The Classic Problem

Tom Stoppard, whose new play The Hard Problem is onstage at the National Theatre in London, made some waves by claiming in a public forum that he had to dumb down a scene because preview audiences weren't getting a literary allusion.

He noted as well that a reference in one of his earlier plays to Goneril was recognized with the appropriate laugh in its first production in 1974, but when the play was revived in 1990, about half the audience was clueless.

The allusion, by the way, is in Travesties, a play so intellectually energetic and hilarious that it is almost never done (and certainly never on the North Coast.)  Henry Carr, a minor British official in Zurich, is being offered a part in The Importance of Being Earnest by its producer, James Joyce.  He asks why Joyce could possibly believe he is qualified.  Carr's younger sister Gwendolen says she recommended him. "You were a wonderful Goneril at Eton."  It seems that knowing Goneril is one of the sisters in King Lear is less essential to the joke than simply knowing it is a woman's part, and that Eton is (or was) all male.  Though like many jokes the humor is in the sound of the specific words.

Coincidentally, the play's director Nicholas Hytner said something perhaps pertinent to this point in an exit interview as he left his position running the National Theatre.  While giving him full marks for staging new plays of social and political import, the interviewer (veteran Guardian critic Michael Billington) noted a decline in productions from the classical repertoire.  Hytner accepted this observation, and said "I think there's been a general retreat from the classic repertory" but added "I also believe things will change and that the classic rep will be rediscovered by a new generation of directors."

This may be true, though especially in the UK--in the US I'd guess that such revivals as the new New York production of Albee's A Delicate Balance owe their existence to actors with clout (usually from the movies) who want challenging roles in a time-tested play once in awhile.

 But this overall point that the classic rep is not being done extends beyond Britain, though perhaps for different reasons.  My guess is that universities are also doing fewer classic plays, even modern American classics, unless they happen to be musicals.  It seems true of HSU for instance.

So what? Here's what.  Classic plays aren't classic just because they're old.  They may challenge successive generations of actors and directors as well as audiences, but they are worth that exploration.  And they are embedded in our common culture, for more than (but also including) punch lines of new jokes.

Some of this is an unfortunate byproduct of a healthy change--plays from cultures not much represented on common stages before.  There are only so many production slots, at the National or anywhere.

But it seems some and possibly quite a lot of it is not only because theatre audiences have dumbed down, but so has theatre education, leaving young theatre artists unequipped for the hard problems of the classics.

And it's a situation that feeds on itself, as the Hytner and Stoppard observations taken together suggest.  With fewer productions, fewer theatre artists as well as audience members get to experience classic plays.  They may all then comfortably believe that splashy musicals, identity dramas and warmed-over sitcoms are all there is.  Until very soon they are right.

Meanwhile, Stoppard's The Hard Problem (which is about consciousness, not--as the playwright points out--erectile dysfunction) is meeting with mixed reviews, often pointing out that it's not as good as his earlier plays.  If you read the reviews online and follow the algorthimically generated links, you may soon run into a review that says exactly the same thing about The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard's now "classic" trilogy.

Theatre Ain't For the Faint-Hearted: Dell'Arte Christmas Show 2005

One of my first North Coast theatre pieces, more than a year before I began this blog. It reminds me of my intentions for my column--to include reporting as well as preview and reviewing. But regular reporting takes time and the resources of a staff writer. Anyway,for the record, Dell'Arte's 2005 Christmas Holiday show, and a statement about theatre and the people who create it .

USC football fans got a little worried a few weeks ago when star tailback LenDale White went down with an injury in practice. They still had the superlative running back Reggie Bush (this year’s Heisman) but no backups. Fortunately for USC it was a minor mishap and White returned to help them trounce UCLA on the way to their upcoming national championship game in the Rose Bowl.

 Injuries, even in practice or (as has happened in the NBA and NFL) in pre-game warm-ups, are an expected hazard in sports. But in the artistic realm of theatre? As two local productions discovered recently—within a week and just yards apart—freak injuries can instantly shake up a stage game plan, or cancel the show. No negligence- ---just the breaks of the game.

 The cast of Dell’ Arte’s Myth-o-maniac was starting this year’s first free holiday road show at HSU’s van Duzer Theatre on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The audience was seated, eagerly anticipating the customary physical comedy of this popular annual performance.

The show began with the two female cast members, Audrey Finkelstein and Kali Quinn, singing their opening song as they approached the stage from the lobby. Christopher Beaulieu, the third and only male player, was onstage, preparing to go out and meet the two women. “I stepped down from the stage, I started to skip up the aisle,” he recalls, “and my ankle went out from underneath me and I hit the deck.”

 So Act I was moved from the theatre (where the show was cancelled) to the hospital emergency room. Beaulieu left there after midnight with a diagnosis of a bad sprain, and a wheelchair.

 After a short night at home in Ferndale, he was back at HSU at 8 a.m. to help re-block the show for a scheduled 10 a.m. performance. Beaulieu had to replace his walking, running, skipping and jumping with wheeling---and considerable crawling.

 The following Thursday, at HSU’s Gist Hall Theatre, a show created by Jyl Hewston’s physical theatre class called Immortal Steel was scheduled to open at 8 p.m. It was 8:20 when Hewston (also the director) apologized to the audience for the delay, and the show started. The delay was due to an accident.

 The show featured 16 actors and some 15 fights---with staffs, cudgels and mostly with swords. So was an actor’s arm accidentally lopped off by someone who didn’t know the blade was loaded? Not exactly. A half-hour before curtain, an actor tripped on some stairs.

 He had a minor sprain to one hand, but it meant that one key fight had to be cut entirely because he couldn’t hold a staff, and otherwise he became a left-handed swordsman, which required other adjustments. “I had to pull the other actors out of make-up,” Hewston said, “ and prepare them for the changes.” University theatre is supposed to be partly a learning experience, and it was for that cast. But the show did go on, for all 6 performances.

 Meanwhile, Myth-o-maniac had more than a half dozen shows scheduled while Beaulieu ankle was healing, and they were all over the place: Fortuna, Crescent City, Willow Creek and Eureka. By the time I caught the show at McKinleyville High School last week, Beaulieu was adept enough to be doing some wheelchair wheelies and other stunts. “Every show is different anyway,” he said, “but I try to add something each time, as I get comfortable with it. So now the wheelchair’s become part of the show. ”

 Beaulieu hopes to be on his feet again when they return to the Carlo Theatre at Dell’Arte this week, December 15 through 18. “But if I’m not, we’ll work the wheelchair in even more,” he said. “I don’t think it’s taken away from the piece.” In fact, it’s added something. “I’ve noticed kids in wheelchairs in the audience, and I think it’s great if they make a connection with something they’ve never seen before.”

 The Greek word for theatre means action. Drama is (among other things) the physicalization of fiction, the transformation of the storyteller’s gestures and the imagination of the listener into stuff and movement, in order to enact the story’s pith and moment. From the page to the stage---both enacting it and creating it new every time-- is the job of making theatre, and it’s sweaty.

 Though certain kinds of theatre make special demands on the actors’ bodies, all theatre is physical theatre. For those who do it, theatre is about as effete as football. All kinds of people get involved in creating its apparently effortless magic, but one thing is sure: theatre ain’t for the faint of heart.

Where Wednesday's Drama Was

More than once this year, when I avoided the halftime (sorry, intermission) restroom line at Redwood Curtain by heading for the men's room in the bar down the street, I stopped to watch the San Francisco Giants on TV, tempted to stick around for the outcome.  No matter how excellent the production was on stage, the immediacy and drama of baseball was compelling.

Then came the playoffs and it was hard to sit still at the theatre and pay attention, when I had my ipod-type device in my pocket, tuned to the radio station where the best announcing team in baseball was describing and explaining the action.  (This was before the ESPN radio automatons took over for the World Series.)

