Age Matters

The March/April issue of the Dramatist (publication of the Dramatists Guild) begins with letters that refer back to a column that argues that older playwrights, and not just young ones, might write worthwhile plays. That column said: "Look, no one likes to age, especially the artistic child within you. But with that glorious aging comes more wisdom, more experience with craft, more experience with relationships" etc. Letters responding to it came from people in their forties and even seventies who don't have established playwriting careers but who are writing plays and trying to get them produced anyway.

The editors called the response "overwhelming," which generally means it is responding to a point of view unheard of before. The idea has apparently become gospel that at least among the non-famous (but possibly extending to the formerly famous as well), only the young can write plays. Anyone not young is illegitimate, foolish and should be ashamed of themselves, which probably they are. So a bunch of people wrote in to say, not so fast.

I come at this issue from an older perspective, but also from my own youth in an apparently different time. While I had terrible panics and despair over the possibility that I wouldn't "make it" as a writer until, could it be possible, my 30s, and I believed that my youth gave me a particular perspective on my times, I would still have easily accepted the idea that older writers were legitimate, and could have greater perspective based on experience as people and as writers. It stands to reason.

But apparently it is now a minority argument, because doors are largely closed to older playwrights--meaning 40 and up. There are contests, fellowships, opportunties for young writers. Even if it isn't made explicit by rule, new means under 30 or maybe 35. It's not just in the theatre--I remember a San Francisco Chronicle book critic who shocked the literary world by countering the many annual"best writers under 35" lists with his "best new writers over 50." But he only did it once.

There are reasons why the new stage is dominated by young playwrights. University students are virtually the only subsidized playwrights in America, although they are often subsidizing themselves by means of student loans. They are instructed, coached, mentored and produced. In a community like this one, they are pretty much the only new original plays anyone sees. This happens because the university has turned the arts (and related fields, like journalism) into profit centers, and the university has become the chief employer of writers, including those playwrights who aren't writing movies or TV shows.

Once out of their undergrad and graduate programs, young playwrights have a certain amount of time to devote to the theatre, during which years they either get produced and noticed and become part of the theatre-Hollywood-university system, or they don't, and get on with not being poor anymore.

These days, with many in the huge baby boomer generation retiring on possibly the last dependable pensions there will be for awhile, there are likely to be more writers and playwrights in their 50s, 60s, etc. who can subsidize themselves. Presumably institutions will respond to that, although so far they aren't. The only allowable topic for older writers is being old. As long as they make fun of it.

There is the additional question of audience for theatre, which is generally older, and whether a predominantly young perspective serves them all that well.

But what is really shocking about this debate is that there is a question involved as to the legitimacy of the non-young playwright's perspective. All you have to do is go to student plays and however charming and even insightful they are, it's clear the writers don't have very much to write about, or much perspective on it. The argument for craft is more complicated, but it seems obvious that while young writers can excel by instinct, talent, originality and enthusiasm--as well as the "first thought, best thought" phenomenon--there is something to be said for craft gained by experience crafting.

Of course the theatre needs youth to replenish itself (and to move the sets.) Still, there's institutional prejudice against the not-young in the theatre as well as most everywhere else. But you know, the theatre--and most everything else--is missing something, something important, something it needs.

This North Coast Weekend

HSU Ten Minute Play Festival begins this weekend.

This North Coast Weekend

The Dell'Arte scholars go from the tragic to the ridiculous with first-year students in Flops Popping, the popular spring clown show. Twenty-four students in various combinations cavort on the Carlo stage, Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.

Another popular annual spring event is the HSU Ten Minute Play Festival, which this year celebrates its 10th birthday. Coordinator Margaret Thomas Kelso (who began the festival in 1998) says there are an unusual number of plays this year with social and political themes, including terrorism and interrogation, war and genocide. (Plus the usual comedies and fantasies, of course.) The Festival begins this weekend, Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 in Gist Hall Theatre, and continues next weekend, May 1-3. A lineup of the plays and other info at HSU Stage.

Auditions announcement by Ferndale Rep:

Hey Seniors - ages 55 plus! The Ferndale Repertory Theatre is holding auditions for our second annual all senior show. This season we are auditioning Dave Silverbrand’s original script, Make Mine Metamucil on MONDAY, April 28th and TUESDAY, April 29 from 7pm -9pm at the Carson Block Building, the third floor, 517 Third Street, Old Town, Eureka. Director Denise Ryles is seeking eight ensemble players – four men and four women, age 55 plus.

The theatre is also looking for seniors interested in the technical and backstage positions. Please call the theatre (707) 786-5483 with your contact information and we will get back to you.

