Love-Child of Shakespeare and the Kabbalah

When I did a little research on The Tempest a few weeks back, I found this amazing chart:

I’ve been trying for weeks to decipher this nutty thing. It’s an attempt by scholar G. Wilson Knight to map Shakespeare’s cosmic order, which he dubbed “Shakespeare’s Dramatic Universe”. Knight wrote one of the 20C’s great works of Shakespearean scholarship, The Wheel of Fire, but this looks like something a mad kabbalist would’ve come up with. The source is The Shakespearian [sic] Tempest, which I finally dug up, only to find it as impenetrable as the chart:

The opposition of tempests and music is itself regarded as provisional, since tempests are part of 'great creating nature', and indeed themselves a music. They are thus more ultimate than 'disorder' or 'death', which remain negative and provisional—you cannot use the words without some sense of the deplorable, or the bad (disorder always sounds nasty)—while the Shakespearian heart is, and must be, a grand positive, beyond all moral or metaphysical negations.

Since I found this chart, I’ve been trying to decode its mysteries. I’ll only bore you for a minute…

Bisecting the chart is a “line of poetic insight”; I have no idea what that means. But it acts as a mirror, so that the social realm on its left has its reflection in the personal on the right. Similarly, at the equator, “tempest” merges into “order” above and into strife (“armed opposition”) below. Now, you see the little arrows near the “harmonies” that point off the chart? At first I read them like a “straight” line at the poles on a Mercator map, which on a globe would be a circle. So if you head up on the left, you’d arc back on the right. But according to Knight’s notes, they’re actually like the warp tunnels in Pac-Man: if you go up from the top, you come out at the bottom.

Enough of that. This chart exerts a magnetic tug, pulling me into its madness. We can map the cosmos of Dante or Milton or Blake, since their works were themselves cosmic visions. But Shakespeare had no conceptual unity in the 37+ plays he wrote over 20+ years. That’s not to say he started each new script with a blank worldview. But his poetic imagery and plot & character arcs don’t translate naturally to spatial terms. In fact, to call Macbeth’s metamorphosis from Act 1 to Act 5 a “character arc” is to rely on a conventional metaphor, and maybe not the most accurate one.

So I’m trying to develop an alternative to “Shakespeare’s Dramatic Universe”. One of the flaws in a spatial representation of Shakespeare's cosmos is that it doesn’t account for the plasticity from play to play. Elements such as tempests and battles, strong queens and canny fools, forests and courts, England and Rome, father-daughter pairs and plays-within-plays, even styles of prose and poetry, may loom large or fade into the background, fuse into one chimera-symbol, or get ignored entirely. A project in this blog will be tracking these and other tropes from play to play, deducing their meaning within the play's context and in the larger scope of Shakespearean dramaturgy.

The NY Times earns an F in Shakespeare

Last weekend, the NY Times published an astonishingly lazy “dialogue” by theater critic Charles Isherwood. Isherwood asks himself why he often feels resistant towards seeing Shakespearean drama. Part of what makes the piece so galling is that Isherwood, one of the few American critics to earn a living writing about the stage, has the opportunity to write his thoughts out on the most popular dramatist and poet of the English language—and he half-asses it:

HIM …But I’ve got to tell you, I hate Shakespeare.

ME I understand that. Now tell me why.

HIM Because it’s boring.

ME [After a pause] Let’s stipulate, for a moment, that Shakespeare can be boring.

HIM Dude, you didn’t really rock it in debate class, did you? Whose side are you on anyway?

ME The side of right and virtue and truth and beauty, of course, the side of the greatest dramatist and poet who ever trod the earth. But let me continue. Of course, bad Shakespeare is boring…

Then he says “listen to this” and quotes some Hamlet. Isherwood and his boss, Arts & Leisure Editor Sia Michel, should be embarrassed.

