Search Results for: cry trojans

Thinking about this play today, I hear the first word in the gravel-mouthed syllables of Martin Prochazka, a great Czech Shakespearean who I first met at a bar in Prague about four years ago:

“De-terratorial-i-zation!”

That’s what it’s all about. Or at least that’s what I thought about after seeing this show at St. Ann’s on March 27 with an eager dozen or so of my students.

Without digging too deeply in Deluezian & Guattarian weeds, the deterratorializing impulse in The Wooster’s Group’s latest (and third) iteration of Troilus and Cressida, now entitled “Cry, Trojans,” organizes this still-bizarre but unexpectedly streamlined version of their Red Indian take on the Trojan half of Shakespeare’s Trojan war play. Casting Trojans as Native Americans, whose costumes and stage dancing inhabited visual cliches made manifest in the “spirit guide” video monitors arranged on the four corners of the stage, relocated classical heroism into a landscape at once prehistoric and celluloid. Ben Brantley didn’t like it, but he didn’t try very hard to figure it out.

I’ve been thinking and writing about this production for several years. I saw it first in Stratford in 2012, at the International Shakespeare Conference, and then a second time in the bitter cold in January 2013, downtown at the Performing Garage. That was a workshop production, in preparation for the current run at St Ann’s in Brooklyn.

You’d think after three evenings with these Woosters I’d have a pretty good sense of what’s happening. But the strangeness lingers.

Deterratorialization works to unsettle, even unmoor familiar associations. What are we left with when we watch a story of the Trojan War with no Greeks and Trojans who spend their time starting a video screens we the audience can’t see very well?

My experience of this Wooster production makes me hyper-aware of how theater requires us to parse out attention, looking now as Scott Shepard’s stoic Troilus, now at Kate Valk’s erotic and playful Cressida, sometimes at the video monitors showing Splendor in the Grass or The Fast Runner. Where’s the right place to put your attention? Watching this play means deterratorializing your eyes.

The second word is mediation. This term has become my Wooster-watchword, first pronounced in 2012 to a pint-quaffing gathering of mostly hostile Shakespeare professors at The Dirty Duck, the Stratford pub where we gathered after seeing the 2012 production of this play, in which the Woosters’ Trojans stage-fought against the heroic stalwarts of the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It’s extreme mediation,” I said to the skeptics. “That’s what the screens do. It’s how we live today. What do we all look at when we stare at our tiny beloved screens?”

After the workshop in the Garage last winter, I managed to get Liz Lecompte, the play’s director and co-founder of the Wooster Group, on the phone. I spun her my theory that their production sliced most of the epic warfare off this love-and/as-war play, so that the alienating moves almost but not quite prevented our access to the core melodrama. I said I thought Pandarus’s song was the key thing: “Love, love, Nothing but love…”

(It turns out the the love-and-violence subplot of the play extended to the original cast back in 2012, according to the Times.)

They cut most of that song in the new version, and in a few ways that streamlining unsettled the emotional reading I gave the play in 2013. The 2015 version was a clearer, more foreceful Cry, Trojans than what we saw in the Garage — the playbill is, especially for the Woosters, a model of clarity — but perhaps also a darker one.

My students were shocked that the love scene pantomimed rape, with Troilus scooping Cressida over his shoulder and running in circles while she flailed with her fists and wailed — not with full emotional force, perhaps, but in a kind of symbolic dance. After he put her back on her feet, she pronounced the invitation that scandalized the play’s Victorian editors:

Will you walk in, my lord?

In Valk’s pouty delivery, this line does to Troilus what he’s just done to her by carrying her across his shoulder: embarrasses with raw eroticism. Her sexuality unnerves him, assails him, and the two, like the gorgeous doomed lovers played by Warren Beaty and Natalie wood on the monitors, have their once-separate selves over-written by the roaring waterfall of eros. There seems no more choice in their passion than in Cressida’s later ambivalent yielding to Diomedes in the Greek camp. Love is not choice but submission to a story that writes the self, not a story we can write ourselves.

(Speaking a story we can’t write ourselves, the Woosters invited me to do a short dialogue about the play earlier this spring — but when my train ran late, they went on without me. Oh well. I have answers for those questions, if the occasion ever re-arises…)

This darker and more entangled extrapolation of the love plot makes the central figure of the play not so much either of the lovers but the go-between, Pandarus. As played by Greg Mehrten, who also plays King Priam and, briefly, the satiric Greek Thersites, the “sleazy uncle” (as my students called him) occupied the uncomfortable heart of the drama. In an atypical move for Shakespeare, this figure of moderate rank gets the last word at play’s end, and bequeaths that audience his “diseases.”

