Cuffs, bars, guns, and Shakespeare

Malcolm Harris on Shakespeare in prison. The whole essay is excellent, but I was especially taken with two paragraphs, one from Brecht and one from Harris.

Brecht:

Shakespeare pushes the great individuals out of their human relationships (family, state) out onto the heath, into complete isolation, where he must pretend to be great in his decline … Future times will call this kind of drama a drama for cannibals and they’ll say that the human being was eaten as Richard III, with pleasure at the beginning and with pity at the end, but he was always eaten up.

Harris:

If the carceral system is the country’s fundamental fact, then its fundamental logic is that of cuffs, bars, and guns. No readings or performances are going to change that, but they can change the way we see it from the outside. Without a story about 2,266,800 bad choices, America is just a country that keeps its underclasses in cages. Shakespeare’s drama for cannibals lends a sense of noble inevitability to a prison system that’s not only historically and globally specific, but exceptional. It’s fitting theatre for a society that eats its own.

Also, there is mention of C.L.R. James's great Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways.

Shakespeare on Screen: Coriolanus and Private Romeo

A Shakespearean double feature: one, a relatively faithful adaptation of one of Shakespeare's least-loved tragedies, fully populated with Famous Brits; the other, a reconfiguration of Romeo and Juliet in an all-male military academy, made on a clearly minuscule budget with a small cast of pretty unknown actors. Neither is entirely a success, but they're not boring, and both are valiant attempts worth at least the time it takes to watch them.

Coriolanus was the last of Shakespeare's Roman plays (after Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra) and it has never had the popularity of its predecessors, despite being at least their equal in its rhetoric and drama. Indeed, T.S. Eliot once wrote that, "Coriolanus may be not as 'interesting' as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success." (Meanwhile, Shaw called it "the greatest of Shakespear’s comedies.") Shakespeare took the basic story from Plutarch, but adapted it for greater resonance with the circumstances of early-17th Century England. He also simplified it for dramatic purposes — Plutarch's Coriolanus is politically experienced and shrewd, while a central fault of Shakespeare's Coriolanus is his inability to adapt his brute military talent to the political (or social) realm.

One of the reasons Coriolanus has probably not been as popular as many of Shakespeare's other tragedies is that its central figure is unlikeable, but not delightfully so. Richard III is utterly detestable, but the character is beloved of actors and audiences because he absolutely revels in his nastiness, and thus allows us to do so as well. (The same could be said of Titus Andronicus — Julie Taymor brilliantly showed how much our enchantment with such Shakespearean characters is similar to our enchantment with such characters as Hannibal Lecter.) But Shakespeare keeps us at more distance from Coriolanus. His verse is rough, raw, sharp; he has nothing but contempt for the masses and yet also loathes the aristocracy. His only comfortable home is a battlefield. More than any other of Shakespeare's protagonists, Coriolanus is the subject of other characters' conversations, and so his function within the play is less that of a tragic (anti-)hero than of a foil: through their responses to him and interpretations of him, the characters stand as a portrait of their society.

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker, and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake.

From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it.

The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake does exactly the opposite, causing the sea to pull back and reveal all it had hidden beneath it in the "most secret level of our world".  (From our world the sea steals things, hides them.)  The list of revealed items is egalitarian both in type and era: ballroom candalabra and toilet bowls, barnacled swords and Kalashnikovs, automatic dishwashers and baptismal fonts, wrecked ships and aircraft and tourist buses.

The narrator tells us that "it is given that time does not, never did, exist down here where the materiality of the past and present as they lie has no chronological order, all is one, all is nothing -- or all is possessible at once."  Time and class don't matter at the bottom of the ocean, where all these items are equally useless -- all can be possessed because none have value or cost -- but the revelation of them to human eyes inspires assessment and desire.  Value is born, apparently with no cost.

And so people "rushed to take; take, take."  Look at the punctuation there: semi-colon, comma comma.  The first take is the initial desire to own, the curiosity of wondering what an item might be worth, but with the initial possession comes pure desire, the need to quickly grab as much as possible just for the sake of possessing, the madness of brute avarice.  People's justifications follow, but anything can be justified.

