Review: What You Will at Bedlam

What You Will, or Twelfth Night

playwright  William Shakespeare

company  Bedlam

company

Edmund Lewis, Susannah Millonzi, Andrus Nichols, Tom O'Keefe, Eric Tucker

director/set/sound  Eric Tucker

costumes  Valérie T. Bart

lights  Les Dickert

props  Violeta Picayo

music  Tom O'Keefe & Ted Lewis

The company of What You Will

Twelfth Night, a play that revels in gender ambiguity, is perfectly suited to Bedlam’s fluid method of staging classics. They dub this version What You Will while its twin, Twelfth Night, plays in rep—same cast, different roles. To make the play even more protean, the company double-cast Viola. Effectively (but not invariably) she’s played by Susannah Millonzi, while Cesario and his twin Sebastian is Tom O’Keefe. The actors look nothing alike, but realism in Shakespeare is a fool’s pastime anyway. Bedlam, led by Eric Tucker, would rather find insight in a theatrical staging than a mimetic representation. So in What You Will, as Tucker’s Orsino dances to a bossa nova beat, his partner alternates from Millonzi to O’Keefe. Viola’s ambiguity is a self-confusion that’s only straightened out by Shakespeare’s endgame. But Bedlam gets the final word, since it’s O’Keefe who ends up as Viola. Millonzi, who started the evening in that role, finishes up as Sebastian.

Millonzi, in her rookie effort with Bedlam, sounds the emotional depths of Viola’s soliloquies. Doubling as Maria, she also steals the comic subplot: a pinch-voiced nerdlet in love with a female Sir Toby, here an aging debutante. This puts her opposite Andrus Nichols in both plots, and their great chemistry justifies the unconventional approach all on its own. Nichols matches Millonzi’s shape-shifting abilities as Sir Toby and Olivia. The latter begins the play in deep bereavement, so that when her affections are tossed around by the twins, she’s naked-hearted and vulnerable. It’s a pleasure to see two talented Shakespearean women make the most of their chance to carry the play. Against their formidable performances, the male actors offer simpler takes on their roles, but presumably they find more in the partner staging of Twelfth Night.

Actually it’s worth noting that most of the backstage team is also female, from Valérie T. Bart (who supplies elegant post-war whites that get smeared with a passionate red) to the stage managers and PAs. One exception is Les Dickert, whose lights do more with less. Actor/director, Tucker also supplies the sound design, although the use of vinyl records (Ella Fitzgerald and other post-war sounds) is so closely intertwined with the staging that it probably fell under his role as rehearsal captain. Bedlam is a strongly collaborative company, and its sense of equality likely results in a more open-hearted work. In its short (two-hour) runtime, this What You Will beguiles the audience with an emotionally lush and sensitive staging.

Susannah Millonzi & Andrus Nichols
in What You Will

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Bedlam's What You Will runs from Mar 13 thru May 2 at 312 W. 36th St.

photos: Jenny Anderson

Review: Hamlet at CSC

Hamlet

playwright  William Shakespeare

company  Classic Stage Company

Hamlet  Peter Sarsgaard

Ophelia  Lisa Joyce

Claudius  Harris Yulin

Gertrude  Penelope Allen

Polonius  Stephen Spinella

Laertes  Glenn Fitzgerald

company  Jim Broaddus, Austin Jones, Scott Parkinson, Daniel Morgan Shelley

director  Austin Pendleton

set  Walt Spangler

costumes  Constance Hoffman

lights  Justin Townsend

music/sound  Ryan Rumery/Scapesound

Sarsgaard as Hamlet

There is no ghost in Hamlet. Usually the role would provide backstory for the plot, motivation for the lead, and most importantly, theatrical magic for the audience. In Austin Pendleton’s staging at CSC, however, the prince follows an invisible spirit offstage then circles back moments later with his course set for vengeance. Throughout this production, Pendleton isn’t just banking on his audience’s familiarity with the play, he’s demanding it. His staging only works (when it works at all) through prior knowledge. At times it even seems like a Hamlet in quotes, a sort of three-hour setpiece. It’s abstruse, remote, and finally inaccessible.

