Shakespeare notebook: Feminism and The Comedy of Errors

I wrote this piece a month ago on the Public's Comedy of Errors in Central Park. But due to delays first by the press rep & then by the editor, it never got published. However, positive feedback and encouragement from friends and colleagues (plus pride in my own work) have overcome my disappointment. I hope you find it illuminating.]

Emily Bergl, center, shows Adriana's moxie
in the Public's Comedy of Errors
(photo credit: Joan Marcus) 

Recently, I’ve been questioning my overwhelming passion for Shakespeare. How can I square his 17^th-century beliefs with my own 21^st-century liberal politics? It’s easy to ignore his love of the aristocracy, but much harder to ignore his views of women (to say nothing of, say, Jews or blacks). As titanic and popular as Shakespeare is, I’ve been wondering how relevant he is to the modern New Yorker. In my search for answers, I spoke with Emily Bergl, currently the female lead in The Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare in the Park.

The Comedy of Errors, conveniently, provides an ideal starting point for my inquiry. The farce takes place in Ephesus, a Mediterranean city that devotes itself, like Bloomberg’s Manhattan, to financial success. Its characters are businessmen, traders, and merchants: men who treat out-of-town guests to the luxuries of the city, including dinner (offstage) with an escort. When the long-lost twin of a local broker arrives, the resulting confusions play havoc with his credit and reputation.

Since the play’s setting—a city whose business is commerce and whose measure of success is wealth—so aptly reflects contemporary New York, it dispenses quickly with my anxiety about Shakespeare’s relevance. Additionally, it offers a superb venue for comparing his Elizabethan views with my own principles. Shakespeare seems eager to oblige, since early in the show, he stages a debate over a wife’s proper behavior between Adriana, the broker’s spouse, and her sister, Luciana. Their conversation ends equivocally: Adriana notes it’s easy for her sister to counsel subservience, being unmarried.

Yet historically, critics have assumed the playwright shared Luciana’s view—that women should bow to their husband’s will—and have cast Adriana as a shrew in need of taming. Bergl has a different take: “Adriana’s not really bucking the question of marriage; she’s asking why she should be so powerless and why her husband should have so much freedom.” So Adriana isn’t overbearing so much as independent-minded. But then, too many men (and some women) hear a strong-willed woman questioning the status quo and call her a bitch.

Shakespeare’s reaction is more complex. The key to Adriana, and perhaps a path to reconciliation between his politics and mine, comes halfway through the show. Luciana confesses that Adriana’s husband has just made a pass at her (of course, it was actually his twin). Adriana blasts her spouse, in an exchange worth quoting:

Adriana
He is deformed, crooked, old and sere,
Ill-faced, worse-bodied, shapeless everywhere,
Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind,
Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.

Luciana
Who would be jealous, then, of such a one?
No evil lost is wailed when it is gone.

Adriana
Ah, but I think him better than I say,
And yet would herein others’ eyes were worse.
Far from her nest the lapwing cries away.
My heart prays for him, though my tongue do curse.

I love how Adriana can’t commit to her anger because her love overwhelms it. This internal paradox humanizes her, and lifts her above the absurd farce. Bergl does note a problem, though: “In a modern, post-Freudian world, we call that ‘codependent.’ I do think that it’s a theme in Shakespeare that, while he admires deep, all-consuming love, he also recognizes that it can be dangerous.”

Bergl makes what happens next pivotal to her performance. A foolish servant arrives to fetch bail money for Adriana’s husband, who’s been arrested for a large unpaid debt. This sends her out into Ephesus to help her husband. Bergl explains, “The real turning point for Adriana, when she realizes something is definitely wrong, is when her husband is in debt.” Her motivation could even be viewed as an impulse towards partnership, not in domestic arrangements but in financial deals. Not only is Adriana not staying indoors patiently, as her sister had told her to do, but she’s eager to participate in business transactions.

And so the arc of the play bends constantly towards financial themes. Adriana sees her opportunity to act and she takes it—in the parlance of this summer, she “leans in.” As a Shakespeare fan, it’s heartening for me to see a complex female character who embodies such a trendy sensibility.

While that puts my qualms about Shakespeare to rest, it raises further questions in my mind about feminism and capitalism. After all, contemporary New York, like Shakespeare’s Ephesus, is hardly a utopia of enlightened economics and progressive politics. Women may be measured by the same index for success as men. But those standards are financial and competitive, and I have a hard time gauging success solely by wealth. On the positive side, however, there’s a hilarious production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors in Central Park, and tickets are free.

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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