Much Ado About Nothing

There is a distinction in poetry between poems that rhyme and poems where simply the last word of each line (or every other line or whatever) rhyme. Rhyming poems, done well, have meter and rhythm and music. Poems where the last syllable of the last word of each line happen to share a syllable feel forced.

That's the way I feel about most productions of Shakespeare that are draped in non-Elizabethan costume and stage set. It's as if the director is adding a dash of self-conscious "edge" and shoving the play into an idea that they think good Shakespeare does.

All of which is to say I groaned a little bit when Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedick show up in Messina clothed in soldier's dress circa 1939, and somewhere in the distance a grammophone unwinds. But the American Bard Theater Company's production of "Much Ado About Nothing," actually used the period set to good effect. The playbill told us that the men were returning to Italy at the end of the Spanish Civil War. At the end of the play, Don John, the evil half-brother has absconded, but is returning "with armed men."

But the wedding feast goes on.

"Think not on him till to-morrow," Benedick says, "Strike up, pipers."
They dance on, oblivious to the disaster that will soon interrupt their happy garden party.

The Case for Guilt

We usually think that feeling guilty is pretty unproductive, but watching the Frog and Peach Theatre Company's Macbeth on the tail of Hamlet suggests that guilt propelled Shakespeare to pen some of his most famous lines.

Hamlet and Macbeth are plagued by guilt even when only considering acting badly, and while Queen Gertrude and Lady Macbeth come to guilt more slowly, some of their most famous speeches are born from their apprehension of such personal reckonings. Guilt comes to these characters as visual hallucinations--the "dagger of the mind," the ghost of Hamlet's father, Lady Macbeth's bloody hands--partly because theater is a visual art and we must be made to see the guilt rather than only hear of it. Yet it is the guilt which makes them human, evoking that pity which Aristotle deemed essential to good (and socially beneficial) tragedy, so while Hamlet and Macbeth have certainly "supped full of horrors" in ways most of us can never imagine, their mental torments are familiar to us. After Macbeth slays Duncan, he comes wretched to Lady Macbeth asking "Wherefore could I not pronounce 'Amen'?" Certainly we all might recognize and take caution from our failures to speak the right words at the right time. When Duncan tells a soldier: "So well thy words become thee as thy wounds," we might likewise wish to be thus applauded.

More on Those Potted Plants

I must confess: I am a sucker for site-specific art and performance. Put me in front of a song-and-dance show, and after a while, I check my watch. Put that song-and-dance show in front of abandoned warehouse or empty field or out on the boulevards somewhere, and,well, sold.

That said, I was a little dubious about this one. The World Financial Center, at least in my mind, is so, blegh. Maybe its the proximity to the equally blegh Battery Park City, or the PF Chang's (or whatever) and their ilk that occupy by the ground floor, but the place always just seemed like exhibit A in the mallification of Manhattan.

Hamlet here however really made me look at the building in a new way. Not just the light coming in off the harbor and lighting up the food court, but the way the actors framed different parts of the structure. The building still looks cheaply made, but, behind Hamlet, it looks cheaply made in the way that a stage set looks cheaply made. With its columns and marble floors, the royals of Denmark made the WFC seem almost regal.

Watching Hamlet through a potted plant

The irony was not lost on me that the first free production of Shakespeare we’ve seen was staged in various spaces of the World Financial Center. This democratic and innovative approach meant that New York Classical Theatre’s Hamlet drew an audience of over 150 people, all of whom parked their tushes on various spots of the WFC’s well-polished floors, willingly heaving themselves up when directed to follow the actors to the next impromptu stage.

It was good that the play is so well known since the audience certainly provided its own distracting sideshow. Audience members shuffled along with Starbucks’ lattes or kids in tow, and one of my temporary neighbors brought sunflower seeds in a plastic bag which he shelled, rustled, and chewed throughout Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost. Such intimacies forged a strong sense of community, asserting theater's animate and pertinent spirit, in a way that the internet never can.

