And Yet Another Play, Even Better!

Today I went to the Great River Shakespeare Festival production of The Winter's Tale, and it was stellar.  I so enjoyed it!  Paulina was amazing, just superb.

They did some really interesting staging.  For example, in the trial scene when Hermione dies, they covered her with a light white cloth on a big chest, the sort of chest you might imagine being used on a cruise in the 1890s.  (Chests and such were the main stage furniture.)  The scene with Antigonus and the baby followed, and when he talked about her dream, the actor stood up, covered with the white cloth (through which she could be semi-seen), and said the lines instead of Antigonus saying them.  They did that sort of thing several times, and it was effective.

The other thing:  it really stood out to me after seeing A Midsummer Night's Dream the other day, how well I could hear and understand everything these actors said, and how deep their range of emotional representation was.  They could represent anger without yelling, and then when they raised their voice, it was effective at showing greater anger.

So, if you're in the Winona area, be sure to see The Winter's Tale before it closes!

And Another Play!

Yesterday, I went to the brand new Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival's production of As You Like It, in Eau Claire, at the newish Pablo Center.  The Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival was announced a couple of years ago, but the opening was postponed, and this is the first year.  It's also had some paring, so, for example, a student production of The Tempest was on the books, but isn't happening this year.

Eau Claire's got a lively amateur theater community, and a number of locals were in this production.  The rest of the cast looked to be (from the intro paragraphs), college students and recent graduates. 

The Pablo Center is a beautiful venue, right at the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers; they've put together what they say is a replica of the Globe, but it's less a replica of the Globe than maybe something such as Blackfriars.  As you can see from the picture at the link, and from the image below:

the seating doesn't take advantage of a thrust stage, nor does it have standing room.  It's basically a pseudo Tudo backdrop to a semi-proscenium arch stage.  The lighting reflects that sensibility, so the audience's attention of fully on the stage, and there's little to no interaction between actors and audience through most of the performance.  (The exception is when the court folks join the first row of the audience to watch the guildsmen's performance.)

The performance was basically a strong student performance, a bit hard to hear clearly (I wasn't the only one who found this), but pretty solid.  Bottom was the stand out performer, and did a really lovely job.  The guildsmen's performance was especially fun, with a really creative wall part that I enjoyed a lot.

It's hard for me to think that another Shakespeare focused theater "festival" is going to be able to compete against the Guthrie in the twin cities, American Player's Theater in Spring Green, and the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona.  Ticket prices are pretty high (as they almost always are at the Pablo) for what's basically a student production, especially compared to what's available in the other venues which are fully professional productions.  On the other hand, it's always good to see new theater opportunities trying to make a go of things!

There was a fun and interesting talk after by a local Shakespearean, which I enjoyed a lot!

Reading Ibsen

NWU is doing a production of Ibsen's The Doll's House next semester, and since I'm teaching an Intro to Lit, I thought I'd teach it.  And it's in the anthology.  So I started to read it so that it wouldn't be totally new when I taught it.  (I don't remember reading it before.)

I'm just in far enough that one of the characters is basically blackmailing another about the way she handled signing for a debt.  And I feel totally stressed out and tense.

I don't have any big financial stresses, and my only real debt is my mortgage.  But just thinking about the legal stuffs and financial problems makes me stressed out and tense.

I don't have a problem reading about a character in a play deciding to kill their king, perhaps because it's quite clear to me that 1) I'm not going to go out and kill anybody on purpose, and certainly not a national leader, and 2) in part that's because it's clear to me that killing someone, except under extreme duress (like actual, real, self-defense) never makes anything better.  So it doesn't stress me out that Macbeth wants to kill Duncan, or that Henry Tudor wants to kill Richard III.  Nope, not the least.

But the debt thing?  For some reason, that was so unpleasant that I just put the play down and went and did some cleaning. 

I may not actually teach it after all.  It will depend if I can make myself get through it.  But there's a certain point at which I really don't see the need to read lit to teach that makes me unhappy.

I really don't understand the theater folks wanting to put this on...

Henry 5 at the Globe

I went to see H5 at the Globe last night.  H5 was played by a Black woman, who was very good, very commanding.  Overall, though, it was a cool evening, had rained earlier, and the house was probably less than half full, so the cast had difficulty developing the energy I usually see.  I like to think we're all happy with gender and race blind casting.  I thought I was.  But then the Alice and Princess Katherine scene came, and I decided maybe I wasn't so comfortable as I complacently thought I was.  Katherine was played by a middle aged white man, not in drag; that is, there was no attempt to look "feminine" except that he wore a dress.   He didn't seem to have a wig on (was partly balding with short hair), and he seemed definitely middle-aged. And boy, did that challenge me! For those not familiar with Henry 5: French Princess Katharine pretty much knows she's going to be married off to Henry, the English king; in this scene, she's with her waiting gentlewoman, who seems to know a bit of English, and starts asking for translations of words for body parts.  Hands, fingers, arm, elbow, neck, chin, feet.  For those who have French and English, there are near homophones of "naughty" words in the pronunciations, "dilbo," "cun" "foot" and so forth. Some of the amusement from the scene traditionally comes from watching a presumably innocent young woman talking sexy, and finding the license to say "foot" for example, funny.  With this Katherine, however, the humor there didn't really work for me, which weirdly made the sort of cruel gap of the knowing audience laughing at the innocent young woman stand out all the more.  So that was interesting. And when the courting scene (where Henry meets Katherine and "courts" her, though we all know this is a pretense since her father will decide and she has no choice) came, I didn't feel any of the amusement in the teasing from Henry about language and such.  Maybe the two actors didn't have chemistry, or maybe it was my hangup with the man playing Katherine? Usually, in race and gender blind casting, at least in Shakespeare, you see people of color playing white roles, and women playing men's roles.  On one level, that makes sense because there's a paucity of roles for women and people of color in the plays.  But it means that you have actors from traditionally less powerful groups (people of color, women) playing characters from a more powerful group (white men).  But in Katherine's casting, a white man played a woman, and a woman with pretty much no power at all (since she's basically a political pawn). *** Otherwise: the production seemed a bit rough at the edges, with people either stepping on each other's lines in the prologue, or not quite speaking together (if they were supposed to be speaking together). There were times I really couldn't hear well (I was in the upper gallery for the first time, front row). But usually I could. And I couldn't always understand what I was hearing, and not only because it was French... *** I'm trying to find reviews of this production, but don't see any. I'm wondering how long it's been playing? (It's pretty early in the season, after all.)

