Ashland Theater Note: Love's Labor's Lost

I don't suppose many people would count Love's Labor's Lost as their favorite Shakespeare play (though Harold Bloom seems more or less besotted with it, and Harley Granville-Barker thought he saw possibilities in it).  The plot is thin enough that you can read a newspaper through it.  And the text exhibits a riot of wordplay, the sort of thing that never was Shakespeare's most attractive aspect, and in any event a feature that gains nothing from the passage of time.   Yet Shakespeare at his worst is better than almost anybody else at his best, and just about everything he wrote is at least interesting, even if not completely satisfying.

I'm old enough to remember a time when respectable people could say that LLL was so  bad that it must be Shakespeare's first play.    I don't think many people hold to that view any more.   We've got good reason to think that perhaps seven or eight other plays might have been earlier which evidence, if true, means that we are now nearly a quarter of the way into Shakespeare's career.  So he is still learning (interesting that Verdi was another sort of late starter--I don't think show people get that kind of leeway very often any more).  And even if still learning (but Shakespeare was always still learning), here he is pretty much on the cusp--just beginning to figure what he's got and how he can use it.  Bloom again (I repeat from memory)--this is the play where Shakespeare discovers that he can do just about anything with words.*

Apparently we're not sure of an exact date, but the best guesses appear to put it somewhere between 1593 and 1595--so, perhaps coterminous with the sonnets (themselves like LLL, sometimes fussy and over written).  Also thus perhaps a bit before Richard II and Romeo and Juliet, both miraculous in the sense tht they are plays in which Shakespeare at once indulges his weakness for overwrought verse, yet at the same time criticizes and ironizes it.  Consider: Romeo is a young man who gets some of the best lines, yet fails to grasp that words are not life, and dies for his trouble.  So also Richard, a glorious poet but a disastrous king--or rather, a disastrous king because he is a glorious poet.

I'd put LLL in the same bin with those other two, and in the same perspective: the very success of these young people (these young men)with verse betrays a certain schizoid inadequacy at the task of real emotional connection.  It's this kind of insight, best appreciated when you think of the play in the context of the larger oeuvre, that makes you realize that Shakespeare even now is always thinking, thinking, and usually one or more steps ahead of you, even when you are enjoying him in your slow-paced way.

A couple more points about context.  I always marvel at Shakespeare's capacity for self-correction, his ability never to make the same mistake twice, together with his knack for doing the same thing in a same-only-different way.  Both traits are in evidence here: one this is the only play (save Tempest, his valediction) in which Shakespeare did not pillage his plot from elsewhere.  You can almost surveying his handiwork and saying, "right, plot is not my strength, better go back to the model of plagiarism-plus-improvement that has served me well before."  And two, the play-within-a-play: Shakespeare does one here but it comes across as gratuitous and unkind.  He does it again just a little later  in Midsummer Night's Dream, where it is tightly integrated and one of the funniesst, most charming bits he ever produced.< All this is by way of background for understanding this season's Ashland venture at LLL.  In short, I'd say Ashland's is about as successful as we have any right to expect.  The cast doesn't completely conquer the script, but nobody conquers the script, and they do pretty well with it.  Meanwhile, the  text is malleable enough to allow for the kind of extras that Ashland does well--costumes, music, miscellaneous horseplay.  Indeed oddly, there is perhaps a bit less of extraneous trim here (where the play can take it) than there was in, say, Midsummer Night's Dream (where it was often a distraction).
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*Afterthought on dating: I have "my own" theory on dating the play--"my own," in the sense that I thought it up on my own, though I doubt it is original with me.  Specifically: we know the theaters were closed through the 1593 season, thanks to plague.  We know that this is the time when Shakespeare  wrote a good many of the  sonnets.  We know he emerged in his first glorious flowering about 1595.  Some people also speculate--and it sounds right to me--that LLL was written for private performance, not for the public stage.  So far so good--but what if he wrote it for private performance during 1593--i.e., at the same time as the sonnets, but unconstrained by the ban on theaters, and unconstrained also by the demands of a public audience.  Pure speculation of course, but that is one reason why the study of Shakespeare is so much fun.