But what’s even more infuriating is that this inane article poses an extremely important question (for theater, anyway). Why produce Shakespeare’s plays? Why attend them? After all, there are legitimate, compelling reasons not to produce his work. One of the most important is that, according to 2010 back-of-the-envelope calculations by Parabasis, American theaters out-produce Shakespearean dramas against other playwrights works by a factor of 10. And that’s for modern masters like Stoppard and Mamet, Tennessee and August. For truly contemporary playwrights, the ratio is closer to 100:1. Forget dominant playwright: William Shakespeare, dead 400 years, may effectively constitute the dominant genre of American theater in the 21C.

Furthermore, Shakespeare’s plays are fiendishly difficult to act, since they’re verse dramas in an age where actors and audiences both are used to realism. Shakespeare’s worldview is deeply outmoded: a royalist in a democratic era, a Christian in a secular epoch, a pastoralist in an urban civilization, a racist and sexist in a pluralistic culture.

The Times critic mentions none of these obstacles to enjoying the immensely popular, brilliant, and problematic dramatist. He does, however, take up the cultural impediments that work against audience satisfaction. To summarize his points, Shakespeare is full of:

• Difficult poetry
• Unfunny comedy
• Unrealistic plots
• Too little action
• Men in tights

He also argues implicitly that Shakespeare (and perhaps theater as a whole) can’t compete with TV and video games for a person’s attention.

That list, mirroring the article's style, reads like one that a C student would dash off during study hall before English class. Isherwood's responses, in turn, sound like those of a mediocre English teacher’s rejoinders. That's when he manages to respond at all, since he often switches topics mid-argument. Again, audiences have legitimate reasons not to see Shakespeare's plays. Yet they also prefer to see his work over everyone else's. Rather than reason out that paradox, Isherwood ignores it—or is unaware of it.

Ultimately, however, what frustrates me the most about this article is that its subject is one I continuously grapple with. These days, my obligations have outstripped my schedule, and I’ve had to concentrate my limited time and energy on the theater I love the most. So I’ve decided that, if I’m going to write, I want to write about Shakespeare. But to reiterate, there are enormous issues, doubts, and contradictions in focusing on his work. As I shift this blog’s attention to Shakespeare in New York, I plan to address these quandaries from many angles. I suppose that, if Isherwood’s article does nothing else, it serves me as an object reminder of what not to write.

Public Works and populist Shakespeare

A few weeks ago now, the Public Theater debuted its Public Works project, which aims to revive Joe Papp’s populism. Its mission lives up to the WPA-like handle: hundreds of New Yorkers, professional and amateur, from across the five boroughs, performed on the Delacorte stage for the inaugural production, The Tempest (which I reviewed last week). These people are members of local arts groups that contribute to the artistic life of their neighborhoods. Public Works, in turn, imports theater to those local communities—not, it seems, by parachuting in like a SWAT team of thespians (although it does have a “Mobile Shakespeare Unit”), but by actually collaborating with the local artists. The result, in the case of The Tempest, felt more civic, and not incidentally more electrifying, than the standard format of Shakespeare in the Park. Just as the production envisioned a new approach to Shakespearean production, the program presents a mode of civic arts that feels new.

It isn’t, of course. As a work of artistic populism, Lear deBesonnet, director of both The Tempest and of Public Works generally, was inspired by a 1916 theatrical event, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, which you can read here. As an artifact, the script is typical of that era’s experimental theater. It aims to invent a radical yet accessible new dramaturgy, but instead it gets caught up in symbolic abstractions (think of Konstantin & Nina’s play in The Seagull). In this case, Caliban deliberately echoes the scenarios for Jacobean masques, with their allegorical characters, communal pageantry, and mass participation. At the center of the spectacle, Caliban aims to better himself by learning his master’s magic. It’s easily read as a member of the underclass who elevates himself by his encounter with sublime art. With such intellectual content and poetical style, the 1916 show would seem to have missed its target. Yet it was spectacularly successful: over 1,500 performers entertained 20K viewers per night!