When I teach that moment I like to talk about Troilus as satire, exposing the elite martial codes and the plays that celebrate them, including among others Shakespeare’s Henry V. But this time through I also felt Pandarus spoke for the lost lovers and the meet cute during wartime plot he’d almost smuggled past the epic censors. What if his sleazy love-plot is the disease, and we’ve all caught it? They may have mostly cut his song but I still heard it when I was driving home on midnight highways —

“Love, love, nothing but love…”

Running through April 19th in DUMBO!

Two aesthetic treats a week ago Thursday: #RisingWaters at the City Museum, and Cry Trojans by the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage. In different ways, both about the cold pressure of beauty, both a bit disturbing, and both still have my head spinning.

“Cry, Trojans” has stirred up some controversy among my fellow theater-goers, and my thinking about it owes much to the spirited FB-insightfulness of Holger Syme, Karl Steel, and Alison Kinney, though in the end I liked the show more than each of them did. Plenty of reasons not to like it: it is slow, opaque, and willfully cavalier, filled with hackneyed Native American stereotypes. The Woosters play the Trojans, in this compressed version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, as Red Indians, complete with singing and dancing. (The show originated in 2012 in the UK, when the RSC played the Greeks. I blogged about it then, thinking about the controversy it caused among the Shakespeare conferencers. The New York version mostly cuts the Greeks, showing short clips of the 2012 performance to fill in the plot, and having a few actors briefly assume Greek parts with masks. The action is all in Troy.)

Tom Cartelli smartly parsed the Wooster 2012 show in a Shakespeare Quarterly article that explores the company’s willful strangeness, disorienting strategies, and efforts to re-make the Trojan War through a film about an Inuit Legend. I pretty well agree with him, but I also thought a lot, this time especially, about what Splendor in the Grass, the 1961 Elia Kazan film featuring the gorgeous young stars Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, was doing. Scott Shepherd’s Troilus stares up at Warren Beatty on video monitors with a quizzical look: am I doing it right? Is this what love is?

The Red Indian caricatures are pretty extreme, but, as the 2012 program noted, the Woosters are thinking partly about the fantasy America of the German novelist Karl May, who wrote late 19c novels about the American West without traveling there. I also think about Kafka in Prague and his “Wish to Be a Red Indian”:

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone

“Cry, Trojans” seems to me an experiment in extreme mediation. I love its intensity, its manic energy, its recklessness. In 2012, I argued into the night about how the Wooster-method speaks to our age’s deep engagement with video screens as self-structuring devices. What else do wee see in our iPhones? This time, without the RSC Greeks and their professional counterpoint, I thought about the love story. The Wooster lovers are knowing and smart, but still can’t help being steamrolled by the oldest love story in the book. As in Shakespeare’s play, I think the Wooster production is partly about the overwhelming power of generic forms, even (or especially?) after we’ve stopped fully believing in them.

Or maybe I enjoyed the show so much because I was still in the afterglow of #RisingWaters at the City Museum?

There’s more to tell about last Thursday, the start of my spring semester. My day started at 5 am, when I turned the shower knob, and nothing happened. Frozen water in the pipes: some metaphor for the first day of class!

After teaching, and remotely helping with plumbers (all thawed nicely by mid-afternoon), I got to #RisingWaters around 3 pm, driving through a small snowbank to find street parking on 99th and Madison. I love the Museum of the City of New York, up on 103rd St., teetering on the northern fringe of Museum Mile. This show drew its images from an open call for photographs of Sandy that generated 10,000 images from over 1000 photographers, professional and amateur. The show opened on October 29, the anniversary of the hurricane’s landfall, but I’ve only now been able to get to it. Disturbingly gorgeous, raw, intimate. I’m plotting my next trip there already.

Two pictures in particular  struck me, both from the Rockaways. (The show has images from all over New York and New Jersey, including some heartbreaking images of Mantaloking, NJ, where I spent many happy summer days at the beach as a kid.) One was taken from inside a porch or maybe front room of a small house, looking out from inside a screen door. The screen’s gone, and water cascades over and through the lower half of the door in a glimmering, curving arc. A beautiful waterfall, pouring into someone’s home.

The other picture I remember was simpler: on a beach in Far Rockaway the day after the storm, someone arranged driftwood to form a pattern in the sand where a house used to sit: “THIS IS GLOBAL WARMING.”

I bought two catalogs, Amy Medina’s Salted Wounds and the Wyatt Group’s #Sandy, a book of iPhone photos. Much to look at and think about. What is the relationship between beauty and destruction?

