The All-Male Casting Tradition of Will Shakespeare

This isn't Mark Rylance as Richard Crookback

This week, a pair of Shakespeare productions start performances in repertory on Broadway. Mark Rylance leads the company, playing Richard Crookback in Richard III and Olivia in Twelfe Night (sic—the Folio spelling!). He's not the only one playing a female role, either; the entire company is male. The absence of women is justified by a concept called “original practices”, which Rylance pioneered as the Artistic Director at the Globe in London. The retro impulse drove the company to build its theater according to Elizabethan construction (where allowed by modern fire-codes) and hand-stitch costumes together out of period textiles! It's an incredible place to see Shakespeare's work, especially when Rylance was onstage, and teaches the lover of Shakespeare, or of theater generally, a great deal about his dramaturgy, which is still so central to modern theater.

But any claims that “original practices” makes to artistic fidelity are obviated by 350 years of tradition and cultural drift. We’re so far removed from what Shakespeare meant by “male” that an “all-male” cast doesn’t possess any intrinsic verisimilitude. Anyway, contemporary troupes like this Broadway company tend to ignore the fact that, in Elizabethan theater, the female roles weren’t played by men, they were filled by young adolescents. It wasn’t exactly drag in the modern sense either, but it was a theatrical artifice that required specialized training.

I don’t mean to say that all-male cast can’t bring a new perspective to one of the plays. About a decade ago, I saw an all-male Taming of the Shrew staged at BAM by Edward Hall’s Propeller company. Casting a man as Kate allowed, in a nearly literal sense, the director to pull no punches. The relationship between Petruchio and Kate was more knockabout, seemingly less inhibited. Testosterone gave the production a locker-room quality, where hazing and roughhousing has an undercurrent of primate hierarchy. Perhaps with women in the role, some feminist impulse or latent sense of chivalry had kept most productions from admitting how violent the taming could get, or had subverted it in the name of modernity. Hall’s Taming, however, was violent and dark, reframing Shakespeare's attitudes for a modern audience.

In that case, an all-male cast added something valuable to the show beyond the gimmick. But more often, the concept has a whiff of boys-club exclusivity. Rose Rage, Propeller’s otherwise excellent adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI felt that way; there was no reason to cast a man as Margaret of Anjou (aside from the talent of the performer in a very memorable part). Similarly, Rylance’s original Twelfth Night at the Globe, back in 2002, failed to capitalize on the meta-dramatic kink of men-as-girls. The “original practices” conceit is no less artificial than any revival 400 years after its premiere. The boy who originally played Viola—and probably Rosalind and Portia too—has disappeared along with his name and his acting tradition.

But Twelfth Night does bring up one crucial facet of Elizabethan dramaturgy: those cross-dressing heroines. Shakespeare plays deliberately with irony when he has a boy play a girl disguised as a boy (especially in As You Like It, where actor/Rosalind/Ganymede roleplays as Rosalind, adding another level of cross-gender masquerade). Most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries did little with the device; Ben Jonson’s Epicene, for example, treats it with sniggering sexism. But Shakespeare elevated his female roles by lending them the pubescent actor’s incipient masculinity. His heroines, both comic and tragic, possess an autonomy that lays just below the surface even when they’re in gowns. The all-male cast is intrinsically part of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, but it’s deep in the bedrock, unseen. A modern all-male production can excavate the playwright’s rich approach to gender onstage, but it has to work carefully and imaginatively.

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.

Off-Broadway: Painting Churchs & other revivals

Painting Churches

The Keen Company at Theater Row

written by Tina Howe

directed by Carl Forsman

Critics tend to thump for new plays over revivals, so I want to take a second to applaud the fine revivals of plays by American women right now. Edson's sharp Wit plays at MTC, which Vogel matches with How I Learned to Drive at Second Stage, and now Howe gets a nod from the Keen Company with Painting Churches. All three prove their stageworthiness by themselves. But it's good to see plays that were successful in their initial run get remounted. The productions serve to canonize the works and their writers, strengthening a modern tradition (which is larger and less rigid than a school or genre) of women writing great work. And it brings these plays from the '80s & '90s to a subsequent generation of theatergoers. I doubt these three shows are an incipient movement, but wouldn't it be cool if they heralded revivals of Fornes, Wasserstein, Congdon, and many others?

Of the three, Tina Howe's 1983 play is less dramaturgically flashy than Wit or Drive, presenting its three-actor family drama in a standard format of linear episodic realism. Its subject, a bohemian daughter who paints a portrait of her daffy parents, (wealthy Bostonians who have friends named “Spence Cabot”), offers minimal tension. Howe's style is elusive & challenging, subtly shifting dramatic focus along with audience sympathy from one character to another. A dreamy neoclassical set (Beowulf Boritt) captures her impressionistic tone, while the casual delivery of the actors (Kathleen Chalfant, John Cunningham, and Kate Turnbull) slowly plumbs deep pools of loneliness. Carl Forsman, however, directs the play with a forthright realism, perhaps a mistaken attempt to counterbalance Howe's limpid warmth with comedic whimsy. But Howe's lovely and humane play pulls loose from Forsman's anchoring, proving itself a sturdy script worth the revival.

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Painting Churches plays at Theater Row, closing on April 7. Tickets?

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Read Rebeck's Speech on Female Playwrights

Earlier this week, Theresa Rebeck gave the keynote address for ART/New York's vendor awards. And she killed, giving a hard-boiled lecture on female playwrights in American theater. Read it over your morning coffee; it'll tell you more about the state of the art than any feature you'll skim in the weekend Arts & Leisure section of the NYTimes.

Most of her speech is tough-minded and anecdotal. But she backs up her experiences with facts. An excerpt to whet your appetite:

Generally, over the last 25 years the number of plays produced that were written by women seems to have vacillated between 12 and 17 percent.

This is a disastrous statistic, and it is related to another disastrous statistic, which is the number of women writers and directors in Hollywood. This year 6 percent of films were directed by women, and 8 percent of produced screenplays were written by women, or women had a shared credit on them. That means 88 percent of all plays were written by men, 94 percent of all movies were directed by men, and 92 percent of all movies were written by men.

Women playwrights like myself have a lot of anecdotal evidence to support some pretty coherent theories about why this is the case. People in the power structure seem more mystified and often they don’t seem sure that there is a problem. (One of them actually said to me, not to long ago, “But Theresa, where ARE the women playwrights?” Seriously, he looked me in the face and said that.) Several artistic directors have expressed concern at the idea of 'quotas,' they really don’t like the word 'quota.' I don’t like that word either. Another word I don’t like is 'discrimination' and, 'censorship,' and I wish I could get them to dislike those words as much as they dislike 'quotas.' 'Boys club' is another couple of words I could very well live without. But since there is so much murky territory in language, I think this discussion of numbers is very useful.

Earlier in the speech, she points out a hard irony: “Back in 1918, before women had the right to vote, the percentage of new plays in New York written by women was higher. It was higher before we had the vote.”

In the spirit of fairness, Rebeck also notes that the '09/'10 New York season does offer a number of very good plays by women (and incidentally omits a few, like Suzan-Lori Parks' current show at the Public and Sheila Callaghan's upcoming one at the Womens' Project). Her list includes some of the best shows of the season.

Go see them. See the plays that women write, talk about them to your friends (especially those in artistic management!), interview the writers and build features around their work. Pay attention to this speech, circulate it among theater artists and audiences, and work on changing the facts it presents. It's the 21st century; time to act like it.