Shakespeare's politics in Arin Arbus' King Lear

It's the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and the 398th anniversary of his death. At least, it's when we celebrate it. Putting foolish questions of authorship aside, William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, traditionally performed three days after birth. And Elizabethans used the Julian calendar; under the Gregorian one, the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth/death is May 3. Coincidentally, that's Lady Hotspur's birthday too!

Still, I come here to praise Shakespeare, not to bury him. But as much as I love his plays, the problems I have with them are many, deep, and they do keep me up at night. Shakespeare is big on a rural aristocracy, while the urban multitudes disgust him; I’m pretty much the opposite. And we disagree about authority—state, domestic, religious, you name it. Some of his worldviews I can appreciate intellectually, like the redemption of Christ—until he relates it to Jews. He writes strong female roles but often to nasty purposes.

Shakespeare’s social assumptions are deeply embedded in his plays, such that you can’t extricate the pros from the cons. Yet many politically-minded productions try to modernize the plays in just that fashion. Orson Welles famously turned Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play in 1938, but most directors can't match that audacity and talent. It’s difficult to pull off a political take on Shakespeare that doesn’t violate the play itself—usually the solution is to consciously subvert it. So I appreciate how well Arin Arbus and her company (at Theater for a New Audience) fit an impulse to social engagement into their King Lear.

photo: Carol Rosegg

Arbus and dramaturg Jonathan Kalb don’t shoehorn new material into the already titanic script. Instead, they retain a few beats that usually get cut. The speech that perked my ears was during the tempest of Act 3. Lear (Michael Pennington) is left alone onstage while Kent and the Fool look for shelter. The king, at the brink of madness, says to himself:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

It’s the play’s second mention of a destitute underclass (earlier, Edgar imitates a beggar; he enters in that disguise immediately after this speech), and implies a population of indigents haunting Lear’s kingdom. Pennington’s delivery of “I have ta’en too little care of this!” suggests that Lear momentarily gains a social conscience as part of his harrowing.

The last 3½ lines are hard to parse, but Pennington clarifies them admirably. His Lear aligns himself with the poor naked wretches, and urges other aristos (“pomp”) to join him, so they too may help (“shake the superflux”, or excess riches). He reads “just” to mean “justice”, which implies that charity will shame the heavens into better treatment of the hungry, poor, and homeless.

photo: Carol Rosegg

Pennington and Arbus use the soliloquy’s format, a form of audience address, to put the viewers in the position of Lear’s apostrophized aristos. Houseless heads and unfed sides have increased in New York City, against national trends. It’s a rare Shakespearean production that can remind its audience of that, and a successful one that can do so without imposing a modern interpretation over a play built upon very different social and economic assumptions. But the opportunity is there. By foregrounding it, Arbus, Pennington, and Kalb make Shakespeare matter.

I’ll just mention another beat that counters the feudal rigidity that’s so alien to the modern viewer. Later in act 3, a servant stabs his own lord to prevent the blinding of Gloucester. Most productions frame his motivation as a reaction to horror: fair enough. But in the context of Arbus’ Lear it’s a moment of populist revolution, as a man chooses ethics over fealty. A few moments later at the scene’s end, Kalb and Arbus salvage another beat from the cuts: one of the servant’s fellows resolves to help Gloucester to first aid and a guide:

Second servantLet’s follow the old Earl and get the bedlamTo lead him where he would. His roguish madnessAllows itself to anything. Third servantGo thou. I’ll fetch some flax and whites of eggsTo apply to his bleeding face. Now heaven help him!

This beat, in a rough quarto but not the Folio, is one of the few altruistic actions in a very dark play. By retaining it, Arbus and Kalb illuminate Lear’s nihilism. In these subtle ways, Arbus and her company make Shakespeare matter. The result is a profound piece of social conscience as well as a work of great tragedy.

Review: Sir Patient Fancy (The Queens Company)

Sir Patient Fancy

playwright  Aphra Behn

company  Queens Company

theater  The Wild Project

players
Tiffany Abercrombie, Virginia Baeta, Karen Berthel, Julia Campanelli, Amy Driesler, Sarah Hankins, Sarah Joyce, Natalie Lebert, Elisabeth Preston, & Antoinette Robinson

director  Rebecca Patterson

fight director  Judi Lewis Ockler

set/lights  Matthew J. Fick

costumes  Kristina Makowski

sound  Amy Altadona

Elisabeth Preston & Tiffany Abercrombie
in Sir Patient Fancy

Because each show by the Queens Company is better than the last one, it's no surprise that Sir Patient Fancy is remarkably fun. This all-female troupe revives English comedies from Shakespeare’s era and after, and they have a knack for comic drama. Last season they produced a playful, love-drunk take on As You Like It; this season sees the company reunite for a less familiar play.

