A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

So apparently Daniel Craig is starring in a bizarre Macbeth production heavily featuring soup.

Please recount your favorite bizarre Shakespeare or Shakespeare-adjacent production choices in comments.

rydra_wong posts on her goal to see all of Shakespeare's plays.

If you agree that this is an excellent goal and one you've made some progress toward, please comment with a list of Shakespeare plays you have/haven't seen, preferably annotated with how they were.

I do not count either Two Noble Kinsmen or Edward III, but you can if you like! Bonus content of non-Shakespeare but Shakespeare-adjacent productions delightedly accepted.

Here is my list. It is heavily influenced by what was available when I was around. If it was just by my choice I'd have seen Hamlet live a hundred times and The Tempest at least once.

And making this list reminds me that I have missed seeing the movies of The Tempest and also Titus Andronicus, so I need to get on that.

Cut for theatre/Shakespeare nerdery. ( Read more... )

I regret so much that I didn’t see Henry IV parts I & II, because they had continuing characters including the astonishing Daniel Jose Molina as Henry. Veteran OSF actor G. Valmont Thomas had played Falstaff in those, and he died this year; doing the scenes where they mourn him must have been incredibly difficult or incredibly cathartic (or both) for the actors who did the earlier plays with him.

Henry V, directed by Rosa Joshi and performed in the little black box Thomas Theatre, had a three-quarter stage with raked seating; you can never be more than 10 feet from the stage. At opening, we see a bare stage except for a wall of made of gray boxes, and four ropes hanging down.

While everyone’s still taking their seats, two actors dressed in plain dark clothing came on and started to push the wall. It was on wheels, and rotated; it seemed heavy. The actors were lost to sight as the wall made a full rotation, and when it came back around it was being pushed by a different pair of actors. The wall seemed to get heavier and heavier as time went on, so the last set of actors were leaning over almost horizontally to get it moving. Before the play even began, you had a sense of an enormous, exhausting enterprise; and one which, now that I think about it, was ultimately futile: the wall turns and turns, but nothing really changes, and it ends up exactly where it began, only having swallowed up a number of people in its wake.

Twelve actors performed the play; the speeches of the chorus were broken up between them, sometimes line by line. On that bare stage in their unadorned clothes, all the lines about having to use your imagination to create a war on bare boards worked so much better than they do in more elaborate productions. (Actually, this production was pretty elaborate in a way, but its art and craft was geared toward an appearance of simplicity.)

This was probably the most easily understandable Shakespeare production I’ve ever seen. I could follow every single line of dialogue, including parts that I’ve never really been able to completely get in performance before. Whoever their dialogue coach was, they did one hell of a job. I also realized, while watching, how nicely constructed a play it really is. Henry V has a lot of tonal variance and the transitions can seem jarring; in this, every scene was compelling, and the entire story had a drive almost like a thriller.

Everyone was terrific, but the particular standouts for me, apart from Molina, were a funny and kind Fluellen, and a replacement actor, Rachel Crowl, who played Lord Grey (one of the traitors) and a swaggering Pistol. She has an extraordinarily expressive face and voice, and this was the first time I’ve ever really cared about Pistol. Jessica Ko, the commanding Dou Yi from Snow in Midsummer, was a heartbreaking Falstaff’s Boy, a sweet and funny Princess Katherine, and a Montjoy who developed a real relationship with Henry across their several meetings. Daniel Jose Molina, who looked about twenty-two, was a fiercely intelligent Henry, always watching and calculating, desperate to prove to himself that his war was a right and justified decision. He made all his speeches feel as if he was coming up with those words for the very first time.

(I had mentioned in an earlier post that the company seemed very diverse. I looked it up later. The acting company is currently 70% people of color. It's diverse in other ways too. Here's a fascinating article on Rachel Crowl: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-mn-trans-visibility-hollywood-rachel-crowl-20170713-story.html#)

The ropes, of course, got swung on and climbed on. They also created royal hangings to frame a throne solely by their position onstage, and were used to hang Bardolph. He slipped out of his jacket as the rope jerked upward, leaving it dangling from the rope, and walked across the stage to fix Henry with a chilling glare before he vanished into the shadows.