PRODUCTION DATES are July 13, 14 & 15 at the Rep and three shows in other venues still to be arranged. – for a total of six shows. Rehearsals will start in May. Actors - Be prepared to read cold from the script; wear comfortable clothes and shoes. Monologues are not required but appreciated. Scripts are available for perusal at the theatre. Note that scripts from the theatre may not be taken home. For more information, please call the Ferndale Rep at (707) 786-5483 and ask for Marilyn.

This North Coast Weekend

Pure Abstractions HSU spring dance concert
Thurs-Saturday at 7:30 at the Van Duzer.
For the Dell'Arte School performances and
Jeff DeMark at the Arcata Playhouse Saturday,
see the column below.

We Live On a Political Stage

This is my Stage Matters column I sent in for the North Coast Journal published today. Apparently the email went awry...we're still sorting this out. Apologies are due to the folks at Dell'Arte I interviewed, and to Jeff DeMark, because their shows I write about here are this weekend.

So I'm posting the column in full here today.

The theatre of politics is pretty obvious in this presidential campaign year, but politics in theatre—that is, political and social issues of current concern as subject matter--is also especially evident on North Coast stages in 2008.

Several plays written in another time encouraged reflection on pertinent issues of today—and were likely chosen with that in mind. The year began with “Marat/Sade” at NCRT, which dealt with political violence, totalitarian repression and the gap between rich and poor. “Twelve Angry Men” at Ferndale Rep reminded us of fragile principles in our justice system, and the folly of discarding them. Dell’Arte revived “The Golden State,” which also touches upon economic disparities as well as perennial cultural issues, and North Coast Prep presented “The Crucible,” reminding us of the contagion of fear, especially when it is manipulated for political and economic gain.

Now Ferndale Rep is doing a musical that has the distinction of leading to several Supreme Court decisions concerning censorship and political speech. Today’s younger audiences for “Hair” may be a little baffled by some of the issues of central importance in the story, such as the major plot point of burning a draft card, and all the fuss about…hair. Both had immense symbolic importance in the 1960s, and caused of outrage and violence in the public sphere, and within families. Still, this play’s relevance to current issues of war, protest and repression are obvious, unfortunately.

Other current social and political issues seem clearly on the minds of second year students of the Dell’Arte International School’s MFA Ensemble in the piece they’re creating and presenting for the first time this coming weekend.

Between Two Winters on the Carlo Theatre stage Thursday through Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2, is the result of an eight week process that began with students studying the nature of tragedy (Aristotle’s “Poetics” applied to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”) But when it came time to create a theatre piece, students were directed to find a subject in the newspaper.

According to Brian Moore, the student directing the piece, the story they selected was about a woman who was approached by the man who had raped her 20 years before. He asked her forgiveness, and she refused. Instead she initiated a prosecution, which caused controversy and criticism.

But in the process of writing the script, “it’s taken on a much different life of its own,” Moore said. “From that starting point, we’ve ended up in a much different place.”

Now the story takes place in Kuwait in the early 1990s, where the mayor of a city in Montana goes to honor the hero who saved lives during the oil field fires set by the retreating Iraqi forces in Gulf War I. The mayor is the woman who was raped 20 years before, the hero was her rapist, who has been in hiding ever since.

There are more moral and plot complications. The mayor is “a pretty notorious figure,” said Ronlin Foreman, the school’s director of pedagogical studies, who supervises the project. “She is a hyper politician with aspirations to the Senate, and has a real quality of vengeance in her life.” She also has a daughter for whom she also has political ambitions—who is the child resulting from that rape.

Where all this leads was still taking shape when I spoke with Moore and Foreman this past weekend. But for Foreman, the rationale for applying the tragic form to contemporary events is clear. “We have a surfeit of tragic occurrences,” he said “but tragedy in our day and age is a hard thing to come by. We think that we’re coming into a time when an admission of tragedy, of tragic flaw, is important.”

“Tragedy is a form that at its root pits the rational and ordered world against the world of terror and chaos,” according to a text these students use. “It deals with the human drive to step out of the chorus, to stand for and proceed into the hero’s journey…”

For this project, the chorus—which in Greek tragedy is the voice of the community that narrates and comments on the story—is represented by the media. “We’re planning to have a television camera onstage, broadcasting to monitors,” Moore said, “because we’re exploring how the media can make one of the characters the protagonist one moment, but suddenly shift to side with a different character.”

But the shifting chorus as well as the moral complexities of the situation challenges the classical definition of tragedy. “It’s hard a lot of the time to see the actions of these characters as sins, in the way that the Greeks did,” Moore explained. “We have a much different understanding of morality. We don’t bend to the will of the gods the same way the ancient Greeks did.”