Pendleton sets Elsinore as a luxury wedding: a table center, a canopy of flowers overhead, a tiered cake upstage, banquettes and a bar in the voms. Presumably it’s the royal nuptials (although I wondered if it was Hamlet & Ophelia’s hypothetical one). The white-and-blue palate suggests a Scandinavian climate subliminally, but otherwise the design is abstract—we’re not meant to think this Hamlet is actually playing out at a swank catering hall. But by making the space wholly conceptual, Pendleton divides the plot from its playing, and strands some scenes without a sense of place. That’s okay for the soliloquies and the nunnery scene, but not for specific locations like Gertrude’s closet and Ophelia’s gravesite.

Peter Sarsgaard has worked with Pendleton twice before at CSC, and their prior collaborations suggested he was well-cast as Hamlet. In Vanya and Three Sisters he’d shown an inwardness of focus and a neurotic rumination that should fit this titanic role well. But Sarsgaard also has no experience with verse drama and that shows. Plays at self-reflection, he seems to get lost in the poetic syntax. He’ll murmur into his wine, muffling his words and masking his emotions, then he’ll suddenly swing into fustian mode. His Hamlet is mercurial and temperamental, yet watching him isn’t particularly interesting.

Lisa Joyce as Ophelia, Stephen Spinella as Polonius

The same goes for Harris Yulin and Penelope Allen as the royal couple. Their work must’ve stalled early in rehearsals, since their choices are dully conventional. The supporting cast shows some nuance (Scott Parkinson, as Rosencranz and the Gravedigger, is nimble with the word-play). But only Stephen Spinella and Lisa Joyce are actually absorbing. The early scene between Polonius and daughter is the first to elicit a reaction from the audience. Spinella’s rambling yet brisk “brevity is the soul of wit” speech is the evening’s high point. Joyce is one of the few actors I’ve seen who plays Ophelia as the protagonist of an entire subplot rather than as a supporting character in Hamlet’s tragedy. She traces a convincing arc in the role by suggesting that her stifled emotional response in the ‘nunnery’ scene, and not her father’s death, is the start of her mental unraveling.

That scene ends the first half, surprisingly. The play resumes with “Speak the speech”, which is a great way to regain the audience’s attention after intermission. Or it would be if Pendleton had otherwise shaped the play into a story. There’s no variation to the tone, which undercuts the pacing, and no focus on one scene—Claudius’ prayer, for instance—over another. Pendleton relies on the audience to remember the plot but offers nothing for our attention. A three-hour runtime is par for Hamlet, but this one feels longer.

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CSC's Hamlet runs Mar 27 thru May 10 at 136 E. 13th St.

photos: Carol Rosegg

Shakespeare Listings: April in New York City

This spring is astonishingly busy on Broadway—leading other critics to complain, justly in my view—and in the NYC Shakesphere. Partly for my own sake and partly to get back to regular blogging, I’m putting together a listing of NYC theater onstage this spring that’s related to Will and his world. 

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Cry, Trojans!

The Wooster Group

at St. Ann's Warehouse

The Wooster Group had collaborated with the RSC on a Troilus and Cressida in 2012. Evidently the partnership lacked chemistry, but Le Compte has kept working on her company’s half of T&C. She recasts her all-white company as Native Americans, a Wooster who-gives-a-fuck attitude toward race that dovetails too well with the NYTimes front-page exposé on how domestic abuse polluted the London rehearsals. Keep that in mind when you see what they bring to Shakespeare’s acrid Iliad. (thru Apr. 19)

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Hamlet

Classic Stage Company

This looks like the most traditional staging on the spring slate. Peter Sarsgaard plays the big role. He's been in a lot of Chekhov in NYC the last 5-10 years (including a Vanya opposite his wife Maggie Gyllenhaal) but this is his first Shakespeare. Austin Pendleton has directed Sarsgaard well in those Chekhov productions, but they've been better at the internal, emotional moments than the theatrical gestures. Of all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet plays to those strengths, and Stephen Spinella is well-cast as Polonius. But otherwise it's hard to get excited about this production.

