Shakespeare titles: The Comedy of Errors

David Tennant gets mistaken for his twin
in the RSC 2000 production of The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors inaugurates Shakespeare's habit of giving nondescript titles to his comedies—think of Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. This one's even broader, literally generic, having come to mean any story having ironic accidents, mistaken identities, and farcical proportions. Incidentally, the common phrase derives from the title, not visa versa.

Comedy announces the show's genre, but it's Errors that characterizes the action. Late in act 5, as the play's complications are resolved, one of a pair of twins, separated at birth and now reunited, says,

… I was ta'en for him, and he for me,
And thereupon these errors are arose.

The play's Errors are mistaken assumptions, confusions of the mind. In this respect, the title echoes The Supposes, a then-thirty-year-old translation of an Italian play. The writer of that comedy, a Cambridge grad and bankrupt gentleman named George Gascoigne, explicated his title in the play's argument (= a plot summary delivered before the play):

But understand, this our Suppose is nothing else but a mistaking or imagination of one thing for another. For you shall see the master supposed for the servant, the servant for the master: the freeman for a slave, and the bondslave for a freeman: the stranger for a well-known friend, and the familiar for a stranger.

For Gascoigne, a Suppose was a confusion of identity, whether intentional or un-. Most comedies in antiquity and the Renaissance were named for a character or dramatic catalyst. By naming his play for its comic theme, Gascoigne probably provided Shakespeare with the inspiration to title his own comedies whimsically. Shakespeare definitely knew The Supposes; he poached its plot for act 4 of The Taming of the Shrew*.

As for The Comedy of Errors itself, the title of this early-career play doesn't just show that Shakespeare was already approaching his titles with imagination and flourish. It also proves that his ability to coin unforgettable phrases was already fully formed by 1594, the earliest recorded performance of the show.

* The bit about a gentleman hiring a random traveller to impersonate his father—or rather the father of his servant, who meanwhile was impersonating him. 

Scifi Theater: Goldor $ Mythyka and Geek!

Goldor $ Mythyka

New Georges at the New Ohio Theater

written by Lynn Cohen

directed by Shana Gold

April 6, 2013

Geek!

Vampire Cowboys at Incubator Arts Project

written by Crystal Skillman

directed by Robert Ross Parker

April 11, 2013

Actually, this pair of shows aren't quite SF theater. But they're close, since they both take the role of fandom (especially the scifi/fantasy/comics fan) as their subjects.

Goldor (Garrett Neergaard), Mythyka (Jenny Seastone Stern),
and their DJ-commentator (Bobby Moreno)
Photo credit: Jim Baldassare

Basically, Goldor $ Mythyka revisits the Bonnie & Clyde myth. Its title characters are a pair of social misfits who find their ideal selves in role-playing games. Emboldened by their fantasy lives, they stage a heist and become folk heroes. But with a halfling on the way, Mythyka abandons fantasy and Goldor's revolutionary self-aggrandizement. The playwright adds flesh to the conventional arc by reframing the American myth of self-creation in light of the Great Recession. Her smartest twist is to suggest that parenting, in a sense, is a valid mode of self-creation. The play's only flaw is an onstage MC who comments on the drama. Though played by Bobby Moreno with charm and crack timing, the role's only substantive purpose is to exposit subtext that lies under the dialogue. The play's strong enough, with snazzy projections to set the scene and a cast of confident young and not-young actors, to establish its own identity.

Geek!, meanwhile, follows a pair of cosplayers through an actual convention. The two teens revel in the sense of belonging that dressing as manga characters offers them, but find that identity is more complex than pursuing an obsession, adopting a costume, or even abandoning those passions to stand alone. The sentiment that sorority and support is necessary could easily devolve into glib phrasing about belonging to a like-minded community. But Geek! goes beyond that by showing that self-disclosure (in this case, mourning a friend and sibling's suicide) is individualized and intimate. But that theme sounds heavy, which is the opposite of Geek!. Playwright Skillman knows pop subculture and, with director Robert Ross Parker and an exuberant design team, translates it into imaginative theatrics: dayglo hairdos and a steampunk cuirass; DIY YouTube videos that serve as flashbacks; crossdressing and crosscasting; a multiracial cast with a range of body types. It features plenty of stage combat―always a plus―yet it resolves the rivalry between two girls (not over a guy, incidentally) by joining them in friendship. 