Driving downtown after the show, thinking about Sandy, I stopped for a half hour on E. 79th street. It wasn’t my idea. A couple guys double-parked a blue van, grabbed paint cans & a ladder, and went into an apartment to do some work. I came along a few minutes later, but couldn’t get past them. A snow plow maybe five cars in front of me couldn’t get its blade in between the double parked van on the right and the parked cars on the left. So we waited, maybe 20 cars spilling westward all the way to Park Ave. A couple of us got out of our cars, talked to each other, talked to the snowplow driver, tried to convince him to back up and pull behind the blue van so that the rest of us could pull around. That didn’t seem to be working at first, but eventually he agreed to give it a try. While the plow was trying to back up the guys with the ladder came back, loaded up, and we all drove away. Block party in Manhattan!

I made it downtown on time for green matcha tea at Cha-An on East 9th street, around the corner from the apartment I lived in during the early 1990s. Talked there with Marina Zurkow about some collaborative writing we’re doing for Oceanic New York about flood, disruption, engaging with environments. I came away with a few good ideas: “Instructions” as a genre. Soft-edged squares. Blowing water into an inflatable raft during a flood, which means physically expanding one small fluid body until the expansion of a bigger fluid body subsides. We talked about marshes, barrier islands, the Rising Waters show, an amazing petro-project she has going up at Rice this spring.

I parked in the snow in front of the Performing Garage at 33 Wooster for the 8 pm show. A delicious rye and orange bitters martini put me in a perfect mood, despite the cold wind outside and small folding chairs in the theater.

Some parts of the show were the same as in 2012, though I wasn’t surprised this time by the weird, half-alienated charisma of Scott Shepherd’s Troilus. I spent more time, this time around, thinking about Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. Doomed Hollywood lovers as models for  classical literary avatars? If Hollywood, Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and any number of other artists and genres were getting mashed together in the small space of the Performing Garage, why was I moved by such a hyper-technical, ultra-referential performance? The show stopped for 10 minutes in the middle of the first act because of technical difficulties with the very complex sound system. Not a problem at all, at least for me.

The new title, “Cry, Trojans,” comes from Cassandra’s mad lament, her foreknowledge that the city will burn. It matches our foreknowledge of the destruction of Native American culture and its transformation into global kitcsch like May’s novels. But the lingering force of the play for me was in Troilus and Cressida’s semi-expressive faces looking up at Beatty and Wood on the glittering screens, matching their bodies into the stars’s postures, fitting desires and emotions into pre-arranged molds. They might not want to do it — we might not want to admit to it — but it happens. This show, in all its strange, at times awkward, mannered presentation, insists that there are no unmediated stories.

I left energized, happy, driving home in the snow after a long day.

 

The most brilliant, painful, and astounding performance was the last — but I’ll take the kings in chronological order. Six of them, lined up in a long row.

Henry IV

The dying old man laid out prone on the white hospital bed dropped wisdom on the son who’d already begun playing with the English crown. There’s an easy way toavoid trouble at home, the old man advised: “Busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.”

So started four-and-a-half hours of Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s brilliant and searing Kings of War, directed by Ivo van Hove, which is spending the pre-election weekend at the BAM opera house. A master class in domination, violence, and strategy, it was just the thing to redirect political jitters for a few hours on Friday night. Politics as bloodsport and play, not exactly as Shakespeare wrote it — the performance was in Dutch with supertitles, and stripping down five plays into one night required aggressive cuts — but certainly as Machiavelli understood it.

Henry V

The first crowned monarch — all the kings were crowned on the same red carpet, followed by the same single file line, stretching out to the edge of the stage — started quietly. Ramsey Nasr played Henry V with no visible traces of Prince Hal, and he invaded France  without any leavening from Welsh or Scottish captains, fiery Pistol, or tears at Sir John’s death. Playing against the patriotic swellings we remember from Olivier’s and Branaugh’s films, this Henry V was frightening because he was just a little bit opaque, not quite accessible. Thinking back over the long arc of the full production, I see Henry V as a tactical serpent, exporting to fertile France the destructive forces that would bloody England during successive reigns. Watching his army’s march through Harfleur to Agincourt as a preface to Rose War rather than the culmination of Hal’s journey makes the wastrel-king harder to read. In the sort of outrageous theatrical coup that Toneelgroep has been specializing in for years — here’s my gushing review of their Roman Tragedies, which I saw at BAM in 2012 — the king spoke the Crispin’s day speech as voice-over on a bare stage. The band of brothers, with its fantasy of an organic (masculine) political body unified through royal rhetoric, was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it doesn’t really exist?