Ashland Theater Note: Pirates of Penzance

I've written before about the morphing of the Shakespeare Festival at Ashland: how it has transformed itself from an earnest and perhaps sometimes reverential exercise into a son et lumière extravaganza where sometimes you can't see the bells for the whistles. These new-style productions happen often enough that I infer it's a board mandate, not just a director's jeu d'esprit. I assume the point is to try to reach out to a younger audience. This will work if (a) you actually do reach out to a younger audience and (b) you don't lose your older audience in the process. As I guess I've said, I think that sometimes Ashland brings it off, more or less, sometimes not.

Last night we caught this season's Pirates of Penzance, Ashland's first-ever venture into Gilbert & Sullivan and very much a venture into the new age. On a morphing scale I'd say it worked pretty well, and both the successes and the failures can teach us something about the possibilities of the genre.

First, some stuff that didn't work. They staged it in the outdoor Elizabethan theater. If you've seen it, you know that this is a purpose-built performance space, admirably suited in size and acoustics to allow good actors to convey a challenging script. But Pirates was not that: one it was miked up to the eyeballs, or I suppose I should say eardrums (Mrs. Buce said she liked it better after she stuffed in some cotton). Two, there was an orchestra--not huge, but big enough to make a big noise. Three, there were an awful lot of people on the stage, flailing and jumping and generally making a racket whose particular purpose was not always obvious to the casual viewer. On the miking, I suppose I date myself: I think that most theater is way louder than it needs to be these days, and that it thereby loses valuable nuance. But I suppose the train has left the station on that one: apparently the bankers want mikes, and evidently the management at Ashland thinks the kiddies want miking too.

Now some good stuff: I wouldn't have guessed it, but it appears that Pirates is one old warhorse that actually gains from being hoked up and reconfigured. Okay: not reconfigured a lot--there was still a lot more of G&S in this remake than there is of Shakespeare in some of the Shakespeare remakes they've done. What they've added are some non-G&S music samplings of--well, of almost everything, including, I suppose, a fair number of things that went right by me (I sometimes felt like I do when I watch The Simpsons, knowing that there are plenty of topical references that I'm just not going. But anyway: Mozart, Gershwin, Harry Belafonte, I assume Lady Gaga and heaven knows who else. Thing is, you come away feeling that this kind of merry irreverence is just what G&S deserve.

And more than just the music: the director imbued the whole performance with a kind of cheerful raunchiness, an easygoing vulgarity. It was fun enough in its own right, but more important, the presentation succeeded in detoxing G&S from just the sort of thing that makes you most uncomfortable about them. I mean the simpering, the prissiness, the victorian pretense. Nothing prissy about this Pirates, and as news, this is nothing but good.

Will we be seeing more G&S? I bet, and why not? If the audience buys it, might as well sell. Yet I'm not sure they will have the same luck a second time. Pirates has always seemed a bit second-rate to me: a little tired, a sequel, an attempt to repeat all the jokes that went over so well in Pinafore. Of course, that may be precisely why it works so well as a remake: recall Buce's theory that a second rate novel (e.g., Gone with the Wind)is likely to make a better movie than a first-rate, e.g., Portrait of a Lady. I'm not at all sure I can see the Pirates treatment working with, say The Mikado. So, might as well enjoy it while we can. But bring cotton for your ears.

Spiderman West: The Ashland Style

Scan the blurbs for the staging of Molière's Imaginary Invalid at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival and you could quickly conclude that for full enjoyment, you'd best forget about Molière.   A "wild whorl of love and sickness, song and dance," gushes a newspaper review reprinted at the Festival website.  Elaborating:

Seeing a parallel between Molière's blending of court and peasant theatrical styles and Phil Spector's baroque pop-song productions, director [the modern adapter] has set the story in a Parisian apartment where classic elegance has been splashed with mod fashion.