The nonhuman world doesn't understand ("gasping sea-plants gaped at them") and the people do not notice that all that is here are inanimate objects.  The water took the fish back, leaving only the things.  These people, deformed by desire, are no longer natural.  Their allegiance is not to the living or the dead, but to that which never lived.

Possession and desire give them comfort -- these are people whose houses and livelihoods have been destroyed by the earthquake, people who have been made helpless by nature, but they can forget that in the bounty and the mad, blind, unappeasable ache of their yearning.

Obsessive greed blinds them, and the sea returns and swallows them up into its indifferent equality, making the people the equal of the things they so coveted.

But this is just the first section of the story.  It is, the narrator tells us, "what is known" from what was reported by witnesses and journalists.  It is what was turned into a story, legend even.  The second part changes the focus from the objective to the personal, from wide-angle to zoom.

The narrator gives us this transition as a particular sort of knowledge: "But the writer knows something no-one else knows; the sea-change of the imagination."

We move from fantastic facts to fantastic fantasy, two sorts of knowledge, one a general sort and one the sort known only by a particular type of person: the writer.

Interestingly, the next paragraph, admittedly written, begins like a tale told: "Now listen..."  The writer takes on a persona and pretends to be wielding words made of air, not print; words that appeal to ears, not eyes.  The writer pretends to be telling an old tale, to be using the mode of the oral storytellers, but it is a tale for our time.  We are given a character, a man who has desired a specific object his entire life, but he does not know what the object is.  This differentiates him from the people who went to the sea-bed in search not of something but of anything.  He wants something, but in its mystery it could be anything.

He has things in his house, some of which he appreciates and some of which he doesn't.  Most notably, there is the print of Hokusai's "Great Wave" behind his bed, which "if it had been on the wall facing him it might have been more than part of the furnishings".  His bed is not the sea-bed, the wave is but a representation of a wave.

He is a man full of time: retired, living in an old house above the sea.  He has escaped the excitement of his earlier days.  He is content, but that contentment and quiet is shattered by the earthquake, the Great Event: "the sight from his lookout of what could never have happened, never ever have been vouchsafed, is a kind of command."  The reality of the impossible impels him to join humanity again, to join them on the sea-bed, to search, again, for all he desires.  Quality and value are gone ("detritus=treasure") when the past is stripped bare.

He wants one thing, not anything, and so he is different from the other looters and holds nothing in his hands until finally he finds his object, which the narrator tells us in parentheses and with a question mark might be a mirror.  Something to look at himself with.  "It's as if the impossible is true...  It could be revealed only by something that had never happened..."  What he sought could only be revealed by fantasy.

He finally has what he wants, and just then the wave returns, linked by the narrator's words to the Hokusai print: art enters reality and claims a victim, dragging the man and his precious possession down to timeless, meaningless death.  He is complete now, finally, and outside history.

The next paragraph tells us that this man was not anonymous: he was known "in the former regime circles in the capital".  Along with his corpses are other corpses, old and new, including "those dropped from planes during the dictatorship" -- anonymous, forgotten, unrecognized, hidden by "the accomplice of the sea".  The sea is not the disinterested creature of a nature separate from humanity; it is, or has been, also a tool used by humans to support their power.

"No carnation or rose floats."  No symbol of love or mourning, no sign of the living who care for the dead.  The old regime is gone, but the waters still do their job.  Neither oceans nor dictators memorialize what they hide, destroy, devour.  Is the people's avarice so awful it deserves such punishment?  Is the old man's sin worse than the dictator's?  The members of the old regime still live in the capital, still pass news back and forth, but the old man has left the realm of the human, our world and our time.

The New Yorker version of the story ends here, but the version in Gordimer's eponymous collection adds one more sentence, one that for the second time echoes Shakespeare's Tempest: "Full fathom five" (cf. "sea-change of the writer's imagination" above). Shakespeare's old man gave up his magic powers of control and creation and rejoined humanity.  Gordimer's old man's fate is, perhaps, more bitter.

The old man and all the other drowned desirers are now rich, strangely so, turned into objects, preserved outside of time, unremembered and unknown by anyone beyond the sea-nymphs, those creatures of fantasy and imagination.