Yet more meaningfully, the site of the performance blurred the lines between the theatrical world and the world we all inhabit. Which of course means including the unpleasant truths of The Gap and American Express. But such an approach also encompassed the gorgeous red sunlight that poured down equally on audience and actors alike, transforming all into glowing refractions in some larger play of mystery. The world and the play with its ghosts just down the street at the site of the World Trade Center, gave the seemingly random choice of location a surprising profundity which touched the realm of feeling more than that of thought. (Fortinbras echoes this when he bemoans: O proud Death,/ What feast is toward in thine eternal cell/ That thou so many princes at a shot/ So bloodily hast struck?“) As the play’s content tended towards death, so did the world around us darken. But when Hamlet (the masterful Justin Blanchard) delivered his peroration upon death, visitors in the WFC ascended on escalators out of sight to some celestial afterlife where, as Queen Gertrude (powerfully acted by Rita Rehn) says of Hamlet, we all “with the incorporal air do hold discourse.”

Dear Mr. Pacino:

Dear Mr. Pacino:

I have always admired your work from afar, so it pains me to be the one to tell you this.
In case you are away, working on some movie or some such and haven't been able to follow the off-off(off?) Broadway scene here in New York, you should know that your name and reputation are being dragged through the mud.
Let me explain.
Currently, the American Theatre of Actors is performing Henry V. On the playbill, on the back, under, "This production has been made possible by," along with the usual foundations, appears your name.
Now, while I don't know how much you did to make this production possible--and I suspect not much--I also don't know if you've ever got a chance to see it.
I hope not, but if you did, I am sure you would petition to have your name nowhere near this thing. For Mr. Pacino, the ATA's recent production of Henry V may be the most wretched thing on a New York stage, since, well, the ATA's production of Taming of the Shrew.
I hesitate to even call this thing a play. This is actors--a term I use advisedly--showing that they have memorized their lines, woodenly waiting until one has finished before, with a sigh, beginning their own oration. When a conversation happens between the players, they may as well be talking to a wall. The actors literally bang on their chests as if in a neanderthal parody. It is a production without a point or a pulse.
Mr. Pacino, if you truly had any part in making this play possible, stop. If you did not, and your name has somehow been attached to it without your consent, do everything you can, please, to redress this injustice.
Your reputation can survive another Devil's Advocate.
No way it survives any more by ATA.

War is not all talk

Henry V, though one of the best known history plays, still presents a challenge when it comes to staging since the crowd scenes require some imaginative directorial moves. Unfortunately ATA's lifeless production lacked more than just imagination. Actors had successfully memorized the lines but their affectless delivery compounded with long periods of virtual immobility made the play's full three and a half hours excruciating to sit through. Gluttons for punishment, and loyal to our cause, we did so nonetheless, emerging starved and furious upon the end of a spring night with a lot more fire in our tirades than in the rants the French and English soldiers threw at one another. They were supposed to be showing a real battle, and they didn't even smolder. That the performance furthermore started at least fifteen minutes late was an added affront, explainable only by the fact that there were sixteen people including us in the audience. After intermission that had whittled down to eleven. The actors who made the play passably tolerable at rare moments were Kate Tenetko in the role of Hostess Nell, Cory Hibbs as Pistol, and Tobias Shaw as the Dauphin. My advice to them is to run a million miles from another ATA production. Sadly this is the second one we've seen and it certainly didn't make up for the last.

Thankfully, the next day we saw Peter Brook's refreshing interpretation of several sonnets in Love is my sin and were reminded how simple good acting can be. With careful and sincere gesture Michael Pennington in particular showed the sheer range of emotion that a simple face and body can transmit. I'd see him do the entire Henry V as a one-man show any day.

