Steve Mentz

Kicking off the second day of “Creating Nature” will be a session on “Shelter” co-chaired by distinguished ecofeminists and Shakespeareans Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe. After having recently shared a stage with them on an Ecofeminism panel at the Shakespeare Association of America, I’m especially keen to have their guiding voices and insights to move our conversation into its second and final day.

One of many reasons that I choose Rebecca and Jen to co-chair a session at “Creating Nature” is the model for collaboration and exchange that they provide. They co-wrote their recent book Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory in part through a mutual pedagogical exchange, in which students in Colorado and North Carolina worked together (virtually) alongside their professors. Their model of mutuality, dialogue, and keen analysis will help all of us at “Creating Nature” begin our second morning.

The “Shelter” panel also features Michael Dove, an anthropologist from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He’ll be sharing the results of his field work on volcano-vulnerable communities on the Indonesian island of Java. Alongside Michael will be Debapriya Sarkar, a professor of English and Maritime Studies who works up the shoreline from me at UConn’s gorgeous Avery Point campus, and Phillip Usher, who teaches in the French department at NYU.

I’m looking forward to seeing how these three different scholarly modes, Anthropology, English, and French, will respond to cultural and physical desires for shelter in hostile environments. I’m also looking forward to the challenge that Michael’s Asian-based work will bring to our often Eurocentric discourses in the premodern humanities.

Does the human need for shelter require that we treat our environment instrumentally? Might human attempts to imagine cultures of shelter also embrace the more-than-human? These and other questions may come up as we continue on our second day of “Creating Nature.”

The rousing conclusion of the first day of “Creating Nature” on May 23 will be a two-headed public lecture in the Paster Reading Room featuring Lindy-Elkins Tanton and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

The ongoing collaboration between these two brilliant scholars is one of the inspirations for this event and its hopes for building a lexicon to think together about the environment through different fields and discourses. Lindy directs the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and Jeffrey, an ecocritic and scholar of medieval literature, is Dean of the Humanities at ASU. I first saw them speak collaboratively in the Boston BABEL conference in 2012.

Among their many projects, from founding and running a ground-breaking Humanities Institute in Washington DC to being Principal Investigator on NASA’s planned mission to the metal asteroid Pysche, these two co-wrote the brilliant little book Earth (2017), as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. I’m not sure that I know of a better example of imaginative collaboration between the sciences and the humanities. I blog-gushed in some detail about their (and our) shared Earth in June 2017. The book’s gnomic opening phrase remains one of my favorites —

Earth is a home, a limit, and a recurring challenge.

Their collaborative plenary lecture, titled “Climate/Weather/Feeling,” promises to show us new things about that home, press up against that limit, and provide shared tools to respond to that challenge.

I can’t wait to hear it!

Someone clever on the internet quipped that this weekend is “peak geek culture,” with the convergence of Avengers: Endgame, which I saw with the family Friday night, and The Battle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones coming tomorrow.

I’ve been thinking about how these twin mega-blockbusters embody our culture’s growing awareness of climate change. Are we beginning, as a global mass culture, to replace familiar conflicts against human evildoers with a too-big-to-comprehend struggle against impersonal forces? Or at least, highly personalized, magical, and bejeweled figures that represent impersonal forces?

Thanos, the purple God-Malthus of the Marvell Comic Universe literalizes a fairly common criticism of what environmentalists want, namely that in order to preserve ecosystems they will murder humans. (A smart essay in Yale Climate Connections elaborated the ways that Thanos caricatures environmentalism when Infinity War came out last year.) In Endgame, the Big Mean Purple guy isn’t quite as threatening, and in fact he manages to get himself killed twice, but his tag line — “I am inevitable” — follows Malthusan logic. (The quip-riposte — “I am Iron Man” — combines superhero ego-individualism with our culture’s deep love for technology.) In order to preserve the universe, Thanos must cull all populations. The grim first hour-plus of the latest movie suggests that following the Malthusan path of reducing populations to match finite resources creates, at best, a world in which Captain America facilitates a twelve-step program.

