.7)

At that line, Lady Macbeth shatters, and her head falls into her husband’s chest. For a second, it’s possible to glimpse the marriage that once stood behind these “dearest partner[s] in greatness” (15). It was a welcome view into that emotional core in a production in which the two lead roles were powerfully played but mostly in parallel to each other. I tend to like Macbeth productions that emphasize the marriage bond early, so that part of the play’s tragedy lies in its dissolution. (The best example I’ve seen was by Cheek by Jowl in 2013.)

Eccleston’s performance of the tyrant emphasized physical power and charisma. He did a great job reaching all sides of the RSC theater, and often conveyed a gruff charisma that seemed most appropriate when, in the first and last acts, he wore a (modern) soldier’s costume. He started the early speech “If it ’twere done, when ’tis done…” (1.7) too fast, but he fell into compelling rhythm as he paced through the lines. The only big speech that he seemed to scant was, oddly, the familiar cadences of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” (5.5), though whether he was simply playing Macbeth’s own exhaustion or the progression alienation of the central couple from each other left no force behind “She should have died hereafter” (5.5) was hard to tell.Image result for rsc macbeth stratford witches

Cusak’s Lady Macbeth showed her strength in evening gowns and high heels, in particular when she held together the party of nobles while he husband gaped at Baquo’s ghost (3.4). In the moment of her highest melodrama — “Unsex me here” (1.5) and “I have given suck” (1.7) — she acquired a kind of stately authority in extremity, so that Macbeth’s “men-children only” seemed to be a counter-blow in response to her overwhelming attack. I thought about the meddle/metal and male/mail resonances as he spoke his lines: did he want his wife to be made of steel, or does he fear that the lost child has made her steely? What lasting monument does the doomed couple really want? I though also about the other play the RSC is doing this summer, Romeo and Juliet, in which the two lovers end up as dead statues. Something in love wants to freeze people into art?

Beyond the two strong if perhaps not entirely connected performances at the center, this production distinguished itself in several high-concept ways. A trio of very young girls played the Weird Sisters, who appeared much more often than the few scenes they have in the play and in fact presided over the final scene. Dressed in pink pajamas and sometimes carrying dolls, the girls carried the desired creepy horror-movie vibe.

The Porter, played by Michael Hodgson, also stayed on stage for nearly the entire show, keeping a chalk tally of the body count and setting a countdown clock to 2:00 at the death of Duncan than hit 0:00 exactly as Macbeth gave his final “enough” and fell anti-climactically to Macduff’s sword at the play’s end. In a cyclical gambit that’s now somewhat familiar, the clock started again for the final tableau, as Banquo’s son Fleance appeared ready to challenge Luke Newberry’s boyish Malcolm for the throne.

The other standout performance was Raphael Sowole as Banquo, who nicely combined tenderness toward his son with a soldier’s bearing. During the banquet scene, Macbeth several times appeared to be afraid of empty air, but when Banquo’s ghost at last appeared, face covered in blood, Sowole managed, despite how many times I’ve seen this play, to be shocking. Sowole, another debut actor for this RSC season, also played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, who appeared as an extra-textual ghost late in that play. I saw Sowole at the pub after the show last night, and almost asked him how the double ghosting brought together the two doomed soldiers. But it was late, and I didn’t want to bug the performers.

Duchess of Malfi tonight!

 

Romeo and Juliet (RSC July 2018)

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Bally Gil as Romeo and Karen Fishwick as Juliet

The two best performances of the night were by the pros Ishia Bennison as the Nurse and Andrew French as Friar Laurence. Bennison combined humor with deep emotional connection, especially to Juliet but also to Romeo and even to Capulet, who lashed out at the old family servant as he tried to bully his daughter into marrying Paris. French’s Friar was another ambivalent part — the Nurse and Friar are empathetic figures but bad counselors — who brought out the best in the performances of his young charges. The Friar’s somewhat inexplicable cowardice in the final scene wasn’t really solved by French’s performance, but I’m not sure that plot-awkwardness is fully resolvable.

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Charlotte Josephine as Mercutio and Josh Finan as Benvolio

The heart of the RSC’s summer show of Romeo and Juliet, though, was the young actors in the leading roles, especially Charlotte Josephine’s shadow-boxing Mercutio and Karen Fishwick’s Scottish-accented Juliet. Both women made their RSC debuts in this show. Bally Gil as Romeo isn’t quite as new to the RSC, but his open-hearted and open-armed lover-boy fit the show’s youthful core, along with debut actors in the parts of Paris (Afolabi Alli), Peter (Raif Clarke), Samson (Steve Basaula), and Benvolio (Josh Finan)

At halftime I chatted with some very distinguished Shakespeareans whom I won’t name but who have seen generations come and go on the RSC stage. They complained about Fishwick’s verse speaking, and about Josephine’s overly athletic and mannered Mercutio. They were right, on some level — technically right. The boxing distracted from the pentameter. But I couldn’t help feeling that they didn’t quite catch the vibe.

I’m here in Stratford with my daughter Olivia, who I always count on to give me the teenager’s report on these productions. (Her all-time favorite was Oscar Isaac’s four-hour Hamlet in the Public Theater last summer — which means she doesn’t mind long plays or tragedies, but is a bit susceptible to actors who also play the rebel pilot Poe Dameron in the latest Star Wars trilogy.) I would have liked to have gotten her read on Charlotte Josephine, but she’s still working on her jet lag and passed on this one.

I’ve seen Karen Fishwick before, in the impressively potty-mouthed musical “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour,” the darling of Edinburgh Fringe that visited New Haven in the summer of ’16. As in New Haven, I wasn’t entirely convinced by Fishwick as Juliet. She was in places a bit overmastered by the verse: Juliet’s “Come night” monologue in 3.2 is some of Shakespeare’s most blazing poetry. Fishwick didn’t pace the speech right — though she did wonderfully throw herself back into her bedding to emphasize the childishness of the speech’s last moment, when Juliet likened her wait for Romeo to “the night before some festival / To an impatient child that hath new robes / And may not wear them” (3.2). There were some better moments, including most of her scenes with the Nurse, but Juliet’s the heart-core of the play, and Fishwick didn’t quite get all the way there.

Unless Charlotte Josephine’s Mercutio was the real heart, which got stabbed by Tybalt just before intermission. Josephine’s hyper-activity, which dismayed and distracted some members of the audience, also enlivened the part. The gender noncomformity in Josephine’s casting (Mercutio is one of the toxic swordfighting men of Verona) and in her buzz-cut faux-macho affect were compelling. Mercutio’s poetic playfulness and constant willingness to risk anything make it a hard part to contain, and the role can, as in this performance, put Romeo in the shade in the first act. When Josephine sputtered out Mercutio’s dying one-liner — “ask for me tomorrow, and you will find me a grave man” (3.1) — I wondered if the show could keep its fires burning without its brightest lamp.

The answer was partly that it could not, though Afolabi Alli’s Paris did his best. The second act felt the loss of possibility and of Mercutio’s reckless optimism. I’m not sure this young cast was all quite ready to carry the tragedy, but I look forward to seeing them try other roles in the future.