The Geek! trio of Emily Williams,
Allison Buck, and Becky Byers

G$M and Geek! are both smart shows. Both have advantages and drawbacks, both succeed on their terms (modest) and Off-Off-B'way budgets (also modest), and both are fun and smart evenings at the theater. More broadly, taken together, Geek! and G$M suggest that American culture has converted everyone into “fans” of one thing or another. Fandom is an aid to self-discovery and the foundation of a community, a path to belonging. But that fact raises a dicey proposition: much of what we're fans of is corporate-owned (in my case, it's Marvel comics and Yankees baseball). So we're required to tithe to the owners (not the comics artists, not the ballplayers, note) to understand ourselves and discover others. Of the two, Geek! is more optimistic, maybe because it's less socially engaged than G$M. It finds a subversive streak in the DIY ethos of cosplay and in geekdom generally. G$M is more of a romance―like late Shakespearean plays, it leaps ahead 17 years to resolve its family triad. But both ultimately claim that eccentric passion strengthens a person only when it's shared with another.

Shakespeare notebook: News

Alex Timbers has a fine head of hair.
So does Isaac Butler (not pictured),
& I envy them both.

An old-fashioned web-log today!

Isaac Butler, usually of Parabasis, offers his response on Slate to Alyssa Rosenberg's numbskulled analysis of Romeo & Juliet. Not only does he pull a block quote to show how great even the minor role of Juliet's father is, he makes a broad point about theater:

The actors are, as Rosenberg notes, too old for their roles by at least a decade, but the stage—which requires more engagement of our imaginations than either film or television and lacks close-ups—often cons audiences into leaving their incredulousness at the coat check.

Update: Arch-troll, the Hooded Utilitarian, also responds to Rosenberg in the Atlantic. He makes some good points, though I'd say he's hampered by taking R&J as a text to read rather than to see. But that's an old argument among Shakespeareans.

Also in R&J news, an adaptation called The Last Goodbye will be remounted at the Old Globe in San Diego this fall. The work adapts Shakespeare's story and tricks it out with music by the late Jeff Buckley, a 1990s wunderkind who you might like. Goodbye's directed by Alex Timbers, who'll also be adapting Love's Labor's Lost at the Delacorte this summer. He and collaborator Michael Kimmel premiered Goodbye at Williamstown a few summers ago to sold-out houses.

Speaking of the Delacorte, it'll host a Tempest in the late summer to inaugurate the Public Works Initiative. Lear deBessonet (Good Person of Szechuan) & Ted Almond will create a musical version that casts citizen actors as well as pros. According to the release:

The production is inspired by a 1916 event at City College, which featured professional actors working with 1,500 city residents who united for an adaptation of The Tempest, billed as Caliban by the Yellow Sands.

That City College production sounds interesting! I'll have to look into it.

Shakespeare notebook: Romeo & Juliet

A writer on Slate goes trolling today, claiming that Romeo & Juliet "hasn't aged well" and generally trashing Shakespeare's play. Alyssa Rosenberg is motivated by the announcement that Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad will play the tragic lovers on Broadway this fall. In fairness, Rosenberg does applaud the interracial casting. But she complains that the play is "horribly depressing." Putting aside the juvenile quality of that remark, her point is that R&J has an adolescent view of romance, "full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love."

Rosenberg's criticism might be valid if she executed a stronger reading of the play. To conclude "actors & actresses deserve richer roles than Romeo & Juliet" is to wear ignorance as a badge. Juliet, after all, is one of Shakespeare's richest female roles, maybe his first truly great role period. Romeo may be secondary to her in terms of depth, but he's got a vitality of his own. Mercutio and the Nurse are stupendous. Shakespeare's plotting may get iffy (see below) but his characterization is superlative.

Earlier, she comes off like a vapid producer or a bad dramaturg, complaining "Why are the families fighting? What's the inciting incident?" Her dull-minded complaints suggest that Rosenberg is approaching the play in a literal-minded fashion. She misses the sensibility of the setting. Blood is boiling in Verona. That's why the families are feuding & why the lovers embrace with such tragic haste. She also dismisses the themes rather than grappling with them. If passion has gripped Verona, then R&J's eruption of love is its embodiment. The whole world of the play is young, passionate, hot, sexy. From the beginning, the poetry confuses and conflates sex and death, eros & thanatos. Their suicides, in turn, purge the city of its condition. The tragedy is amplified by the missed chance to heal the city through marriage instead.

Death instead of sex: this is bush-league interpretation, Shakespeare 101, but Rosenberg doesn't even reach that level. Her criticism does have something worth noting, however. She argues that Romeo & Juliet isn't the play for our time. In Rosenberg's view, we live in an era of arrested development. So raising adolescent passion to mythic level, as Shakespeare does, isn't in our culture's best interests. It's the Platonic case against artists: R&J celebrates a bad worldview, so it deserves censure and shouldn't be staged.