The Night King doesn’t speak about his own inevitability, but

his tag line also emphasizes the impersonal: “Winter is coming.” He may simply represent death, as hunky but not very clever Gendry tells Arya. But in environmental terms the Night King might be better understood as Thanos without the snap: he blankets the landscape as absolute privation, the exhaustion of all resources, including life and even memory. To endure in winter, as Stark family maxims recall, requires social solidarity, being loyal to the pack rather than the lone wolf. Much has been written about Game of Thrones as a semi-allegory of climate change. As it grows each week less likely that the Night King will grow a personality (unless he’s Bran Stark?), the allegorical meaning becomes almost inescapable. George R.R. Martin has apparently given the climate change interpretation authorial approval, though I’m not sure that binds the writers for HBO.

It’s not surprising that mass culture’s two most iconic villains of 2019 might assume climate change-inflected shapes, given our collective growing awareness of eco-anxiety. And too much can be made of the how much these figures have to depart from traditional models to allegorize a changing climate. Thanos first appeared in Marvell Comics back in 1973. Nonhuman super-evil bad guys have been core elements of the machinery of modern fantasy at least since Tolkien’s Sauron started Dark Lord-ing across Middle Earth. These villains work as strange attractors, inciting maximum fear and requiring maximum sacrifice to vanquish. Tolkien’s fantasy laments the loss of the pastoral Shire to proto-industrialization from Barad-Dur to Isengard, and that criticism of modernity seems compatible with today’s fear of climate change as industry’s destructive progeny.

But the now-emerging truths of climate change as global experience won’t really wear the clarifying colors of Purple Thanos or the White King. Neither the instantaneous snap of mass murder nor the visible advance of Walkers across the landscape will overwrite our world. Instead, climate change strains all levels of all systems, motivating climate refugees and authoritarian regimes, drought and civil war, wildfires and the desire of the wealthy to build futile walls. As our awareness of climactic change deepens, we are responding multiply, in our popular entertainments and our academic conferences. Climate change touches everything and can’t be separated from many other causes.

It’s no wonder we’d rather imagine that our problems are homicidal Titans or zombie hordes.

Happy watching everyone!

In the afternoon of the first day of “Creating Nature” (May 23) we’ll dig into probably the knottiest communication problem of the conference: how do environmental humanists speak with the paleoclimatologists whose work has been so crucial in understanding global climate change past, present, and future? What shared language spans ice cores and poetry, tree rings and Shakespeare? I’m looking forward to hearing some possible answers from our second panel.

When I first had the idea to try to bring a climate scientist to our party, I reached out to Noah Diffenbaugh, who teaches at Stanford and whose work appears everywhere from the IPCC report to the New York Times. I’ve known Noah for a long time because he’s married to my wife’s cousin. Based on decades of family vacations, I suspected that long discussions with humanists might not be his sort of thing, but he suggested I contact Valerie Trouet, a climatologist from the University of Arizona who works with historical shipwreck data in the Little Ice Age. To my great pleasure, she’ll be joining us in May — which leaves open the question that Noah, who knows a little bit about my work, was setting up: how might my own work with early modern shipwrecks as semi-allegories of ecological disaster connect to her use of shipwrecks as climatological markers in the Little Ice Age? I’m not sure I have a clear answer yet, which was one reason to recruit the rest of this fantastic panel.

The chair will be Joe Campana, poet and eco-Shakespearean whose work always arrives at just the right phrasing. He’ll be joined, in addition to Valerie Trouet, by medievalist Kellie Robertson, whose work has been dazzling me since we were grad students together in the former millennium, and by Shakespearean Henry Turner, who to my mind is one of our most acute and deft scholarly analysts of the terrain between early modern science and poetics.

This panel will work to bridge numbers and ideas and seek connections between computer models of climate and literary depictions of storm-threatened bodies. I often think about these questions through modes of orientation and disorientation, and also through the capacities of systems to accommodate error, in measurement and in calculation. I look forward to hearing what these four brilliant scholars will say to each other, and to us!

Four weeks from today eco-voices will fill the Folger’s Foulke Conference Room as Creating Nature begins. I’m looking forward to hearing from the many brilliant people who will be joining us in May. (Click the link for more!) Over the next several weeks, I’ll do some long-distance introductions of the four sessions and the plenary lecture with special attention to something very specific that I hope will emerge from our conversations: a practical interdisciplinary lexicon for environmental thinking.