Sir Patient Fancy is by Aphra Behn, England’s first professional female writer and an adventurer who dabbled in sex and espionage. Her plays and novels disclose a robust spirit, proving her to be a skilled dramatist of sturdy sexcapades that are still worth watching. Behn embraces decadence and dissembling, and her characters are motivated by desire—a surprise pleasure for audiences used to Shakespearean morality.

In Sir Patient Fancy, Behn links together a series of sex triangles: a trio of gallants compete with fops, fathers, and each other for the favors of pert, marriageable daughters and lusty wives. Although the scene is London, Behn depicts it as a generic urban playground with few concrete references to place or time. Queens’ designers follow those cues by emptying the stage of everything but a block for sitting and some damask for eavesdropping. The lighting plot is usually a bright wash of light, though it should do the work of making each scene’s setting and atmosphere more specific. The design’s lone baroque element is a company trademark: staging dumbshows to modern pop-rock anthems. Sir Patient’s curtain-raiser sets the tone by displaying the triangles of desire to No Doubt’s “Just a Girl”.

The minimalist design demands director Rebecca Patterson keep her actors moving and the comic tone bubbling. Behn’s dialogue lacks the subtext of Shakespeare, but the company turns her deficit to their advantage. They suggest quicksilver thinking by delivering flights of simile with wit and by expressing desire with ribald pleasure. The women-as-women look especially glad to play parts that match the male roles for substance and motivation. Sarah Joyce, as the witty ingénue (think Beatrice inMuch Ado), tempers her character’s sensuality with a saucy skepticism. Tiffany Abercrombie, as an old hypochondriac’s second wife, delivers the evening’s best performance, her range of comedic expressions and vocal registers recalling Madeline Kahn. The women-as-men enjoy themselves too, of course, with the hypochondriac (Natalie Lebert) and the fop (Virginia Baeta) providing the most hilarious moments.

Actually, there’s not a bad performance among the company. Ascribe that fact mostly to the tightness of the troupe. Actors return to the Queens Company for show after show, forming a true company with the chemistry and esprit de corps that entails. They establish a continuity of style and an approach to playing that acts as a signature. All-male shows often get described as ‘testosterone-heavy’, shorthand for roughhousing and crotch-grabbing. The Queens Company does its share of suggestive leg-spreading in turn, but otherwise its common gender doesn't produce an analogous "estrogen-driven" approach. Add the race-blind casting, and its productions seem emancipated. The company knows that love and lust don't come from manhood or femininity, they come from human nature. This liberated spirit and humanist passion puffs Sir Patient Fancy into a giddy pleasure.

Natalie Lebert & Virginia Baeta
in Sir Patient Fancy

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The Queens Company's Sir Patient Fancy runs March 15 thru April 5 at the Wild Project, 195 East 3rd Street

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This piece originally ran on the NY Theater Review

photos  Bob Pileggi

The Ides of March

Frances Barber's particularly brutish Caesar
in the Donmar/St. Ann's '13 production

Today’s the Ides of March, famous as the anniversary of Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC. Shakespeare dramatized the event, of course, but it may be the only story in his collection that’s greater than his telling of it. His major contribution is to spread the myth that Caesar’s last words were “Et tu, Brute?”, but he lifted that from Suetonius, who claimed the famous last words were “Kai su, teknon?”, Greek for “You too, child?”

Caesar is Shakespeare’s most powerful character, from a political and social point-of-view. So it’s ironic that, from various standpoints, he’s not one of the writer’s strongest. Instead of the complex yet characterized verse of the other Romans, he speaks in what Shakespeare, through Rosalind, called a “thrasonical brag” (after Thraso, a braggart soldier in a play by Terence).

In fact, Shakespeare seems to play subversively with the ultimate monarch. He’s not the protagonist of the play named for him. And while he’s alive, in the first half of the play, his humanity (and thus his mortality) is underscored:

    He had a fever when he was in Spain,

    And when the fit was on him, I did mark
    How he did shake. 'Tis true, this god did shake:
    His coward lips did from their color fly,
    And that same eye, whose bend doth awe the world,
    Did lose his luster: I did hear him groan:
    Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans
    Mark Him, and write his speeches in their books,
    'Alas,' it cried, 'give me some drink, Titinius',
    As a sick girl. Ye gods, it doth amaze me
    A man of such a feeble temper should
    So get the start of the majestic world
    And bear the palm alone.