So when I asked “Who is the tragic hero? What is the tragic flaw?” they both laughed a little uncomfortably. “Well, that’s what we’re working on right now,” Moore said.

Applying the tragic sense to these contemporary events remains an essential part of this exploration. “It’s a time when we say that it is important for someone to step out of the chorus—out of the people,” Foreman said, “as leaders—as people who expect to do something to change things.”

Foreman’s goal is to get the script right, so this weekend’s performances may turn out to be more like staged readings, he said. But the exploration will continue to a scheduled mid-May run of “Between Two Winters” at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

There are even some contemporary issues explored in the annual HSU dance concert this weekend (“Pure Abstractions,” Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 in the Van Duzer.) Then beginning next weekend, the 10th annual HSU Ten Minute Play Festival will include an unusual number of plays on social and political themes, including terrorism and interrogation, war and genocide. (Plus the usual comedies and fantasies, of course.) The festival runs April 24-26 and May 1-3.

This Saturday at 8 PM in the Arcata Playhouse, Jeff DeMark reprises his newest show, “They Ate Everything But Their Boots,” about the trials and tribulations of finding and renovating a Humboldt home. This will be only the third time DeMark has done this show since its premiere at the Bayside Grange in late 2006, and he promises some new material as well as an expanded musical presence by the Tiny Tims. Thanks to the mortgage crisis, there’s a new topicality as well to this typically funny, smart and generous DeMark show.

La Bete is on

La Bete at CR this weekend.

This North Coast Weekend

The musical Hair continues this weekend at Ferndale Rep, and La Bete in the Forum Theatre at the College of the Redwoods. My preview of them in the Journal is here. Betti Trauth reviews Hair and La Bete in the T-S.

Concluding its two week run at the Arcata Playhouse is the experimental CRAWDADDY: A Freak Tragedy. My Journal review is here, and Barry Blake reviews it in the T-S. I guess what I'd add to my review is that some of it is strange to the point of being surreal. The bit I liked best was the story of the puppet's father who, as a cartoon character, tested the ringers in ringer washing machines by being rung through them until he was flat as a pancake. Anyway, I assume that bit is still in the show! I wonder if they kept the castrati wolf man--I'll bet there were questions about that in the talkbacks. It concludes this run Thursday through Saturday at 8 PM.

And since I'm linking to my own stuff, here's one to my Journal review of the Canadian TV series "Slings and Arrows," which I've also written about here. Oddly, Michael Fields of Dell'Arte mentioned he was watching it (he's on season 2) and asked me if I knew of it-- before he'd seen my review in the Journal published that very day.

In that column about Hair and La Bete (with a tiny mention of Helen) I also repeated my rationale for objecting to the "trailer trash" term that first appeared here. (Specifically, here.) I've had very good response to it, notably from parents (including theatre artists) and a teacher.

Helen Farewell

I did get to the final performance of Helen on Saturday, and it was a full house. The audience was paying close attention, and not reacting much. Which I was told was very different from Friday night, when some local theatre folk inspired a raucous audience that laughed a lot.

Comedy can be so strange that way--sometimes, especially for plays with unusual themes or classical authors, there have to a few "laughers" in the audience to give others permission to laugh. But some nights even that's not enough. People on Saturday were talking about the content of the play at intermission and afterwards--they were really listening. But they also weren't laughing, and that can be dispiriting to the actors, and throw off their timing. This was a particular burden on Darcy Daughtry as Helen, because she carries and connects the play--the other characters (except for the servant) have one scene each, and two of them have clearly comic turns. Though it didn't seem to bother her.

And that's the other half of the dilemma for this play, because while Erik Rhea as Menelaus has some funny business, his is more of a tragic turn. So the raucous laughter of Friday turned a bit inappropriate as a response to his story of the young soldier being strangled inside the Trojan horse... Still, it probably would have been more fun to be there Friday.

One oddity about this play and where it was performed, that I doubt anyone else noticed: Down the hall from Gist Theatre, on the way to the water fountain that barely works (left over from when this building was a grade school, and so it is very low as well), the vending machines and a couple of the restrooms, there are offices. Specifically the offices of the Audio-Visual department, where the veteran Philip Hooker has been joined by Jim Goddess. And there are their quite unusual names, side by side, posted on the door: Hooker, Goddess.

And of course that's one of the major themes of Helen: Goddess--or hooker? Hooker--or goddess? Both, it seems...behind the same door.

The Lost "Helen" Review

I saw Helen on opening night, which I of course cannot write about in my print column because I get paid a magnificent hourly wage to write press releases in advance of HSU theatre productions (including Helen). Plus my partner, Margaret Thomas Kelso, is the director. Plus I did some additional dramaturgical research for this production (uncredited, I notice).

