The Globe on Broadway

Re-posts of what I wrote last year about Twelfth Night and Richard III, transferred to Broadway from London's Globe Theatre.

Twelfth Night. 
“Okay,” a friend of mine said the other day, presumably (rightfully) sick of my incessant excitement about Twelfth Night and Richard III, imported from the Globe to Broadway via the West End. “But really, what’s the point?”

She was referring, of course, to the conceit behind the production: all-male, traditional costumes and staging, a pre-show dressing ritual and a post-show jig. In short, likely the first attempt at a period-accurate production in New York City a good long time. And one may ask why, of course– such a thing certainly makes less sense on a Broadway stage than at the Globe, where the authenticity of the production can be mirrored by the authenticity of the theatre itself. The answer in theory is first, because the production is supposed to be incredibly good, and producers surely wouldn’t have put up the expense for a Broadway production if they didn’t think it really was; and second, because I think there is value in staging a play the way it was written to be staged, if only for the sake of experiment.

In practice, the answer turns out to be, because Shakespeare done the way it was written to be staged, with a superlatively skilled cast, in fact achieves the exact opposite of what I assume my skeptical friend was imagining: not a stodgy museum piece, but one of the liveliest, funniest, and all-around best productions of Twelfth Night I’ve seen in a very long time, if not ever.

The two poles of the play are Mark Rylance as Olivia and Samuel Barnett as Viola. Barnett’s first entrance as Viola in a dress did get a laugh, though that was more likely because he was crawling out of a trap door. Barnett is more or less the ideal male Viola, with a naturally high-pitched voice and feminine mannerisms. He embodied Viola’s self-conscious discomfort in her borrowed body so well that the multiple refractions of man-playing-woman-playing-man more or less vanished. Particularly opposite Liam Brennan’s hilarious Orsino, the blurred space between man and woman that Viola inhabits was palpable, and often very funny.

Director Tim Carroll is judicious in the darker shading which so often consumes productions of this play. Barnett’s delivery, for example, of Viola’s line “I am all the daughters of my father’s house/And all the brothers, too, and yet I know not” ended in Viola crumbling almost into tears… an opportunity that Orsino immediately seizes to finally get his hands on Cesario, something he’s been itching to do all scene, transforming what is momentarily a tender moment into a deeply and comically awkward hug and almost-kiss.

Mark Rylance’s heavily stylized performance as Olivia likewise keeps the character from the pathos that the role is capable of. I was initially skeptical of this, and of the complete lack of dignity that Olivia possesses from the moment Rylance enters, swooping in wide circles to permit a large train and to show off a ridiculous gliding walk that Olivia and occasionally Maria both employ, which makes it look like their conical dresses are somehow being dragged along on wheels rather than feet. But as this mask of hyper-stylized femininity ranges from this pseudo-dignity into giddy and ridiculously desperate love, Rylance will occasionally erupt into shouts or (more frequently) laughter, which feel so spontaneous and natural in contrast to the artifice that they are genuinely shocking and very delightful. I came to realize that this stylization was as much a trait of Olivia herself as a performance technique. Olivia and Orsino became much more of a matched pair, a duo for whom everything– from loving to mourning to commanding– is a pose to presented rather than a role to be genuinely inhabited. It made me understand the subtitle of the play in a different way. I have always taken “What You Will” in a way that makes it roughly synonymous with “As You Like It.” But Olivia and Orsino in this production brought to mind “will” in the sense of “willpower,” and “What You Will” as a reflection of the fact that Illyria is a country ruled by two people who are convinced they can mold both themselves and the world to be whatever they desire.

Though Olivia and Orsino are the most obvious examples, overall this is not a Twelfth Night in which the characters are known to us. A profound opacity encases everyone. Barnett’s Viola delivers her brief soliloquies from such depths of confusion that they cannot be revelatory. Her mind is so unknown to herself, there is no way for her to reveal it to us. Though Stephen Fry’s Malvolio is much more confidently intelligent (a refreshing change from the usual depictions of the character), even he is too “sick of self-love” to know himself truly, much less make that self known to the audience. This same intelligence rescues the ending from becoming “The Tragedy of Malvolio,” as is so in vogue. This idea of opacity may sound like shallowness, and therefore like a criticism, but it actually isn’t. The characters blindly careening about without entirely understanding what they are doing or why becomes a core aspect of the comedy of the play, and from a textual perspective, is a fascinating contrast to the plays where characters do know themselves intimately, and which are almost exclusively tragedies.

For me, the production drove home one of my devout beliefs about Shakespeare– and obviously, as a dramaturg and person obsessed with Shakespeare scholarship, I’m biased. But I believe, and I think this production proves, that the more one understands about Shakespeare, about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre and performance practice, the better able one is to translate those things into the best possible version of Shakespeare today. Obviously, I’m not saying that I think every production needs to be in period dress with all-male casts. But understanding these things– for example, the stark class differences that period dress permits, or the altered expressions of sexuality in an all-male cast– is not dramaturgical masturbation or stuffy set dressing for people who lack creativity, but an essential aspect of the text itself.

I’m intrigued to see how all of this will translate to a historical tragedy like Richard III, particularly the very different role of the women. But if nothing else, the point is to see a very talented cast approach a play with complete dedication to understanding not only the written text, but all the unspoken assumptions about performance practice upon which the text rests– to try and reveal what audiences saw and fell in love with over 400 years ago, what first made these plays the cultural forces they are now. Inundated as we are at present with deeply mediocre and poorly understood Shakespeare productions, it seems like a laudable goal to me.

Oregon ArtsWatch

I wrote a series of reviews for Oregon ArtsWatch about shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Check them out!

Two Gentlemen of Verona.
"Perhaps the most stirring realization of the evening was the depth of talent evident in the cast. Even minor characters felt fully realized (Celeste Den’s ridiculous Thurio deserves mention), and not a line of verse was out of place. Both Gomez and Clark’s skill interpreting and delivering text places them with some of the best actors I’ve seen at the festival. It’s sobering to realize how little opportunity these women have to display their abilities within Shakespeare’s canon, and exciting that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was willing to become one of very few professional theatres interested in producing an all-female Shakespeare play. Far more than a gimmick or a superficial gesture towards equality, this production offers ample proof that all-female casts can transform and illuminate the familiar texts—and in this case, perhaps even improve them (at least to the modern eye)."

Richard III.
"Dan Donohue takes the [title] role, in his first appearance at OSF since he played Hamlet in 2010. His Richard is great. I will risk hyperbole and say that it approaches the perfect. He strikes all of the contrasts that make Richard so endlessly compelling and so unlike any version that had come before: the hilarious charm with which he courts the audience from his first moment and the blithe, remorseless recourse to murdering his own family; the fantastic confidence and profound self-loathing."

Into the Woods. 
"Like a good fairy tale, Into the Woods is deceptively simple. The morals of the story are easy to find, when the characters don’t state them outright. But much of their power is in this simplicity. As the show itself reminds us, fairy tales are used to teach lessons to children, so the point is not to bury the message too deeply. When it’s well done, Into the Woods, similarly, is less revelation than reminder of difficult truths. The actors and director here succeed beautifully not because they reinterpret, but because they inhabit what is written fully and truthfully."