Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Columbus the Aquaman

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In Short Beach, Columbus Day is the semi-official end of the swimming season.  When it’s chilly but clear, like this weekend, it’s not all that easy to get in the water.  I ended up making the shift to wetsuits on Friday afternoon.

What did Columbus discover?  Certainly not America: he thought it was China, it had been visited many times before by Northern Europeans since the time of Erik the Red, and he had no interest in new places.  The thing he found that was new — or at least new-ish, for the part of Europe that had been formerly oriented toward the Mediterranean — was the deep sea.  “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” was what the Spanish called him.  He wasn’t really a land creature.

Today Olivia & I pulled on our 2mm Body Glove suits & walked past the fall colors to the beach.  A few teenagers were diving off the Yale boathouse docks & then shrieking as they rushed to get out.  The wet suits make it a little easier to get in, though it’s still a shock.  The real payoff is that as soon as that film of water gets warmed up, you feel ready to stay.

How many more swimming days are left in 2010?

Not enough.

The Breakdown of the Multiple Parts in the Cutting Ball Tempest

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I mentioned in my last entry that three actors play all the roles in our version of The Tempest. The breakdown of the parts are as follows:

David Sinaiko – Prospero, Alonso, Stephano

Donell Hill – Ferdinand, Caliban, Antonio

Caitlyn Louchard – Miranda, Ariel, Gonzalo, Sebastian, Trinculo

The first scene with the Boatswain we have staged as a kind of collage of voices, and Adrian and Francisco’s lines have been redistributed amongst the other lords.

Our director, Rob Melrose, is working with the concept that there are three meta-roles – Prospero, Ferdinand, and Miranda – and that the other doubled characters may be understood as fragments of their personalities and psyches or how they are perceived by another character. Other three-actor productions, such as the London Globe’s 2005 Tempest, have used a similar conceits to ground their actors (in their case, Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel instead of Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand). Critics like Marjorie Garber have noted that the, with the abundance of similarities between the sets of characters, that the story may be reduced to a story involving certain key figures or types.

With this understanding, the actors change characters not simply when there is a need manifested by the plot (i.e. it’s now time for the Stephano scene, so the actor playing Prospero has to turn into Stephano), but when there is a need created within the meta-character (Prospero is turning into Stephano because something in the last scene has triggered the Stephano aspect of his conscience).

To give an example: we begin the first scene between the shipwrecked lords with Alonso drinking from a bottle out of despair from the loss of his son. By the time this scene comes to a close, Alonso has drunk so much that the Stephano aspect is able to appear. Stephano and Alonso share many of the same defining traits as Prospero – they are, each in their own way, leaders and masters, but with varying levels of sophistication and mastery. In the case of Ariel and Miranda, the first instance of the change is manifested when, after Prospero lulls Miranda to sleep, he awakens the latent Ariel personality within her almost by means of a kind hypnosis. In some instances, we need to get a little creative with the narrative. Sebastian and Gonzalo cannot be onstage at the same time, so the Sebastian aspect only awakes when Gonzalo is asleep.

It may appear from my account that we are taking quite a bit of liberty with the text. True enough, our production is not as strict as a more “traditional” interpretation (whatever that means), but I feel that a lot of the logic we have created for the transition between characters is more for the benefit of the actors than the audience. When they are able to make sense of why they change characters, the audience can make sense of the transitions as well. Once again, we are not trying to force a new narrative down the audience’s throats that warps The Tempest, we are telling the story of the play.

The actors have all taken great pains to significantly differentiate the characters through their voice and physicality and those choices, with the aid of certain costume choices (glasses for Ferdinand, sunglasses for Antonio, etc.), but, with the same three actors playing all the roles, it is impossible to dupe the audience into believing that the characters are entirely distinct. Shakespeare was undoubtedly conscious of these similarities when he wrote the play, and if those similarities are expressed so clearly with three actors, we would be doing ourselves a disservice by trying to mask it.

-Bennett Fisher, Dramaturg

Cutting Ball Theatre’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest opens November 5 at the Exit on Taylor in San Francisco. More info at www.cuttingball.com

Julie Taymor’s Tempest

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The trailer for Taymor’s forthcoming sound-and-lights extravaganza Tempest is now on YouTube:

Tempest Trailer

It’s supposed to open Dec 10.  Maybe the class should all go together on our last night, 12/14?

