Women in Shakespeare: Jade Anouka as Ariel

Since most Shakespearean casts are male-heavy and even male-only, coverage tends to focus on men who create the work. Let's balance that out! This is the second season of my interview series, Women on Shakespeare. I'm talking with the women who produce and perform Shakespeare and related work in New York City.

Jade Anouka has taken a central role in Phyllida Lloyd's Shakespeare trilogy. She took over as Marc Antony last year after appearing as Calpurnia in Julius Caesar (NY '13), and she stood out as a tender Hotspur in Henry 4.1 (NY '15). In the third production, set as before in a women's prison, Anouka plays Ariel to Harriet Walters' Prospero. Ms. Anouka emailed with me about her roles in the all-female company.

Let’s start with Ariel. What have you discovered about her that you find fascinating?

Firstly I don’t see Ariel as 'her', he was written male, but I just try and play the scenes, play the intentions of the character and not focus on genderizing Ariel. I found the desperation of Ariel for freedom and liberty is what drives him throughout the play. He is fulfilling these tasks for Prospero happily, but only because if he does it well Propero has promised him his freedom and soon.

Ariel gets my favorite stage direction in all of Shakespeare: [Re-enter Ariel, invisible…]. How do you and Lloyd stage that? More generally, how is the magic of the role (and play) treated, especially given the vivid reality of the jailhouse setting?

Haha yes! As you say the prison setting could restrict us in someways as to plausible theatrical effects... but then again it opens us up to the real magic of theatre... of make-believe... of pretending. I love the youthful idea of how invisibility is realised in our production. When Ariel is invisible nobody looks at him. It's been funny where fellow cast members have forgotten I'm on stage in some scenes because they have invested so much into pretending they can't see me that they start believing it!

By framing the trilogy with the setting of a women’s prison, Ms. Lloyd doesn’t simply ignore her actors’ gender. How does this complex approach to gender and sexuality affect your performance of Ariel?

I honestly don’t think about it. I don’t try and be a boy, I don’t [try] and be feminine, whatever that means, I just play the character of Ariel, use what Shakespeare has wrote and what I find interesting to serve the production. Also we are all playing inmates playing characters, so my prison character, Sade, affects how I play Ariel. Sexuality on the other hand is something entirely different. I don’t think we have had an approach to sexuality with these plays. People may have made judgments about our characters' sexuality but it's not something that affects the work I don’t think.

You’ve appeared in all three plays of Lloyd’s Shakespeare Trilogy. What similarities have you noticed between Marc Antony, Hotspur, and Ariel? How have you approached Ariel differently in rehearsal?

Sade is what links them, they are all played by the same prisoner. All three are very determined characters. All three are charismatic and successful in getting people to follow them. Anthony gets all of Rome to do a 180 and believe in him, Hotspur rallies armies to fight on his side against the odds and Ariel uses magic to get anyone to do, well, anything. In rehearsal there was lots of discussion about how Sade might want to represent magic [as] what feels like freedom to her. The movement/dance/song/rapping came from that idea.

How does the Lloyd’s rehearsal approach and aesthetic of the Shakespeare Trilogy fit with other Shakespeare you’ve worked on?

Phyllida is very inclusive, rehearsals are collaborative and every voice is heard. It's also very playful and very thorough. I have been in quite a few Shakespeare plays and no two rehearsal approaches have been the same. I've done very 'traditional' productions at the Globe, I've done very minimalist arty productions at the RSC, productions with only 'two planks and a passion', with directors who are unashamedly strict with the iambic verse & those less so. What I love about doing Shakespeare is that the plays stand. The stories always hold up. But what I really love about this Trilogy work with Phyllida is that those stories can now include me and people who look like me. It has shown how Shakespeare and Theatre is, can be and must be non exclusive.

Talking about Shakespeare more generally, what’s your perspective on his parts for women?

He has some great parts for women. But there is definitely not enough of them. I have loved playing Ophelia, Juliet, Olivia in the past. But when I got to speak Mark Antony and Hotspur I was like wow this is awesome stuff. The boys have been having all the real fun! I don’t think they know how lucky they are. These roles are meaty, powerful, complicated and big. Shakespeare wrote in a very different time to now, women's roles in society were not what they are now. Assuming his works reflected the world he lived in then we need to bring it up to date. His words are great which is why his plays live on and people keep producing them. But if we do we must move with the times too. The good women's roles run out quickly and so we are taking on the men's now too. What new things can we discover by playing... Surely that’s what theatre is all about....?

Do you have any other Shakespearean roles you’d love to play, or to go back to? Not just the women either—any dream-roles traditionally played by men?

Hamlet. I played Ophelia at the Globe in London and absolutely loved it. But when I was backstage listening to Hamlet I couldn’t help thinking how great his speeches are and how honest the character's reactions to an awful series of events are. Hamlet is young and going through a hard time there is something we can all relate to in that. Male, female, black, white, gay, straight. It's so human. I wanna give him a go!