NH Theatre Events

Posting here has been light because at the moment I'm in rehearsals for The Winter's Tale in Sandwich, New Hampshire. It's the realization of a lifelong dream -- I am getting to play the King of Bohemia! (Otherwise known as Polixenes, but I insist everyone refer to me as the King of Bohemia. I rule over many cafés and have my own line of designer liberal guilt.) For anyone who happens to be nearby, the show runs August 11-16 at the outdoor stage of the Sandwich Fairgrounds at 2pm, rain or shine.

Also, I haven't yet had a chance to write about my experience as a participant in the first of the Write On Golden Pond playwrighting/screenwriting workshops offered by Whitebridge Farm Productions here in central NH. I've known workshop leader Ernest Thompson (winner of one of them Oscar thingies for writing an obscure indie flick called On Golden Pond) for longer than either of us would care to admit, and for five or six years I participated in an informal playwrighting group he led, so I more or less knew what I was getting myself into, but the workshop exceeded all my expectations -- easily one of the best I've participated in, and having been a playwrighting major at NYU for three years, I've been in a lot of workshops.

A second writing workshop is coming up in two weeks, and I can honestly and enthusiastically recommend it for anybody interested in dramatic writing. It's an intense, immensely fulfilling experience. Also, I'm told financial aid is available. And New Hampshire in the summer is beautiful. (Well, when it's not raining. But even the rain is beautiful!)

Slings & Arrows

It took a few recommendations (including Kelley Eskridge mentioning it and Abigail Nussbaum writing a comprehensive review), but I recently watched all 18 episodes of the Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows, a smart and tremendously entertaining show about a theatre festival very similar to the Stratford Festival, where many of the actors in the series have appeared.

Stratford is a place of magic for me -- I have only been there once, in the mid-90s, but it was among the greatest theatre experiences of my life. Or, rather, two productions were among the greatest theatre experiences of my life: productions of Amadeus and The Merry Wives of Windsor (we also saw Macbeth and The Gondoliers -- the former was, I thought then and expect I would think now, dull and awful; the latter was well done, but it's not among my favorite Gilbert & Sullivan shows, so while I appreciated it, I didn't feel much passion for it). I have long lost the program from that summer, but two actors so impressed me that their names have stuck with me ever since: Stephen Ouimette and William Hutt.

Ouimette played Mozart in Amadeus to Brian Bedford's Salieri. He gave the role a range I had never imagined it could possess, making the character into something entirely different from what Tom Hulce did in the movie. Ouimette was also in Merry Wives, and one of the things I most remember is that I didn't realize it was the same person for quite a while. Here was an actor playing utterly different characters in repertory, something I had never experienced before, and which opened my eyes to what real acting can be: the challenge, the fun, the beauty of it. But the real revelation was Hutt as Falstaff. I had just finished high school, and up to that point had not seen any truly great performances of Shakespeare, and few performances of his comedies at all. They never seemed very funny to me on the page, and reading them was much more of a chore than reading the tragedies and histories. But I laughed throughout this production of Merry Wives, and most especially at Hutt's performance.

Stephen Ouimette was one of the stars of Slings & Arrows, and William Hutt was a guest star in the third season, giving a tremendously moving performance as an elderly actor who wants to play Lear before he dies (Hutt himself would die at age 87 in June 2007, less than a year after the end of Slings & Arrows). The presence of these two actors alone was enough to ensure my interest, but what held that interest was the intelligence of the writing and the impressively high quality of the acting from the first episode to the last.

From early on, Slings & Arrows was conceived as a three-season show, with each season following the ups and downs of putting on a particular production -- Hamlet in the first season, Macbeth in the second, and King Lear in the third. The events in the lives of the characters often parallel or echo the events within the plays, and the show deliberately explores ideas of youth in season one, middle age (and ambition) in season two, and old age (and mortality) in season three. It doesn't all work -- the second season is somewhat weaker than the first and third; I never bought the motivation for Paul Gross's character's insanity; the third season suggests an answer to the question of whether Ouimette's character is really a ghost or a figment of Gross's character's imagination, a question that should never have been answered, etc. -- but there are no episodes that felt like clunkers, and remarkably few episodes that didn't feel tightly conceived and cleverly executed.