(thru May 10)

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Something Rotten

Broadway (St. James Th.)

A fluffy musical comedy set in the Elizabethan theater, Something Rotten is notable mainly for being a Broadway show not based on some prior work. Instead it imagines a pair of Elizabethan playwrights who anachronistically invent musical theater to compete with Will Shakespeare. So Rotten isn’t exactly groundbreaking: this is the schticky sub-genre of musicals-about-musicals (e.g. The Producers, Spamalot). The creative team is a question mark, with the musical elements coming from Hollywood types; a book by a big-in-Britain comedy writer; and direction/choreo by Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon). The big draw is Christian Borle, who earned his Tony for Peter & the Starcatcher, and who here plays the Bard, but Brian d’Arcy James is no slouch onstage either.

(open-ended)

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'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Red Bull Theater

at the Duke on 42nd St.

One of the essential English classics that gets crowded out by Shakespeare's dominance. It offers a great pair of leads—its last NYC revival in '92 had Val Kilmer and Jeanne Tripplehorn at the Public—plus some honestly great poetry, dark dark psychology, and several astonishing scenes. Usually (but aptly) described as "What if Romeo and Juliet were siblings?", Tis Pity is decadent but ironic about it: the incestuous couple are just about the only heroic models in a corrupt Italian court. And the Red Bull can be relied on for an inventive sense of theatricality and willingness to get dark. And Tis Pity is dark even by Jacobean standards. Plus it's got one of the most memorable titles in theater history!

(April 14 - May 16)

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Twelfth Night

What You Will

Theater Bedlam

at the Dorothy Strelsin Th.

Theater Bedlam apparently has enough ideas for staging Twelfth Night that they’ve decided to mount two productions in repertory. I’m confident that they can manage it, since their Saint Joan and Hamlet last year were packed with innovations in staging and playing. Seriously Bedlam is breaking new ground in Shakespeare; watching them you get the sense that they really are experimenting in rehearsal and finding ingenious ways to incorporate new ideas for staging. They’re re-invigorating classic plays, which is what I secretly want most when I see a show. And while some people might find a double-bill of the same show harebrained, I think it shows how hard Bedlam is striving to push the boundaries of how to produce Shakespeare’s plays. I’m more excited by these two shows than any other Shakespeareana this spring.

(thru May 2)

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The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Fiasco Theater

at Th. for a New Audience

Fiasco pivots quickly from an acclaimed Into the Woods to present the rare Two Gentlemen. This company made a strong impression a few seasons ago with Cymbeline of all plays, and their Woods extended their style into a non-Shak avenue. The tight camaraderie of the ensemble, a flair for play-acting and for imaginative use of props and bodies, and an approach that foregrounds character rather than versification all make Fiasco a distinctive and potentially trend-setting company. They’ve picked a challenge with Two Gentlemen. It’s a very early one in Shak’s career, full of self-serious poetic romance and broad clowning comedy. It’s very rare to see—in fact, it’s one of only three plays by our man that I’ve never seen! So I’m looking especially forward to seeing what Fiasco does with it.

(April 24 - May 24)

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Wolf Hall, pts. 1 & 2

Royal Shakespeare Company

on Broadway (Winter Garden Th.)

I'd include Wolf Hall just because it's the RSC. But the first novel in Hilary Mantel's historical series covers the same period of history as Henry the 8th, from Cardinal Wolsey's alliance with France to the birth of Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth. More generally, Mantel follows Shak in the way she dramatizes history. This double bill plays out a set of tragic arcs in the English kingdom, by staging a succession of political maneuvers over a decade-plus of time. On the RSC tip, this production is up for several Olivier Awards: best new play and lighting design, plus director Jeremy Herron, and Nathaniel Parker for his King Henry. As a lover of history plays, I'm looking forward to this one. See also my historical guide on Playbill Online!

