Tag: American Shakespeare Center

The Panels

I gave my paper today, which I think went very well! I didn’t get too immensely nervous until just before it happened, and I didn’t knock anything over, accidentally swear, or utterly lose my place, so that counts as a win.

I’m proud to have been on a really wonderfully strong panel, with a bunch of fantastic papers, including Paige Reynolds’ captivating discussion of the use and abuse of Desdemona’s body after she is killed, Elizabeth Kolkovitch’s examination of how contemporary productions stage the masque in Timon of Athens (and, basically, their varying degrees of sexism), and Annalisa Castaldo and John Culhane’s investigation of a question that has been troubling me recently– whether or not bed tricks, such as that in Measure for Measure, would have been construed as rape.

Patrick Harris’s paper about the ring exchanges in Merchant of Venice provided another excellent example of the fruitful use of actors, as he played with the various shades of meaning that emerge when the characters in the play give and take Portia’s ring in various ways.

Michael Dobson’s keynote address was very exciting as well, comparing Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labour’s Lost through the lens of the various temporal settings the plays are given in contemporary productions, and why Much Ado tends to feel so quaint and distant precisely because it is so rooted in the reality of Shakespeare’s own time, whereas Love’s Labour’s intentionally fantastic and idyllic tone in fact helps it feel more present and real.

The Play: Much Ado About Nothing 

I found myself keenly aware of actor repertory while watching Much Ado About Nothing. Four days in a row of watching the same twelve actors in four separate plays will do that to you, of course. But I was most struck by a specific pair: Lauren Ballard and Benjamin Reed. Ballard played Edward Lancaster, Molly Aster, Maria, and Hero. Reed played Edward York, Peter, Longaville, and Claudio. They were explicitly linked across all four plays, and romantically in three of them.

This had the odd effect– completely coincidental and entirely based on the order in which we happened to see the plays– of easing, somehow, the often troublesome fact of Claudio and Hero’s reunion. This was due partly to their strong performances, of course, but there was also a degree to which I had become accustomed to seeing them together. The fact of their union– feeling, in some ways, like a long-awaited culmination after the two disrupted romances of Peter and the Starcatcher and Love’s Labour’s Lost— seemed inevitable and natural.

The Panels

Today’s theme for me was hearing from some scholars who have really figured out how to usefully leverage contemporary performance in service of historical principles. So often, using a modern-day performance in an attempt to excavate historical ideas can feel like false objectivity: just because something seems obvious to us doesn’t mean it would have been obvious or logical then. Or it can just come off seeming a bit “so what?”– highlighting that an individual performer/production made a given choice can feel more like anecdote than analysis.

The staging session led by Farah Karim-Cooper and Beth Burns of the Hidden Room Theater Company transcended all of these issues with its emphasis on experimentation. Karim-Cooper recently published a book about early modern gesture onstage, and has done work with Burns’ company to illustrate some of her theories and findings in performance. No one claimed to offering truth, only possibilities– and the possibilities they presented were very interesting. Pairing Shakespeare’s heightened language with heightened gesture felt so fitting and natural, a forceful reminder that Shakespeare is not naturalism, and works best when it isn’t trying to be. I was startled when their very sincere rendition of Q1 Hamlet‘s dumb show had much of the room in gales of laughter, as the exaggerated, expressive movements really weren’t funny– they were just unfamiliar. But they were also very evocative and very beautiful, and Karim-Cooper’s connection between the gestures of rejection and capitulation of the Player Queen and her wooer in the Hamlet dumb show and the “perverse wooing scene” between Gloucester and Lady Anne in Richard III was very fascinating, and I think indicates a really important and useful avenue of exploration, one that reminded me of Janette Dillon’s work on scenic “units” in Shakespeare and the Staging of English History. What might be found by attending more closely to gestural echoes across the plays?

Katheryn McPherson’s paper operated similarly, experimenting with space in public vs court performances, letting the actors traverse different ranges of the playing space and to incorporate (or not) the presence of a theoretical monarch.

Richard Priess’s exploration of an apparently impossible stage direction in The Devil is An Ass– one that seems to require an actor to be in two places at once– was so firmly rooted in text and so masterfully argued that his use of actors actually felt more like illustration than exploration. But in that, it provided another useful example of how to take advantage of the performance options this conference offers.

James Keegan brought an actor’s take (though he’s also a professor) to the difficulties of hoisting the dying Antony’s body aloft in 4.15 of Antony and Cleopatra, but applied a sufficiently thoughtful and scholarly lens to take his conclusions beyond mere anecdote.