The entire set consisted of the wall and the gray boxes it was made from, which the actors moved on and off. (They didn’t usually literally remove them from the wall, though they occasionally did.) They were stacked to become a throne and dias, they were lit from within to become the bonfires burning around the camp, they opened to reveal the insulting gift of tennis balls, and so forth. Large ones became coffins; small ones placed onstage opened to reveal actors from previously unseen trapdoors, climbing out of tunnels. It was seriously one of the best sets I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen other “modular boxes” sets that did not impress me. It was just so well-done.

With such a small cast, the war was created primarily with movement. The soldiers sometimes swapped coats to distinguish sides, and sometimes didn’t; at one point the army of France starts to bolt offstage, then does nothing but turn around in unison to become the English army that’s ruthlessly pushing them back. The entire war was shown by means of an unnerving sound effect halfway between a trumpet and a siren, some cannon fire, boxes being slammed down and shoved across the stage, and red clothing.

The red clothes were a take on the old “red streamers are blood,” only they were long-sleeved shirts and a few gloves. They were pulled out as entrails, they puddled on the floor to become pools of blood, they covered missing limbs. Once an actor stretched one over his face in a screaming death mask. As the battle went on, they started piling up on the floor. There was a very haunting double vision of the shirts as blood or bloody rags of flesh, and the shirts as the discarded clothing we’re used to seeing at the scenes of mass death by violence.

After a fairly long sequence of this, you really did feel like you’d seen a war. The distinction between armies broke down fairly early, so it was just anonymous people fighting and dying. When Henry finally asks Montjoy if the day was his, you understood why he didn’t know. At the answer, his barely-there composure starts to slowly break apart until he was having a sobbing breakdown (right in front of my seat, that was nice) and was comforted and cheered up by Fluellen. Which marks the first time that scene has ever not seemed incredibly jarring to me, but actually made sense.

The scene with the princess was funny and charming, with nice awkward chemistry between them. But of course, that’s not the end. The end is the chorus breaking into the happy ending to tell us that Henry died young, and all his works were undone and for nothing: “They lost France, and made his England bleed.”

And the entire company turns to the wall and starts pulling open the boxes, which we hadn’t previously realized were drawers, and are packed full of the red clothing. That had all been taken away for the scene at the court of France, but now it starts piling up on the floor again, even more than at the very end of the battle, as the lights fade to black…

Love's Labors Lost is a very odd play, rarely performed because the language is so difficult. I think it probably reads better than it performs unless the cast and direction is extremely good. In reading, I like it for its sense of a kind of delicate bubble of time, all sunlit foolery and innocent youth, and how the ending shows exactly how evanescent the whole thing was. It also has a very beautiful last line.

This production went in more for broad comedy that takes a sudden shift to seriousness in the last ten minutes. Performed on the outdoor Elizabethan theatre, the set featured a lot of party balloons including a giant inflatable pig on the top balcony, and a rock/pop band onstage. Due to smoky conditions, we ended up waiting in the audience for half an hour while whoever was in charge of safety decided whether or not to cancel the show. Finally someone stuck her head out the top window and gave us a thumbs-up to rapturous cheers. The audience and performers were obviously really excited to have the show go on at all (I learned later that multiple performances had been canceled or moved to a local high school due to wildfire smoke, and this was the first time they'd performed on the stage in weeks) and all attempts at getting audience participation went extremely well.

The comedy was really funny, and I liked the songs. There was a lot of fourth wall-breaking, and some anachronistic added joke lines. The king and his buddies, and the princess and her ladies, start the show in all-white outfits (monastic for the men, cute sailor dresses with color accents for the women), and the men take their vows of chastity by planting a colored paint handprint over their hearts. As the play goes on, the colored paint gets used more and more - they paint emblems on their outfits, attack each other with paint, etc - as they increasingly lose sight of their vows, and they end up with rainbow outfits. Those then switch to red for Act II, and to black for the finale.