But here I am free, free! To judge my own integrity.

It's all a matter of degree, really, especially around here, and especially when inevitably you get to know people who are running these theatres, directing, acting etc. So when I go to see a play, everything else has to drop quietly in the background, deferring to the experience itself.

Anyway, this was the first time I saw the play since that early run-through, so naturally I first noticed the improvements to the set, and the lighting and sound effects I either hadn't seen or heard, or only partially in part of a tech rehearsal.

Then there was the odd feeling about laughing--was I laughing at what I laughed at before, was I missing stuff I'd found funny the first time because--well, because this was the second time? But I knew I was finding new laughs, either in lines I'd missed or because the actors had added new business and emphasis.

But once I got into the flow of the play itself, it was like any other opening night experience. And even with some first night jitters and stiffness here and there, I thought the performances were remarkably good. I'd gotten the feeling that Margaret was thriving in her experience as a director, and I could see why. The combination of the actors' talents and her care in helping them find ways to express the lines, and make them clear--it was all there.

And though I'd read the play a couple of times and seen that run-through, it was only at this performance that I realized what a good play it was. It has its limited focus, which not everyone will agree with. But the writing is splendid. The director and cast really brought out its virtues. Judging from the reviews of the original production and one or two others I read about, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the best production of this play there's been so far anywhere.

I won't say the acting itself was better--I didn't see those other productions. But the effect of those productions was, according to what was written about them, nothing like this one. Even though this is a university production, and brilliant professional actors might find additional nuances in these characters, this production works as a whole in ways that (according to those reviews) it doesn't seem the others did.

This was Missy Hopper's last performance as an HSU student, and it's a great little part for her to go out on--a carefully crafted, expressive, funny character part (if you can call playing a former shepherdess who is now a recovering cow a character part). (And that's another weird thing--I've seen Missy and other HSU students in several parts, but have never written about them, because they were all HSU shows that I can't write about.)

Johanna Hembry also has a particular take on the character of Athena--it works because she has to convey a lot of attitude and the character as a whole in her short time on stage. Especially important when you're the only representative of the gods who have been manipulating people for decades--raping them, sending them off to wars, hiding and duplicating them, blowing them off course on their way home.

Erik Rhea plays Helen's husband, the one she is waiting for. His scene and his character depends on his interaction with Helen, and that worked very well that first night--it was moody, funny, troubling, and moving in turns. Leslie Ostrom as the servant is on stage longer than anyone but Helen, and she has several long speeches, which now don't seem like long speeches. Her character is a storyteller, and naturally acts out her stories as she continues her duties. Very effective. As I noted before, they all have stage presence, but their performances are also disciplined and authentic.

As Helen, Darcy Daughtry is onstage for the entire play--all but a few brief seconds. It all depends on her. And she's just wonderful. Theatregoers hereabouts have seen her in small roles, but this is her breakout performance: a star is born.

We follow the moods of her character, and we may judge Helen in different ways--is she superficial, imperious, ironic, childlike, knowing, self-deceiving? Yes. And by the final scenes, she is really, really moving. Darcy carries the early scenes and takes you into the play with her charm. But by the end, she is in every moment, and you are with her.

I'm not a big fan of the Gist theatre--the compressed amphitheatre seating is weird and disorienting, and the room is usually too warm. The stage area can be quite big, and some productions have used that potential to good effect, others not so much. But this production uses the stage's ability to be small, and intimate. That absolutely works for this production. Being able to look into Darcy's eyes in that final scene made it very moving.

Darcy was the outsider, a non-HSU person, but she not only overcame that, she set the tone for everyone else by being prepared, working hard and working well with everyone. It's great that she got this opportunity to carry a play, and we're fortunate that she wanted to try.

Now my big worry is whether there's going to be room for me to see it again in its final weekend. HSU shows normally draw bigger houses the second weekend (most run Thursday-Saturday for two successive weekends), and a couple of other events on campus last weekend definitely suppressed the usual attendance. So I expect it's going to be a big, crowded weekend, and I can't see depriving someone who hasn't seen it at all. But I heard that one of the crew said the Saturday performance was especially good, and I want to see what they've made of it. I've seen several HSU shows opening and then closing night--it's always interesting, theatrically and emotionally.

Look at that, I've called actors by their first names. So I guess this does turn out to be a non-professional review, which in some ways is a big relief.

Let the Sunshine Back In: Hair in 2008

Unlike any shows before and few since, the musical Hair was produced in several U.S. cities at the same time it was still on Broadway. I saw it in San Francisco in 1969. I had a friend in the cast, who’d been the lead in the play I wrote and directed at college a year before, a similar 60s-spirited extravaganza called What’s Happening, Baby Jesus? (So we were pre-J.S. Superstar as well.)