Thanks to Tara for the link.

Update: Watched it again today & it looks fun, if perhaps a bit over-the-top.  Sorcery. Passion. Stupidity.  Treachery. Revenge — so go the subtitles.  An interesting summary, I suppose?

We certainly should go on 12/14.  Anybody know a movie theater close to campus?

Cutting Ball Theatre’s Three Actor Tempest in Rehearsal

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In my dramaturgical research for The Tempest, I was delighted when I stumbled upon blog entries written by actors during the rehearsal process for Globe Theatre in London’s three-actor production of the play in 2005.  I found those entries profoundly informative, since the actors not only discussed their interpretation of the characters and their understanding of the play’s meaning, but addressed the challenges of manifesting those ideas physically in the production. So, when Professor Mentz offered to have us blog about our production at the Cutting Ball Theatre in San Francisco, which begins previews on November 5, I was delighted. I hope that these entries provide an interesting and worthwhile supplement to the course.

Our director, Rob Melrose, has chosen to stage the play with three actors – David Sinaiko, Caitlyn Louchard, and Donell Hill – playing all the roles, hoping that it will give “an up close and personal look at the monsters lurking inside all of us.” Our staging includes video projection, original music, and other surreal elements that I hope to describe in more detail in future entries.  Most dramaturgs are justifiably wary of more experimental stagings, but I believe theater is a living organism, and just in the way modern critics have been able to read everything from Freud to Fanon into The Tempest, so should we freely though heedfully dive certain fathoms into a piece to find what may be buried at the center. Combing through some critical writings on The Tempest and seeing the actors on their feet in rehearsal, I feel that this production succeeds in uncovering compelling and essential aspects of Shakespeare’s play that may not be as readily apparent in a “traditional” staging. Overlapping groups of threes abound in the play – the Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand trio, the Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban trio, the Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo trio, and so forth. Seeing the same actor in a different role a few pages creates wonderful, unexpected moments of revelation. Prospero’s line to Miranda that “to the most of men this [Ferdinand] is a Caliban/And they to him are angels” is deliciously curious when the actor playing Ferdinand has just minutes before left the stage as Caliban: the audience is left to question whether or not there is any fundamental difference between the two. Just so, when Stephano (played by the same actor playing Prospero) shows affection for Caliban, we are reminded of that missing episode before the events of the play when Prospero was loving and compassionate to his sole subject on the island. Moments later when Caliban entreats  “Prithee, be my god”, we are viscerally made aware that this new allegiance, like Caliban’s allegiance to Prospero, is not much better. Oddly, by reducing the number of actors, we have revealed more about the similarities and differences between each character than one might be able to do with a larger cast.

Innumerable critics have talked about the relationship between The Tempest and psychology – likening the island to the human mind, arguing Ariel and Caliban are Prospero’s Superego and Id respectively and that the play is the story of reconciling these aspects of his conscience. Melrose is interested in exploring the play in this light, but also sees it as a deeply personal story about a father letting go of his daughter, a man forgiving his enemies, and the universal desire shared by all men and women to be “released.” I think this focus on the human element has helped keep our production grounded in the story, and, ultimately, is what preserves, what is, in my opinion Shakespeare’s most essential messages in the play, that “the rarer action/Is in virtue than in vengeance.” Freud and Jung are there, and plentifully, but the audience is not held hostage by the concept but given freedom to draw their own meaning. Our Island may be more surreal at moments, but we’ve built a bridge to the mainland.

-Bennett Fisher, Dramaturg

All is need and change

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Caliban’s long speech in Chapter III of The Sea and the Mirror (channeling Henry James, as Ashbery’s blurb has it) is a bizarrely counter-intuitive performance of the “natural” in Tempest-ville.  It’s also deeply, subtly, a meditation on the dramatic Muse, explicitly so in the italicized part at the start.  There’s also some hard-to-follow movement of the pronoun “He,” which seems to stand for Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero at different time.  Perhaps our friends at Cutting Ball, currently rehearsing a Tempest w/o either Ariel or Caliban, want to weight in on that slippage?