So it's no surprise that the biggest drama in town on Wednesday was anywhere even casual baseball fans were gathered to watch the seventh game of the World Series, and to see the Giants win it by the score of 3-2.

What stage drama could even compete?  One of the oldest pitchers to start a World Series game--a former great--doesn't get out of the second inning.  A middle-to-late reliever comes in to prevent further damage, with the aid of an excellent play by the shortstop and a brilliant play by the rookie second baseman with such a perfect baseball name that it had to have come out of the comics, or those baseball books by John R. Tunis and Joe Archibald I read as a kid: Joe Panik.

All of this is the first act warmup to the star's dramatic entrance.  After the Giants go up by a run, in comes 25 year old Madison Bumgarner, who started and won two previous games in this World Series, the second of them a complete game shutout just two days before.  And he does it again--though not without drama at a fever pitch in the last of the ninth: one of those errors by a usually reliable fielder puts a runner on third for the Kansas City Royals--the kind of portentous mishap that has led to legendary meltdowns at the last minute.

But no--with a 2-2 count, Bumgarner runs a pitch in that handcuffs the batter--he pops it up--third baseman Pablo Sandoval, himself a hitting hero of the postseason--squeezes it and falls to his knees.  And the Giants are world champions again: 2010, 2012, 2014.  Spooky.  And given this season, improbably.

What possibly could match that drama?  England's National Theatre doing three great Shakespeare's in a week, David Tennant does Hamlet, then Macbeth, and now it is up to the great but aging Olivier in Lear.  He gets through the opening scene but falters--suddenly Patrick Stewart has to rush on for the rest of the first act.  But he doesn't know the rest of the play, so with only two days rest, Tennant takes over--and the crowd is cheering at the end!  Or, wait, the crowd is in tears at the end!

No, not even that works.  Certainly there are plays and performances that are more rewarding and memorable than your average sporting event.  And as entertainment, sports offer a combination of immediacy and ritual than the theatre finds difficult to match.  On the other hand, I remember Joe Papp suggesting to me that when sports are providing the dramatic buzz, there's something wrong with theatre--it isn't making itself important enough to its times.

There are some things to be learned from sports that apply to making stage shows better, but probably not very many. Perhaps it's just different, but it also ought to be a bit humbling.

(And if you're interested in the Giants progress through this improbable postseason, I offer commentaries and links to professional reports at American Dash.)   So... congratulations to the World Champion San Francisco Giants!

Is Theatre A Luxury?

News from the LA Times:

 "Bloomberg, the New York-based financial news giant, is shutting down its Muse brand of cultural journalism and has laid off its theater critic. The shake-up was part of a company-wide reorganization that came down on Monday and resulted in layoffs around the newsroom. Bloomberg plans to continue to cover the arts, but with an emphasis on luxury. In an email sent to employees on Monday, Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matt Winkler said that the company has decided "to scale back arts coverage and no longer use the Muse brand." He said Bloomberg will align its leisure reporting with its luxury channel on its website, and with Pursuits, its magazine for wealthy readers."

Decreasing arts coverage and dumping the theatre critic has been going on for a decade or more in major magazines (some of which no longer exist) and newspapers. Perhaps not cheerful news (unless your show has been recently panned.)  But also not much new in it either.

But here's what caught my eye:  "Bloomberg plans to continue to cover the arts, but with an emphasis on luxury...  He said Bloomberg will align its leisure reporting with its luxury channel on its website, and with Pursuits, its magazine for wealthy readers."

This is first of all a clear acknowledgement that New York City has become an enclave for the rich, the only ones apart from tourists who can afford theatre tickets.  But Bloomberg's reach is far beyond New York City or even Washington,.D.C., another city that is pushing out its middle class. (In New York as in San Francisco, tech money has filled the space vacated by financial sector downsizing after the unpleasantness of 2008, while in Washington it's big money politics.)

Apart then from the national trend of the disappearing middle class, there's the reality living up to the cliche of the arts as only for the wealthy.  It is not generally true, especially when your definition moves away from arts events that are more glitz than substance much of the time anyway.

But it's a stubborn cliche, even here on the North Coast.  A North Coast Journal music column used the dubious mechanism of noting different kinds of music events by the footwear that characterizes their supposed audiences. For an event sponsored by the HSU Music Department, the footwear described were expensive loafers.

I'm not sure the writer ever attended an HSU Music event, where the audience is usually students, faculty, other musicians and a scattering of others, none of them wearing expensive loafers. This may be the audience that used to go to the Arkley Center (though not often enough apparently), I wouldn't know, I've never been there.  But anyone who has been to any theatre event on the North Coast must know that you are far more likely to see some pricey footwear in Wildberries than anywhere plays are produced.

Money and the arts don't go together like a horse and carriage.  They are more naturally enemies than allies, as a lot of bad art suggests.  While having a rich family helps young people survive long enough to establish a career in the arts, the arts themselves attract audiences and passionate devotees from all income classes.  They fascinate and inspire a self-selected audience and set of practitioners.

But it's also a product of our cultural insistence that theatre is nothing but entertainment, and entertainment is a luxury.  Theatre can be and should be a lot more central and important in people's lives and to the community.        

Pick Yourself Up

There are columns I mean to write someday.  When an idea becomes more fully formed, and there's an occasion for it, sometimes I actually write them.  And sometimes somebody else does it for me.

David Denby's piece in the New Yorker about the movie version of Les Mis says a lot of what I would have said concerning my feelings about certain musicals.  These days I probably would have said it more delicately but then, not as well.

First Denby trashes the movie, which he'd seen without having seen any stage version or hearing the music beforehand.  Then he trashes the story and the music.

He notes that the story "stripped of its social detail and reduced to its melodramatic elements, no longer makes much sense..." Which goes for some other musicals.  But it's what he writes about the music and the general approach to musicals that I want to copy:

I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.”

And now, the real point: our great musicals were something miraculous. They were a blessed artifice devoted to pleasure, to ease and movement, exultation in the human body, jokes and happy times, the giddiness of high hopes. Even the serious musicals, like “Carousel” and “West Side Story,” had their funny moments...  If you want emotion in a musical, please, if you’ve never seen it, catch the George Cukor version of “A Star is Born,” in which Judy Garland (John Lahr agrees with me on this) produces the single greatest moment in film-musical history. Late at night in a club, when she thinks no one is listening (while James Mason lurks in the shadows), she sings the Harold Arlen torch song “The Man That Got Away.” Overwhelming.

He offers a cure "for those suffering from absorption in “Les Mis.”

 Download the Astaire-Rogers “Top Hat” from Amazon. Throw it on a big screen if you can. Or download “Singin’ in the Rain,” with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, or “The Band Wagon,” with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, or “An American in Paris,” with Kelly again. I will tell you right now that these movies will not make you cry. But if you’ve never seen them before, they may open an entirely new path to pleasure. See them twice, and you will put aside the maudlin nonsense of “Les Mis” forever.

Stage Elsewhere: Daisey Chain

Issues of veracity, of the difference in dramatizing versus reporting, stage vs. journalism, are suddenly up for discussion in the affair of Mike Daisey and his monologue, The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs. It was the centerpiece of a program on NPR's "This American Life," concerning the conditions at a Foxconn factory in China that assembled Apple products, including the iphone.  Very long hours, poor working conditions for very low pay, possible chemical poisoning, underage workers, and various abuses leading to an epidemic of suicides were what Daisey talked about, within the framework of his trip to China.