"Both right and sinister"

The idea of casting Zephyer Rep's "Midsummer Night's Dream" with an all-female cast seems an appropriate way to update a play once acted entirely by men. Such a transformation has the promise of undermining the play's heterosexual underpinnings, which are pretty solid despite its brief flirtation with bestiality. Kymm Zuckert (Bottom) and Caroline Kessler (Lysander) amp up this production's queer innuendos by sporting black leather and chains, but despite the potential offered in the play's dialog--"I am a man as other men are"--the play reinforced gender roles rather than calling them much into question. Lysander repeatedly grabbed and pointed to "his" crotch, and Helena and Hermia engaged in such a screeching "girl fight" that it was virtually impossible to understand a word of what was said. This production made clear that it is not enough to have a clever concept for re-envisioning Shakespeare--the words too must be interpreted so that the conceit is more than merely superficial. Why set the play in the 80s for instance?

More Midsummer in Midspring

In our enthusiasm for the Blessed Unrest production of Midsummer Night's Dream, we forgot I think to talk about the actual play.

Midsummer Night's Dream is often performed and its plot convoluted, so, in brief, it is the story of two couples' courting complications after they wander into the fairy woods and run across impish supernaturals there.

"The course of true love never did run smooth," Lysander says to Hermia after her father forbids their wedding, and indeed, although the play is often dismissed as light romp (probably written for a marriage ceremony) it seems to me to say something profound about the nature of human love. "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind," says Helena, but according to the play, love is neither. Once Puck places the love-in-idleness flower on Lysander, his affection for Hermia, an affection that previously they were both willing to die for, is re-directed.

Is the point here that someone all love, or all human feeling, is mysterious or even arbitrary? Helena has a serious of tricks to woo Demetrius, including revealing her friends' elopement plans, but not until he too is struck by the flower does he come around.

Thoughts?

Blessed Unrest

Agreed.

This Midsummer Night's Dream was perhaps the most delightful play we have seen so far. We had seen so many stinkers as we crawled out to the odd corners of Manhattan for this project, and Blessed Unrest's promise of "theater for the adventurous" and invitation to come over for drinks made me worry they were going to try and get us liquored up before a performance of the play in pig latin or with sock puppets.

Instead, this was a tight, well-acted, and fun production, right down to a choreographer Lady Gaga dance at the end of the first act. Vaishnavi Sharma and especially Hannah Wilson are terrific. Even the space, which looked like a scrubbed down Soho loft circa 1975, including the coughing pipes, was a vast improvement over the other church basements we've crept into

We've got a full-deck of Shakespeare in the days and weeks to come. I dare say I'd see this one again.

"Your play needs no excuse"

Thank god for "Blessed Unrest's" production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." This diamond in the rough restored my faith in off-off Broadway, a faith that wavered rather seriously since we began our project. This company's energetic and crystal-clear presentation of a play packed with fairies, amazon queens, magic elixirs, and shape-changing donkeys made Shakespeare's magical forest thoroughly relevant and captivating from start to finish. Opening with a provocatively naked Hippolyta, the actors deftly navigated the themes of infidelities and inconstancy, while amping up polyamorous innuendos in campy costumes that came off bit by bit as the play went on. There was a surprising and wonderful dance sequence at the end of the first half, and even the silly play within the play was performed so well that the audience guffawed despite the hour. A production like this makes me glad that as we check the upcoming Shakespeare performances in New York, we continue to say, along with Theseus, "I will hear that play." Everyone should.

Against frippery

Near the end of "The Tempest" my favorite characters, Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano are sidetracked from their mission to kill Prospero by a chest of fine clothes. This scene could very well stand as a warning to those attending BAM's Bridge Project production of the play, since its flashy theatrics overshadow the play's most interesting themes of exile and shipwreck. In Mendes' interpretation the magic has the upperhand instead, so Ariel appears with gigantic metal wings spanning half the stage like a creature right out of "Metropolis," fire and smoke overwhelm the theater, and Caliban (ok, this was great) emerges from below stage through a circle of sand. The actors are so busy pacing around that circle in much of the play, kicking up sand and taking far too much delight in showing us how clever the stage set is that their words disappear upstage off into the smoke. I couldn't hear half of the play.

Fortunately, having seen their coproduction of "As You Like It" the play was saved for me by thinking about how the one overlaid the other. Casting the same actors in similar roles in both plays (storytellers Prospero-Jacques; loyal servants Adam-Gonzalo; the usurpers Duke Frederick-Antonio) highlights Shakespeare's systemic structure as a scaffolding for his plays' real brilliance: language. (On that note, check out "Double Falsehood".)