This is a question I continue to grapple with, especially being partly based at an institution that is rooted in experimenting with reproductions of early modern spaces. It was so useful to see some great examples of how performance as research can feel really effective.

The Play: Love’s Labour’s Lost 

I forget that lots of people aren’t fans of Love’s Labour’s Lost because to me it seems so self-evidently great. As I was saying to someone today, I think that if people could move past their panic about the density of the language, they’d realize that the extremely contemporary-feeling characters and situations would (I think, anyway) prove sufficiently accessible to audiences to make up for the linguistic soup.

This production was delightful, though the day’s panels inspired some interesting thoughts about the play’s much-discussed inconclusive ending. As Burns and Karim-Cooper’s panel in particular remind us, “original practices” is not just an aesthetic– not just a 17th century playhouse and costumes and fast entrances and live music. There is an acting and storytelling style that needs to be retrieved as well, and the ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost is a place where contemporary expectations crash particularly jarringly against what the text suggests.

It was in evidence in this production as well: the Princess of France performed the entire end of the play tearfully– which makes naturalistic sense. She’s just learned of her father’s death, after all. But her actual text bespeaks calm. The language is measured and complex, devoid of exclamations or lamentations. Like the end of so many comedies, the end of LLL lifts above any pretense at naturalism, into the heightened realm where improbable conclusions become possible. Hero is both revealed and reborn. Proteus is forgiven. The Princess is now a Queen (as has often been pointed out, her speech prefix changes instantly) and presents the King with a fairy-tale like quest to restore his wounded honor.

The incorporation of contemporary songs at certain moments in the play suggest they weren’t necessarily seeking to fully achieve an OP aesthetic, and the injection of extra emotion into the ending sequence certainly didn’t disrupt the splendid production– but I admit I was most moved when they finally did eschew naturalism to end the play with a dance.

The Panels 

My definite favorite paper of the day was presented by Lindsey Snyder, a scholar and ASL interpreter who discussed the possibilities contemporary gestural languages like ASL can present for attempting to revive early modern gestural vocabulary. The part of the paper that really blew my mind was her translation of several speeches by Juliet, to illustrate the dramaturgical power of ASL’s embodied notions of time– the way that time, past, and present are located upon and in relation to the speaker’s body. Not only was this a fascinating intellectual point, her translations of Shakespeare (and her wonderful performances of them!) were immensely moving. I have an ongoing fascination with ASL in general, and translations of Shakespeare in particular, and I loved getting to see the topic approached from such a rigorously scholarly point of view.

There is definitely a propensity for highly theatrical papers– not just those that use actors to demonstrate points, but speakers, like Matthew Kozusko’s discussion of the rhetoric of Coriolanus, who structure the papers themselves in a self-aware and performative way.

An exciting paper on a more practical note was Megan Brown’s presentation on the Folger’s new Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama, a resource that sounds very exciting and that I hadn’t previously known about.

The Play: Peter and the Starcatcher 

Okay, it’s not Shakespeare. But I absolutely adore this play, and saw it more times than I should probably admit during its Broadway and off-Broadway runs (don’t judge me, it was always for free).

Unsurprisingly, the play’s DIY, Nicholas Nickleby-inspired aesthetic works extremely well with the Blackfriars’ shared lighting and lack of sets. The actors were obviously having a huge amount of fun, and so the audience was, too. It was interesting to see how differently and more flexibly this show used the space. Where The Fall of King Henry only had one entrance from the house, here the actors were all over the place, moving through rows, clambering over audience members, and jumping off the stage. There was more use of the trap door and upper gallery, too.

I felt extremely aware of the elaborate language, and the delight the play takes in its own kind of poetry. There really is something so Shakespearean about such awareness of the musicality of words and taking such pleasure in building delightful sounds out of them. I’m not sure if it was the actors’ Shakespearean training that made them handle the language in a Shakespearean fashion, thus raising my awareness of the dialog’s complexity and pleasingness, or if it was the simple fact of the setting that drew my attention. But in either case, it seemed a highly fitting choice for this company.

I’m in Staunton, Virginia for the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Conference! Terrifyingly, I’ll be giving a paper on Saturday morning, but before that there’s three days of panels, papers, and performances that I’m going to try to write about.