But producers of the NPR show got wind of discrepancies, then confronted Daisey.  In particular they wanted to talk to his translator, named in the show as Cathy.  He told them her name really was Anna, that he'd had a cell phone number for her, but it no longer operated and he had no way to find her.  When the actual translator--a Chinese woman who used the name Cathy for western clients--was easily found, she disputed his recollection of what he had seen and what people had said to them in China.  All of this led the NPR program to take the unusual step of going on air to retract the entire program.

Responses to all this were various and are still unfolding.  The consumer watchdog organization sumofus.org for example sent out an email pointing out that the matters of fact under dispute didn't alter the basic facts, that "conditions in the factories are horrible, and in some cases illegal."  And the New York Times story that came out around the same time as the NPR broadcast affirms this.  Others point out that these factories, including Foxconn, make electronic products for other U.S. companies as well.  Meanwhile, TPM reported (in a disapproving tone) that the Public Theater was not going to cancel the remaining scheduled evenings of Daisey and his monologue.

Recently Mike Daisey went on stage at Georgetown to improvise a monologue on all of this, and it's an interesting and instructive read.  He spoke about his general process that included this monologue, but also how it was different:

"None of my other monologues are like it. They're all different. This one? This one was driven. It wanted to change things. It wanted very badly to break out of the theater and change things. It wanted very badly to see change happen in the world. It was like that Brecht quote, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.That's what it felt like. And I always visualized the monologue, for good or for bad, I always thought of it as a weapon. I always saw it that way. Balanced. Well built. Intended to try to get into people, to change us. To fundamentally* connect us to our circumstances."

He talks about how life has demonstrably changed in just a few years because of smartphones, and how art can respond to that change, and change things itself. "And what I'm trying to bring together in the piece is the idea that our whole story is the story of metaphor shifts. And if we can see the world in a new way, if we actually see it differently, that is what makes change happen. There is nothing else that makes change happen. It does not come from money or guns or power. It comes from the change, and when people's minds change, that's what pushes forward. And I believe that's what art can do, is affect that kind of change, create bonds of empathy between us and people on the other side of the world..."

He had been obsessed with Apple products and Steve Jobs (the primary subject of the monologue) but started reading about the factory conditions in China.  He decided to go there, and arrived just as reports of suicides were hitting the media.  But then they stopped, thanks to a crackdown by the Chinese government, and implied laxity and short attention spans of western media.  He felt compelled to talk about what no one else was talking about, and he did so for a couple of years before anyone paid much attention.

He talks about the dramatizing aspects of a work for the stage, but said that he never thought of the monologue as fictional in the sense of being made up. "Because if I wanted to make shit up, I wouldn't go to China. I would stay in my apartment in Brooklyn and make shit up. It's easier."

He kept getting interviewed, and stopped correcting the false assumptions and statements of interviewers.  He admitted that he allowed one such falsity to enter the monologue--that he had met a victim of the chemical poisoning.  He knew he had not, although the poisoning itself was otherwise documented.  But on other points that were contradicted by his translator, he says simply that his memory differs--he does remember that person, he did hear this person say that--and hints that her disapproval of his questions, her siding with China PR, may be distorting her version.

Noone--not "This American Life" nor the New York Times--says that the substance of what he was talking about was false.  The chemical poisoning may have occurred at a different plant in China, but it is documented.

In the Georgetown monologue, Daisey does say that a few of the encounters happened less dramatically than in his show, but they did happen.  (One of the more dramatic images--the guards with guns--that the translator disputes, he still says he really saw.)  All of this does speak to the expectations that the dramatic monologue creates, at least the kind that is represented as the monologist's experiences.  There is some kind of weird reverse fourth wall phenomenon.  The person on the stage who keeps saying "I"--I saw, I heard, I felt, I suddenly realized--is reaching through the fourth wall to say, this is really me and this really happened.  While we in the audience realize that to some extent, since this is being said from a stage, it is using theatrical contrivances.  It's a planned out, perhaps written out, and often performed piece with structure--with narrative but also dramatic effects (building action, misdirection, climaxes, etc.) But while breaking the fourth wall usually signals the artificiality of what's on stage--that it's a play, not reality--in this case, the acknowledgement of the audience by speaking directly to it seems to negate the artificiality of the stage, and adds to the sense that this is a real person talking about real memories and events.

I recall a very powerful autobiographical piece, mostly about childhood, performed some years ago at HSU by a visiting theatre artist from southern California.  And I recall my disappointment when he later admitted that its most dramatic scene was pretty much made up.  I don't think this invalidates it.  But I remain disappointed.  It seems like cheating artistically, though few would probably agree with me on that.  In any case I'd rather see someone make something artful out of real events.  I don't know exactly why adding to a scene seems more like cheating that leaving things out, skipping things and all the other usual elements of constructing a narrative, but it does.

There is of course the additional component of the social change intended by this theatre piece: how does that change the theatre artist's responsibilities, if at all?  I think it still comes down to what the artist signals to the audience it should believe.

In any case, most of what Daisey is criticized for is his failure to truthfully and fully answer questions for the journalists making the radio program. For his stage monologue, Daisey is essentially claiming that, for the most part, he stuck to the truth as he remembers it, and that he pretty carefully checked the facts (though he admits his numbers got inflated in performance.) It will be interesting to see how all this develops.  

McCarthyism in America

The City University of New York has refused to give playwright Tony Kushner a planned honorary degree because a member of its board of trustees objects to Kushner's views on Israel.

Now historian Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University is returning her CUNY honorary degree in protest, with a very pointed statement.  According to Salon, her statement reads in part:  "I received my honorary degree from CUNY because of my scholarship on the McCarthy period, when over one hundred professors (including at least fifteen from the New York City municipal colleges) lost their jobs for political reasons," writes Schrecker. "I assume that no one within CUNY’s Board of Trustees or administration wants a repeat of those dark days."

Justification for this response is inherent in the statement made by the objecting board member, who wrote in a New York Times oped that Kushner's "libelous statements against Israel were made by anyone outside the Jewish community, that person would be correctly labeled an anti-Semite."  This is precisely the kind of inflammatory charge that McCarthyism represented.

Stage Matters?

Stage Matters from Theatre Communications Group on Vimeo.

I was on the road when "Dell'Arte" left a comment on this blog pointing me to this video, and I've only now gotten around to checking it out. It's a nice TCG piece and an appropriate video to post while I contemplate my end of the year entry in my column, which is called...wait, I know it, it's...oh yeah, Stage Matters.

Revival

How do you make an old play new again? Moving the era of a Shakespeare play, especially closer to our own time, has become a strategy so common that it now seems reflexive, as predictable as the movement of a knee tapped with a hammer. Following the screen success of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of a few years ago featured teens in prep school uniforms carrying cell phones. But such elements depend on surprise and especially wit, as well as relevance, and their effects wear off quickly. Some work better on screen, but not always even there (Almereyda's postmodern Hamlet with Ethan Hawke was less successful.)

Sometimes, changing the period can be illuminating, but this depends on an original, relevant and brilliantly applied vision. However, there are a couple of other ways to revive older plays and make them more relevant to contemporary audiences.

One way--which is the essential way--is to play it honestly. The most difficult task for actors in Shakespeare and other well-known plays is to convince the audience that the characters are experiencing these events for the first time--that they don't know what happens next. Actors enact emotion, and this is the core of both the performance and the audience response. If the production, and particularly the actors, can make it real, the audience will experience it as new and relevant.

In general, a production that finds the vitality in the play can't help but to make it relevant to the times, because it will engage an audience living in these times. Playwright Terrence McNally spoke recently about the process of creating Ragtime, The Musical (he wrote the script), first produced on Broadway in 1998 and revived there last year, just nine years after the original production closed. He made this perceptive comment (published in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of The Dramatist) about the revival: " Everything will be the same as before but everything will be different, too. That's because we have a different country than when Ragtime [the novel by E.L. Doctorow] was published and Ragtime, The Musical premiered. If Ragtime seems different to you this time around it's not because we've re-written it. It's because this is a society that has re-written itself."