One of the smart choices made by the writers of the show (Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney primarily -- Coyne and McKinney also play recurring characters) was to treat Shakespeare's works seriously and respectfully, but to make the series itself a comedy. All the characters are basically stereotypes, with a generally predictable range of personality and emotion, though the main characters do develop over the course of the three seasons (I would call the musical theatre actors in the third season caricatures if I hadn't lived with such people). But most of the real moments of vivid, multidimensional acting occur in the scenes from Shakespeare's plays -- not just because Shakespeare could write brilliantly complex characters, but because Shakespeare's plays offer us insight into what is going on within these character's lives. The characters don't become fully real, fully human until they are performing. Which is utterly appropriate to a show that is primarily about actors.

Because it is a comedy, there is very little about the arc of each season of Slings & Arrows that is a surprise. We know each show will be a huge hit (artistically if not financially) and that the main characters will all triumph in the end, just as we know that everybody will get married at the end of a Shakespearean comedy. Suspense about the end result is not what holds our interest -- what keeps us engaged is wondering how we will get to that end, and the marvelous individual scenes along the way. The Slings & Arrows writers loved symmetry, and they had great fun pairing characters and situations, creating subplots to comment on the main plots, etc., and the show's directors and editors took advantage of every such moment, particularly as they used the progress of one production at the festival to comment on another.

The overall vision of the show is a sentimental, idealistic, and simplistic one, a vision that very much celebrates the mystical, Romantic idea of actors as magicians and holy fools. In a documentary about the world of the theatre, such a vision would be infuriating; in Slings & Arrows it is charming. It charms us into believing -- at least for the hours we are watching the show -- that the lines between art and commerce can be clearly drawn, that art can heal wounds and make peace, that everyone has a great performance somewhere inside them, that sincerity matters more than anything else. Though its characters have their cynical moments, the show itself isn't the least bit cynical. If it weren't so funny, and if scene by scene it weren't so well written, the Pollyanna approach to life that is at the show's core would be insufferable. Instead, Slings & Arrows presents us with a fantasy world we all might want to live in. It's certainly one I was in no hurry to leave, perhaps because after years of disillusioning experiences with theatre at all levels, I still have enough of an idealist buried somewhere inside me to believe that maybe it isn't entirely a fantasy world.

Meanwhile, up at Stratford they're doing Taming of the Shrew, and so am I right now. They're also doing Romeo & Juliet, which I taught for the first time this past school year (badly, I must say, but so it goes). The company that produces our Shrew, Advice to the Players, also runs a camp for kids, and a bunch of those kids (from this year and past ones) decided to put on their own production of R&J, directed by and starring them, the day after Shrew closes. Because they thought it would be fun. Because there's something about Shakespeare and about the theatre that they love. Idealists and lunatics, magicians and holy fools! And it gives my heart great joy!

Of Sunday and Macbeth

My yearnings for theatre were sated last week when, through luck and happenstance, I got to accompany friends to two of the most talked-about shows in New York at the moment: Sunday in the Park with George at the Roundabout Theatre and Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As events and opportunities to spend time with friends, both were completely pleasurable. As aesthetic artifacts, both were disappointing.

The better of the shows in terms of script is the lesser of the shows in terms of production: Macbeth. The central problems are that the play is a hodgepodge of ideas and techniques and that Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth gives a one-note performance in the key of overwrought. (Patrick Stewart's performance is, like the whole show, occasionally extraordinary and generally competent, but lacking coherence.) The director, Rupert Goold, has chosen to put the play in quasi-Stalinist dress and on a single set: a white-tiled hospital ward-asylum-torture chamber, augmented with projected imagery when necessary. It's an effective choice, giving the play a sense of unity and menace, particularly in conjunction with the choice to make the witches into three nurses. The opening scene with the bloody soldier is hilarious at first, because the actor playing the soldier performs like an epileptic animatron, but the segue into the next scene, when the witches wonder when they'll meet again, is marvelously creepy.