The king was the same actor who played Henry in Henry V, which we'd seen that afternoon! Getting to see actors in different roles over the same day or couple days is one of my favorite things about OSF, or any repertory theatre. He was charming, but Berowne, Sir Adrian Whatsisface, and his page stole the show. (Our waitress at the pre-show dinner was an understudy for one of the princess's ladies!)

It was generally a very nicely-done and enjoyable production of a difficult play, though it wasn't at all clear who some of the supporting characters were (Holofernes and those guys - I think they're academics?) and IMO, if there is a giant inflatable pig in Act I, it should descend or ascend or be used in some way by the end. Overall it was a lot of fun, but my least favorite of the four plays I saw. I'd like to see a production that was more delicate and less broad - more like my experience of reading the play.

Edited to add pig.

Inspired by the Ashland-set lesbian romance Set the Stage, my friend Halle and I are going to the Shakespeare festival next week! We're seeing Love's Labors Lost (which neither of us have ever seen performed) and The Book of Will (an original play about how Shakespeare's friends pieced together Hamlet after his death) on the Elizabethan stage, a new play adapted from an old Chinese one, Snow in Midsummer, at the Bowmer (a large proscenium stage), and Henry V in the Thomas (formerly the Black Swan), a very small black box theatre, usually used as a 3/4 or round stage.

I'm super excited. Ashland set my whole adult life in motion by switching me from an intended career in medicine to one in the arts; that might have happened anyway, but it was a very nice and suitably dramatic way for it to happen. In the middle of one of their plays, Peer Gynt, I watched an actor fight invisible trolls and thought, "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life." And I changed my major to theatre arts.

But I hadn't been back in something like 15 years. Has anyone gone more recently (or equally non-recently)? What was it like?

Burr is a historical novel with two interwoven timelines and two first-person narrators. In 1833, Charles Schuyler (not related to the Schuyler sisters), a journalist and aspiring lawyer, befriends the elderly Burr and coaxes him to tell his side of the story. It’s election time, and Schuyler has secretly been hired to get proof that Presidential candidate Martin van Buren is Aaron Burr’s illegitimate son, in the hopes of discrediting his candidacy. But as Burr tells his life story, Schuyler gets seriously mixed feelings.

I was given this book in high school by one of my uncles (I forget which; it would have been in character for either) because he thought it was well-written and I’d appreciate the prose. Despite a near total lack of knowledge and interest in the time period, I not only enjoyed it a lot (the prose is indeed excellent), but got curious about the duel and spent about a month reading primary sources in the library (this was pre-internet) to figure out exactly what was up with it and who shot first. Once I had satisfactory theories for that, I reverted to my previous lack of interest in the period for the next 25 years.

Then came Hamilton. So I re-read Burr. Vidal’s afterword says that apart from inventing Charlie Schuyler and much of the 1833 - 1840 storyline, and moving characters around in a few minor ways, it’s as historically accurate as he could make it in terms of facts and even dialogue as recorded at the time. The opinions, of course, are the characters’.

This is probably true (it’s definitely more historically accurate than Hamilton in terms of what happened to whom when), and yet even apart from opinions, when one writes fiction rather than biography— actually, even in all but the most exhaustive and objective biographies— you still choose which facts to include and which to leave out. (And even those biographies must choose how to phrase their statements of fact, and thus leave different impressions on readers. Simply writing an exhaustive biography makes the statement, “This person was important. Their life deserves to be recorded in excruciating detail.) No story of a real person, whether fictionalized or true, will recreate that person as they really were. Gather them all together, and you get a sort of pointillist painting, a thousand different stories making up a portrait of a man. Look closer, and they fragment again.

Miranda’s Burr and Vidal’s Burr are clearly derived from aspects of the real man, but are very different people. Vidal’s Burr is both more cynical and more playful, charismatic but misanthropic; he flat-out hates Hamilton and is only sorry he killed him, if he is sorry, because it ruined Burr too. Miranda’s Burr is a potentially great man with a fatal flaw, who the misfortune to be inspired by, provoked by, and finally destroy and be destroyed by his opposite and mirror image, a great man with his own fatal flaw. Miranda’s Burr regrets; Vidal’s Burr blames.