In asking for a lexicon, I’m emphasizing that we come to this conference with different critical and professional vocabularies, but I hope we’ll leave it with some new terms, new ideas, and new ways of thinking. The title, “Creating Nature,” is a line from Shakespeare (Winter’s Tale 4.4), but also a provocation to think about how we create the nature that creates us. That’s why the conference will bring together not only active researchers in the premodern environmental humanities but also scientists, anthropologists, artists, and environmental lawyers. Knowing that it’s not fair for each of these figures to represent fully their rich and complex disciplines, and recognizing that many of us, especially the Shakespeare scholars, may tend to revert to type in our beloved Folger’s halls, I want to introduce the conversational challenge faced by each of the four panels and the interdisciplinary plenary. How can we best talk to and with each other? What words do we need, and how can we use them?

The first morning’s session on “Sustenance” will be chaired by eco-Shakespearean Karen Raber and feature talks by maritime environmental law scholar Robin Kundis Craig, environmental historian Dagomar Degroot, and Shakespearean Julian Yates. Their challenge will be to weave together Robin’s analysis of “Saltwater Sustenance” with Dagomar’s excavation of the “Frigid Golden Age” of the Dutch Republic during the Little Ice Age with Julian’s analysis of food, cooking, and other cultural activities in and beyond Shakespeare, perhaps all the way to Noah’s Ark(ive).

I won’t step on what I anticipate will be a stimulating and imaginative session, but I’ll speculate a bit about sustenance and food in terms of a critical lexicon. There’s lots of great scholarship on food today, from the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective co-run by Creating Nature-ers Rebecca Laroche and Jen Munroe, among others, to my St. John’s colleague Steven Alvarez’s amazing “taco literacy” scholarship and teaching that ranges from Mexico to Kentucky to Queens. In advance of our symposium, I’m thinking about food as comprised of material, cultural, and spiritual objects and processes. I’m thinking also about a moment in New Jersey many years ago, when after attending the funeral of my ninety-four year old grandmother, I ranged through the back of the fridge to extract and wolf down the week-old leftovers of a lifetime’s worth of her special potato pancakes. The pancake I ate was stale, cold, slightly rancid, and painfully delicious. I can taste it still, and not just when I get up early on a holiday morning to struggle through my approximation of her recipe for my own children.

More soon, about “Storms,” history, and paleoclimatology!

Finally, in the final week of its run, I got to see Theatre for a New Audience’s “Julius Caesar,” directed by Shana Cooper, who has reprised a production that debuted at Ashland in 2017. I’ve had to shift dates two or three times because of mid-winter mania — I think the first ticket I held for the show was in late February — and I was worried that I’d not make it in the end. Nothing like a not-too-crowded theater on a Tuesday night!

In the wake of the big Trump/Caesar production in the Park in 2017, which stirred up the Breitbart hornets so much that Delta Airlines — to which mega-corp I’m bound by chains of flyer miles — pulled its support from the Public Theater, this production was impressively stripped down. The crowd scenes, from Lupercal to the assassination at the Forum to the battle at Philippi, were the highlights, as Cooper directed a powerfully ritualized riot-as-dance that was part faux-Haka and part heavy metal mosh-pit. Having the closing battle between Roman legions physically echo the rioting plebs in the opening scene was a compelling choice. Are soldiers organized rioters? Do men in groups tend toward communal violence? Among the dancers and the smaller parts, Stephen Michael Spencer’s Caska stood out as perhaps the most memorable figure in the cast. At the play’s close, he stood at the phalanx’s apex, grunting and chanting a war-dance that distinctly upstaged the final spoken lines of Benjamin Bonefant’s Octavius Caesar. A case of the physical warrior crowding out the oily politician? And also a production that loves movement more than words?

The sweep of the crowd scenes formed a backbone around which the individual performances entwined themselves. The big players were an odd mix. Brandon Dirden’s Brutus was thoughtful and melancholy in his crucial soliloquies, especially “It must be by his death…” (2.1), in which he opened a chilling window into the so-reasonable heart of a killer. He re-activated that intimacy with the audience in his first scene with Caesar’s ghost (4.3), but when facing other characters in scenes of animated conflict — the spat with Cassius in 4.3, the pre-conspiracy conversations in act 1, and especially when confronted by Merritt Janson as his wife Portia in 2.1 — Brutus diminished. It was odd, in a production so dominated by a trio of crowd scenes, to have the lead actor flourish only in his solitary moments.