Choice Voice: Sing To Me Through Open Windows

According to renowned early 20th century Italian actor Tomasso Salvini, the three most potent elements of acting are: “Voice! Voice! Voice!” 

 You might expect that sentiment from an old-school actor like Salvini, or even actor and director John Gielgud, who suggested that while attention is often lavished on other aspects of performance, how the words are spoken “can have more effect than anything else.”

 But open almost any book on stage directing or acting, and they proclaim the importance of voice. The purported Stanislavski “Method” may have enshrined mumbling on American stages, but director Robert Lewis quotes Stanislavski writing at length about vocal acting: “Letters, syllables, words—these are the musical notes of speech, out of which to fashion measures, arias, whole symphonies.”

Harold Clurman (another Method-influenced director) writes about it—even Jerzy Grotowski devotes some 30 pages to vocal technique in Towards a Poor Theatre.

 A revelatory object lesson in vocal acting is available this weekend at the Arcata Playhouse, where Bob Wells performs in a short play by Arthur Kopit, directed by Dan Stone. First of all, every word Wells says can be heard, and every word can be understood. With these foundations in place, Wells goes on to act with his voice—his intonations, pronunciations, the words he stresses hard, the syllables he lets linger and float away.

 Beginning with his surprising “entrance,” Wells captivates, even when he does almost nothing except create this character with sound. He’s masterful: both poetic and clear. We know who this man is, and we attend to what he has to say.

 The play, called Sing to Me Through Open Windows, is more problematic. Arthur Kopit is a contemporary American playwright with a long career that began with revolutionary absurdist romps like Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, but more recently has included musicals, including Nine, which reached the silver screen this year with Kopit as an executive producer.

 Whether Kopit has copped out or America has caught up to his absurdism is an open question, but this early play is at best an exercise in poetic symbolism that for me remained fairly elusive in this production. There’s the old magician (Wells), the boy who visits him (played by newcomer Zachery Davis with appropriate vulnerability) and a clown whose relationship to the others is difficult to assess (played with appropriate physicality by Craig Klapman.)

This is the kind of challenging work that Dan Stone often chooses. Figuring out what was happening was more difficult because Bob Wells was the only one who was clearly audible all the time. Even so, a kind of ambiguity is inherent in this play. The stage imagery, including the music (all created by Dan Stone), worked well. The lighting was especially clarifying, but other choices (like the puppets) less so.

 The themes of life’s transitions and mythic cycles are there when you think about it, but the impact of aging was absolutely clear as an experience. That’s the work of Wells, playing a magician who is in the process of himself vanishing.

 “Fear is like regret,” he concludes, “only with fear, there’s not much time left.” Remarkable words to come from a 22 year-old playwright (as Kopit was when he wrote this), but very powerful when spoken by a veteran actor in conscious control of a superior vocal instrument. I particularly urge young actors to experience—and listen to--this performance.

 This Sanctuary Stage production plays Thursday through Saturday at 8 at the Arcata Playhouse.

 Speaking of voices, the Arcata Playhouse recently hosted a live original radio comedy, broadcast on KHSU. Both Ferndale Rep and Redwood Curtain have done these, and the full house at the Playhouse also attests to their popularity. What’s weird about watching a radio show is that it isn’t weird at all. The talent—too numerous to name—was great, the script (a detective story parody involving KHSU) was mostly funny, pocked with puns and other psychic detritus (you know, crazy people from Detroit.)

 Afterwards some participants recalled the great audio artists called Firesign Theatre, of “Temporarily Humboldt County” and “Nick Danger, Third Eye” fame. Get their CDs—still funny, and not insane.

 Coming Up: Still speaking of voices, completing its run this weekend at the HSU Studio Theatre is The Homecoming by Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, known for his unique dialogue, and among the ensemble is another notable North Coast actor who excels at vocal acting, Jabari Morgan. Remaining performances are Thurs.-Sat. at 7:30 and Sunday at 2. Info at HSUStage.blogspot.com.

 On Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8, the Dell’Arte Company Cabaret features your favorite Dell’Artesans plus special guests and a sneak preview of their epic work-in-progress: Blue Lake: The Opera. Then on Monday, Dell’Arte hosts visiting Le Cabaret Noir’s “Sin on Heels,” advertised as “a tawdry blend of burlesque and gender-bending performances.” For more on both cabarets, check dellarte.com.

 On Saturday March 13, Ferndale Rep holds its annual fundraiser, “RepFest: Comedy Tonight” at the Ferndale Community Center. Auction items and other information posted on ferndale-rep.org.

Talk

The first season of The West Wing created symphonies of dialogue that stirred television and led to multiple Emmy awards--and it all began with a kid who watched plays just to hear the people talk.

We've been watching The West Wing on DVD, beginning from the beginning. What a treat to re-watch this truly great series--one of the three or four best ever--without commercials, and with subtitles (they talk so fast that I often had to tape episodes just so I could watch them later and catch what I missed.)

For the uninitiated, The West Wing aired for 7 seasons beginning in 2000, and centered on the West Wing of the White House. I'll leave the political commentary it inspires for another blog. Here I want to mention something about the series that was said on one of the "special feature" featurettes on the final DVD of season 1. (The special features are terrific, the episode commentaries not so much. Producer/director Tommy Schlame and writer Aaron Sorkin do the commentaries but don't actually say much, except how neat it is to see an episode they hadn't seen in awhile. Sorkin especially wants people to shut up and listen to the dialogue.)

The series had fine acting by Martin Sheen as President Bartlet and an ensemble cast, but it got its spark and notoriety from the writing of Aaron Sorkin, who wrote all but one of the show's first 88 episodes, to the end of its fourth season. As cast members in one of the featurettes note, they soon learned to speak Sorkin's scripts word for word, because everything was in the language. The words were not only precise for comedic and dramatic moments, but in weaving the episodes together.

Now here's the comment that jumped out at me. Sorkin said that his parents started taking him to the theatre at an early age, and even before he understood the stories, he loved the dialogue, and how they created symphonies of words. It was the dialogue he heard in plays that inspired him to write.

If you know The West Wing, you know it is dialogue-driven. It's people in rooms--and famously, walking between rooms--talking. Talk became the music that made a multiple Emmy-award winning television series.

A couple of days after I first saw this featurette, I happened to read a review of a volume of Gore Vidal's essays in the New York Review of Books. The review writer, Jonathan Raban, noted that Vidal began as a playwright, and that his experience writing dramatic (and comedic) dialogue became the distinctive voice of his essays. "His best essays are aural performances," Raban writes. "...I can think of no other modern writer, with the possible exception of the playwright Alan Bennett, in his published diaries, who has succeeded as well as Vidal in transforming lines of cold print into an instantly audible speaking voice."

So having been hit over the head with this point twice, I got it: dialogue--words, talk--on stage can become the essence of an individual and successful voice in other media, like television and print.

But this point tends to reinforce another that I also read this week, which gently suggests that talk is as important--possibly more important--in theatre than the visual and conceptual elements that tend to dominate these days. Shakespeare was the specific case in point, and the matter of assigning some priority in staging and direction to making it easier for audiences to hear those words.

Now where did I read that bit...? Oh yes, in my column in the Journal. So here's the relevant passage, with a few more words...

Northcoast Prep doing King Lear got me thinking about Ronald Harwood’s play, The Dresser (also a movie with Albert Finney), which was about a small Shakespeare company playing the English provinces during World War II, based loosely on Donald Wolfit, reputedly one of the great Lears of the century. He was a last exemplar of the “actor/manager” school, and the theatrical style emphasizing the star, declaiming the great Shakespeare parts.

