Primrose Road

On Friday night, we saw the Frog & Peach Theatre Co's Richard III at the West End Theater, a small space with a huge domed ceiling on the second floor of a church on W 86th Street. The production starred Anatol Yusef as a slimy, conniving Richard with sometimes-sad, pleading eyes.

It wasn't the most original Richard III I've seen (a battle mimed amidst strobe lights? really?), though there was an interesting audience-complicity-inducing element: when Buckingham presents Richard to his subjects, the actor encouraged us to clap, and we did, even though we "knew better." At a number of moments, we were the Richard's subjects, somewhat uneasy about the man but also somehow compelled to clap.

Karen Lynn Gorney played a somewhat soapy Margaret, which nevertheless seemed appropriate to the character.

While the rather-straightforward performance wasn't quite full of the "terror, mayhem, and butchery" advertised on the company's site, it was captivating and made a Shakespeare-like use of its audience.

Received a postcard today for "The English Channel," by Robert Brustein, at the Dorothy Streslin Theatre (312 W. 36th St.):

"The murky relationship between great writers and their proclivity to "borrow" ideas and materials is examined in this comedy trading Shakespeare's relationship with the Earl of Southampton, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Christopher Marlowe during the turbulent months before Marlowe's death."

There could be a misunderstanding of how authorship and "borrowing" worked in the days before copyright and intellectual property, but it looks like it's worth seeing nevertheless. It's playing until October 5th (see Smarttix.com for tickets and showtimes).

Note: Very early in this review, I "give away" this production's ending. I've waited until the after the last performance (June 29th) to post my review, but I'm giving fair warning because I know how much Internetters viciously eschew "spoilers." (Yes, spoilerphobics, I *am* making fun of you.)

For the most part, there was little if anything that was utterly new-and-exciting about this Shakespeare in the Park production directed by Oskar Eustis.. (Then again, it is difficult-to-impossible to do anything new-and-exciting with Hamlet.) The Wooster Group's production at the Public last fall was, in my view, far more thought-provoking. Here at the Delacorte, we saw an early-to-mid-twentieth century military-based monarchy in which the older generation often wore military costumes from the previous century. Eustis, who told a Playbill interviewer that the character Hamlet faces "a nation run by a corrupt leadership at a time of generalized paranoia," seemed to want remind audiences that Hamlet is not simply Shakespeare's most character-driven play but also an important political drama.

The decision to give the production a dual focus -- Hamlet as grieving son and Hamlet as potential political figure -- likely contributed to the three-and-a-half-hour runtime. (Perhaps Eustis also did not want to cut any of onetime-Hamlet Sam Waterston's lines as Polonius.) The politics of Hamlet were most strikingly highlighted in the blocking of the play's very last line: Fortinbras' command, "Go, bid the soldiers shoot." In the playtext (though not in the First Quarto, which omits Fortinbras' last line altogether), the stage direction indicates that the soldiers should shoot a "peal of ordnance."

Here, one of Fortinbras' soldiers shoots Horatio, the character who is supposed to survive his friend Hamlet and tell his story.

This Fortinbras is not Hamlet's double; he is not the young man who also lost a father but chose to take action rather than brood. When he commands his soldier to shoot Horatio (has this possibility ever been addressed in the academic literature, I wonder?), it becomes clear that in this production, Hamlet's dying command to "give [his] voice" to Fortinbras is a mistake on Hamlet's part. In 4.4, when the Norwegian Captain tells Hamlet about Fortinbras' invasion of Poland, we hear bombs and realize that we are witnessing an air raid. Perhaps at this point, Hamlet -- quite confused, as his subsequent "what is a man" soliloquy suggests -- mistakenly decides that he needs to be more like Fortinbras.

I'm basically in full agreement with the New York Times' assessment of the Polonius family: Sam Waterston played a Polonius who was far more complicated than the doddering old man and protective father types that his character does indeed encompass. Often foolish and sometimes sadly lost in his own mind, Polonius loves his children but doesn't know how to help them. After a "get thee to a nunnery" scene in which Hamlet doesn't know that Ophelia's lying (it's refreshing to see it staged this way after a string of movie adaptations in which Hamlet's anger is definitively triggered by her lie) but continues to feign madness and anger in order to push her away, Ophelia reaches up to her father, who is way up on the "ramparts"; all he can do is reach back down. Later, when Ophelia's sanity is almost entirely gone, she reaches up to heaven in the same way, unable to connect with her out-of-reach father.

Lauren Ambrose played Ophelia's mad scenes with a surprising, intelligent aesthetic beauty. She could have easily gone with a sort of chemical-psychological-realism here, given that she spent some years with the mental-illness-fest television show Six Feet Under, but managed to play a sorrowful, regretful Ophelia rather than an uncomfortably terrifying Ophelia. I only wish that, because of the sometimes-political nature of this production, Ambrose and Eustis would have seen Ophelia as more of an astute political commentator. (After all, if she understands what Hamlet means when he tells her that all who are married "but one" will die, then she is the only character who knows that Hamlet is planning to kill Claudius.)