The stage was set in the first half of the production (a touch of H4, H5 and the first two parts of H6) to resemble Churchill’s War Rooms, now a museum in London, with maps, desks, and a single bed (in which Henry VI would sleep after kneeling in prayer). The great innovation of the staging, however, was several backstage hallways, which were included in the action via stedicam footage that was projected on a massive central video screen. The screen showed some backstage murders, conspiracies, and even, during a memorable speech in which King Henry VI indulges in a pastoral metaphor, a flock of sheep (or goats, maybe?). With the exception of the livestock, most or all of the filmed action was live, but it was only visible to us via video feed. The result was as seamless an intermingling of live and filmed action as I’ve even seen, making even the Wooster Group‘s pyrotechnics appear a bit labored. Another patterned staging showed figures of authority — York and Richard III, especially — seated with their backs to the audience but with their faces shown in close up on the big screen. The combination of contempt for and intimacy with the masses was potent and disturbing.

This staging of Henry V moved without a pause from his securing the hand of Princess Katherine to the conquering monarch’s funeral, which opens Part 1 of Henry VI. This staging of wooing scene, often a semi-comic break from the relentless battles, showed the king’s emotional neediness more than his mastery. In a sharp inversion of common practice, the scene suggested that Katherine understood the king’s English but he cannot fully decipher her French. His sometimes comic lines about being a soldier who cannot speak love-verses built to his petulant fists pounding on the table in frustration. The princess, and the off-stage negotiators of the Anglo-French treaty, rescued Henry — but the sense of not-fully-visible violence, like the rapine and pillaging the king had threatened but not visited on Harfluer, lingered after the conqueror passed.

Henry VI

Eelco Smits’s boyish Henry VI looked out of place in his pajamas among the senior military men dressed in suits. Crowned at six months old and never quite growing into his father’s bloody shoes, this Henry brought the play’s action back to England and civil war. All Shakespeare’s French scenes, except Suffolk’s wooing of Margaret, were cut, and to the list of missing figures these plays added Joan of Arc, Jack Cade, and several others. The cabinet room now overflowed with rivalries: the Cardinal and York and Suffolk plotting against Henry’s uncle, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, whose losing hand was played with brilliant frustration by Aus Greidanus, Jr., who would later play Buckingham in Richard III. But the blazing star of the Henry VI plays, and one of the two incandescent performances of the evening, was Janni Goslinga as Queen Margaret of Anjou. 

Margaret, “the she-wolf of France,” dominated the Henry VI plays, especially in a production like this one that cuts Joan of Arc and Jack Cade and minimized Warwick the Kingmaker. Goslinga’s performance ratcheted up the human intensity of the political intrigue, which shifted from Henry V’s war-strategy to a complex multi-party civil war. King Henry VI’s famous piety saw him kneeling in pajamas at his cot while the senior administrators continued their business meeting, but this abdication frustrated Margaret’s ambition for herself and her husband. She burst into rage when Henry VI disinherited their son in order to prevent his rival, the Duke of York, from pushing him off the throne. While the production skipped most of the final stages of the civil war, including almost all of Henry VI, Part 3, which includes Margaret’s great despairing speech — “Say you can swim; alas, tis but a while” — but she dominated the middle section of the performance.

Edward IV

In a nod toward clarity, Kings of War crowned the Duke of York, rather than his son, who was also named Edward. The key scene featured York with seated at a conference table with his back to us, holding aloft a lit cigarette in his right hand. The video screen displayed his impassive face. We watched the smoke curl up as the Duke let his silence negotiate with an increasingly frantic King Henry VI. At the end, York was named heir, Margaret raged against an impotent Henry, and the Lancastran forces were routed. In Shakespeare’s dramatic cycle, completing project takes several more battles and campaigns — but York’s stillness and the implacable control of Bart Sleggers’s performance stood in nicely for all that violence. When the curtain at last came down after two and a half hours (only one interval!), the white rose of York was firmly in command, though the arrival of a certain son, Richard Duke of Gloucester, whose late self-atomizing speeches were almost all Toneelgroep kept of Henry VI, Part 3, promised futures troubles.

Richard III

Hans Kesting, who I’d previously seen play Antony in Toneelgroep’s Roman Tragedies, gave the part of Richard III a sinuous intensity that I don’t think I’ve ever seen equalled on stage before. Without any elaborate physical hijinks or props, except a wine-colored stain under one eye, he carried Richard’s dark ambition and restlessness through his body. He threatened just by standing still: I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more ominous stage moment than watching him stand on one side of the stage, staring at his reflection in a full-length mirror, while other characters pretended that they controlled the kingdom. I’ve seen Ian McKellen and Kevin Spacey give strong live performances of King Richard — but Kesting roared over all of them. As my buddy Erik said after the curtain, “I guess I don’t need to see Richard III ever again.” 