Politics happens both among crowds and in smaller encounters, and the places that this production limped were mostly interpersonal. Brutus could not match either Portia or Matthew Amendt’s sinewy Cassius. Rocco Sisto played a wonderfully expansive, stage-commanding Caesar, and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart showed a humanizing devotion to him as his wife Calpurnia. I’ve never before seen Calpurnia appear onstage during Mark Antony’s funeral oration (3.2). In literally waving Caesar’s bloody shirt, Calpurnia provided emotional ballast for Jordan Barbour’s Mark Antony to bound about the stage.

During the furor about this play in 2017, I remember thinking that every production of Caesar must necessarily be about murdering the President, and of course it didn’t take long to find the analogous Obama/Caesar production from 2012, directed by the always-awesome Rob Melrose. Unlike those two ripped from the newsfeed productions, Cooper’s staging seemed deliberately opaque rather than topical. The relative weakness of Brutus in the public scenes also tamped down the central ethical dilemma. Might it be necessary to murder your “best lover” for “the good of Rome” (3.2)? I enjoyed this production, especially for its crowd scenes including the boot-stomping murder of Cinna the Poet, but I’m not sure it quite faced up to the horror and violence of that question.

The day before I descended the #shax2019 maelstrom in DC, I took my ecotheory grad students on a trip to the ecofuture. We stood together on green grass atop a windy hill in Staten Island, looking northeast at the Manhattan skyline, and spying just a glimpse of green promise in the lady’s torch on the watery horizon. The grass we stood on itself stood on top of roughly 200 feet of twentieth-century household garbage, the refuse of Freshkills, once the largest landfill in the world, which will soon be the largest park developed in New York City in 100 years. The finished park’s 2200 acres will cover nearly three times as much space as Central Park. A plan that includes tours, outdoor activities, and art installations will reintegrate and make accessible to the public this damaged land. We stood together amid methane straws and funnels designed to leach liquid waste out from the bottom of the decomposing landfill. Is there a happier metaphor for our ecological future? A better image of things getting better in a messy world?

I kept returning in my mind to the #trashpastoral of Freshkills during my whirlwind half-week among the Shakespeareans. The comparison isn’t fair to a conference that has supported me since my grad student days almost a quarter-century ago, but the making-new and making-better parts seemed to fit what’s happening in the SAA today. Things are changing, both things we can see and below ground where we can’t. There are plenty of toxins around, in our academic and wider cultures. I’m proud to be part of an organization that’s making things better.

Triumphs of Time

[being a partial list of things the SAA is bringing toward happy fruition]

1. The Wed afternoon Town Hall, which I got to a bit late, is opening up a once-secretive organization. It was great to see and hear both veteran and novice SAA-ers talk about the organization we want to be. I was particularly struck by the aplomb of our new Executive Director Karen Raber, who appears to have solved, at least prospectively, the long-running SAA conflict between religious holidays and the conference. #SAAmiracles?
2. In addition to moving the SAA off the Easter/Passover cycle, the Town Hall provided the announcement of a great initiative, SAAllies, spear-headed by a quintet of inspiring scholars who want to make our organization more diverse, welcoming, and accessible. I was happy to wear the electric green lanyard, and to take part in supporting our too too SAAllied flesh as we navigate the conference spaces and beyond.
3. A less visible but I hope also lasting initiative began also this year, starting via google docs and morphing into a hashtag, #shaxgrads. This group will become, in the fullness of time, a Grad Student Caucus to support and advise early career entrants into SAA’s sometimes mysterious culture. My advisee Lisa Robinson rode point on this initiative, and I feel fortunate to have been able to nudge things forward by making a dinner reservation for eight volunteers and offering stray bits of advice. I was blown away by the energy and clearness of vision of the students gathered around the table at Cuba Libre! on Th night! I look forward to great things from them.
4. I’m not sure how many years the NextGenPlen has been going — maybe a half-dozen now? — but it continues to dazzle. I was blown away not just by the archival and imaginative richness of the five presentations, but also by the stage presence and authority on display. I had a brief moment of embarrassment on behalf of old bald white men during a question from the floor — but the response was so deft and thoughtful that I am now trying to convince myself the question was an intentional set up, enabling the brilliant riposte. I don’t think that’s really true — I think it was a cranky question — but the presenters handled everything brilliantly.
5. I had to skip much of Friday for the happy task of taking my son to Accepted Students Day at George Washington U, so I missed Ayanna’s lunchtime talk and about half of the #ShakeRace Plenary session. I caught most of David Sterling Brown’s gorgeous and persuasive discussion of “white hands” in and beyond Antony and Cleopatra. I also heard Kim Hall’s moving and formally inventive excavation of the human suffering encoded in archival records. I’ve heard a few of her talks out of her current project on Shakespeare and African-American culture, and they have been revelatory work. We are lucky to be watching this material come together.