 We were a bit snobbish about Hair—it seemed so 1966. A year seemed like a decade then.

 But now everything old is new again, especially as there’s so much linking 2008 with 1968, when Hair premiered on Broadway. That symmetry surprised director Vikki Young when Ferndale Rep decided to do a 40th anniversary production of the original American tribal love-rock musical.

Hair's original Broadway cast include Diane Keaton

 “Forty years ago we were embroiled in an unpopular war, there were racial issues, economic, environmental issues, and it was an election year,” she said. “Here we are forty years later, and nothing has changed. As a matter of fact, we’ve probably stepped slightly backward.”

“When I started this I had no idea that I would be so affected by this play. It is so timely—the images, the songs, the message that it delivers probably is more valid today than it was back then.”

The process of developing the production with a large, integrated cast whose ages range from 18 to 60 was particularly powerful, Young said. She found herself explaining a lot to the younger actors, like who LBJ and Margaret Mead were.

On the other hand, one of the older actors is “just getting to the point where she can do the final number without bursting into tears.”

Ferndale Rep’s production begins this weekend with a preview on Thursday, April 3. It feature’s a five piece band with musical direction by Tom Phillips, and choreography by Linda Maxwell.

There will, however, be no nudity, as there famously was in the original. “At first I was going to do it, but then I thought –why?” Young said. “Back then it was done as a message—today you see nudity on national television. It’s not shocking. This is something we didn’t need to do.”

But there’s no avoiding the political themes, and the Ferndale production won’t even try. That’s certainly in the spirit of the original—it played nationally while it was still on Broadway because the producers wanted to spread its anti-Vietnam war message.

 “I don’t think any of us have ever seen such excitement about a show coming to our stage,” Young said, the anticipation primarily coming from those who remember the show from its LBJ/MLK/RFK-era past. But a young, energetic cast and the show’s eerie relevance today may make it a hot ticket for the Obama generation, too.

 Also beginning this weekend, College of the Redwoods presents La Bete, a comedy in verse by contemporary playwright David Hirson. CR drama instructor Kjeld Lyth directs. This play about a 17th century theatre company was Hirson’s first, and received an elaborate Broadway production in 1991 that resulted in several Tony nominations. New York Times critic Frank Rich praised its ambition to create “a mock-Moliere comedy of manners and ideas as refracted through (or deconstructed by) a post-modern sensibility,” though he didn’t think it succeeded.
 But it was a hit later in London, winning a Laurence Olivier Award for best comedy. It’s since been done by regional theatres.

This production of La Bete will be “performed at breakneck speed in an absurdly high-comic style,” according to the CR description. In this play and his subsequent comedy, Wrong Mountain, playwright Hirson satirizes the contemporary theatre for its high art pretensions and low standards. Critics and audiences have argued over whether he does so successfully.

 Your chance to experience the play and join the argument comes this weekend and next, with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 pm in the CR Forum Theater. There’s also a matinee this Sunday (April 6) at 2 pm.

 Also this weekend, an experiment begins at the Arcata Playhouse where Dell’ Arte, Four on the Floor Theatre and a Canadian company collaborate on a work-in-progress about a Depression-era freak show, called “Crawdaddy: A Freak Tragedy.” It also runs two weekends, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8. Watch this space for more.

 Finally, Helen, a contemporary comedy about Helen of Troy, has its final three performances this weekend in the Gist Hall Theatre, Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 pm. I am involved to a more than usual degree in this HSU production, so use that information in judging my integrity, but I feel readers who usually agree with my observations will want to know about this intelligent, theatrical comedy, and its uniformly fine performances. In particular, Darcy Daughtry, who has appeared in smaller roles in various community productions, is wonderful as Helen.

 One bit of old business: last week I found myself in the odd position of writing a letter to the editor about my own column, objecting to the term “trailer trash” that appeared in a sub-head (that I didn’t write.) The letter was printed under a clever headline I still don’t understand, so I thought I’d better explain here why I find the term objectionable---with an appropriately theatrical anecdote.

 In an American Theatre magazine interview, playwright Lucy Thurber recalled a conversation she had with August Wilson (a great American playwright who wrote about the African-American experience) at a playwrights conference several years ago. Explaining her own plays, Thurber told him, “I write about poor white trash.”

 Wilson asked her, “Are you trash?” “No,” she said, “I’m just using it as a descriptive term to explain that part of the population.” “Again, I ask you,” Wilson said, “are you trash? Are the people that you grew up with trash? Are the people you love trash?”