Indeed, many of my favorite moments in the play were the scene transitions. Talking with other people who have seen the show, many of whom liked it far more than I, the banquet scene gets mentioned as a high point, and for me it was so, but not as much for the scene itself as for the movement from the scene of Banquo's murder (on a train, staged clumsily) to the banquet -- there is a puzzling shift to the entire cast singing something as if they've briefly been beamed in from Sweeney Todd, but just because it's puzzling doesn't mean it's not effective (I'm a sucker for sudden choral impulses), and then the chorus becomes the banquet. It's a lovely bit of choreography. Banquo gets to charge in, face and chest drenched in gore, and jump on the table, and then comes the intermission (or "interval" as the announcement at BAM said -- apparently they even imported the house manager from England). The scene is repeated when the second half of the play begins, this time sans Banquo and gore, so we get to see that Macbeth is -- shock of shocks -- delusional! It's one of the dubious choices that gives this production of Shakespeare's shortest play a running time closer to that of your average production of Hamlet.

Ultimately, my favorite performances were those of actors in smaller roles, particularly Christopher Patrick Nolan as the porter, portrayed with such diabolical menace that the character seems to have little to do with Shakespeare's original, but is nonetheless captivating to behold -- many of the other actors strain for similarly overblown effects, but produce characters that are less compelling, less nuanced, more like a reanimated bag of tics and tricks than a person.

Nonetheless, this is absolutely the best production of Macbeth I've ever seen. That is faint praise, though, because for some reason, though Macbeth is the Shakespeare play I have seen most often (yes, even more than A Midsummer Night's Dream, but that's probably because I've vowed never to see that one ever again lest it reach levels of fatal toxicity in my system), I have nonetheless had the bad luck to see nothing but truly atrocious productions of it, including an utterly lifeless version at the 1995 Stratford Festival in Ontario.

(I should note that Rick Bowes said the only reason I didn't like Kate Fleetwood's performance was that I couldn't adjust to the nontraditional casting of a woman in the role.)

Sunday in the Park is an altogether better production, one with strong and thoughtful performances throughout, and a coherent style and vision. My primary complaint was with the orchestra -- well, band, really. The production began at a tiny British theatre (yes, this is another import, a fact Michael Feingold has complained about) and despite moving to very modern and expansive digs here in the U.S., the band has not been expanded, and the lack is painful to anyone who knows the original soundtrack -- excruciatingly painful at a couple of key moments, in fact. Plenty of musicals can survive just with a piano -- I once saw a perfectly good Sweeney Todd performed that way -- but the orchestrations of Sunday in the Park provide a level of meaning to the show that is simply not available without at least a few more instruments (preferably some brass) than the new production has. The final moments of Act I, with the song "Sunday", are breathtaking with an orchestra, and while they were still affecting at the Roundabout -- it's one of the best moments in all of Stephen Sondheim's work -- the emotional power was greatly reduced from what it could be.

Sunday in the Park provides a few gnarly problems to any production. First, there's the technical challenge: how do you assemble one of the most famous post-Impressionist paintings during the course of the first act, for instance? This production solves the technical challenges cleverly -- with projected animations. Even in these days of massive Broadway spectacles, the animations in Sunday in the Park are impressive because they make the stage itself into a blank piece of canvas, allowing quick and occasionally stunning transformations. Sometimes the animations are distracting, but more often they are magical, as props and set pieces that previously seemed solid evaporate into thin air.

The other problem with Sunday in the Park is the second act. Critics have, ever since the original production of 1983/84, complained about the second act, and its shallow satire of the 1980s art world has not aged well. This is, though, primarily a problem with one song, albeit a long one: "Putting It Together" (rewritten to somewhat better effect for the revue of that title, where it became about putting a show together) -- the rest of the act is, though a bit ethereal and certainly less impressive than the first act, not particularly painful. The new production does its best with "Putting It Together", but Daniel Evans makes George so unsympathetic, so much the stereotype of the bristling and bitter and whiny artist, that the emotional possibilities of the second act's conclusion are lost, and what remains feels forced and sour.

It is, though, a generally enjoyable production, though seldom transcendent in the way the material can be.