In mine own person

[being a more personal list of some of my conference highlights]

1. Speaking on the Ecofeminism panel Sat morning with one of my grad school comrades, the chair of my own very first SAA seminar (in 1996!), and two other collaborators and colleagues was a personal highlight for me. I greatly enjoyed our discussion of collaboration and community, both in eco- and feminist contexts. I also appreciated moments in which we differ, or in which we take different directions. Difficult questions are also a form of collaboration!
2. I didn’t know Christy Desmet well, but I knew her enough to miss her, and I was happy to be able to toast her memory at the Blue Bar on Friday night.
3. During the before-dinner rush, I also got a phone call that made me very happy: the news that a junior member of our profession has received an offer of a tenure-track job! The scholar in question was not my student, but is someone whose work I admire and support, for whom I’ve written letters, etc. In these stormy times, good news shines a little light.
4. I dragged the Ecofem gang out to the Lebanese Taverna in Woodley Park, a now-thriving eatery that was a hole in the wall when my family moved into the neighborhood in 1985, when I was just starting my undergrad days & had no glimmerings of an academic career. It’s nice to go back to old places!

And yet..

I don’t like to complain, and I am sensitive to the competing demands of time and space. But the #shaxfutures initiative is too important to have been shunted into in a Sat afternoon dual-booked slot. [Note: In the earlier language I did not mean to accuse SAA’s schedulers. I really do recognize how hard it is to schedule competing interests. It’s not an easy task, and we are trying to be better.] I had to run after the talks but before the q&a in order to catch my train, which makes me also complicit in not placing the discourse of a Living Wage at the center of my SAA. But I caught enough to know that this work needs to move into the light.

Amanda Bailey organized a great panel featuring a pair of past and present non-tt faculty from her home Uni of Maryland. Maggie Ellen Ray spoke powerfully about who gets to be a “Shakespearean,” which reminded me that I use that term to address all my students when I send them group emails, and the appellation sometimes makes them feel self-conscious. Sabrina Baron, who I’ve known since a Folger seminar on print culture we took together in the late 1990s, used Francis Bacon’s theses on bias and error to explore why we avoid facing the adjunctification crisis squarely. Amanda Bailey introduced the term “humane-ities” and provided some concrete thoughts about how be better academics, departments, and members of an academic community.

As Amanda talked about Judith Butler’s idea of up-against-ness, for which I don’t have a good citation, I kept thinking about the forces that guided this particular session in the Sat afternoon slot — near the end of the conference, in the middle of a late lunch hour, hard to get to for people (including me!) who were heading to trains & planes on Saturday afternoon, and even those who were just drawn to the gorgeous DC springtime weather.

The first time the SAA presented a #shaxfutures session was in Atlanta in 2017. That session had no concurrent session against it, and it was scheduled back-to with the conference plenary itself. (I mashed up the two sessions in my blog-recap.) This year, and also last year in LA, #shaxfutures was scheduled against a second great session and wasn’t located at the heart of things. I’m a little worried about where we locate our future.

What does it mean that we can so powerfully and collectively celebrate the moment of excruciating empathy that Kim Hall dazzled us with in her encounter with a child’s life in the archive, but don’t face the stunted careers of people who walk our campus hallways every day?