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The Donmar Warehouse's The Tempest runs from January 13 to February 19 at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO. Tickets are $40-$90.

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headshot  Donmar Warehouse

photos  Teddy Wolff

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Review: The Tempest (Shakespeare in the Park)

The Tempest

playwright  William Shakespeare

company  Shakespeare in the Park

theater  Delacorte Theater

players

Jordan Barrow, Louis Cancelmi, Francesca Carpanini, Nicholas Christopher, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Chloe Fox, Rosharra Francis, Thomas Gibbons, Frank Harts, Sunny Hitt, Brandon Kalm, Olga Karmansky, Tamika Sonja Lawrence, Rico Lebron, Danny Mastrogiorgio, Tim Nicolai, Matthew Oaks, Charles Parnell, Chris Perfetti, Rodney Richardson, Laura Shoop, Cotter Smith, Sam Waterston, and Bernard White

director  Michael Greif

set  Riccardo Hernandez

costumes  Emily Rebholz

lights  David Lander

sound  Acme Sound Partners/Jason Crystal

soundscapes  Matt Tierney

music  Michael Friedman

Sam Waterston & Francesca Carpanini
in Shakespeare in the Park's Tempest

The Tempest has Shakespeare’s greatest stage direction: “Enter Ariel, invisible.” The one in Winter's Tale about the bear is gonzo, but this has a paradoxical beauty that begs the question, "How do you stage that?" In that sense, it stands for the whole play, which demands inventive staging. By this criterion, the summer’s Tempest in Central Park is a let-down.

The opening storm establishes the tone and range of any Tempest. Here it’s an ultra-conventional bit of confused shouting over realistic SFX of thunder and techy flashes of lightning. After that uninspired curtain-raiser, the lighting is often harsh; the music is live percussion, a cliché of the modern Shake-stage. The design feels all wrong for this elemental play, with its steel gantry trimmed with neon to dominate the set. There is a photorealistic backdrop of waves and a couple phony-looking rocks—the stage could serve for Winter’s Tale or any other play involving a shipwreck. Each of the play’s three plots has a highly theatrical moment—a fantastical banquet, a sumptuous clothes closet, and a marital masque—but all three opportunities are squandered. Plot and sense is subsumed under stage business and emotional telegraphy.

The actors’ stylized, almost syncopated versifying is consistent in method but also includes a tendency to over-emote without communicating sense. The characterizations are also generic. Even Jesse Tyler Fergusson, a sitcom star & legit actor who was so delightful in Comedy of Errors a few seasons back and here the play's jester, lacks pizazz. Of the supporting cast, only Louis Cancelmi’s Caliban feels original and new. He’s got a knock-kneed, simian gait, and speaks as if with a speech impediment to suggest his recent acquisition of language. The lovers have a few earnest moments (note how Miranda pities Caliban through their first scene), but otherwise each plot simply passes the time until the next one.

Sam Waterston, at least, has laid the foundations for a solid Prospero. Dressed in light linens and sandals, he looks like a semi-retired Easthamptonite. But in the first scene he establishes Prospero as a cantankerous grump towards his daughter, then goes further by casting the wizard as Ariel’s slavemaster and Caliban’s torturer. He may overdo it in this scene but he’s having actorly fun with Shak (and that’s more than most of the cast do). His performance stays on this note till the finale, when he learns mercy, absolves the guilty courtiers and drunkards, and even hugs Caliban while ceding the island to him. It’s a strong arc for the character and a spine for Greif’s otherwise limp Tempest.

Louis Cancelmi, Jesse Tyler Ferguson & Danny Mastrogiorgio
in Shakespeare in the Park's Tempest

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Shakespeare in the Park's Tempest runs May 27 to July 5 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

photos: Joan Marcus

Review: Tempest at La MaMa

Tempest

La MaMa Etc.

director  Karin Coonrod

La MaMa is one of the last theaters in town to present radical politics and social idealism as a matter-of-course. That’s the context for Karin Coonrod’s Tempest, and especially a moment I’d often seen but never really heard before. In a lovely set-piece, a shipwrecked courtier imagines a utopian state. Gonzalo conjures a vision (maybe Shakespeare’s, but he’s tricky with the dramatic irony) of a commonwealth based on natural equality, an absence of laws and of class. Costumed in white period finery, ruffs and breeches, and, incongruously, modern heels, actress Ching Valdes-Aran recites the speech as a chant-like song, underscored by a mandolin. Her rhythm turns the piece into an incantation or spell meant to transmute the apex capitalist’s utopia of modern Manhattan into an anarchist paradise. I wish.