The response—that R&J purges the juvenile from its setting, fictional and real—should be obvious. But Rosenberg also sets her reading up as a claim that audiences find the show "embarrassing and unsettling" because of its mythic passions and adolescent focus. She may have read Shakespeare's play but I suspect she hasn't watched it; her complaints fall apart in the face of the play's poetry, drama, and sheer momentum. R&J is one of Shakespeare's tightest plots; its only real flaw is the contrivance of the "missed letter", which would've informed Romeo that his beloved wasn't actually dead. It's also an extraordinary crowd-pleaser—audiences aren't embarrassed or unsettled, they're engaged and thrilled by Shakespeare's near-perfect dramaturgy. That fact leaves Rosenberg looking like a scold, wagging her finger at an audience for enjoying something they shouldn't.

I love Shakespeare this side of idolatry, so I'm anticipating this high-profile production with excitement. I'll point out a further pleasure: the Off-Broadway CSC's R&J, also in Fall '13. New Yorkers will have the pleasure of comparing approaches, not just as contrasts but as reflections of one another. See you there!

Review: Clown Bar

Ain't too much sadder than the tears of a clown

Pipeline Theater Company at Parkside Lounge

written by Adam Szymkowicz

directed by Andrew Neisler

attended Feb. 28

Man walks into a bar, looking for the joker who killed his brother. Sounds like a gag, this piece of clown noir, and most of its cast wears a cherry red nose. But Clown Bar pours its pulp strong enough to tickle fans of Bogart and Mitchum too. Staged in the back room of an LES dive, the show plays out in real time as its cop protag investigates a crime syndicate. The script is tight and funny—hard-boiled schtick. The direction serves to tell the story, ignoring the implications that link clowns to class and the Sophoclean sense of fatalism that makes noir so cynical. Shane Zeigler gives the lead detective a voice like Batman and an attitude like Leslie Nielson: so square he's hilarious. But he can't prevent the theft of Clown Bar by Kelly Rae O'Donnell. Muttering like Popeye used to do, she gives her floozy in facepaint an emotional fragile undertone. The whole show's as substantial as a helium balloon but seriously funny.

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Clown Bar plays at Parkside Lounge, closing on March 23. Tickets?

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Shakespeare Notebook: Much Ado About Nothing

Once again, Beatrice gets the better of Benedick
photo: Gerry Goodstein

TFANA at the Duke on 42^nd Street

directed by Arin Arbus

Feb. 16, 2013

Happily, this taut Off-Broadway staging of Much Ado is less schmaltzy than most versions, approaching the play as an adult romance rather than a romantic comedy. In a nod to the script's characterization of Beatrice & Benedick's relationship as a “merry war”, director Arin Arbus shows an Italian court where men woo women with salvos of wit and negotiate marriages like they do treaties. It's no surprise when, in the play's main plot, a young aristo too readily doubts his fiancee's fidelity, since he's always approached romance with suspicion. And if love is a battlefield, Beatrice and Benedick are Hector and Achilles. In that stupendous scene where Beatrice requests that Benedick “Kill Claudio”, she redraws the battle lines, and Benedick's acceptance of her charge suggests the brokerage of a separate peace.

Onstage too, the performers stand above their peers. Maggie Siff (who played a superb Kate in Taming of the Shrew last season) suggests that Beatrice hides a lonely soul with a tart tongue and chilly demeanor. Her stage partner, Jonathan Cake, shows less depth but more range, charming the audience with direct-address and arguing himself into love in soliloquies. A sweet scene on a swing together, fishing for compliments from each other and getting teased instead, makes superfluous their grudging admissions of affection in the final scene. The duo don't have perfect chemistry but they're talented enough—and the script's done so much already—that they're still a pleasure to watch.

The play's two other keys are Don John and Dogberry; one instigates the main plot and the other inadvertently unravels it. Both are tough roles to play. The motiveless malignance of John implies a full psyche, smart but antisocial (an extreme version of Bea and maybe Ben); in the role, Saxon Palmer relishes how the character hides his nature. Like the villain, the citizen-constable cannot articulate his deeper thoughts, but unlike John he utterly lacks guile. His foolery can get tiresome in many productions, but John Christopher Jones coaxes inspired laughs from his cracked vocal chords. The rest of the cast gives workmanlike performances, though a few servants make the most of their stage-time.

The stage (designed by Riccardo Hernandez) is simple: a raised playing area of wooden tile, ringed by realistic turf and a tree and bench upstage-right. The lighting (Donald Holder) is a little more complex, and consequently a little more fussy. The costuming (Constance Hoffman) sets the period, for no reason good or bad, in the Sicily of a century ago. But in general, the design stays out of the way so the actors' and the script can act the play. In this respect, Arbus' Much Ado doesn't surprise the audience with radical or unexpected interpretations. It's a professional production of a pleasurable play, accessible and satisfying.