I wonder if we need to address our abiding affection for meritocracy, even when we know that’s not how the so-called “job market” works. So many the terms of praise in #shax2019 and academic culture more broadly are terms of distinction: brilliance, imagination, originality. I love those things too, but I worry about the implicit sheering-off that insists on only so many places on stage, so many “good jobs,” so many markers of value. We celebrate the stars on stage, but need also to make time & space for the majority of SAA-goers. Maybe a Melancholies of Meritocracy panel in some possible #shaxfutures?

I do love excellence in what we do, and I saw great work in the hour-ish of the #shaxfutures panel I was able to attend yesterday. But we as a community can do better to consider who gets left off our various stages.

Right around the time I had to scoot toward Union Station, Amanda introduced, I think via Butler again, the emotional challenge of adjacency, that it can be harder to feel deeply for the things near to us, as opposed to things more distant. That’s not an adequate explanation of the split of our attention at #shax2019 (and was not intended to be), and I certainly don’t think that racism or sexism or other forms of toxic behavior are in any way “distant” in our profession. But I’d like the questions of #shaxfutures, and also the questions of how the SAA can best serve its most precarious members, to occupy more of our time and our labor.

I don’t say that in any way to accuse our wonderful SAA leadership or to exculpate my own complicity. In fact, the #shaxfutures panel this week reminds me painfully of what I owe to non-tt faculty and how little I have repaid that debt. To be specific and personal: Sabrina Baron, the brilliant print historian on this year’s Futures panel, is a longtime “lecturer” at UMD (or I guess the local term is “professional track faculty”?). Sometime in the early ’00s, she helped start the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, in the wake of a seminar at the Folger that we both attended. She invited me at some point later to give a talk to the group. I talked about celestial navigation and maritime orientation in Spenser, in one of the very first public talks I did as part of what has become my career-defining oceanic turn.

Because of Sabrina’s invitation, the talk caught the eye, or I guess the ear, of a then-librarian at the Folger, who asked me afterwards if I thought the Folger would “have enough of that kind of stuff” to do a maritime exhibition. I said I thought it would — and several years later that conversation translated itself into Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750, an exhibition which remains a highlight of my academic life and opened the blue door into the ocean studies wonder-world that’s defined my professional life over the past decade.

Would I have been able to launch my watery work without Sabrina’s timely invitation? Maybe, I guess — I mean, I probably would have written some of that stuff. But all of our successes, professional and otherwise, are (to borrow a term from academic labor) contingent. I benefitted greatly from Sabrina’s labor on my behalf, and I’ve never been able to pay her back. I wish that I had found some way.

Last encounters

I’ll close this blog-rumination, drafted on the northbound Amtrak while the #shax2019 twitterfeed chirps to me that the conference keeps rolling along, with one final encounter, driven by the green SAAllies lanyard. No names for this one!

In the hour before the #shaxfutures event Sat afteroon, I was tired and smalltalk-exhausted. I ate fried tofu in Chinatown and sat on a semi-secluded couch in the hotel lobby, watching the flow of roller-bags and the human billiard-collisions of Shakespeareans. A senior Shakespearean sat down next to me, and we started chatting, in a slightly tired and over-stimulated sort of way.

Then, to our surprise and pleasure, a first-time SAA-goer grad student who’d seen ourgreen lanyards on sat down with her sandwich, saying, “I don’t want to each lunch alone, can I join you?” She had noticed my nametag because I’d been part of her recent comps list. The three of us had a fantastic chat, talking about her work-in-progress on Spanish-language early modern texts set in the Americas, Ben Jonson, the conference, and how the academic world looks to newcomers. She reminded me of the #shaxgrads I’d had dinner with on Th, and I suggested she connect with them via the hashtag. I also thought about the dazzling NextGenPlen-ers. Many things are bad about the state of our profession — but the people are great.

As we, like the Freshkills Park engineers, labor to transform the toxins in our history into the green pastures of a shared future, we need to keep the people foremost in mind.

See everyone in Denver next year!

What do we want when we go to the theater?