(thru July 5)

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Upcoming

Hamlet in Bed

Rattlestick Playwrights Th.

May 14 - Jun 18

A drama about an actor who wants to play Hamlet

Macbeth

Mobile Shakespeare Unit (Public Th.)

May 17 - Jun 7

Low-fi Shak for NYC community centers & the Public

The Tempest

Shakespeare in the Park (Public Th.)

May 27 - Jul 5

Sam Waterston plays Prospero in Central Park

Dr. Faustus

Classic Stage Company

May 29 - 

Chris Noth (!) makes a deal with the devil in Marlowe's tragedy

Cymbeline

Shakespeare in the Park (Public Th.)

Jul 27 - Aug 23

Hamish Linklater & Lily Rabe return to Shak under Dan Sullivan's hand

These Paper Bullets

Atlantic Th.

November 2015

A musical based on Much Ado, with music by Billie Joe Armstrong (?!)

Writing link – Wolf Hall in Playbill

The company of Wolf Hall boogie on Broadway
(photo: Johan Persson)

I've got a busy spring coming up, with lots of Shakespearean theater and related work to cover. To get started, I re-read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the exceedingly well-turned historical novel about Henry the 8th and Anne Boleyn. Then I wrote a layman's guide to the relevant history for Playbill Online: 

http://playbill.com/news/article/tudor-mania-in-the-theatre-a-guide-to-the-royalty-of-wolf-hall-345663

Wolf Hall covers the same stretch of history as Henry the 8th, which Shakespeare collaborated on with his protege, John Fletcher. H8 is the only one of Will's plays that I've neither seen nor read. So I'm looking forward to reading that in the next week! I've also lined up Peter Sarsgaard as Hamlet (at CSC) and the first episode of the BBC's Wolf Hall with Mark Rylance.

American Racism: "Othello was a white man!"

I spent this Thanksgiving weekend with Lady Hotspur and the Tiny Tiger instead of reviewing the two Shakespearean productions I saw in November. When I did sit at my computer, I could only think about one thing and that was Ferguson. I tried to approach the two shows—Pericles at the Public and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine at TFANA—by noting that the casts are racially diverse. Those two companies are the top Shakespearean troupes in town, and their commitment to race-blind casting is worth celebrating.

But commending American Shakespeare—or American anything—on its approach to race felt like bad faith this Thanksgiving. The mechanisms of justice are beyond broken; for a subset of Americans, they never existed in the first place.

I considered examining Shakespeare’s tricky but ultimately racist dramaturgy, teasing out the differences in eras. Shakespeare’s London didn’t have the framework of Social Darwinism that implies blacks invite and deserve their second-class status, or the pseudo-genetic notion of race that claims that people of African descent can’t be fully civilized. On the other hand, in 21C New York the biblical Curse of Ham no longer obtains.

Ira Aldridge, c. 1854, as Othello. Aldridge emigrated from the US
to Europe, whose audiences were less bigoted about black actors

Then, as I paged through books for inspiration, I found a shocking excerpt in Shakespeare in America, a collection published in 2014 by the Library of Congress. The piece is Mary Preston on Othello, one of 14 essays on Shak that she wrote in the 1860s—the Civil War era. She’s a Romantic, roughly contemporary with Emily Dickinson, and she reads Othello as an allegory of Nobility corrupted by Envy. This gives her a huge problem when she deals with Othello’s race (all italics are hers):

“In conclusion, let me add a word of explanation to my reader. In studying the play of Othello, I have always imagined its hero a white man. It is true the dramatist paints him black, but this shade does not suit the man. It is a stage decoration, which my taste discards,—a fault of color, from an artistic point of view. I have, therefore, as I before state in my readings of this play, dispensed with it. Shakespeare was too correct a delineator of human nature to have colored Othello black, if he had personally acquainted himself with the idiosyncrasies of the African race.