That rejected style had its excesses, but as a general comment, today’s emphasis on concepts and creating “stage pictures” may have gone too far in other directions. Those old-style actors knew how to make sure they were seen and heard clearly. They created the stage equivalent of close-ups. It’s really not that Shakespeare’s language is so difficult; just that there’s a lot of it. Instead of devising distractions, I’m in favor of making it easier to see and hear the words spoken.

That's partly a matter of projection and diction, but it is also a matter of making sure the speaker is seen. That's something those old actors of the classics knew in their very experienced bones: in order to be heard, the words must be seen. Not in phony hand gestures, but in the faces of the speaker.

This Insubstantial Pageant

That's what Shakespeare called it, but his texts
have remained pretty substantial. The text and
the moment, as in Tony Kushner's "Angels in
America" and its various performances on stage
and screen, demonstrate that the tension between
text and performance is theatre, and is a lot of its
enduring value. See post below.

First Principles: Text and Performance

The proper relationship of the text and the performance is often controversial, and different styles of theatre handle it differently--as do, unfortunately, different actors. But let's take a step back for a moment, and look at it in terms of the questioning of text--written words--by those who like to use spoken words as a stand-in for electronic media.

For instance, classicist James J O'Donnell (quoted in a book I'm reading for review elsewhere, called Distracted, by Maggie Jackson): "Is it not strange that we take the spoken word, the most insubstantial of human creations, and try through textuality to freeze it forever, and again, try to give the frozen words of those who are dead and gone, or at least far absent, control over our own experience of the lived here and now?"

Well, it might be strange if that were even close to true. For starters, while the spoken word has been "insubstantial" in a technical sense, at least until sound recording, the oral tradition of storytelling is hardly insubstantial in the larger sense. Stories that Homer recalled were told for hundreds of years before he wrote them down. Stories in the Native American tradition are still told, in living evidence of how the oral tradition works. (See The Truth About Stories by Thomas King, for evidence.)

But the real smasher of these sentences is performance, even theoretically. Apply what O'Donnell says to music, and you can see the logical problem. Music that is performed once is indeed "insubstantial"--that is, lost forever--unless the notes are written down (or the performance is recorded.) But once it is written down, according to O'Donnell, we are slaves to it forever, as it controls our experience of the here and now. Can't live with it, can't kill it.

It is certainly true that a piece of music, especially when heard repeatedly, and a book, and a play, can in some sense form our experience of the here and now, even beyond the here and now of the actual performance. That's why people associate certain songs with particular experiences, or play particular music to induce certain moods. Our view of the world is shaped in part by what we read, hear and watch--which sometimes means, by art.

The obvious example of how the fixed (the text) combines with the now is performance. Even apart from intepretation that consciously seeks to make a text more relevant to the now, or consciously shapes it for some other purpose, performance, by being in the moment, inevitably brings the text into a new time and place.

It's the best of both worlds. We can have performers, and all the people involved in a production, plus the audience of each particular performance, combine to create something that is alive in the here and now. While we also have the text of Shakespeare's plays, safely preserved, so that others may try to find and present its truth. Note that word: present.

For the here and now is not the last word in wisdom. Nor is the latest medium necessarily the best--compare for instance the books that physically last decades and hundreds of years, and that can be read by anyone who knows the language without assistance more complicated than eyeglasses, versus decaying diskettes and the multiplicity of formats and computer languages that has turned information storage into a gigantic toxic Tower of Babble.

Each generation finds newness in the text of at least some of the dead and gone. Voices from the past may be as important to our present as they are likely to be to the future. Only the arrogant, the deluded and the ignorant of the lessons preserved in some of those texts, would think otherwise.

Just as a given text can transcend its historical time, it may well be useful beyond a particular performance of it. There is an inherent tension between text (often composed in isolation by individuals) and performance (often resulting from the dynamics of many people working as a group), and it is healthy tension, like the tension that holds the structure of a geodesic dome together.

Besides, as a practical matter, while some actors and directors feel constrained by a text, many more actors (in my experience) are hungry for playwrights to give them words to say.

First Principles: Storytelling

"Theatre is a pragmatic art form. It's a storytelling art form, and lives or dies by its storytelling."

Tom Stoppard

First Principles: Live and Let Live

There’s something about the opening show of the Mad River Festival that inspires ruminations—or pontifications—about theatre itself. Last summer I looked to theatrical origins in traditional festivals. This year had me thinking about the “live” in live theatre, and its relation to the local and community.

These thoughts were also inspired by a conversation with Charlie Myers, my movie-reviewing colleague in these pages, after the benefit concert for Deborah Clasquin last Saturday. (An impressive turnout, though the proceeds will apparently pay for at most one of the three experimental treatments Deborah requires, so donations are still being accepted at the HSU Music Department.)

Charlie and I chatted about the comparative advantages and disadvantages of our respective beats. Although I envy Charlie’s access to on-the-job popcorn, and I’ve noticed that he can critique the latest Spielberg film without much chance of running into Steven at Wildberries (nor of receiving the evil eye from the ticket-taker on his next visit to the theatre), on the whole I think I have the better gig. And that’s even apart from the fact that these days I would only review movies on a sliding scale. If my base rate were $100 say, I’d have to charge $500 just to sit through an Adam Sandler comedy, $400 for Mike Myers, etc.

Unlike movies, theatre is live and local in various ways, as exemplified by these Dell’Arte summer shows. They’ve become community rituals, and the shows respond to the occasion, even in seemingly small gestures, like a character blowing bubbles for no apparent reason but to interest the children on the blankets near the stage. That the community sees itself reflected or refracted on stage is part of the “Theatre of Place” enacted in this year’s play, which works because the theatre has the depth of experience and credibility that can come with being located in the community, and because the story on stage can respond to the latest news with the speed and spontaneity of live performance.

There are prices to be paid in dramatic focus, structure and depth, and references that not everyone knows enough about to find funny. But sometimes revealing the local does more. The Dugan story reflects characteristics of the North Coast, but in doing so it reveals something about many other small towns, counter to media images. The kind of differences and diversity symbolized by transsexual Lesbian Terry Dugan (and based on a real story—see Donald Forrest’s moving explanation in the program) is almost always associated with big cities--and “San Francisco values.” But the truth is that they are present in these smaller places, though perhaps less obviously than here on the North Coast. So the shame, guilt and conflict portrayed in this story may exist even more strongly there, and extends to all kinds of differences, not just this one. And the process of forgiveness—including self-forgiveness—or the failure to find it, is a more universal drama of real life.

In locating an essential drama in the local, there is usually an element of the universal. Being human, the drama is shared, and the community is partly created by seeing it enacted.

You can get that universality at the movies sometimes, too. But what you can’t get is the same kind of intimacy when the people on stage and the people in the audience face each other. An aspect of this was imprinted on my consciousness some years ago at a small theatre production in Pittsburgh of Arthur Miller’s play, “The Creation of the World and Other Business.” Though it’s comedic, the play deals with weighty themes of good and evil, individuality and community, fate and freedom. The audience was very close to the action, and I had my Satori moment when I saw right in front of me God’s bare feet. That is, the bare feet of the actress playing God. Somehow that made the play real and present. These were real people struggling with these big questions, as the human author did, and as we in the audience do.

There is something about real bodies on the stage—at times uncomfortable, and yet vitally human. Audiences and actors breathing the same air demonstrates that apparently abstract questions may really be the most basic concerns of the human community. So how do you combine life and art, the everyday with its meaning? Create art. Present it live.