Coincidences of April, the most compressed and hyper-busy month of the academic calendar, put me in front of two gloriously dissimilar shows in the past week: Yale Rep’s Afro-futurist romp of Twelfth Night on Saturday, and Red Bull’s brutal and violent production of John Webster’s gory revenge tragedy The White Devil on Tuesday. I loved both, but hard to image they were the same sort of thing, written for the same small theatrical community, maybe a decade or so apart. So why not try to blog-review them together?

Directed by Carl Cofield, Associate Director of the Classical Theater of Harlem, Twelfth Night showcases the talents of the Yale School of Drama’s 3rd-year acting class, as their spring Shakespeares generally do. I’ve been going to these productions since I arrived in New Haven as a grad student in the mid-90s, and long experience has moderated my expectations. But I’m not sure if I’ve seen a more rousing show in the University Theater than this funkdadelic, electro-futuristic Twelfth Night. Cofield’s set, vision, and pacing was pure Wakanda: an Afro-utopia that strutted but didn’t fret its fast two hours across the stage. I’ve seen lots of great, high-spirited Sir Tobys who convinced willing audience that the singers and drinkers have the better argument. But I’ve seldom seen a play that enlists not just Toby but also Orsino and even Olivia and Viola, into the spirit of misrule.

The White Devil, based on a lurid ripped-from-the-headlines story about adultery, murder, and intrigue in sixteenth-century Italy, didn’t quite go down as smoothly. Webster’s poetry is angry and intricate, but also gorgeous and inventive:

Sum up my faults, I pray, and you shall find,

That beauty and gay clothes, a merry heart,

And a good stomach to feast, are all,

All the poor crimes that you can charge me with.

In faith, my lord, you might go pistol flies,

The sport would be more noble.

The doomed love affair of Vittoria and Duke Brachiano, orchestrated by her brother Flamenio, spits in the face of propriety as it condemns to death their spouses and numerous bystanders. It’s sometimes hard to tell if Webster wants us to hate his villains or the pious aristocrats more. My sense is that we semi-admire the baddies for their nerve.

The star of Twelfth Night, beyond the director and the music, may have probably the veteran actor Allen Gilmore as Malvolio. As counterweight to the festive utopians, Malvolio showed just enough of the hypocrisy in ambition (and vice versa) to energize the production. Among my favorite moments of the night came at the end, when he stalked on stage during the dance-off that subbed in for a curtain call, stared everyone down, and then vogue’d his way into his own round of applause.

To facilitate the turns and twists in the violent plot of The White Devil, director Louisa Proske made repeated use of a large video screen, on which the occasional soliloquy or murder appeared. As is generally true with Red Bull’s efforts to revivify the bloody non-Shakespeare works of the early 17c, the production was well-served by strong actors and powerful momentum. Daniel Oreskes’s Brachianno may have been the most charismatic of the bunch, but Tommy Shrider’s slinky Flamenio caught my eye whenever he was on stage.

When the Yale Rep actors transformed Orsino’s famous if a bit sappy “If music be the food of love” opening speech into a nightclub dance-number, I knew we were in good hands. Music spilled out from sources both expected — Erron Crawford’s Feste as hip hop artist, Chivas Michael’s Toby as fez-topped night-club maestro — and less predictable, including Ilia Isorelys Paulino playing a joyful Maria who occasionally would belt out her lines in song because she just could not help herself. I also loved Tiffany Denise Hobbs’s Olivia, who hid in the early acts behind a hat that may as well have been a gladiatorial shield before breaking into love and movement once fetching cross-dressed Cesario catches her eye.

The question of Vittoria, the poor but proud heroine played by Lisa Birnbaum whose affair with Brachiano and defiance of patriarchal norms stirs the plot stew in Webster’s tragedy, remains vexed. Does she, like Malvolio, desire to better her station? Might she, like Viola and Sebastian, have played her hand less aggressively and made her way into elite society? That’s not Webster’s kind of play, and not his vision of the world, either in decadent Rome or the Jacobean London that’s probably his real target.

I had hoped that tonight, when I’m blogging these thoughts from home, that I’d be adding to the mix Glenda Jackson’s big Broadway Lear, though that plan foundered on the shores of a sick child. Could I have made division of myself and made it to the theater? Not hardly — which may be as much of a response to King Lear as I’ll manage tonight.