“We may regard, then, the daub of black upon Othello’s portrait as an ebullition of fancy, a freak of imagination,—the visionary conception of an ideal figure,—one of the few erroneous strokes of the great master’s brush, the single blemish on a faultless work. 

“Othello was a white man!”

That’s nuts! It’s a different sort of Shakespeare-crazy than Knight’s kabbalistic chart, which at least is rooted in a close reading of the plays. On a superficial level, it’s like saying the ghost in Hamlet is actually Claudius in disguise (he would’ve gotten away with it, except for those meddling kids!). It makes nonsense of the play.

I suppose we could admire Preston’s chutzpah. She’s bold enough to say that Shak overreached, and that he failed in his artistic intention. But in her misreading, the flaw that undermines Othello is that a black man cannot be a tragic hero. Put another way, Preston is saying the death of a black man is never tragic. That's still insane, but it’s also a view shared by the 21C Americans who dismiss Michael Brown’s murder (and Trayvon Martin’s, and innumerable others) as anything but a crime.

Race in Shakespeare is a Gordian knot, which I’ll revisit at the (sadly inevitable) next conflict. In the meantime, the Public’s Pericles and TFANA’s Tamburlaine coming up!

Shedding blood on St. Crispin's Day

It’s St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, the anniversary of the 1854 Battle of Balaclava—that’s the English cavalry fiasco memorialized by Tennyson in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” But of course, we really remember it because of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Or more accurately, we know it because of Shakespeare’s epic speech at the climax of Henry V. As if you need a reason to watch Sir Laurence:

So who was St. Crispin to get a day of his own? Actually, he shares October 25 with his brother, St. Crispian. Their story’s pretty standard for martyrs of pre-Christian Rome. Back in 285 or 286, the boys were making a living in Belgic Gaul as shoemakers, while they proselytized the illegal faith. They got hauled before the prefect of Gaul, Rictiovarus. And this brings us to the good part of any martyrology: the torture. Here’s the story from a Victorian collection about saints:

The judge, then, ordered the two brothers first to have spills of wood thrust between their nails and the quick. Then S. Crispin and S. Crispian prayed, and instantly the spills started out of their fingers, and turning in the air, rushed at their tormentors and stabbed them, so that several fell dead on the spot and others died soon after of their wounds.

Then Rictiovarus commanded a couple of millstones to be hung round the necks of the martyrs, and that they should be cast into the river Aisne. S. Crispin and his brother swam across without feeling the slightest inconvenience from the mill-stones.

He then had boiling lead poured over them, but that refreshed rather than injured the indomitable shoemaker martyrs. Then pitch, oil, and fat were stewed together, and they were plunged in the bubbling caldron. This failed to injure them, therefore Rictiovarus, disgusted at his want of success, pitched himself headforemost into the fire under the caldron, and stifled his dissatisfaction in the flames.

Seeing their chief persecutor thus disposed of, the martyrs placidly devoted their necks to the sword, and their heads were struck off without difficulty by the executioner.

One may be quite sure, when in the Acts of the Martyrs a series of tortures and miraculous cures leads up to a decapitation, that all but the decapitation is a pure invention of the writer.

The saints lived and died in Soissons, where a nice cult grew up around them for a millennium and change. One day, in the middle of the Hundred Years War, French soldiers staged a massacre of English bowmen garrisoned in Soissons—then kept going, and killed and raped the citizenry. When the English forces faced the French at Agincourt, King Henry claimed to be avenging the saints and city on this, their day.

Shakespeare sources turned that bit of royal PR and the astonishing military victory into a legendary episode in English history. But ironically it’s Shakespeare's speech about remembering the battle, and not the battle itself, that keeps alive the observance of St. Crispin’s Day and the legend of Agincourt.

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quote from The Lives of Saints, Rev. S. Baring-Gould, vol. 12, p. 628-630 (1870-1877)

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