What $9 In New York Gets You

* A one-day Metrocard "Fun Pass"

* A ride on the Coney Island Cyclone

* And, at the Strand, a hardcover copy of a 1972 of Acting Shakespeare, by John Gielgud.

What $9 does not get you, apparently, is anything close to a decent performance of Taming of the Shrew. This became abundantly clear after we forked over the change sat through nearly 3 hours of the American Theatre of Actors performance of the play.

Where to begin on this thing? With Gregory O'Connor's Grumio, who for some reason thought it wise to pirouette and fly across stage every time his master Petruchio bid him hence? With Michael Matucci's absurd too-cool-for-school Petruchio, which made him sound like he belonged unironically at this high school reunion. No line of Shakespeare could go unadorned in this production, but had to be met with an arched eyebrow, upturned palms or something that stage whispered, "Boy, these guys sure are c-c-c-razy!!!"

The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare's funniest plays. Only rarely did a chuckle ever escape the lips of the audience on Sunday, a damning indictment of a production of this play as possible.

Tragic motes & motley coats

As You Like It is billed as a comedy, and in its sugar-coated marriage finale BAM's Bridge Project adaptation lives up to this. But the play is constantly hinting at the ways that tragedy refuses to go away. The first act ends in the delicate death of Adam--Alvin Epstein who plays the starving elderly servant, slips away so gently in Orlando's arms, that the simplicity of the moment is made the more momentous for its being under-acted.

His death is a morbid counterpart to the boisterous finale. Adam (whose name suggests not only the first man but also the first mortal man) haunts the rest of the play in which characters are so often enjoined to be happy--"Prithee, be cheerful," and "search for cheer." When the singers gorgeously intone "This life is most jolly" the melancholic tune Sam Mendes has chosen for it, suggests the very opposite. When Jacques, who renounces the pleasures of companionship, remarks that he envies foolish Touchstone's "motley coat" of speech, we might recognize that each comedy is rendered happy only through its patches of sadness. The cloud is silver but its lining is dark.

Marriage for Marriage

What struck me about Measure for Measure--a play I had not seen or read or knew very much about--were the different ways that marriage was used. It seemed to involve both pain and punishment on the one hand, and pleasure and reward on the other.
Angelo is instructed to marry Mariana as a punishment for his deceit; Lucio must marry his whore as punishment for slandering the Duke. No wedded bliss for these four. There were condemned to look at each others' ugly mugs as payback for carnal knowledge.
But, lest we think marriage merely be a death sentence among the Elizabethan set, The Duke provides the only romantic spark by, improbably, asking Isabella to marry him. His offer is, by the parlance of today, a companionate union: " What's mine is yours and what is yours is mine."
Charming, I guess, but what can't help but wonder what the good Duke thinks of an institution that he can banish people to for crimes against the state

"Why art thou thus attired, Andronicus?" or Do Clothes Make the Man?

On the subway on our way to see "Measure for Measure" at the Duke Theater, David was rereading "Catcher in the Rye" in honor of Salinger's recent death. Emerging in Times Square's hubbub, he noted how little people seem to care about presenting themselves in public. It's certainly true that a lot has changed since the porkpie hat, the Saturday tie, the bolero suit and heels, the bonnets and canes. But Shakespeare still has a lot to say about dressing up.

While Titus rather foolishly dresses up to look a lot like the Swedish chef (this was in a performance the next day at the American Globe Theater--upstairs in a church that bizarrely reeked of incense(it was Episcopal)) by the time Shakespeare got round to writing "Measure for Measure," he was taking clothes a lot more seriously.

The play is filled with "seemers." Isabella berates Angelo "Seeming! Seeming," and echoes of seams and schemes resound. Lucio describes Friar Ludowick (the Duke) of being "Honest in nothing but his clothes..." What can we take of Shakespeare's sartorial universe when we're back on the streets and riding the subways?