Korbel IV, Korbel Before and Thoughts on Live Theatre

First, the before IV of Korbel:

 The saga of the Dugan family in the mythical North Coast town of Korbel began in 1994. So before describing the new play, here’s a primer on the story so far, based on Michael Fields’ recollections:

“Korbel I: The Funeral” was centered on the funeral of the Dugan clan’s matriarch, Dorothy, who in financial despair, had committed suicide. Flashbacks revealed the truth about her son Terry, a transsexual Lesbian. Her other son, Tommy, was a logger “who was missing many of his body parts due to logging accidents, and was incapable of doing certain things,” though evidently that didn’t include fathering a child, because…

In “Korbel II: The Wedding,” Tommy had to get married in order to keep his child, but elsewhere in the Court House the Southern Korbel Unorganized Militia (SKUM) was planning a disruption. Meanwhile there was a fight at the wedding, and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms invaded (“We had people rappelling off the roof at Dell’Arte.”) “Where’s Tommy Dugan?” the ATF demanded, and in a response that Fields says was stolen from the Spanish Baroque playwright Lope de Vega, but which most of us remember from “Spartacus,” several members of the cast—beginning with a 7 year old boy—proclaimed: “I’m Tommy Dugan! I’m from Korbel!” Then, Fields recalls, members of the audience spontaneously repeated it themselves: “I’m Tommy Dugan! I’m from Korbel!”

In “Kobel III: The Birth” the only industry left in the town was a company that dug a deep hole in the ground, and dumped stuff into it. “Nobody knew what was going into the hole, but it was a business, and it was in Korbel” so it was accepted. Until people noticed that no babies had been born since the company came to town. But Dorothy Dugan returned from the dead (as she had in Korbel II), to miraculously cause people to give birth. “We gave little water balloons to people in the audience, and everybody was giving birth—including her son.”




Going for IV

That was nearly a decade ago, and the series seemed to have run its course with what Fields admits was its weakest script. But several factors converged to bring Korbel back this summer. For one thing, there were local events that begged to become part of the saga, like the ongoing drama of Blue Lake’s disgraced police chief, the continuing transformations associated with the Blue Lake casino, and the rise of the marijuana grow house economy. “Kevin Hoover wrote a long article about grow houses in the Arcata Eye awhile back, and suggested in it that Dell’Arte should do a play about it,” Fields said. “The last line of the article was: ‘Are you reading, Michael?’”

But another impetus came from an unlikely source: the Campaign for Love and Forgiveness by the Fetzer Institute, and a series of local forums on the subject sponsored by KEET. The Dell’Arte School was to be one of the locations, so Fields attended. Eventually he went to all of them, and realized there was dramatic material there. “It seemed fitting to do it as a Korbel piece, because it has a past, and forgiveness is a lot about holding onto something or letting it go. You can’t change what happened, but how do you move on? There’s a great quote—I think it was Confucius: ‘Forgiveness doesn’t change the past, but it enlarges the future.’”

(Actually, Dutch botanist Paul Boese said that, but Confucius does have a great quote on the subject: “Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.”)

The question now, as Fields recognizes is, “if comedy and the theme of forgiveness can exist at the same time” in the same play. We’ll all get a chance to find out, starting June 26, the premiere of “Korbel IV: The Accident”… The emergency room of Korbel’s new for-profit hospital and casino, St. Mo’s (she’s the patron saint of gamblers) is suddenly filled with victims of an accident, when a mysterious taco truck driven by the police chief and filled with machine guns runs over several people. But since every second home in Korbel is now a grow house and uses seven times the power a normal home uses, there’s a blackout—only enough power at St. Mo’s to run three life support systems (and of course the slot machines)—but there are four criticals: so somebody has to die!

There are plenty of local references, Dorothy’s obligatory return from the dead and especially, lots of songs by a trio of nurses played by three of the best-known singers around: Joyce Hough, Jayse Lecyour and Lila Nelson. The cast features original Dell’Arte ensemble members Joan Schirle, Michael Fields and Donald Forrest, and local all-stars Jackie Dandeneau and David Ferney, Bob and Lynne Wells, as well as Jane Hill, Lynnie Horrigan, Soren Olsen, Josh Salas and Calder Johnson. Fields promises a spectacular stage set, designed by HSU’s Jody Sekas: “It’s what Vegas would look like if it came to your hospital.”

What's This Review IV?

Opening night of Dell’Arte’s Korbel IV: The Accident saw an overflow crowd in the Rooney Amphitheatre, cheerfully engaged in the annual rites of family mini-picnics, adult wine-sipping and general bundling-up after sundown, gathered to witness the resumption of a hometown participatory soap opera with the Dell Arte brand of comedy, music and local satire. They weren’t disappointed.

Michael Fields anchors the story as ex-logger turned hospital janitor and apparent gun-runner, Tommy Dugan, growling like a North Coast Jack Nicholson (“It’s not a Ken and Barbie world.”) Much of the comic action is in the winsome and capable hands of Jacqueline Dandenau and David Ferney, Bob and Lynne Wells, Jane Hill and Lynnie Harrigan as hit and run victims with backstories, and the singing nurses of St. Mo’s Hospital and Casino: Lila Nelson, Joyce Hough and Jaese Lecuyer.

 In our conversation, Fields likened their musical interpolations to those in Dennis Potter’s breakthrough TV miniseries, “The Singing Detective,” though I was reminded of Potter’s “Pennies From Heaven,” which shares the song “Life is Just A Bowl of Cherries” with Korbel. Josh Salas, Soren Olsen and Calder Johnson are the dancing orderlies.

 The show typically veered from topical local humor and slapstick to the Potter-like poignancy of the world-weary refrain, “Is this all there is?” There were the usual flamboyant touches—a real ambulance arriving at the gate, life support hoses pulsing with neon lights—a spectacular 1950s Las Vegas style set by Jody Sekas, and upbeat tunes by Tim Gray and the Dell’Arte House Band.

What about the question the playwright Michael Fields asked—can this comic mayhem be combined with saying something about love and forgiveness? The answer is yes, thanks to some nice second act writing (the Emily Dickinson lines were perfect), Donald Forrest’s eloquence as Terry Dugan, and Joan Schirle’s brief but delightful appearance as Dorothy, the matriarch. A lot was resolved, but is the story over?

 There’s something about the opening show of the Mad River Festival that inspires ruminations—or pontifications—about theatre itself. Last summer I looked to theatrical origins in traditional festivals. This year had me thinking about the “live” in live theatre, and its relation to the local and community.

These thoughts were also inspired by a conversation with Charlie Myers, my movie-reviewing colleague in these pages, after the benefit concert for Deborah Clasquin last Saturday. (An impressive turnout, though the proceeds will apparently pay for at most one of the three experimental treatments Deborah requires, so donations are still being accepted at the HSU Music Department.)

Charlie and I chatted about the comparative advantages and disadvantages of our respective beats. Although I envy Charlie’s access to on-the-job popcorn, and I’ve noticed that he can critique the latest Spielberg film without much chance of running into Steven at Wildberries (nor of receiving the evil eye from the ticket-taker on his next visit to the theatre), on the whole I think I have the better gig. And that’s even apart from the fact that these days I would only review movies on a sliding scale. If my base rate were $100 say, I’d have to charge $500 just to sit through an Adam Sandler comedy, $400 for Mike Myers, etc.

 Unlike movies, theatre is live and local in various ways, as exemplified by these Dell’Arte summer shows. They’ve become community rituals, and the shows respond to the occasion, even in seemingly small gestures, like a character blowing bubbles for no apparent reason but to interest the children on the blankets near the stage.

That the community sees itself reflected or refracted on stage is part of the “Theatre of Place” enacted in this year’s play, which works because the theatre has the depth of experience and credibility that can come with being located in the community, and because the story on stage can respond to the latest news with the speed and spontaneity of live performance.