 "That was a huge, emotional moment for me," Thurber said in the interview. "The language we use about ourselves is important. There is something about having the courage to talk with dignity and trust and faith about these parts of America that are us."

This North Coast Weekend

Darcy Daughtry and Erik Rhea in HELEN, a comedy
about Helen of Troy, at HSU's Gist Theatre, Thursday
through Saturday at 7:30 PM. HSUStage for details.

HELEN Wheels at HSU

I'm even more involved than usual in the next HSU production, which begins Thursday. Not only did I handle the media releases and material on the HSU Stage web page for Helen, but I did some dramaturgical research for the director, who also is my partner, Margaret Thomas Kelso. So consider this more of an insider account, if you wish.

Helen is a comedy about Helen of Troy adapted by contemporary American playwright Ellen McLaughlin from a play by Euripides. Years ago, Eric Bentley suggested that university theatre should mount four kinds of plays: the great classics of the past, new plays, modern classics, and forgotten plays. This play is a fairly new, very modern forgotten play that adapts an ancient forgotten classic. (Although, by some cosmic coincidence, the rarely performed Euripides version of Helen was done at UC Santa Cruz earlier this month. )

Ellen McLaughlin has done closer adaptations of other Greek plays, but this is more her own. She's also an actor--in fact, she was the original Angel in Angels in America, from its first workshops through Broadway. Her working relationship with Tony Kushner continued when he directed the New York production of Helen at the Public Theatre. But I only found a few productions of it since. So this is a rare opportunity to see it.

I saw a run-through a couple of weeks ago, before the tech stuff was added. I've heard film directors say that the biggest part of their job is done in casting the movie. When I saw the run-through, I felt that way about this cast: they're at least half the battle. There are only five actors, and only two of them have more than one big scene. But they all look right for their roles and they all bring something interesting to their characters, and perhaps most importantly as a starting point, they all have a strong stage presence. Stage presence is really a mostly intangible combination of factors that adds up to someone your eyes and ears are drawn to, someone you just have to watch when they're on stage.

The casting coup was Darcy Daughtry, who plays Helen. Helen is on stage for all but a moment of the play, and it turns out that Darcy can hold that stage with ease. She's been in North Coast theatre since she was a child, I'm told. I've seen her in several North Coast Rep productions, and in last season's Othello. But not in a role this major. Judging from what I've seen, and what I've heard Margaret say about the work she's been doing on the part, I think this could be a breakout role for her. She's got an immense charm and assurance. She holds the stage, and she takes you with her.

This is Margaret's first full length play as a director here. She directed several plays at her last job, including one with a very large cast. (I ran a follow spot for that one, and did some sound, as I recall. ) In fact, shortly after we met in Pittsburgh, she directed a short play I wrote. Directing can be exhausting and thankless, but she's really been thriving on this experience. She's already looking for another play to direct, for the HSU season after next. She seems happier doing this than working on the play she wrote (Relative Captivity) while it was being done last term. I attribute a lot of that to working with Darcy, but directing as a practical matter, as an activity even apart from the outcome, is about relationships as much as anything else. I can't say for sure, but she seems to have "a happy set" (borrowing from movie lore again.)

(Of course, these are human beings--and besides that, college students. And it's spring. So with all the people involved--cast, crew, etc.-- a romance beginning, a romance ending can both wreak their little havoc on efficiency. It happens.)

Directing in an academic setting has its particular challenges as well as opportunities. Mounting the best show is just part of it; the learning experience for students is another. Seeing how that works in previous college productions I've observed has certainly fed back into how I review plays in any academic setting. But as far as what becomes visible, the opportunity is for all of us to discover something fresh and new. Sometimes that leads to surprisingly new ways into a play. That's very likely with Helen, partly because it's been done so few times.

But there are other complications in an academic setting, like the calendar. Between the run-through I saw and the dress rehearsals this week, there was spring break. That certainly complicated the publicity, and it seems to have made this week more frantic. But all theatre is like that--as in that famous, favorite quotation from Shakespeare in Love:"Let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to immense disaster…" " So what do we do?" "Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well." "How?" "I don’t know. It’s a mystery."

Of course, it's not all mysterious. There's a lot of planning, vision, care, effort and sacrifice as well as last-minute creativity and sudden concentration. I've heard about some new tech stuff being added to Helen, as well as sound and light problems on the way to being solved. So I'm wondering if I should sneak into the last dress rehearsal tonight, or wait for opening night Thursday. I guess it will depend on how late I am putting up more posters.

Elsewhere

Some news notes from the past week or two...