It’s hard to describe the impact of seeing Kesting’s Richard on stage. I think it had something to do with the way he held his body, and also something to do with the way I’d been holding my body for the past 3 hours when he finally arrived on stage. Kesting walked gingerly, as if he were a coiled spring, with his hips slightly forward and arms back, enough to disturb but not enough to be a caricature. At one point his cascaded into full ridiculousness, wearing the crown he’d not yet claimed, draping a rug over his shoulders, and running around the stage in a parody of the humpbacked king. Most of the time he was just alien enough to disturb but not disrupt.

I also think the way the show made us wait for Richard made a difference. By the time he appeared, we’d been sitting still for over two and a half hours, and the late arrival of the man we knew would be the last titular king in the sequence focused our attention. If Henry V, conqueror of France, was understated and his play oddly calm, Richard III arrived to upstage him — though of course the final turn to Richmond, the future Henry VII, also returned Ramsey Nasr, who’d played Henry V, to center stage.

A few moments of Kesting’s Richard particularly linger. When he was sure he was about to be crowned, he sat at the war room table in front of three brightly colored hotline phones. He lifted the red phone, drawls into in in a fake American accent: “Hallo?…Barack?!” Guffawing, full of himself, he next grabbed the green phone and spoke in German to Angela Merkel. To the blue phone he barked at Putin in Russian, then mocked the Russian leader as a “pussy” after he hung up.

Especially after reading the harrowing reporting from Trump’s gold-plated plane in this morning’s Times, I’ve been mulling how Kesting’s Richard combined ruthless domination with near-absolute neediness. The seduction of Lady Anne, about which Richard crowed when she left the stage, played itself out through utter desperation and need. When he bared his breast and offered her the knife, his brutal control operated through his urgent need to be at the center, the most hated and the most loved, the only one who matters:

Lo here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword,

Which if thou please to hide in this true breast,

And let the soul forth that adoreth thee,

I lay it naked to thy deadly stroke.

No wonder Anne couldn’t kill him. Who could strike in the face of so much need?

Richard’s successful wooing of Anne to be his wife gets inverse-mirrored late in the play by his failure to convince Elizabeth to woo her daughter to be his next bride (4.4). Chris Nietvelt, who had previously played the French herald Montjoy, staged Elizabeth as Richard’s match, in a way that Anne and even Margaret had not been. After she left the stage, having not agreed to his proposed match for her daughter, Richard gave the Brooklyn theater one last crowd-pleasing ad lib: “nasty woman.”

The night before the battle showed Richard seated in the position of power on a bare stage with his back to us, staring at his own massive image on the video screen. Slowly, the features blurred to reveal, superimposed, the faces of his victims: Edward, Henry VI, Clarence, the two young princes, Lady Anne. Their presences drove the king mad, and as the screen faded to blood red he galloped around the stage bellowing, “a horse, a horse, My kingdom for a horse!” The famous line reimagined itself as pure physical need, desire for a stronger and more durable body, a vehicle for Richard’s boundless ambition and drive. We never saw him die: as he galloped horseless around the red stage, the video curtain pulled up to reveal the entire cast, now dressed as supporters of Richmond’s invading army, with Richmond himself at the head. Richard snaked through the crowd and vanished into the backstage hallway, not to return until the ovation.

Henry VII

What did the new king mean? The cycle closed with another Henry and another coronation for Ramsey Nasr, who had started us off as Henry V. The circular turning and absence of the tyrant’s body suggested that not all evils have been firmly banished. “The dog is dead,” said Richmond, as he prepared to marry to white rose to the red. Would that all political divisions were so easily sutured.

New Year’s Day is for summing up. How many plays did I blog-review in 2015? An even ten, though unevenly distributed: three in Feb, none in March, two each in April and May, none over the summer, one each in Oct, Nov, and December. Mostly in New York, but Songs of Lear and Measure were in New Haven.

1. NYSX’s Titus Andronicus Feb 4
2. The Winter’s Tale at the Pearl Theater Feb 23
3. Songs of Lear by Song of the Goat Feb 27
4. Cry, Trojans by the Wooster Group April 11
5. Othello by Titan Theater April 27
6. Two Gents by Fiasco at Tfana May 2
7. Tis Pity by Red Bull May 6
8. Midsummer at the Pearl Theater Oct 4
9. Henry 4 at St Ann’s Nov 14
10. Measure for Measure by Fiasco Dec 5

 

I’m excited for my S15 Shakespeare class, which starts tomorrow. I threw out my tried-and-true structure for writing analytical papers and am going to try something different: writing in response to contemporary performance. All the writing assignments — three short and one long paper — will be in dialogue with contemporary performances, in most cases things we’ve seen together, but perhaps inevitably some filmed performances also. Here’s the four-pack of shows we’ll see this spring in NYC. So excited!