Christopher Acebo's grand scenic design and eye-popping costumes blend with Paul James Prendergast's period-groovy pop-soul songs and Ken Roht's near-campy choreography in explosions of color and motion. Argan, by contrast, mostly sits in a wheelchair and complains, but as played by David Kelly in an iridescent robe and a Spector-ish halo of frizz, he's anything but inert ...


And the jokes are almost nonstop: cheesy puns, off-color asides, sight gags and so on. Anachronistic references to dowries, Viagra and even Hall and Oates fly by ...

 So you might think that  Molière is missing in all the frenetic acting. You wouldn't be quite right--the original was, after all, a comedy and some of the original comic ideas lie there somewhat mangled under the accumulation of debris.

But  Molière is only an incident or an accident  in the full flowering of what you might call "The Ashland Style"--a by-now-fully-matured genre of  theatrical display.  Some of the elements I've already set forth: start with a venerable name--Shakespeare is best,   Molière will do.  Add some of what Ashland has always done best--physical comedy on the order of Feydeau farce.  Tricky near-gymnastics are good, like a scene played at the top of a moving ladder, or a wheelchair that almost skids into the audience.  Add surreal costumes, heavy on primary colors (but no harm if you ask the lead to wear a duck  on his head).

And then the noise.  Oh my, the noise.  I was chatting a while back with a guy who works in Broadway tech. I remarked on  how loud Broadway shows have become. Yes, he said, but it's not the sound guys: they understand modulation.  It's the bankers, or the folks in marketing: they are the ones, he said who want full decibel all the time.

Maybe, although I can think of a good practical reason for all this miking in Ashland: the nature of the Ashland audience.  It's divided into two rather disparate parts.  One part is old--the public pensioners and suchlike who beguile away their sunset hours under a patina of culture.  in the nature of things, their hearing is beginning to go, and they might not complain about loud because they might not know it is loud.  The other part of the audience is the young--the schoolchildren who arrive by busload for a dash of uplift.  Presumably they have already destroyed through the earbuds whatever hearing God gave them but in any event they take loud as a given, a precondition, a matter of course.

Put the sound together with some flashing lights and you've got a halfway decent son et lumière show. So, a Spiderman  replay?  Not exactly.  While it may be like Broadway (or even Vegas. come to that), it's really much more just like itself--a peculiar mix of high culture and boffo that seems to keep bums on seats and cash tumbling into the box office: call it Spiderman west.  You certainly can't argue with this kind of success.  And you shouldn't expect anything else, really: in particular, you couldn't keep the place full by just staging and restaging the old warhorse classics in an old warhorse way.  So if you like lights and color and a lot of actually pretty good pratfall comedy, this is probably the place to be.  If you were looking for a Shakespeare Festival--well, that's a slightly different question.  

Ashland Caesar

There are innovations in the new Ashland Shakespeare Festival production of  Julius Caesar,  but the presentation of a woman in the title role is not really one of them.  Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet more than a century ago; apparently she wasn't well received, but that fact appears to root in the performance per se and not in her sex. Other women have taken men's parts, if not often, still often enough to make it no longer a novelty.

The more pertinent issue is: why is Vilma Silva here?  Is she here because she is a seasoned stage-person responding to a new challenge?  Or because there is something that she as a woman can bring to a man's role?

If the latter, then it's not obvious to me what it is she was supposed to bring.  Shakespeare's Rome certainly does present itself as a man's world, and Caesar himself, in conventional readings, as a catalog of manly virtues.  Silva's Caesar certainly isn't particularly manly--she's rather a good, hardened, seasoned, female politician, on the order of Elizabeth Dole.  It's a coherent reading in its way but it's a reading you certainly can't torture out of the text.  And it is far from clear what it adds to our understanding of Caesar (or Caesar) except insofar as it shows us what he is not.

Yet if she is not to be judged as a woman, why specify that she is "she?" Why put her in a gown and rewrite all the pronouns?  As I say it is no longer a novelty for women to play "men's parts."  Ashland for years has used African Americans (and others) in traditional white-male roles, to good effect.  Here in Caesar, there are other women in the cast, some in "men's parts" without making any effort to recast the characterization: Antony says "you are not wood, you are not stones, but men"--but are several women on the stage.   Ironically, one loss of insisting on Caesar's womanhood is that we lose one good woman's part: Caesar's wife, Calpurnia is hustled out of the script, her lines reassigned to others, in whom they make less sense.

