Girl fight!

It's too bad girls don't like each other much in Shakespeare. It would be nice if our clever bard had left a few more words of wisdom for his female followers that weren't about feuding sisters abandoning senile fathers to the elements, or ladies threatening to dash babies' brains out.

Maybe it was the Secret Theatre's staging of The Taming of the Shrew that got me thinking about Shakespeare's gals. Their fun interpretation put a Mormon spin on the famous morality play, casting Petruccio in a particularly sinister light as a Warren Jeffs look-alike played by Richard McDonald. Kate mercilessly led her sister Bianca onstage by a rope, and clawed at her father for his indifference. (Brief aside: the hair design was a stroke of sublime genius).

In the many Midsummer Night's Dreams we've seen lately Helena and Hermia are always directed to communicate midsummer in jealous high-pitched shrieks. Last night's production in Central Park was no exception. The Gorilla Rep's disappointing romp in the park in conjunction with an all-Norwegian cast of actors was no Smiles of a Summer Night. Actors sped so fast through their lines while galumphing around on the grass that I was glad I knew what the play was about, since it was impossible to get much sense of it from their deliveries.

Midsummer Nights' Dreams and Dreams and Dreams

Identity, and desire, and taste are fickle things, A Midsummer Night's Dreams says.

The Mortal Folly's production was the better of the two, I agree with you on that, L. It was the group's first production, not just of this season, but of any season, and there was a real electricity and energy to the performance. My favorite bit, besides the music that you rightly point out was pretty top notch, was how dirty everyone was by the end of their time in Arden. This wasn't no roll around on the Great Lawn; those escaping kids went full-on into the wild.

What I liked about the Firecat show was that I didn't expect to like it very much. This is one of the odd and underlooked elements of the aesthetic experience, I think--the element of surprise. I looked around at that sparsely crowded theater, and then the players coming on stage--in what you correctly refer to as jazz shoes and body paint--and my eyes took a loooonnng roll.

But I found their take oddly captivating and courageous. It's the middlest of the summer here, the height of the theater season, and I don't think anyone is doing Shakespeare quite like Firecat was. And despite all its oddity--everyone on stage, the actors not facing the audience, all the players smushed against one another and moving about as if a single organism--the actors totally had me in thrall to the story.

Midsummer Night's Dream: "Thou Art Translated"

If the Henry history plays were the most popular during Shakespeare's time, what does it meant that, in New York, Midsummer Night's Dream far outstrips the bard's other plays in sheer number of productions? Did the financial crash make us dash headlong into the Edenic Athenian woods because all mistakes are fixable and the benevolence of Puck and Oberon's white magic is the order of the day? Or is it the Shakespearean Sex in the City and have our appetites for sensuality and love become so universal that troupes are afraid of putting on anything else? Certainly, it's a great play. But with two more on the roster just for the month of June, it strikes me there has to be a reason for its contemporary popularity.

Mortal Folly Theatre's version directed by Katherine Harte-DeCoux was certainly my favorite of the two. Firecat's abridged production made some curious choices (like having the actors speak all their lines to the horizon and not to one another) but I'm afraid their body paint and jazz shoes seemed to be less tongue-in-cheek than earnest high-school pantomime, though I think David may disagree with this. Check out the cast shot http://firecatnyc.com/Cast.html.

Mortal Folly's production ("What fools these mortals be" proclaims Puck) was wonderful in the forest. The actors really enjoyed playing, they had a great one-woman orchestra who seamlessly combined cello and kazoo, and they included an adorable child to represent Hippolyta's "stolen" Indian boy, who was entirely left out of the other versions we've seen. The "changeling boy's" presence added an innocent touch to the Rubenesque sensuality of the feathery, ferny, fleshy forest, showing how the theater can be just as bewitching for its actors as for its audience.

More on Fiasco

Two images stick with me from Twelfth Night last weekend.

One, when Sir Andrew Aguecheek, played by a wonderfully campy Haas Regen (Aside: why does good Shakespeare we've seen seem to have at least one campy part? ) decides he has had enough of Olivia's (Georgia Cohen) moaning after Cesario (Annie Purcell) and is quitting the boisterous castle where he and Sir Toby (Andy Grotelueschen) have been making merriment.

He comes on stage with a driver's scarf wrapped around his neck, and goggles perched on his head, and proceeds to take a table placed in the middle of the stage--this production's only real prop--turn it on its side and attach four bicycle wheels to each of the corners, as if he is preparing to drive off. Toby talks him out of it, by telling him,

She did show favour to the youth in your sight only

to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to

put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver.

But the little detail of having Andrew overturn the table, and screw the wheels onto its sides shows the thought and care that went into this play


The second image that remains in my mind nearly a week after seeing the play occurred a few moments after. At one point I remember looking up from the action to the audience seated on risers around the stage. The AC had gone out by that point, it was a sweltering city summer night, and all of the fifty or so people had turned their playbills into makeshift hand fans. From where we sat, it looked like the whole audience was a-flutter, waving dozens of tiny wings, but all remained riveted to the play going on beneath them

"Greatness thrust upon them"

Fiasco Theater's Twelfth Night was the liveliest, most entertaining play we've seen yet. It was an unbearably sweltering night when we saw the production, and audience members were flapping away with fans and programs to provide a little relief, but it didn't detract a hair from the boisterous, funny, and at times touching performance. The actors knew how to use the full range of their vocal capacities, but didn't just yell their way through the lines. Haas Regen lustily caroused as Sir Andrew, Ben Steinfeld sang gorgeous surprising ditties, and Elizabeth King-Hall was devious and fetching as the serving maid Maria. I could go on. Each actor brought vitality and sheer joy to their parts--even Paul L. Coffey who got stuck with the role of the gullible and foolish Malvolio.