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Much Ado About Nothing plays at the Duke Theater through March 24. Tickets?

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New Shows: Feb. 5-11

I'll pick an oddball for this week's spotlight: Nectarine EP at the Flea. It's a sort of radio-play based on The Odyssey. But before you skip ahead, note that it's not a simple adaptation―it's a weird aural experience, crazy downtown theater in a hip sonic style, the sort of work you're more likely to catch at Ars Nova or St. Ann's (see This Clement World below). Frankly, I'm not sure what to expect but I love sonic experiments and radio drama. And I also enjoy the Bats, the Flea Theater's young, in-house troupe. But there's plenty more to see if that doesn't interest you. I'd like to catch Zorro and a robot double-bill at the Japan Society. How about you?

Ageless, Timeless, Eternal

where: The Wild Project

first night: Wednesday, Feb. 6

I mention this dance piece because it's based on the love poetry of Will Shakespeare. The concept is that it looks at the romances of three couples―aged 20, 40, & 60―to gain perspective on Shakespeare's own views.

Donnybrook!

where: Irish Rep

first night: Thursday, Feb. 7

A musical adaptation of The Quiet Man, that classic cinematic slice of Irish-American cornpone by John Ford and John Wayne. An American prizefighter, retires to Ireland after killing an opponent in the ring, falls for a lass, and tries to avoid a fight with her mulish brother. Actually, it's perfect material for a musical adaptation.

Foodacts

where: Theater Row

first night: Wednesday, Feb. 6

A sort of essay on food and life leavened with literature and staged for audiences. A half-dozen actors take on roles from Homer to Hemingway. Inexplicably, food is neither cooked nor served during the performance.

From White Plains

where: Signature Theater

first night: Friday, Feb. 8

This show's creative process sounds great. The company mounts a work, from script to production, within four months. It opens opportunities for more relevant and current drama. But this play―which is about coming out, gay violence, and taking responsibility for youthful indiscretion―doesn't sound especially a la mode.

Hamlet

where: Access Theater

first night: Friday, Feb. 8

The Bedlam Theater had a surprise hit last season in Saint Joan. Their fresh take on Shaw will be revived in March. In the meantime, catch their new work, a four-person Hamlet. Such a small cast should make this famously long play move briskly.

I, Worker and Sayonara

where: The Japan Society

first night: Thursday, Feb. 7

These two one-acts address the integration of robots into the home as caretakers and servants. Unlike most scifi theater, however, robots and androids actually play the roles! A Japanese theater company has collaborated with Osaka University's cybernetics department to stage this show. It raises all sorts of cool questions about live performance, doesn't it?

Lady Han

where: Incubator Arts Project

first night: Friday, Feb. 8

A classic Noh drama by the master of the form (a 17C gent by the name of Zeami) gets a 21C American upgrade. The sentimental script has a prostitute pine for her aristo lover till she goes mad. The staging, however, sets this Zen tale of seasons and emotions in a modern context of maximalism and plastic disposability.

The Madrid

where: City Center Stage 1

first night: Tuesday, Feb. 4

MTC builds their winter programming around strong middle-aged actresses, and everybody wins! Laurie Metcalf has lifted the company's Broadway show above a mediocre script; this premiere stars Edie Falco. She's a woman who abandons her comfy life. So it's a middle-class comedic drama. But a woman wrote this play, another directs; it's great to see that.

The Mark of Zorro

where: New Victory Theater

first night: Friday, Feb. 8

A rapier slashes the letter Z―the mark of Zorro! The masked avenger from Mexican California, the original Hispanic-American hero, takes the stage of the New Vic, to the delight of kids and youthful adults like me. This Scottish production has three actors play all the roles of a rousing adventure.

Passion

where: Classic Stage Company

first night: Friday, Feb. 8

Sondheim's '94 musical divided audiences in its premiere & led to his temporary devaluation. CSC gives the show its first NYC revival and hands the reins to John Doyle. He's the Brit who reinvigorated SS by putting musical instruments into his perfomers' hands.

Talley's Folly

where: Roundabout at the Laura Pels

first night: Friday, Feb. 8

Lanford Wilson's two-hander about a last chance at romance won the Pulitzer in '80;  in recent years, its quiet, heartfelt style has come back into style onstage. This Off-B'way revival costars Danny Burstein and Sarah Paulson, a brilliant pair of actors perfectly cast, but the director (Michael Wilson) has rarely impressed me.

This Clement World

where: St. Ann's Warehouse

first night: Tuesday, Feb. 4

If you haven't seen the work of Cynthia Hopkins, you really ought to. Here's another chance, with her eclectic music and fiction backing documentary footage of her trip to the Arctic Circle. The subject, naturally, is the environment, but it's less pessimistic on the subject than you'd predict.