The Specialized Paper and the General Audience

I'm supposed to give a paper to the school here on Monday, after spending from Wednesday to Sunday night in Barcelona.

I have a paper ready, but need to put together some powerpoint type slides to show with it.

The problem is, the paper's about a quirky bit of The Winter's Tale, and trying to summarize the play enough to get the quirky bit understood seems daunting.  So, this woman dies, except a lot of critics think she's just been hiding out.  And this other woman has a statue made and then uses her art to bring it to life, except a lot of critics think it's fake all along, and...

Back to revising.  I'm off to Barcelona tomorrow!

***

But last week, I returned to Stratford-upon-Avon!  I went there before, and saw the archaeological dig, and again and saw Macbeth on the new stage.

This time, I went out to Anne Hathaway's family's home, which was late medieval, and would have been fascinating even without the Shakespeare connection.  But to think of stepping on stone floors where Shakespeare probably stepped, that was cool!

 There it is, a doorway!  I think it's an addition, and the one inside is more from the period.

And, of course, I went to the Centre and New Place, too!

We saw Twelfth Night, evidently still in previews.  Here's the only review I see on line.  But I'm wary of any review that starts out talking about what a privilege it is to see a play.

My review: I thought the acting was good, the singing less so (Feste didn't have the voice training to really carry it off).  The costuming was interesting, as were the casting choices, but I felt like things were reinscribing Orientalism a little too strongly or without really thinking about it.  (Guess which characters whose gender is confusing and questionable were played by actors of apparent Indian/Asian descent...)

The thing is, when I teach the play, I tend to downplay the cruelty.  But in production, the cruelty really stands out to me.  And I'm increasingly uncomfortable with it.

Review: Coriolanus (RSC)

On Wednesday last, a small group from the college went to the local movie theater to watch a live broadcast of the RSC's Coriolanus from Stratford-upon-Avon.

I hesitated about going because Coriolanus isn't in my top 25 Shakespeare plays, and I've had a cold and sore back and am busy.  But finally I decided to go since I've never seen it before and live theater's not that easy for me to get to, even in a movie theater.

I think the RSC is doing all the Roman plays this year, so Coriolanus came along for the ride.  And for the most part, the production felt like it.  Workmanlike.  It got the job done.  Overall, the first three Acts could have been a step faster all through.

But I want more out of theater.  I want to be challenged to think (or rethink) things.  I want to be excited, or saddened, to be reached at an emotional level or an intellectual level.    And this production didn't do that for me.  The actors were fine in their parts, but no one struck me as especially good.

The Roman plays are all political, and this one happened in modern dress, which seems more effective than togas these days.

I'm not quite sure what I want from a filmed version of a staged play.  I found the camera work (changing points of view, changing distance, and so on) a bit distracting.  When I watch a play, I sometimes find myself watching side action, and I couldn't do that often with this camera work.

I did think the casting of two women actors to play the Tribunes, Martina Laird as Junius Brutus and Jackie Morrison as Sicinius Veletus, was interesting because the rather tall and athletically built men really felt threatening when they loomed over the Tribunes.  And Menenius seemed to be mansplaining in ways I don't think I've felt before when I thought of the Tribunes as male characters.  The effect for me was to make me identify even more closely with the Tribunes than otherwise.

I remember first studying Coriolanus in a course and talking extensively about same sex desire, so I expected to see a real sense of that on stage.  In Act 4, scene 5, the scene where Coriolanus goes to Aufidius to join with him, when Aufidius says,

                            Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars! I tell thee,
We have a power on foot; and I had purpose
Once more to hew thy target from thy brawn,
Or lose mine arm fort: thou hast beat me out
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me;
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat,
And waked half dead with nothing. (Source)

it's nigh impossible to miss the homoerotic aspects.  But in the RSC's production, Aufidius was more smirking than convincing, more like a teenager showing off a bit rather than a man who's had dreams.  And that was that.  The play didn't take Aufidius's dreams or desires to heart, didn't give them a Greco-Roman context of homoerotics between soldiers.  It just sort of sat there and then was over.  (I'm sure the actor did as directed, and could have done the part very differently if so directed.)

All in all, then, I was disappointed.  I want so much more out of plays than I got from this production.  Is it me?  the play?  or the production?