Titus Andronicus: by the New York Shakespeare Exchange

Tuesday Feb 3, 8:30 pm. At the HERE theater, downtown Manhattan. 145 6^th Ave (1 block south of Spring)

 The Winter’s Tale: at the Pearl Theater, 555 W. 42^nd Street (between 10^th and 11^th Aves)

Tuesday Feb 17, 7 pm.  

Cry, Trojans: by The Wooster Group (an experimental version of Troilus & Cressida). At St. Ann’s Warehouse, DUMBO, Brooklyn

 Fri March 27, 8 pm. Cost TBA

Two Gentlemen of Verona: by Fiasco Theater at Theatre for a New Audience

Fri April 24 at the Tfana theatre in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

 I’m especially looking forward to seeing what different kinds of writing this course will generate. At the risk of over-sharing, I’m going to send my class (via this blog post) to my 2014 year-in-reviews compilation of the performances I wrote about last year, including an earlier version of Cry, Trojans. Here’s the list with links, and a few notes to help contextualize the shows(for anyone who missed this list in early Jan):

1. Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance (1/17): An all-male cast from the UK brought this production to Broadway from the reconstructed Globe Theater.

2. Cry, Trojans by the Wooster Group (1/31): A workshop building up to the production we’ll see in March.

3. Twelfth Night by Pig Iron (2/21): A brilliant, rowdy, musical version of the play.

4. Antony & Cleopatra at the Public (3/13): An Angl0-American cast, in a show also over from London.

5. Red Velvet at St Ann’s (4/4): Not Shakespeare but about the life and performance history of Ira Aldridge, the first great African-American actor to play Shakespeare in London.

6. Lear at Tfana (4/23): The second production at their new space in Fort Greene.

7. Rumstick Road by the Wooster Group (5/2): This one’s a film, and not Shakespeare at all.

8. Macbeth with Kenneth Branagh (6/6): Staged at the Armory uptown, this was Sir Kenneth’s NYC debut, apparently. The production had been previously staged in an unconsecrated church in the north of England.

9. Antony & Cleopatra at the Globe (6/28): I saw this one in London, standing room at the Globe.

10. Two Gents and The White Devil in Stratford (8/7): The first two of the four plays I saw at the International Shakespeare Conference in Shakespeare’s hometown.

11. 2 Henry IV and Roaring Girl in Stratford (8/9): The next two at Stratford-upon-Avon.

12. Gaia Global Circus (by Bruno Latour) 9/28: Another non-Shakespeare show; interesting for the eco-minded.

13. Tempest 1 at LaMaMa (10/6): First of three productions of The Tempest in the East Village this fall.

14. The Master and Margarita at Yale Drama (10/26): A great production of the modern Russian masterwork.

15. Tempest 2 at LaMaMa (11/22): The second production was in Korean!

16. Pericles at the Public (11/26): A great traveling show, to which I brought last semester’s class.

17. Tamburlaine at Tfana (12/7): John Douglas Thompson, fresh from playing Satchmo on Broadway, conquers world.

18. Inherent Vice (12/15): Another film, and non Shakespeare. Further thoughts here.

19. Tempest 3 at LaMaMa (12/20): An Italian company combines Shakespeare with activism, sci fi, and late 20c history.

Two days into 2015 and I haven’t done my 2014-in-review post! I’m behind already.

In swimming as in blogging, 2014 was a year of constancy. No long swims, and several months with no water-miles logged — in Jan I was recovering from ear surgery, and in May I guess I got caught between pool and open water seasons — but a respectable total of 103.37 miles. On the blog, 12,500 page views, roughly the same as last year, and about 7k visitors to the site.