Neither of those guys sounds remotely like the deeply weird person who comes across if you read a summary of Burr’s life that includes the stuff that can’t be proven or remains mysterious (supposedly fondled a marble bust of Hamilton post-duel and said, “There was the poetry;” allegedly attempted to secede from the US and make himself Emperor) or excerpts from his diary (in which he accidentally sets himself on fire and attacks someone with an umbrella that has a knife in the handle.)

Vidal’s book has two somewhat unreliable narrators, but the third somewhat unreliable narrator is Vidal himself. Like anyone writing historical fiction and, to some inevitable extent, history, he chooses the events that support a cohesive character of his own imagining, and leaves out or downplays the ones that don’t. And that’s completely apart from the made-up episodes, like his theory on what Hamilton said (or Burr was told that he said) that provoked the duel. (I can see where Vidal got the idea, but there doesn’t seem to be any historical basis for it ever having been said at all, let alone that Hamilton said it.)

Not one of the Founding Fathers comes across well from Burr’s perspective: Washington is lumbering and incompetent in battle, Jefferson is canny but a snake in the grass and nowhere near the genius he’s portrayed, Madison well-meaning but pathetic, and Hamilton brilliant but vicious and hypocritical. The more Burr insists that Hamilton keeps projecting his own worst qualities on to him, and the more he blames everyone else for all the bad things he supposedly did, the more the reader gets the impression that there’s projecting going on, all right, but at least fifty percent of it is coming from Burr.

In an early scene, an actor pulls a friend away from a fight and misquotes Iago, saying, “You know what you know.” (I think at that period actors sometimes modernized Shakespeare’s dialogue, so that may be a nod to that rather than an error. Iago’s actual lines are “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”) This scene does not initially seem to have much to do with anything (it does set up some later stuff) and but mostly seems to be there to get readers thinking about Othello. (Vidal explicitly identifies the quote.)

Miranda’s Burr sings in the closing lines of the song “We know,” “We both know what we know.”

Those are both common phrases, so Miranda’s use may not be meant to echo either Vidal or Iago… but on the other hand, the Iago line is extremely famous and Miranda certainly would know it from Othello even if he wasn’t also inspired by Burr. (I would guess that he has read Burr; it’s pretty famous.) It’s the moment when you realize that Iago’s stated motives (way too many stated motives) were probably all lies or rationalizations, leaving the audience with a mystery never to be solved. What we know, we know… and we still have no idea why Iago destroyed Othello and, in doing so, destroyed himself. Remind you of anyone?

More subtly, it reminds us of a major theme of Vidal’s book, which is the unreliable narrator and the impossibility of ever knowing for sure what really happened in the past. We know what we know… but is it true? Who told us what we know? Should we believe it? Did they have a hidden motive, like Schuyler coaxing Burr to tell his stories, Burr hoping to vindicate himself, Schuyler hoping for the dirt on Martin van Buren, and both lonely men unwilling to admit that they want a friend? Who wrote our history books, and what did they think we should believe? Vidal and Miranda’s Burrs both know that they’ve been painted as villains, and try to tell their side of the story. And both Vidal and Miranda consciously re-tell history to hold a mirror to the politics of their own times.

Back to Othello letters are very important in the play. They also are in the real-life story of Burr and Hamilton, and furthermore play more of a role in both Burr and Hamilton than is required to just tell the story. The duel letters are obvious, but letters to Theodosia are important in both works (in very different contexts) and there’s also the letter-burning in “Burn.” (Which also involves infidelity, which of course is a huge plot point in Othello, though there the accusations are false.) The Othello motif is for sure intentional in Burr; not sure about Hamilton, but it’s interesting to consider.