Were we to evaluate Silva as a theatre-person and not as a woman, I'd judge her a bit disappointing, though not hugely so.  She's an effective communicator, dynamic and magnetic but again she is herself, not Caesar and it's so she comes across as a successful elocutionist, not as an actor.  For what it is worth, I'd say the same about Danforth Comins' Antony. Comins is one of the most impressive veterans in the Ashland company and he has turned in some superb performances (his Brick last year in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was as good as it gets).  In his big speech a Antony ("Friends! Romans!  Countrymen!") he comes near to the right level of manipulative sociopathy.  But you remember that underneath it all he is just too decent a guy for all the mischief that Antony so effectively creates.   The best actors are the ones that make you forgot who they really are. 

If there is a noteworthy innovation in the production, I suppose it is "Ako,"  cast as(inter alia) the Soothsayer who speaks some of her lines  in what I take to be Japanese.  Remarkably, I'd say that this does work. Let's stipulate that there were not Japanese in the Roman forum; still, the alien utterance adds just the note of strangeness you would want for such an urgent intimation of doom.  

A Pivotal Shakespeare Moment

I believe I first heard this bit of Shakespeare 50-plus years ago in an LP of readings by John Gielgud:

What's this, what's this? Is this her fault or mine?
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?
Ha!
Not she: nor doth she tempt: but it is I
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be
That modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough,
Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? O, fie, fie, fie!
What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?
Dost thou desire her foully for those things
That make her good? O, let her brother live!
Thieves for their robbery have authority
When judges steal themselves. What, do I love her,
That I desire to hear her speak again,
And feast upon her eyes? What is't I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue: never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art and nature,
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite. Even till now,
When men were fond, I smiled and wonder'd how.

Fans will recognize this as Angelo, the proud, punitive authoritarian surrogate-ruler in Measure for Measure.  He has been talking with Isabella, who sought him out to beg mercy for her brother Claudio, sentenced to decapitation for illicit sex.   The sex wasn't even all that illicit: it was consensual, and the lovers were betrothed.  But Angelo is unmoved by her plea--until he discovers, to his horror, that he is suffused by the same kind of ungovernable passion (i.e here, for Isabella) that led Claudio to the mouth of his grave.

I think I understand now (as I surely did not then) that it is not just a powerful speech in its own right, but rather also a pivotal item in the entire Shakespeare canon.   Here we have a central figure in solilloquy, responding with shock and horror at the spectacle of his own inner self.  Can we imagine any character any work ever before who might have responded to himself in the same way.  Montaigne in his study perhaps, or Hamlet (whose own play appeared just a few years before).  But that is the point: Harold Bloom says that Hamlet taught us what it is to be human; her Angelo continues the job.

Another thing I learned since my first encounter: Gielgud's Angelo evidently occupies a pivotal juncture in the development of modern British drama.  I learn that Peter Brooks's presentation of Measure with Gielgud in 1950 proved an eye-opener for British audiences, creating a new understanding of the play and the part almost as revolutionary as Shakespeare's first introduction 350 years before (and not incidentally, did much to establish Brooks' own career).

I'm prompted to remember all this on having seen a new Measure here in Oregon at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival.  It's a flawed performance of a flawed work but interesting in its flaws of both sorts.  Say this about Shakespeare: he often wrote imperfect plays but he never wrote dull plays.  And like no other artist except possibly Picasso, you can always see him pressing the envelope, exploring something new, trying to expand the frontiers of his own world.   I may say more about the new Ashland performance later--I still haven't quite made up my mind about it.  But that may be precisely the appeal of this imperfect work, in text and also in this performance: you know it is imperfect but it gets under your skin and you cannot let it go.

Biblio note: the Gielgud LP is an item in its own right; here's a brief Wiki introduction.  Note to self, see if you can retrieve a copy of the LP.  No, wait, I don't have anything to play it on.