August Wilson's play Fences, which is being produced at the Oregon Shakespeare festival right now, is also headed back to Broadway. This would be the second Broadway revival of a Wilson play, and is being directed by another playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks. Wilson himself came up with the idea, in a conversation with the producer on his 60th birthday.

Meanwhile, American Theatre reports on the ongoing marathon of all ten Wilson plays at the Kennedy Center in Washington: a core company of 25 actors plus some special guests, and a small cadre of directors (all with "a personal connection with August"), is mounting them in limited form over several weeks. They'll be done with minimal production values and script-in-hand. "The most important thing is to hear the purity and beauty of August's words," says project director Kenny Leon. The purpose of doing all of them in a short time is to hear "each play talking to the other plays." Wish I were there!

But sad news also last week: the death of Anthony Minghella, known as the director of major motion pictures like The English Patient (for which he won the Oscar), Cold Mountain, and his first movie which is one of my personal favorities (and which makes me a member of yet another cult): Truly, Madly, Deeply. But Minghella was also an accomplished playwright (an evening of his short plays was done in Washington last year) and recently directed stage opera. He was a prodiguously talented man, who was only 54.

All's Diverse Anyway

I'd be surprised these days if many places with the relatively sparse population of the North Coast has even three publications publishing theatre reviews. We have more than that sometimes, but this week it's a three-way diversity of opinion on the North Coast Rep production of All's Well That Ends Well. Contrary to my experience (as described below and in the NC Journal), Melody Stone in the Eureka Reporter got over her initial dissonance to accept the trailer park world. In the Eureka Times Standard's Northern Lights, Betti Trauth came down somewhere between Stone and me, calling the production "innovative but uneven." Pretty cool.

This North Coast Weekend

From All's Well That Ends Well at North Coast
Rep (review below). The Wiz is at Eureka High
and there's a Clowns Without Borders benefit
in Arcata Saturday, at Redwood Raks, 824 L
Street at 4 and 8pm. Info at 845-5842.

All's Not Well

Well, so far the Journal has not honored my request to take the offending sub-title off my column online, so I won't link to it from here. Besides, there were a few editorial changes I don't agree with, so since it's my blog, I can print what I want to--including the text as I wrote it. It includes observations I wrote more about here.

The Journal also did something else very odd--they advertised an email address for me that they created at the paper. They did so without asking me if I wanted such an address, nor did anyone tell me they were going to do it. Isn't that close to identity theft? They claim I'll get the mail directly through my current email address, but I don't see how. So I strongly urge you not to use it.

A couple of other preliminary comments. Though I refer to "parody" I wind up calling the treatment of the play a "travesty." These have pretty precise meanings, at least according to my prized reference, English Synonyms, Antonyms and Prepositions by James C. Fernald, which I believe is long out of print--I picked up my worn copy in a free pile at the recycling center. It's far more precise that the disappointing references online and even those I paid too much to buy.

Anyway, Fernald writes about both in the category of caricature ("a grotesque exaggeration of striking features or peculiarities, generally of a person.") I used "caricature" twice in the piece, as in caricature rather than character, though Fernald points out the word usually refers to a sketch or picture. In performance, the better word is burlesque: "treats any subject matter in an absurd or incongruous manner." But for us it also carries other connotations from American theatre and culture.

But within this category, parody and travesty describe different kinds of changes to something that already exists, like a play. "A parody changes the subject, but keeps the style; a travesty keeps the subject, but changes the style." So with that in mind...here's the review:

With great playwrights and great plays, comes great responsibility. “All’s Well That Ends Well” may not be Shakespeare’s greatest comedy, but it is at least as great as some of his plays that are performed more often. It’s full of ideas and ironies (which may well include the title.)

The story is rooted in ancient fable. Helena is the orphaned daughter of the deceased physician to the late Count of Rosillion in France. Helena was taken in by the Countess and lives alongside her son, Bertram. As the play begins Helena is helplessly in love with Bertram, and when he goes to the King’s court, she follows. She uses one of her father’s remedies to cure the King of an ailment. In gratitude, the King allows her to pick a husband from among his courtiers, and she chooses Bertram.

Bertram refuses to consummate the marriage and goes off to war (accompanied by Parolles, a scamp and center of subplots), telling Helena in a letter that he won’t be her husband until she takes the ring from his finger and has a child by him. While at war in Italy, Bertram arranges to bed a local woman but Helena substitutes herself for the assignation, and eventually fulfills Bertram’s conditions, so he accept her as his wife.