The Public Works’ Tempest didn’t come close to that level of attendance, but it did display a similar sense of pageantry and civic engagement. And as fun as The Tempest was on an aesthetic level, I’m more engaged by the artistic philosophy that links it to Caliban by the Yellow Sands. In New York, as public funding has been withdrawn, the arts have increasingly followed a patronage system. The stories onstage and the audiences in the house have mirrored this shift, coming to reflect the world of the corporate backers and corporate-derived private foundations. This collaboration, however, begins to redress that homogenization and elitism by crossing lines of class and race. In the language of both 1916 and 2013, its aims are progressive. The civic participation has populist underpinnings as well as aesthetic innovation, and works on a scale that befits its Gotham setting. It’s possible to imagine a future production that extends the model of The Tempest to invite creative participation from the audience.

As for The Tempest itself, Shakespeare’s play does have its political and racial themes, and although they didn’t form the production’s spine, they did supply some subtext. The show—in which non-white, non-privileged artists have been imported from the outer boroughs for a standard Manhattan audience—could have been iffy. But deBessonet turns that subtext on its side by casting the arts groups as the island’s spirits. The Calpulli Mexican Dancers; members of Domestic Workers United; the Middle Church Jerriese Johnson Gospel Choir: these performers inhabit Shakespeare’s magical isle, whereas the Italianate courtiers and fools merely visit. The effect is to suggest the vast and diverse underclass of New Yorkers who live in this city, effectively unseen by the white, white-collar 1%. This facet was visible to those who looked, but it didn’t eclipse the show’s atmosphere of inclusiveness. I’ll look forward to more theater from the Public Works project, to see where deBessonet and company take these ideas.

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photo credit: Joan Marcus

Shakespeare notebook: The Tempest

Public Works at the Delacorte Theater

directed by Lear deBessonet

Sept. 7, 2013

The Tempest (at the Delacorte last weekend only) might showcased the biggest cast I’ve ever seen—and I’m up to nearly 2000 shows in my two decades of theatergoing. As the inaugural production of the Public Theater’s Public Works program, The Tempest engages the talents of a dozen NYC arts organizations, from gospel choirs to Japanese drummers to a NYC public school’s ballet program. The result ravishes the audience’s senses, conjuring the magic and music of Shakespeare’s drama superbly and modeling perfectly the ideal of Public founder Joseph Papp’s to stage Shakespeare for the locals.

Created by director Lear deBessonet and composer Todd Almond, this Tempest takes liberties with Shakespeare’s play but stays laudably faithful to its spirit. The duo raise the role of music and dance to the same level of importance as the script—a reasonable alteration since the script draws parallels between magic and theater, music, and dance. More radically, they alter the play such that Prospero initially sets out to avenge his political exile and only in Act 4 softens. Further, Prospero is demoted from protagonist, usurped by Ariel. Played superbly by Almond as a glam MC in white and silver, the spirit speaks modern prose rather than Shakespearean poetry. His desire for emancipation from his servitude is the show’s strongest emotional component. These alterations suggest one path forward for Shakespearean theater: not by shrifting the playwright or altering his intent but by adding to the play’s scope and vision.

The island's spirits enjoy the show
as much as the Delacorte audience
(photo credit: Joan Marcus)

The success of this Tempest, then, is mainly its conjuring of the island setting. Rather than relying mostly on scenery and lighting (and not to shortchange the respective work of designers Saunders and Micoleau), the production takes advantage of NYC’s local arts organizations. Though the island is mostly uninhabited by humans, it’s home to scores of “spirits”, played by a local choir whose members grin widely as Ariel banters with them about the foolery and complots of the island’s mortal visitors. This chorus of locals, mostly black and mostly female, wears the primary colors and flowery patterns of tropical cultures. That fashion helps to set the location and contrasts nicely with the stock doublet-and-hose of the play’s characters. Finally and most vitally, their talent for song gives life and character to the island. The company’s presence suggests that the Shakespeareans are interlopers; it’s not Prospero’s island, it’s theirs.

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.