So, day one…

The Panels 

Blackfriars strictly enforces a quite short paper limit of ten minutes, and perhaps because of this brevity, the most compelling papers for me were ones that took a specific, concrete, and sometimes extremely narrow (like, one word level narrow) focus. Lena Cowen Orwin’s keynote address, while obviously longer than the other panel papers, set the tone in this respect with her investigation of the origins of Shakespeare’s monument in Stratford, and suggesting evidence that Shakespeare himself had likely designed it. She also made the brief but fascinating point that the evidence suggests that, unlike, say, Edward Alleyn who seems to have been colloquially known as Ned, Shakespeare was known to his friends and colleagues (and maybe even his family) as Shakespeare.

Other highlights for me:

• Tiffany Stern’s exploration of the use of the word “playhouse.” Cuthbert Burbage’s court testimony of the 1630s describes both the Theatre and the Globe as being known as “the House,” and while we have taken that word to be a general term– and it has become one– she queries whether it may not have been specific to those buildings.
• Paul Menzer’s reflection on his loathing of the word “nuncle” and how Shakespeare has become a lens through which we refract our concepts of good and poor taste.
• Tim Fitzpatrick’s excellent explanation of the methods by which they derived the measurements for New Zealand’s Pop-Up Globe. His comparisons between Wenceslas Hollar’s sketches for his famous engraving and a very well-explained theory of ex quadrata geometry make a very compelling argument for a second Globe that was distinctly smaller than the dimensions chosen for the Globe reconstruction in London (which was based off its own well-founded theories).
• James Marino’s study of the effects of revision on cues in the two editions of Doctor Faustus. His originating question was to ask how much revision to cues were actors willing to tolerate. And the answer seems to be “a fair amount.”
• Claire Bourne’s illumination of the use of  “printer’s lace” divisions as more than just a way to take up space/make up for half of Q1 Romeo and Juliet being printed in the wrong text size, and not just simple scenic divisions (which really didn’t exist as such at that point) but as indicators of thematic divisions.

The necessity of matching form to content– the form in this case mostly being defined by time constraint, but also by the fact hearing a paper is much less kind to wandering or vague connections than reading one is– has been a useful reminder that while conferences are often framed as a “state of the field” check-in, they’re really kindest to very specific kinds of work.

The Play: The Fall of King Henry (3 Henry VI) 

I’ve never seen any Henry VI play live before, and diving into part three, arguably the strongest one, seemed like a fair enough way to begin. The ASC has been putting together the first tetralogy, retitling the Henry VI plays as The Tragedy of Joan of Arc, The Rise of Queen Margaret, and now The Fall of King Henry. Like my beloved Oregon Shakespeare Festival, such multi-year cycles are enabled by their resident acting company, many of whom (as their bios attest) have been working for the ASC for years.

This was my first show in the Blackfriars, a replica of the indoor playhouse used by the King’s Men. I’ve been in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe’s version of an indoor, 17th century playhouse, but it’s much smaller than the Blackfriars. I had some hopes that this would ameliorate the major sightline issues that one encounters in the SWP when sitting anywhere along the sides… but it didn’t. The sight-lines are just as bad (and the seats are just as uncomfortable). In the SWP, I happened to see a series of Jacobean tragedies, so I ran into a new problem seeing a sprawling history play:  3 Henry VI introduces a bunch of new characters in the second half, who are naturally doubled by actors whose characters died in the first half. But because I frequently couldn’t see new characters’ faces when their names were first mentioned, for most of the second half, I had no idea who any of the secondary characters were. Unless we assume that the average playgoer was extremely well-versed in heraldry and every character just wore their coat of arms– which I strongly doubt– this seems like a problematic staging issue that must have had a better solution in the 17th century than the directors managed to find here.

There was a detour at one point earlier today into the classic question of whether early modern audiences went to “hear” a play rather than “see” a play, and thus didn’t care about the apparently crappy sight-lines in these indoors spaces. I am unconvinced by this, particularly because we know for certain that companies spent most of their money on costumes. That would certainly be a waste of money if audiences didn’t care about seeing– or couldn’t see.

But the sight-lines aside, this production was a great reminder that the Henry VIs are really much more engaging and performable than they get credit for being. The early (probably collaborative) verse, while sometimes a bit clunky, is also simple and easy to follow. The extremely heightened action is actually really compelling, even if, in this instance, the production couldn’t resist making jokes out of some of the more ridiculous moments. Then again, maybe they were meant to be jokes in the first place.

The Blackfriars’ irreverent spirit is definitely well suited to a messy, extreme show like 3 Henry VI. I’m looking forward to seeing how some straightforward comedies play… and maybe if I’ll be able to get a better view.