 There are prices to be paid in dramatic focus, structure and depth, and references that not everyone knows enough about to find funny. But sometimes revealing the local does more. The Dugan story reflects characteristics of the North Coast, but in doing so it reveals something about many other small towns, counter to media images.

 The kind of differences and diversity symbolized by transsexual Lesbian Terry Dugan (and based on a real story—see Donald Forrest’s moving explanation in the program) is almost always associated with big cities--and “San Francisco values.” But the truth is that they are present in these smaller places, though perhaps less obviously than here on the North Coast. So the shame, guilt and conflict portrayed in this story may exist even more strongly there, and extends to all kinds of differences, not just this one. And the process of forgiveness—including self-forgiveness—or the failure to find it, is a more universal drama of real life.

 In locating an essential drama in the local, there is usually an element of the universal. Being human, the drama is shared, and the community is partly created by seeing it enacted. You can get that universality at the movies sometimes, too. But what you can’t get is the same kind of intimacy when the people on stage and the people in the audience face each other.

 An aspect of this was imprinted on my consciousness some years ago at a small theatre production in Pittsburgh of Arthur Miller’s play, “The Creation of the World and Other Business.” Though it’s comedic, the play deals with weighty themes of good and evil, individuality and community, fate and freedom. The audience was very close to the action, and I had my Satori moment when I saw right in front of me God’s bare feet. That is, the bare feet of the actress playing God. Somehow that made the play real and present.

 These were real people struggling with these big questions, as the human author did, and as we in the audience do. There is something about real bodies on the stage—at times uncomfortable, and yet vitally human. Audiences and actors breathing the same air demonstrates that apparently abstract questions may really be the most basic concerns of the human community. So how do you combine life and art, the everyday with its meaning? Create art. Present it live.

Limitations of Tragedy Continued

The Clay Cart suggests limitations of western drama

Recently I reviewed a Dell' Arte School's MFA Ensemble production, Between Two Winters, which was the outcome of their study of classic tragedy.  I also reviewed a production currently at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, called The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. While it isn't itself a tragedy, it had a lot to say about tragedy as a necessary reflection of the human condition. I also referred back to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of the Sanskrit play, The Clay Cart.  I ended it suggesting that tragedy might be less a category based on human nature than on the view of a particular culture in a particular time and place, though expressed so well in a form of drama.

I quoted a literary scholar on this, but I might also mention historian of religion Karen Armstrong who also suggests that this era of Greek drama came after a long period of awful times in that part of the world.

Here's a little more of what I was thinking... Tragedy is often considered the apex and greatest form of our drama, and in a sense of our culture. The idea of the hero with a tragic flaw, undone by hubris, fated to fall from the heights, does seem to express or at least fit well with many other central notions of western culture. The fatal flaw is like original sin, hubris is offending the jealous God. There's perhaps a bit of Social Darwinism--even the mighty fall because the fatal flaw makes them unfit in the continual struggle for survival.

But what if--as van Buitenen suggests--Greek tragedy is not the consummate form against which every other theatrical form from every other culture is measured? What if it really expressed a particular culture--western culture--or even more particularly, the cultural beliefs of ancient Greece? And so it may not be humanity's best expression of the universal human condition: the way things are. Maybe just the way the Greeks thought things are. Maybe just one way things can be. And maybe the ideas that seem to fit so comfortably with tragedy--like humanity as innately sinful (as some western religions say) or humanity as predominantly selfish (dominated by selfish genes) as some western science emphasizes--maybe they are culture-bound as well, and not the whole human story?

Because we do get the sense from our culture that human nature is either damned by Divine design or evolution to accentuate cruelty, ambition, selfishness and violence. Of which humankind certainly provides many examples, which our dramas emphasize in form and content.

But Sanskrit drama doesn't do Greek tragedy, nor does it emphasize the survival of the most selfish, nor does it find drama only in people being cruel to each other. As I wrote in the earlier review: "The Clay Cart is not a religious play; the OSF program describes it as a social comedy. But comparing this play to western dramas and comedies, the most revealing and ultimately inspiring difference to me was the kind of conflict that creates the dramatic action. Yes, there is a villain (though he’s played as a ridiculous figure from the start) and human foibles that lead to complications, but the overall motives are most often generosity, loyalty, empathy and love."

I am certainly no expert on Sanskrit drama, but I wrote about my experience of that play, and found scholarly support. The (Little) Clay Cart, wrote one of its translators, is about "a man of heart" representing India's "classical aesthetic culture." The essence of his character is in how he expresses "moral duty" and "sympathetic generosity." The outcome: "The righteous man may suffer, but in the end he is stronger than the wicked, who is really a fool." He represents virtue, because "he loves his friends and forgives his enemies."

In this sense, it is exemplary drama, which can be soporific, and is certainly not the whole human story. But then, neither is tragedy. Wouldn't we be better off with a little more balance in our drama-- new interpretations of what how virtue is expressed, what it means, what it costs but what its rewards can be--in our own culture?

For after all, our science is showing that altruism is just as natural as selfishness, that animals exhibit cooperation and sharing as well as competition--if we only allow ourselves to see it. And at least in practice, our religious traditions include encouraging compassion, and modelling it. So can't our theatre produce drama (and not just the bipolar of tragedy and comedy) to reflect this? Because we're going to have to achieve a balance--to face our flaws but emphasize our ability to get beyond them, to keep trying--if we're going to be up to the challenges of the future.

To be fair, this is not precisely van Buitenen's point, in his introduction to the translation that OSF uses of The Little Clay Cart. For example, he sets the Greek idea of fate against the Hindu idea of transmigration of the soul into the next generation, making "any single life an episode in a far longer chain. No single life makes ultimate sense in itself; the chain of life does."

Still, his basic point about the culture-bound concept of tragedy allows for mine. Here's more of that passage: "This 'absense of tragedy' [in Sanskrit drama] is sometimes pointed to with a mildly accusing finger, as though any theatre worth the name should have it. Apologists then point out that India was 'prevented' from developing true tragedy by the underlying climate of its thought. This argument takes for granted that tragedy is an almost natural expression of any culture. But why not argue that Greek tragedy constitutes the exception, not the rule, and that it presupposes a very specific notion of moira (fate) that was peculiarly Greek?"

I also must confess that my point was also influenced by Daniel Mendelsohn's lovely essay in the New York Review of Books on the revival of the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha, which not entirely coincidentally, is largely about the hero of 20th century India, Gandhi (although it covers mostly his earlier years in South Africa, where he developed his methods of passive resistance.) The essay begins:

Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas. Like the Greek tragedies that the sixteenth-century Venetian inventors of opera sought to recreate, Western musical drama has tended to be preoccupied with the darker extremes of human emotions: excessive passion and wild jealousy, smoldering resentment and implacable rage. These, after all, are the emotions that spark the kinds of actions—adultery, betrayal, revenge, murder—that make for gripping drama. Unpleasant as they may be in real life, such actions are essential to the Western idea of theater itself, in which the very notion of plot is deeply connected to difficulties, problems, disasters...[So] When we go to the theater, we want to see characters doing things. Bad things, preferably."

He finds in the work of Philip Glass another approach, which is not tragedy and probably to many people isn't even drama, or opera. But it is drama of a sort, it is theatre, and Mendelsohn finds it beautiful. And in beauty, is there not something of truth? In the end, tragedy may cause pity and terror. But it doesn't exactly inspire hope. Not only do we need that, but there is plenty in the world and in human nature that's good. To show how people can accentuate that, to show those possibilities, is as human and can be as artful as pushing the easier buttons of fight-or-flight--the reactions that could well be the fatal flaw of tragedy.