Month	Total Distance
Feb	13.01 miles (=22,900 yards, =20,940 meters)
Mar	11.25 miles (=19,800 yards, =18,105 meters)
Apr	5.26 miles (=9,250 yards, =8,458 meters)
Jun	11.96 miles (=21,050 yards, =19,248 meters)
Jul	9.24 miles (=16,260 yards, =14,869 meters)
Aug	17.88 miles (=31,471 yards, =28,777 meters)
Sep	6.16 miles (=10,850 yards, =9,921 meters)
Oct	3.35 miles (=5,900 yards, =5,395 meters)
Nov	14.80 miles (=26,050 yards, =23,820 meters)
Dec	10.45 miles (=18,400 yards, =16,825 meters)
Total	103.37 miles (=181,931 yards, =166,358 meters)

 

Of my 55 blog posts — which I think may be a new high number for me —  19 were theater or film reviews. Here’s the list starting in January, an autobio in spectating:

1. Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance (1/17)

2. Cry, Trojans by the Wooster Group (1/31)

3. Twelfth Night by Pig Iron (2/21)

4. Antony & Cleopatra at the Public (3/13)

5. Red Velvet at St Ann’s (4/4)

6. Lear at Tfana (4/23)

7. Rumstick Road by the Wooster Group (5/2)

8. Macbeth with Kenneth Branagh (6/6)

9. Antony & Cleopatra at the Globe (6/28)

10. Two Gents and The White Devil in Stratford (8/7)

11. 2 Henry IV and Roaring Girl in Stratford (8/9)

12. Gaia Global Circus (by Bruno Latour) 9/28

13. Tempest 1 at LaMaMa (10/6)

14. The Master and Margarita at Yale Drama (10/26)

15. Tempest 2 at LaMaMa (11/22)

16. Pericles at the Public (11/26)

17. Tamburlaine at Tfana (12/7)

18. Inherent Vice (12/15)

19. Tempest 3 at LaMaMa (12/20)

Most blog posts in a month was 5, in June, October, and December; least was 1 in May (what was going on in May?), followed by 2 in July and September.

I estimate those 19 reviews amount to something over 15k words that I wrote about performances in 2014. Almost all of them were only published on this blog. I have promised an article-sized version of my response to “Cry, Trojans” to Shakespeare Survey next year, after the Woosters do a final full production in St. Ann’s this coming March. Other than that, though, I haven’t published any of these reviews, though I may still combine the three Tempests at LaMaMa this past fall into something larger. (I think my last published review was on the Julie Taymor *Midsummer Night’s Dream” that opened the new theater space for Tfana in Fort Greene in fall 2013; it appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin 32:2 [Summer 2014] 307-310. But I never blogged that one.)

This coming spring semester I’m going to mine this archive as well as recent issues of Shakespeare Bulletin, and maybe a few other early modernist blogs (like Holger Syme’s Dispositio) to think about how we respond critically and rhetorically to modern performances of early modern plays. There are a bunch of great upcoming shows in NYC this spring, as I’ve noted already, and I should be able to get almost all of my students to at least a couple of them. I’ve been wanting to shake up the writing that I assign in my Shakespeare class without reducing the intense focus on close analysis, and this might be a good way to do it.

I’m toying with a couple of other 2015-ish resolutions, but those will have to wait for a later post.

 

I was asked recently for a list of Shakespeare and other early modern plays that I’m planning to see this upcoming season in New York. I decided to do a blog post in case other people would like to see what’s on my radar. I’m sure there are other things that I’m missing, and I welcome suggestions. Stay tuned for blog reviews!

Dec 2014

Tamburlaine (by Christopher Marlowe) at Theater for a New Audience, with John Douglas Thompson, one of our best young Shakespearean actors.

I’m going this coming Fri, 12/5.

The Tempest (Nella Tempesta), a multi-lingual & multicultural adaptation that includes assorted other writers besides Shakespeare at LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village.
Run is 12/11-21; I’m going Fri 12/19.

Jan 2015

Titus Andronicus at the Shakespeare Exchange (a small new Shakespeare company)
Jan 22 – Feb 7; I’m going to take students around Jan 27.

Feb 2015

The Winter’s Tale at the Pearl Theater
Feb 10 – March 15. Probably take students on Feb 17 or 24.

March 2015

Cry, Trojans (Troilus & Cressida) by the Wooster Group at St Ann’s Warehouse
March 24 – April 18. I’m taking students on March 27.

Hamlet by Classic Stage Co
March 25 –

April 2015

April 14 – May 16, 2015 Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford) Red Bull Theater

 

April 17 – May 2, 2015 Othello Titan Theatre Company (Queens)

April 24 – May 24 Two Gentlemen of Verona by Theater for a New Audience

 

May 2015

Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, Classic Stage Co
May 29 —

“What did you like about the piece?” reverse-interviewed Liz LeCompte after the screening of her film Rumstick Road, which she and Ken Kobland back-formed out of archival audio and video footage from the celebrated 1977 stage production she co-wrote with Spalding Gray, in the Wooster Group‘s originary performance. “It’s kinda morbid, now.”