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Hamlet as a realistically grief-stricken thirty-year-old man (realism actually worked for his character much better than it would have worked for Ophelia's) who has a sense of humor and regularly makes a variety of groaning noises to express a range of emotions (and not only when he's feigning madness). This Hamlet is a good man who makes some awful decisions under the pressures forced on him by his mother, uncle, and dead father. I wondered, then, why the director made the decision to go the Zefferelli route with the scene in Gertrude's bedroom (i.e. suggesting that Hamlet might have raped his mother had Polonius not stirred behind the arras) when he'd otherwise sketched out a Hamlet who is not crazy or sexually problematized but rather simply overwhelmingly saddened by grief. This simplistically Freudian route offers, for me, very little payoff.

Stuhlbarg seems to have a very good sense of rhythm and how the Shakespearean line works. This became especially clear when the actor had to handle two unexpected situations, an overhead helicopter and a coughing fit. After Hamlet told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he could be bounded in a nutshell, a helicopter passed over us; instead of trying to finish the line over the sound of the helicopter, Stuhlbarg instead paused and followed the helicopter with his eyes, eliciting laughter from the audience. Of course, the crazed "oh-my-god-it's-a-flying-machine" look was an easy way out, but the break itself seemed to be exactly on rhythm, as if the iambic pentameter beat had kept going on regardless of the pause in speech. Later (I believe during the "what is a man" soliloquy), he handled a slight coughing fit well, even keeping his coughing on rhythm to some degree.

(NB: the above observations on rhythm may simply be the result of the fact that I'm currently working on a dissertation chapter about blank verse ...)

With the exception of the giant moths flying at our heads (perhaps the reason for Stuhlbarg's coughing?), the 5 1/2 hours of sitting on woodchips while waiting for tickets, and the 3 1/2 hours of sitting on rather uncomfortable seats, Shakespeare in the Park offered a lovely night and an entertaining -- and occasionally surprising -- Hamlet.

My friend L., fascinated by the fact that Iachimo is able to convince Posthumus that he's slept with Imogen by merely describing a mole on her breast, told me that I should change my dissertation topic to "Breast Moles in the Plays of William Shakespeare." I share this only because I want to see how many people come to Primrose Road by inputting "Breast Moles in the Plays of William Shakespeare" into search engines.

(Though I should give some credence to L.'s suggestion, because she did come up with the idea for my master's thesis ... when we were in the ninth grade. It's true.)

Breast moles aside, the production at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater did a fairly good job of working simultaneously with the play's political and "fairy tale" elements. Phylicia Rashad did indeed deliver an almost Disney-style performance as many of the reviews claimed, but, as L. commented, Cymbeline can be a bit of a Snow Whitish play at times. Jonathan Cake was a scheming, near-motiveless Iachimo, a rather charming evil genius Roman solider. Martha Plimpton often portrayed Imogen as merely confused when she is, at different points in the play, naive/intelligent/brave. Her portrayal of Imogen's horror when she finds what she believes to be the headless Posthumus next to her, however, was on-target; while Cloten's beheading seemed to generate laughter rather than horror in the audience (I think laughter was the director's intention, anyway), Imogen's reaction to the headless body definitely seemed to send a chill through the (collective spines of?) the audience.

Though the political element was definitely present (the director seems to have made relatively few cuts), especially in the second act, I felt that the production went the easier route in portraying the queen's son Cloten as little more than a bumbling mama's boy who really does love Imogen. Granted, he is to some degree a bumbling mama's boy who thinks he has a chance with his married stepsister, but the playtext suggests that he's also a soldier/politician who genuinely believes, unlike his scheming mother, that the Britons should "nothing pay for wearing [their] own noses," that they are a nation that should not have to pay Rome for its nationhood.

I'm now going to discuss the ending, so if you're one of those people who lives in fear of learning the endings to Shakespeare's plays before you see them, I'd recommend not reading on.

In the play, the issue of the tribute is one of many problems explained away in a deus-ex-machina-style ending that restores the order and sweeps subversive possibilities under the rug; the King agrees to pay the tribute that the Britons had fought so hard not to pay because it was the Queen's idea, part of her plan to kill Cymbeline and make the kingdom her own.

L. said it best: "I think that was the first time I've seen an actual deus ex machina ending."

Yes, the staging of Posthumus' dream not only incorporated giant ghostly ancestor-marionettes who looked suspiciously like Roman statues but also a deus (Jupiter) riding on an eagle-shaped machina. Which was, in my view, actually the right thing to do, because audiences were laughing at the absurdity of the conclusion. So somehow, despite the extraordinarily traditional staging, despite (or, because of) the characters' regular appeals to a cluster of spotlights up above, Cymbeline exposed the absurdity of destiny by swiftly restoring the British tribute to the Romans, the king's supposedly-dead sons, and the general "world order" which the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were in the process of questioning.