That’s Cassius in Act 1, so read it with a touch of skepticism, but at times the anecdote gets borne out. While he’s alive, Caesar’s greatness isn’t inherent, it’s in his wife’s prophetic nightmare and the soothsayer’s warning to “Beware the Ides of March.” His arc towards apotheosis is only activated by the assassination. As Brutus considers the event beforehand, he says:

    Let us be sacrificers but not butchers, Caius

    …

    Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods

Then Brutus goes further, staging the assassination as a sacrificial ritual.

                                    Stoop, Romans, stoop,

    And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood

    Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords:

    Then walk we forth, even to the marketplace,

    And, waving our red weapons o’er our heads,

    Let’s all cry, ‘Peace, freedom, and liberty!’

After his death Caesar is more than a man (a little like Obi Wan Kenobi). His spirit haunts the play—not just literally, as a Shakespearean specter appearing to Brutus, but in the verse and behind the events. As Cassius says in his Roman suicide,

    Caesar, thou art revenged

    Even with the sword that killed thee.

And when the army of Brutus is unexpectedly defeated by Octavius,

    Oh Julius Cesar, thou art mighty yet!

    Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords

    In our own proper entrails.

My favorite aspect of Julius Caesar is this tension between the man and the myth. Shakespeare’s approach is pretty Christian (Platonic?), suggesting that Caesar's true soul is only seen once the body is discarded, and he becomes history. In fact, we still live in Julius Caesar’s world: we have a month named for him, after all, and we remember the date in the soothsayer’s warning.

Review: King Lear (Chichester at BAM)

Frank Langella explains to the balcony
how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to be Lear
(photo: Richard Termine)

A month or two ago, I saw my 150th production of Shakespeare. With so many evenings drawn from the same set of plays, I tend to value the innovative approach and the unique staging over quality executed conventionally. A case in point: BAM’s production of King Lear, acclaimed by most critics, left me cool. The treatment felt old-fashioned—it favored the melodrama and external emotion over complexity, nuance, and an expression of consciousness through language. But the show wasn’t a wash-out: quality executed conventionally. Plus, I saw facets of the play I’d never noticed before.

Mostly, this Lear (from the Chichester Festival Theater) feels familiar, unrisky, a little bit rote. Angus Jackson locates it in a generic medieval England: lots of leather and metal on the costumes, a stage dressed with wooden planks and stone, and set with flaming braziers and a gothic throne. The cast declaims its verse straight to the balcony. In the lead role, Frank Langella plays each scene well—how could he not, with that rich baritone built for the sonorities of Shakepearean verse? But he’s not a coherent psyche, he’s a flipbook of mental states. The show may provide that old Aristotelian “pity and terror”, but it’s apprehended from afar. Lacking psychological depth or a tragic sensibility, covered too deeply by a melodramatic artifice out of the 19C, this Lear seems more like a historical pageant than a drama.

Again, that pageantry is executed quite well. And to me, it also reveals an archetypal layer to Lear, one that prefigures Shakespeare’s tragicomic romances. As Lear damns each of his daughters in turn (with Langella shaking his fist at the rafters), the repetition takes on a ritual meaning. Edmund and Edgar, now flattened into Bad Son and Good Son, revert to their antecedent roles as players in a morality: one tempting his father to evil and the other working to salvage that soul. Note also the strangely stiff formality to that subplot’s act 5 climax, as the trumpets sound thrice to summon Edgar for trial-by-combat.

Lear cracks as the designer drenches his set with real H20
(photo: Richard Termine)

While this Lear shows how the play foreshadows the style of the romances, I doubt that’s its intention. The central image of Jackson’s show is the old standby, Lear howling at the storm. But it’s rare that an evening’s most memorable moment is its centerpiece. Long after I’ve forgotten this particular tempest (except maybe the actual torrent of water onstage), I’ll recall the quiet beat when Edgar describes the chalk cliffs of Dover to his sightless father. Here, as an aid to his imagination he blindfolds himself, in mirror to his father’s bandages, and then recites the speech. The action helps the viewer become a listener, and enlists the mind’s eye to conjure the vision. I’ll remember it as a perfectly staged moment of Shakespeare.

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King Lear

Chichester Festival Theater at BAM

director: Angus Jackson