The play and the film build themselves around audio interviews of Gray’s family that discuss his mother’s suicide in 1967, when Gray was in his mid-twenties. The film shows images of Gray and three other members of the Wooster Group on stage in 1977, screened along with crackling audio feauturing the voices of Gray’s father, two grandmothers, and the doctor who treated his mother in the 60s. The combined effect is powerful and eerie. Gray’s probable suicide in 2004, as well as the subsequent artistic histories of the Woosters and Gray himself, create a disorienting multi-temporality, inside and outside of the 1960s, 1970s, and 2010s. As Ben Brantley wrote in the Times, there were ghosts on the screen.

“It was like a scientific inquiry,” LeCompte said in her post-screening discussion with Richard Maxwell of New York City Players. The film showed “Rumstick Road” to have been intensely fractured, with moments of almost unbearable power. Libby Howes, playing the part of “Woman” and perhaps thinking of Gray’s mother, dominated one long scene by bowing her body forward furiously for perhaps ten full minutes. In a display of physical abandon she flung her torso forward recklessly, repeatedly, with full extension and flowing hair, as the voices of the family discussed Gray’s mother’s depression, her Christian Science beliefs, her devotion to Mary Baker Eddy.

My favorite moment, perhaps, was the lone speech by Gray’s maternal grandmother, “Gramma Horton,” who quoted Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings on the absolute superiority of spirit to flesh. Gray’s preface to this recording revealed that Gramma Horton had not wanted him to share her words on stage.

The emotional charge of the show flows from its compulsive open-ness, Gray’s defiant exposure of Gramma Horton’s urge to keep something private, of his father’s New England reserve, of Gram Gray’s being “not in sympathy” with her daughter-in-law’s religious intensity.

Everything, on stage and now on film, gets laid bare.

My working theory about the Wooster Group’s more recent plays —  I’m writing a piece on “Cry, Trojans,” for the International Shakespeare Conference this summer — is that they build alienating structures in order to overcome them, at least partly, with emotion. Theatrical pleasure operates on both sides of coherence, sympathy, and identification.

In the film’s final moment the eternally thirty-six year old celluloid ghost-Gray looks up at the audience and thanks them for coming. At that point the camera pans back, revealing in front of the stage the arrow-point of the fifty-person audience upstairs at the Performing Garage in 1977. A sketch by LeCompte in the program shows that the stage and audience together formed an X, the vertex of which was right in front of Gray’s face. Marking the spot.

LeCompte also said something about how she chooses work for the Wooster Group. “I try to find something that I don’t understand,” she said, “and something I love.”

Back when it was really cold out, wedged between #RisingWaters and “Cry, Trojans,” I had a great visit with Marina Zurkow to discuss our collaboration for the Oceanic New York book. I’ve been meaning to write up my notes since then. Busy times!

As treasures start rolling in from Oceanic depths, I’m thinking more about the shape of this book project. There’s no way to capture the fluid dynamism of the event itself — but formal play and poetic experiments can gesture toward that multiplicity in different media. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.

My notes say Marina & I were thinking about “Instructions” as a generic term — I was thinking about Marvell’s political satire “The Last Instructions to a Painter” (1657), and Marina was talking about a project she’s working on with Una Chaudhuri that will appear, in some form, at BABEL 2014. In the Oceanic New York context, I like the idea of instructions as imperatives: this is what we must do now, in our watery city. Not to save it, but to live in it.

So: a half-dozen waterlogged thoughts, based on my notes from 1/23/2014:

1. To make marshlands a pastoral space, add boats. Plus some shepherds. A few songs?

2. Look closely at asphalt borders: curbs, potholes, parking spaces, driveways. The way in is the same as the way out.

3. The best way for making soft edges on squares is friction. Lots of friction.

4. Look at Newtown Creek and see History. (Ignore the smell.)

5. If you’re floating in an inflatable raft in Buttermilk Channel during a hundred-year’s flood, and you’re blowing as hard as you can into a little plastic nozzle in order to keep the raft full and buoyant, you’re matching two fluid flows against each other. The idea is to use the flow of air from your lungs into the plastic raft to counter the flow of salt water into New York Harbor. It might be possible, for a little while.

6. Drowning, as Sebastian Junger explains in The Perfect Storm, is a form of radical experimentation, being up against the “Zero-Limit Point.” “Holding our breath is killing us,” Junger reasons the body might say to itself when underwater, “and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in” (142). He’s describing New York City as well as George Clooney.

At some point I’ll want to think more about porousness, marshlands, that messy mid-point between Utopia Parkway and dystopian visions. There will be more instructions to come. Maybe some swimming lessons too?