The program tell a story about this cast which reveals almost universal participation in the Brown/Trinity graduate acting program. Though it's unclear when they graduated, what it suggested to me was that the actors and directors (Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld) have spent a lot of time thinking about how to do contemporary theater well. Part of it involved, perhaps counter-intuitively, being relaxed. No difference was made between the stage and the theater and actors seamlessly transitioned from standing around during intermission and chatting with one another to performing the play's second act. They pulled off audience participation (we actually sang a round together!) without any of the usual reluctance that frequently occurs in such instances. And despite all the fun they seemed to be having, the gentle themes of the play--estranged siblings, unrequited love--were so delicately handled, waves of admiring awe rippled through the audience at the brief moments when there was a lull in the laughter.

The Storm Theatere and Blackfriars Repertory Theatre's As You Like It

After a few months of doing this, I have come to realize that there are three kinds of Shakespearean productions in New York City. For lack of an official taxonomy, let's call them the Pros, the Competents, and the Amateurs.

The Pros are obvious. There is a thick line between them and the Competents. The Pros perform on or near Broadway (or at BAM). You can tell a Pro by the ticket price, and by the sets, and usually by the actors too, whose names are recognizable from the stage and screen.

The Amateurs are pretty obvious, but it usually takes until you actually get to the theater to realize that you are in fact in the presence of The Amateurs. The first tip that you are in for an Amateur is that the theater is mostly empty, and those few hardly souls who do make it out are clearly friends and family. An Amateur will often run for one weekend. The actors speedthroughtheirlineslikethisasiftheywereanxiousfortheplaytobeoverandthecastpartytobegin.
The cast bios in the playbill for an amateur typically say something like "Melissa (Juliet) is sooo excited to be in her first production with the Madcap Theatre Company!!!! She wants to thank her extra special muffin Tom for all his support!!!!"

The Competents, meanwhile, will never be mistaken for The Pros, but it would be foolish to lump them together with The Amateurs as well. The actor bios may be just as thin, but on stage, they seem to be actually enjoying themselves. The production is confident, and take risks, that may not always succeed, but at least are taken. These are the real gems of this endeavor seeing all of Shakespeare in a year, because they delight and surprise, as in, who knew there could be such great theater on 11th Avenue?

The Blackfriars' production of As You Like is a member of this last group. As You Like It is a slightly slight play about sibling rivalry and female friendship, but this production pulses with life. The minor characters--Le Beau, played with campy originality by Gregory Couba, and Touchstone, played Dinh Doan--move the production along. Jacques, a lord attending to Duke Senior, is played by Peter Dobbins with wonderfully morbid, languor. His, "All the world's a stage," speech is emitted with a sigh, as if its a play he cant wait to see over.

Perhaps Dobbins through has sat through a few plays by the Amateurs.

Sweet Revenge

Is there a way to resolve a dispute without revenge? Or does all resolution in Shakespeare have to conform strictly to either comedy or tragedy? Is the only way out of a vengeful finale to set the characters dancing sillily round a maypole?

In the Hudson Guild Theater's Hamlet and the Red Monkey Theater Group's Romeo and Juliet that we saw this weekend, the only way to solve a quarrel seems to be in death. Everyone is out for vengeance. Hamlet, Laertes, Romeo, Paris, Tybalt... and in the latter production, the choice of setting, the Wild West of the American 1870s, accentuates the bloodthirsty underpinnings of a play remembered mostly for being about love.

Yes, Shakespeare's plots might feel like rickety old scaffolding for marvelous language, but if Shakespeare is so adept at spanning the entirety of human emotions with his words, why are his stories so predictable?

Secret Shakespeare

The Secret Theatre is so-named because it sits on an unremarkable stretch of Long Island City, underneath the 7 train and far far removed from the Great White Way. Theatregoers sip on bottles of Yuengling at a tables set up by the entrance while a few hardy souls (from an in-rehearsal troupe practicing nearby, I surmise) grill on a barbecue.

The real delights though happen inside the stage. BOTH saw their production of The Tempest on closing night, and there was a palpable energy in the audience. The production feels like a piece of modern dance as much as it does a play. Ariel is played by not one not two not three but four young women, who speak in unison but move not, and who lend a spritely air to the production. the primary prop is a long purple rope which hangs from a pipe, and which the Ariels use to flip around in, much as a gymnast would.

If there is a false note here, it's Richard Mazda, who plays Prospero. He is angry Prospero rather than a wise one, and Mazda sped through his lines so quickly you would have thought he was anxious for this delightful little run to be over

Propping up Shakespeare

We haven't written much about props here, however the American Bard Theater Company made me realize how important they can be to a successful play. Like the secondary plots in many Shakespearean comedies, props, though only playing supporting roles, can still make or break a show (see my comment on BAM's "Tempest"). Since "Much Ado About Nothing" is filled with light flirtation, it was apt that the moon appeared via a small pulley which cranked a flimsy but gorgeous cardboard globe into the sky. Like a paper lantern on a spring evening, it swayed, fragile above the stage, honestly confessing to the improvisational nature of off-off broadway theater. Rather than hiding the artifice of theatrical dressings, actors decorated the arbors with swathes of material at different moments in the play to convey the changes in scene and occasion. Sometimes it is precisely this amateur quality of theater that brings its freshness and joy, and of particular note was Andrew Eisenman in the role of Benedick who brought just the right amount of levity to the role to keep us gently amused.

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.