My favorite passage isn’t the “restored relation” at the end, but the passing hymn to radical difference & change that comes on p47: “the wish for freedom to transcend any condition,” which may be a kind of “nightmare” or also “a state of perpetual emergency and everlasting improvisation where all is need and change.”

Recent times, and political theorists from Schmitt to Agamben, have suggested a political reading of that state of emergency as well.

“Creation’s O”

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For me, the shockingly brilliant insight and innovation of The Sea and the Mirror is how Auden asks us to think about Antonio.  He tends to be an afterthought for many readings of The Tempest — an Old World Machiavel who’s easily forgiven & forgotten — but Auden (perhaps writing with 1930s Europe in mind) gives him the choral role in Chapter II, with each lyric ending up as part of Antonio’s “alone.”  Auden’s Antionio ‘s a deeply skeptical, deeply individual poetic creation.  He mocks Prospero’s magic: “What a lot a little music can do.”  He doubts that mercy and book-drowning will have lasting consequences: “they will soon reappear, / Not even damaged.”

Against P’s show-and-tell, Antonio places individual will.  “Your all is partial,” he argues against his brother, “I am I, Antonio / By choice myself alone.”

He gets the last word each time: “choice for himself, burning in the dark for Ferdinand, toasting with Stephano, talking with Gonzalo, playing in his head with Adrian and Francisco, wearing a diadem with Alonso, sailing with the Master and Boatswain, fighting the white bull with Sebastian, laughing with Trinculo, dancing with Miranda.

As “Creation’s O” he is beyond his brother.  Outside of his control.

Auden’s “silent dissolution”

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Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best,

Then, I surrender their fascinating cousel

To the silent dissolution of the sea

Which misuses nothing because it values nothing

Whereas man overvalues everything…

Auden’s great poetic commentary & meditation on The Tempest, which is also very much a poem of a European fleeing Europe during WWII, operates throughout between the dissolving opacity of the sea and the artistic fantasy of the mirror.  It’s a strange and gorgeous poem, though I’m not always sure in re-reading it whether it’s a hymn to the power of art or a lament about human failure.

I suppose that I see the same deep ambivalence in The Tempest as well.

We won’t have too much time at the NYPL on Tuesday to talk about Auden, so let’s bring him online for the next few days.  It’s a poem to chew on.

October Twilight

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Got back from the rock-wall climbing birthday party after the second soccer game just as the sun was starting to go down.  A quick three-mile jog to warm up as the evening star poked her seductive head over Killam’s Point in the east.  The tide was just coming up to full, a wide, still pool of a flood.  In the last flashes of sunlight out on the Sound I could see white sails, round-bellied but still.

The water’s cooler now, & it takes me about 50 yards of fly and 50 free to get my body comfortable.  As soon as I stop my skin starts to tingle.  I turn to look back at the houses of Short Beach, every third one lit from inside.  No one else is visible on the bay.  Even the seaweed is silent, floating in stolid clumps.  I float on my back and watch the sky.

Timing is everything.

Robinson Crusoe

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I’ve been thinking over the past few days about Robinson Crusoe, Mariner.  We’ll be busy next week with the NY Public Library & Dr. Lubey’s work, but esp. since she’s one of our resident Defoe experts, we might want to expand this conversation.

Matt P., our roving seminar member who’s spent the last two weeks in China, has started his project by thinking about the similarities between Prospero’s exile and Crusoe’s: both Europeans on isolated islands who survive, enslave non-Europeans, and appear, perhaps in slightly different ways, to represent fantasies about the colonial experience.

There’s lots to chew on in that parallel, but I also thought I’d share some recent material on Defoe that I put together this summer at the Folger.  Here are links to a web site based on his comprehensive world history, the Atlas Maritimus of 1728, to a map of his maritime travels that was published in Part II of his story, and to two audio clips.  (The first is recorded by my brother-in-law, Maury Sterling, last seen in the cast of “The A-Team” this summer.)

Defoe’s Atlas Maritimus

Map of Robinson Crusoe’s Travels

Crusoe’s Shipwreck

Alexander Selkirk

Enjoy!