On Shaking the Bard

This is some explanation of my views that support commentary here and elsewhere--including in this week's NCJ--about staging Shakespeare in times and places that are different from those stipulated in the play itself.

First of all, a director's duty is to bring the text of a play to life for the audience of the time and place in which the play is performed. That's an essential duty, but not the only one.

Let's assume for the moment that we're talking about a sincere attempt to re-enliven Shakespeare’s plays by changing or mixing milieus and time periods. (There are other possible motives that may contribute or dominate, which I'll describe later.) Some such have succeeded, and the best have provided new insights and interpretations as well as being highly entertaining. Others have been honorable failures. What makes the difference?

The most obvious is whether the time and place selected can support the action of the play without straining the credulity of the audience, or puzzling it so much that they are taken out of the play completely, or at least for so long that by the time they get back to it, they've missed so much that now it really doesn't make any sense.

There is one fairly recent example that a lot of people know that succeeded extremely well--in fact, maybe too well, in that it inspired a lot of imitators who didn't figure out what made it work. It was the 1996 film version of Romeo and Juliet, called Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Clare Danes. It is a contemporary setting--in the city of Verona Beach--and uses modern technology (cars, guns) to tell the story, while editing the text but using Shakespeare's words.

The director was very clever in making the story and the words work--the message that arrives too late is botched by a Fedex type delivery, etc. But the essential dynamic of the play is maintained by making the Montagues and Capulets two rival big business/crime families. That's both clever and easy to understand, because it provides a contemporary analogue to the powerful rival families of the nobility in the play.

On a more modest scale--and with less spectacular results--was a production last year of As You Like It at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I wrote about what worked about the concept here: the 1930's America era gave an edge to the difference between rich and poor, and the power relationship between the two brothers was made crystal clear when Orlando was shown working at a loading dock run by the Boss, his thugish, possibly criminal older brother, Oliver.

But things were also lost by setting the play at that time and place, which I discussed here: for instance, some of the nuances of the essential differences between the court and the wilderness, the forest where the exiles are gathered. So the change was partially successful.

In fact, in this play as in a lot of Shakespeare's plays, the locales (both in place and time), have little actual parallel in a real time and place. They mostly exist within the play itself, so setting them in specific, recognizeable places--known worlds with their particular rules--can distort them or, as bad or worse, sink them--the rules simply don't work in the world of the play.

The locales Shakespeare stipulated may have been fanciful, but the world on the stage assumed the understanding of life and reality of Shakespeare's original audiences. So locale is more than an historical period or geographical place. It includes sets of ideas. Any specific locale must support and express those ideas.

These days Shakespeare's plays also come to us with a long history in performance and discussion. And here is a possible point of contention. The tradition that I know of how a director approaches Shakespeare says that the director researches the play's past--what are the most celebrated interpretations, what are the controversies over the play and the characters, etc.? Actors know stories of the great performances, and now they can see some of them recorded. They use the past to help them decide how they will approach the production or the role.

Some directors and actors today may differ on this point. They may want to come at the play without any baggage, without any preconceptions or the need to respond to how it's been done before, or elsewhere. Perhaps also because the audience they foresee will approach the play that way.

While honoring one's own personal responses to the play is important for a director, and coming up with a creative, fresh approach in some way is often necessary to produce something for audiences that will engage them--both something that will spark the imaginations of people new to the play, and that will provoke those who think they know the play all too well to sit up and see something new in it.

But that doesn't absolve the director from taking the history of the play into account. That history doesn't have to be limiting, but it should be a consideration, partly because members of the audience are going to bring some piece of it with them, and partly because that history has enriched the play with questions and ideas connected to emotions, so when it is performed now, it can be richer still. Besides, why not take advantage of all that study and opinion, all those experiences?


Some who stage Shakespeare in a different time or place may justify it solely by pointing to what Shakespeare himself did. They may say that he freely adapted the stories of others in his plays, and based some on old plots that he also took out of their original times and places. And that's true. As Shakespearian actor Paul Gross says in his excellent interview included in the DVD of the Canadian TV series, Slings and Arrows (he's the star of it), Shakespeare was a popular artist, who took from everywhere in order to put on a great, entertaining show. So he endorses the idea of staging Shakespeare in different ways, including in alternate settings--if it works. "But if it's stupid," he says, "it's stupid."

That's because these plays exist: they are texts by the playwright who is generally regarded as the greatest who ever lived. If you are going to do Shakespeare, you should do Shakespeare. Now maybe you want to do the story of Romeo and Juliet, and you want to set it in Manhattan between rival gangs of whites and Puerto Ricans, but you also want to add a lot of songs and dancing, and you want to pretty much keep the older people out of it. And you'd rather not have to use all those words.

Or maybe you want to do the story of The Tempest, only you want to set it in the future and on another planet in another star system, but you also want to have a really cool monster and a robot. And you don't want to be limited by all that damn verse.

Well, then you do what Shakespeare did: you write something new using whatever parts of the story, and whatever characters you want. And so you call it West Side Story. You call it Forbidden Planet.

What you don't do is call it Shakespeare. Or try to get his words to serve your concept.

Why more people don't do that, instead of trying to bend Shakespeare and his plays to their will, has to do with the root of a less noble motive for changing locales than to re-energize the plays. That reason is that Shakespeare is a powerful brand name. People go to see Shakespeare plays when they might not go to see your play or mine. Directors get jobs directing his plays, while they or their producers can't find financing for a production of an original play.

This may not be as they like it, but they want to work, and maybe all's well that ends well. But it ain't necessarily so. It's my suspicion that some directors allow their resentment of the brand name, and of the complexity of the plays themselves, to influence and even shape their productions. What passes for creativity is sometimes peevishness.

Sometimes they simply may not trust the play's ability to communicate, or they don't trust the audience's ability to deal with it, unless it is made as close to pure spectacle as possible. Shakespeare, of course, was a showman--he wrote parts for clowns and comic relief, as well as writing blood and thunder--to keep everybody interested. And some translation of that impulse may be necessary in these quite different times. But trashing the plays with sensational effects and cheap tricks that violate the text, or even fail to do it some rough justice, is another thing entirely.

Which brings me to the third possible motive for changing the time and place of the action: it's the fashion. It certainly is virulently fashionable now to do so, just as it was a generation or so ago to mount the plays in "modern dress" with bare stages and minimal sets. Now directors seem to be competing to set their productions in the most extreme and outlandish settings they can imagine.

They may try to justify it as a way to make the play more accessible. But is it the play they are making accessible? Where is the play? In the nineteenth century it was fashionable to provide new happy endings for some of Shakespeare's tragedies, so Lear and Cordelia walk arm and arm into the sunset, and Hamlet and Ophelia live happily ever after.

In the end, figuring out some sensational locale for the play is the easy way out. So is loading it with tricks, like verse-spouting characters clutching cell phones. It's harder to go into the depths of the play, to come up with an interpretation for a character or characters--even an extreme one--and to stage the actors and even shape the text (somewhat) to support it. Or to imagine a new way of staging a scene, a moment, that will better express the feelings and the ideas discovered in the play.

I understand how difficult any of that can be, especially in productions that don't have the resources of major regional theatres. It's hard enough just to get one of these plays on its feet, and for the actors to learn all the damn lines and to speak them clearly, communicating what these sometimes strange words mean.

But time and energy may be better spent in these endeavors than in creating an attention-getting setting, that gets attention only for a few minutes, and providing a surprising visual world, with the surprise wearing off very quickly, and adding a lot of business that gets a brief laugh here and there. For if all you've ultimately done is create an onstage world that doesn't make sense to the audience, and/or that doesn't serve the play, what often happens is the actors are condemned to struggle for two or three hours trying to reconcile setting and play. And that doesn't serve anybody.