Coonrod’s production has plenty of these set-pieces. That one moment is brilliant, several others are interesting, and a few are dull. All are underscored by a soundscape of vocal noises and archaic instruments in a dense composition by the inestimable Elizabeth Swados. Her music heightens the show’s strangeness, and evokes Prospero’s island far more strongly than anything else in the design or playing. Even when it’s weird or discordant, this aural component is always interesting.

That can’t be said for a lot of this uneven production. By shaping her show around set-pieces and sonic moments, Coonrod runs into the trickiest facet of Shakespeare’s script: its static quality. Prospero spends most of the play watching, guiding, and manipulating the other characters indirectly. He shuts down two conspiracies, preventing action rather than causing it. The Tempest is sort of an anti-play, radical in its way for Shakespeare. But Coonrod leaves the connective tissue, the drama between the set-pieces, to the performers, who must add dynamism themselves. She seems more interested the in set-pieces, masques, and other formal devices than in plot.

The players take a presentational approach, which works when Valdes-Aran has her speech, or when Tony Torn’s clown does an earthy, barrel-hall double-act with Liz Wisan’s jerky hipster. But the courtiers, the lovers, and even Ariel and Caliban rarely give us a compelling reason to watch them. They don’t resort to bits of business, which is good, and they don’t find inner motivations for their actions, which is fine. In Shakespearean theater, these conventions can be replaced with complex poetic thought, but they don’t convey that either. Instead, the cast offers the emotional content in broad strokes, or nothing at all.

Reg E. Cathey’s Prospero is especially disappointing. The actor is best known for his role in The Wire (as Mayor Carcetti’s political operator), and last year he got an Emmy nomination for House of Cards. He’s also got a long and sturdy stage bio; I last saw him play Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Public Lab in ’11 (also under Coonrod’s direction). Cathey has a deep, smoky voice, a powerful presence, and a sly, ironic delivery that should be perfect for Shakespeare—I’d love to see him in a History. But in this Tempest, he lifts his voice to its higher registers, pinching the verse and limiting his range of expression. He gives hints of the character’s cunning, but he’s focused on the role’s emotional burden. His Prospero is always troubled, always angry, yet his tempest of expression lacks an object.

In the epilogue—another set-piece—finally, his passion seems specific to the moment. Prospero says, “Now I want | Spirits to enforce, art to enchant | And my ending is despair …” The moment, and the actor’s conviction, catalyzes Coonrod’s themes by linking Prospero to Caliban and Ariel: all three express a desire for freedom from bondage. In the other subplots, characters attempt to grab power to escape servitude; they’re foiled by Prospero, maybe because power over another is only an illusion of freedom. True liberty is found in equality—in Gonzalo’s commonwealth.

A few extra observations:

• Coonrod and set designer Riccardo Hernandez use a very deep thrust stage, almost a tennis-court transverse. This configuration has weird sight lines, which adds to Tempest’s dream-like quality. The stage is open and bare and black, except for a pair of metal poles that function as masts & trees, and a perforated chrome globe with a lamp inside for a planetarium effect, and some sort of Faustian sigil. They stick the band behind a proscenium at the open end, and Prospero watches the whole show from there. He’s controlling events from beyond the fourth wall, which is cool. But he doesn’t actually do much back there except emote.
• I kvetch about Cathey’s performance, but he does a lovely and riveting rendition of the “Such stuff as dreams are made on” speech. It’s another v.g. set-piece in a production built around those.
• Aside from Valdes-Aran, the cast is mostly forgettable. The lovers were cute but had no chemistry, while the courtiers just glowered. I enjoyed the clowns, although they didn’t do anything new or surprising.
• Ariel is Joseph Harrington, the last kid to play Billy Elliot on B’way. When he’s speaking, he’s kind of stiff, but his balletic skills are impressive—he performs this role in combat boots, a symbol of his bondage & removed at the finale. But he’s the least well-served by Coonrod’s approach.
• Caliban, by contrast, just ignores the show’s style and relies on his own technique. Slate Holmgren does have a simian physicality that fits with the clowns’ slapstick & watersports. Otherwise he plays in mainstream Shak style, finding a psychological journey for the character. He learns his lesson and so earns Prospero’s respect.
• Runtime was about two hours, no intermission. So the play has been cut heavily but well (by dramaturg Sharon Scruggs, presumably). The various plots are clear and the structure streamlined. But why'd they cut The from the title?
• Another nice touch: the shoes in this Tempest, which are keys to characterization. I mentioned that the courtiers wear white heals, and that Ariel is held down by his boots. Oana Botez put good thought into this facet of her design.
• Tempest is part of a La MaMa Shakespeare project on Hurricane Sandy and climate change. That subject didn't intersect with Koonrod's production in any obvious way. Maybe La MaMa's two other Tempests—one by a South Korean troupe, the other by Italians—will.

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photos

Vanessa Shoenwald