The current production at North Coast Rep is fluidly and energetically staged by director Cassandra Hesseltine, the scenic design by Daniel Nyiri is creative, and there are fine performances: for example, Gloria Montgomery as the Countess (though the character is meant to be older--George Bernard Shaw called this role Shakespeare’s most beautiful for an older woman), and Carrie Hudson as her clown. Lincoln Mitchell as the King had impressive moments. A.J. Stewart has the makings of an exciting Shakespearian actor, but the showy excesses that threatened his outstanding Iago in the recent Shake the Bard “Othello” pretty much swamped his portrayal of Parolles in this play on opening night. Others, like Kaitie Sutter as Helena, bravely soldier through.

But it’s difficult to really say much about the acting when there’s more caricature than characterization. That seems part of the director’s approach in setting this production in a contemporary trailer park. There’s no reason why great or even pretty good plays can’t be set in trailer parks. But the reasons this one doesn’t work are many, and they start becoming evident very quickly.

The first test for the audience is whether the world on stage makes sense. Here we’re presented with a trailer park where the manager is a King who for some reason has an army. Some of the residents apparently have servants. These and similar incongruities are a lot to swallow, or to understand in terms of the crucial relationships, which meanwhile go flying obscurely by.

In her program notes, the director writes that the play is about honor. This is a view shared with W.H. Auden, who explains in one of his famous lectures how the concept is worked out within the class and status system in the play. Class and power relationships are important in Shakespeare, and they are crucial in this play. But the popular notion of the trailer park is that it harbors one class. Maybe that’s the director’s joke, but instead of illuminating those relationships, this setting muddles them to the point of incoherence.

Instead of relationships we get interacting caricatures, especially of the central characters: a love-struck girl with a crush on a moronic jock. Those characters never seem more dimensional than that, and if you’re wondering how Shakespeare could hang an entire play on it: he didn’t. Theatregoers have argued over the enigma of Helena, and Bertram’s true nature, for centuries.

One sign of a badly imposed concept is how much it works against Shakespeare’s words rather than with them. At times in this production there are heroic attempts to use the language, but mostly it’s a losing fight. Soon the desperation to escape from the lines and the play within them leads to one cheap trick after another—from cell phone photography to simulated vomiting.

In our time, there’ve been sincere attempts to re-invigorate familiar Shakespeare plays by changing or mixing milieus and time periods. Some have succeeded, and the best have provided new insights and interpretations as well as being highly entertaining. Others have been honorable failures.

But relocating Shakespeare’s plays to ever more bizarre times and places has also become a virulent fad. In some hands, it expresses mostly the feverish need to reduce the plays to spectacle, more from a peevish impatience with their complexity than as an opportunity to explore their depths of emotion and meaning. Shakespeare has become an exploitable if resented brand name.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to this production—that it is a sincere effort—didn’t improve my experience of it. For me it was more travesty than problem comedy. Even as an interpretation, it seemed to me to reduce Shakespeare to a wordy sitcom: the worst of both worlds.

People go to Shakespeare productions for various reasons. Those who go for a cute concept, costumes and clowning may enjoy this one. Personally, if I’m going to sit still for several hours, trying to maintain my concentration on all those words, I want some illumination and emotion that comes from the playwright generally regarded as the greatest who ever lived. I’ve enjoyed Shakespeare parodies—I’ve written and been in a few—but parody is parody. The play is the play. If that’s what was presented at NCRT, I’m truly sorry, I didn’t see it.

Letter to Readers

I thought my column in the NC Journal dated today (March 20) might provoke a letter to the editor, but I didn't think it would be from me.

Here's the letter I just emailed:

A subtitle to my Stage Matters column used the term "Trailer-trash." I did not write these words, and I find the term offensive. I never refer to any group of people as trash.

Readers of this site may remember an anecdote I quoted in December. Here it is again, with the operative words emphasized:

In the new issue of American Theatre, there's an interview with playwright Lucy Thurber, whose play, Scarcity, dealing with an American working class family, is printed in the issue. Thurber recalls a conversation with [playwright August] Wilson at the O'Neill summer playwrights conference. "I write about poor white trash," she told him. "Are you trash?" he asked her. "No," she said, "I'm just using it as a descriptive term to explain that part of the population." But Wilson said, "Again, I ask you, are you trash? Are the people that you grew up with trash? Are the people that you love trash?"

"That was a huge, emotional moment for me," Thurber said. "Where it cracked, this play was born. The language we use about ourselves is important. There is something about having the courage to talk with dignity and trust and faith about these parts of America that are us."

The column reviewed a production of All's Well That Ends Well that sets the play in a trailer park. I wrote that the setting didn't work, and I amplified some of the points in my post here yesterday.

I've asked that the subtitle be changed in the online version. If it is changed, I'll link to it from here. If not, I'll post the review later.

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.

This North Coast Weekend

Melodrama reigns (rains?) at Dell' Arte
this weekend.