There’s much more of Iago in Vidal’s Burr than in Miranda’s, but Miranda’s Burr is certainly acting in a Machiavellian manner in “We know.” Finally, though obviously concepts of race were different then, Iago is white and Othello is black, and that is important in the play. While Vidal’s Hamilton is white, “Creole bastard” comes up, just as it does in Miranda’s play; Hamilton wasn’t a racial minority as we think of it now, but people did have issues with where he came from. In Hamilton, of course, the most significant use of race is actors of color playing white people; Othello was often played by a white actor in blackface up until relatively recent times.

The characters in Hamilton are, by and large, infinitely nicer, better, more idealistic, and more likable people than in Burr… but then again, Vidal’s Burr has a vested interest in making everyone else look bad to make himself look good in comparison. Miranda’s Burr states his own case, but also narrates Hamilton’s story with honest admiration when that’s what he feels, even if he hates feeling it.

Othello aside, it’s fun to see where Vidal and Miranda were drawing inspiration or even lines from the same historical source, but did completely different things with it. For instance, you can see that they both thought the historic Jefferson was a giant racist and decided to take him down a peg or hundred.

Vidal’s Burr is charming even in decay— you can tell that you’d like him if you met him— but beneath that still-sparkling surface, human feeling is reserved for only a precious few. Everyone else is held in witty contempt. However, there is real feeling between Burr and Schuyler (much to Schuyler’s angst, given what he’s supposed to be doing), which keeps the book from feeling too grim or depressing. It’s cynical and sometimes quite dark (and contains period-accurate racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) but also well-plotted, gripping, and witty.

Burr

This one's short but sweet.

I was stage managing an evening of short plays by the playwright I hate more than any other, John Patrick Shanley. How do I hate him? Let me count the ways:

1. Except for portions of Moonstruck and the one brilliant line in Joe vs. the Volcano, "The lights! They're sucking out my eyeballs!" his writing sucks. It is cheap, pat, phony, overly slick and mannered, and twee.

2. His plays exemplify the "Nice Guy" phenomenon, in which a certain type of man always complains that women reject him because he's a nice guy and they want abusive assholes, when the real reason they reject him is because he's whiny, passive-aggressive, smug, self-righteous, and sexist. Similarly, many of his plays give lip service to feminism while portraying women as brainless bimbos who secretly long to be dominated.

The worst example of this was in some play of his in which a woman shows up with a black eye, and tells her female friends that she and her husband got in a huge fight, she deliberately pissed on the bed, and he punched her. But that cleared the air, and now they love each other more than ever! The friends are horrified and say that she should leave him. She retorts that if feminism is really about letting women make their own choices, then it shouldn't deny her true and meaningful experience. BAAARRRRRRFFFF.

3. In college, some of my friends and I got tickets to see his four-person play, Four Dogs and A Bone. Every minute was torture. A few days later, we were at a restaurant when we overheard a man at another table saying, "The actors were good, but the script was so bad, it was like watching four guys trying to lift a Mack truck."

I said, "Excuse me, but are you talking about Four Dogs and a Bone?"

He was.

Anyway, there I was, stage managing his abominable play. The lighting designer had over-designed given the electrical capacity of the theatre, so I constantly had to unplug and re-plug plugs at the patch bay to get it to work. The patch bay was under the lighting board in a very small space, so if I managed to not stick my finger in the socket, I'd bang my head instead. It was torture.

The only bright spot was the hot light board op with whom I shared the very small booth. He was a tall skinny black guy with a shaved head and the sort of banked intensity which romance novels often describe as "smoldering." We didn't have much time to talk, as we both came to the production late, but we worked well together and our brief conversations had been quite congenial. I decided to cunningly sound him out to see if he had a girlfriend (or boyfriend.)

"Soooo," I said one night, "You ever go get a drink after a show?"

"I don't drink," he said.

"Ah," I replied. "Hmm." I was about to suggest a snack instead, but he was already on a roll:

"I don't drink," he repeated. "I don't go to bars. I don't go to clubs. I don't dance. I don't take caffeine. I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. I don't eat meat. I don't have casual sex. I don't get piercings. I don't party. And I don't do small talk."

"Really, no small talk..." I mused. "How does that work when you go on dates?"

Even before he spoke, I knew what his reply would be: "I don't date."