and go we know not where

Shakespeare is hard. Every time I sit down to see some Shakespeare I dread the possibility of poor execution. Will this director, these players, leave me wondering what they’re saying? Feeling like a kneaded clod for not comprehending the four century old metaphors?

Which is why, when Shakespeare is done right, there is gratitude. A gratefulness that underscores and complements the full emotional range that the Bard unfurls with his brilliant book.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Measure for Measure made me glad like that.

I have no recollection of Measure for Measure before last night. I know I read it once. I slogged through most of the Riverside Shakespeare as an undergrad; even the history plays. But I can’t recall experiencing the oppressive weight and rage invoked by Antonio’s benightedness or the sweet relief of mercy measured out that flooded me last night. Nor do I recall being filled with grief and apprehension on hearing Claudio explain why death is a fearful thing.

I may have dismissed the play when I read it long ago because of its quaint mores -- the whole of the action hinges on sexual transgressions that are no longer life or death concerns. We do not execute men for impregnating women out of marriage; we file complaints when men in power request sordid sexual favors in exchange for political ones or we wait and call TMZ when they renege on their side of the deal.

The director Scott Williams doesn’t allow these old-world concerns to trip us up; they instead serve the core action of the play and provide just the tension required to keep the volley alive; just the strain needed to peel back the seeming and reveal the being. Nor does the director marry off all our players easily at the end -- his handling of the final scene between the Duke and Isabella is one of the moments of this production that makes it peer to London and New York productions -- Rupert Goold’s Macbeth and Sam Mendes' As You Like It come to mind.

Only the stagecraft was second rate and distracted from the whole; as did the decision to seat several rows of audience on the stage. Better that they lose the snowy soap flakes, give up a few ticket sales, and tuck away whatever that monstrous unused tubing was that floated over the stage like it was waiting for the Blue Man Group to come charging out and toss out the rain capes.

All the better not to distract from the central trinity of players in this production, all of whom answer to the strength that Shakespeare demands: Robert Sicular as the Duke, Chip Persons as Angelo, Lenne Klingaman as Isabella.

Klingaman as Isabella is especially remarkable. It would be easy to play a nun as pious and celestial, cold and untouchable; but the tiny Klingaman is rooted and real with the strength of an oak, a woman who preserves her power without apology and acts through it to make a difference for others without sacrificing herself. Antonio’s transgressions make perfect sense in the magnetic pull of her presence; as does the Duke’s sweet hopes to capture and own her.

That Williams saw an opportunity in the final scene to turn easy assumptions inside out and ensure that Isabella remains true to herself and that same strength that bathes her world with mercy and grace -- here is where the audience is changed and amazed.

And grateful.

prodigious birth

Bergen - Clouded Sun
Originally uploaded by Magh

The challenge of speaking like Shakespeare, in conformance with Chicago’s Talk Like Shakespeare Day, is to strike within even a hectare of his humanity.

You can fake it with a few iambic pentameters; a scattering of withalls and verilies; but while the discipline of his measured verse is something to marvel at, Shakespeare's stunning talent lies in his insight into the human character, and his ability to portray people and their failings with wit, compassion and heart stopping beauty.

To be bawdy and bold and brilliant all in a tightly-turned phrase. To revel in the fire and tension and play between people engaged; to lift the scrim on our tangled webs; to be brave enough to say it.

Good luck with that.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.


Henry IV, Pt 1, I.ii. 175–195

full of wise saws and modern instances

When it comes to As You Like It I usually don’t. As a rule, Shakespeare’s comedies leave me cold. I like my Bard with a little Tybalt in it; a Cordelia and her mad daddy at odds and then reconciled; or a couple of star-crossed lovers dead in a heap on the cold stone floor, the whole neighborhood full of regret.

Sam Mendes’ direction of As You Like It at BAM’s Harvey Theater changed my mind -- not in a pure binary way, but in one of those subtle shifts of perception that dissolves intolerance and makes the world richer and more inclusive for it.

Shakespeare’s comedies are now something more subtle and rich and real than they were before.

The set design is richly cinematic, with a luminous quality that one might expect from the director of American Beauty, but most appreciable was the transformation of the story itself from the ways I’ve experienced it in previous productions (in less capable hands).

Mendes has uncovered something true about Shakespeare’s play that I never knew.

Gone is the madcap screwball tone and laughable gender confusions. Instead:

• The gravity that binds us to those we care for occupied the stage like an unnamed actor, swinging the players into their orbits as gravity influences planets around a single star in unique but concomitant obliques.



• Twinning was everywhere and beautifully explicated in ways far more psychologically revealing than Rosalind could convey by simply donning drag. Power and class are flip flopped; gender is bent. When we move from the court of the usurping Duke to the winter woods of his expulsed brother we see the treacherous Duke (whom we’ve come to know as erratic and violent -- fearful of maintaining his shaky status) step, with his retinue, to the hard wood wall that backs the stage.[1] In the dim light the wall rises to reveal the wild and the wood behind them, and they step out of their court finery into weather ravaged rags. Before our eyes they become the court in exile. Before our eyes we see the wheel of Fortune spin and end on her head.



• We see the play’s hallmark gender confusion played out not as buffoonery but as a part and parcel slice of humanity, where human sexuality is more subtle than a pure pipefitting of parts, and all players are ultimately more nuanced than they seem.

Where the production is weak:

• There’s a lovely strain of melancholy that moves through the play and influences its pacing. This works beautifully until the end, where it’s forced upon the reconciliation scene where parties are wed and the father and daughter are reunited. We need a little more madcap pacing here to make it play right; a few more exuberant reunion embraces, and we need them sooner than they were received.



• Somewhere in the mix, too, we lose sight of why Rosalind remains disguised in the forest. She’s encountered her father, we learn, and yet remains concealed. Why? It supports her charade with Orlando, of course, but the threat is no longer clear or imminent -- we need a sharp reminder of why she conceals her true self once she’s transitioned to the safety of the woods.

But these are small things, and the play as a whole is a lovely retreat and a mind opening three hours. Bonus to the whole is the delicate integration of orchestration. Musicians are placed both above the stage to set the tone and then emerge to make music within it. I’m of the school that believes a well-made play has a little bit of music and dancing in it -- As You Like It accomplishes both, and the choreography of the happily coupled pairs somehow managed make me cry, which I have to count as a success even though it startled me.

Thank you, Mr. Mendes, and Company. As it turns out, I liked it very much indeed.


As You Like It is a Bridge Project production, a collaboration between BAM, the Old Vic and Neal Street. It will run at BAM through March 13th.

Cast:
Ashlie Atkinson, Phoebe
Jenni Barber, Audrey
Michelle Beck, Celia
Edward Bennet, Oliver
Christian Camargo, Orlando
Stephen Dillane, Jaques
Alvin Epstein, Adam & Sir Oliver Martext
Jonathan Lincoln Fried, Le Beau
Richard Hansell, Amiens
Ron Cephas Jones, Charles the Wrestler
Aaron Krohn, Silvius
Anthony O’Donnell, Corin
Juliet Rylance, Rosalind
Thomas Sadoski, Touchstone
Michael Thomas, Dukes Frederick & Senior
Ross Waiton, William
Stephen Bentley-Klein and Shane Shanahan, Musicians

Originally uploaded by beebo wallace

[1] I mentioned to my brother -- my date for the evening -- that the wall in question reminded me of the wall in Mary Stuart, representing her imprisonment in the Tower. Come to find out it wasn’t happenstance -- Neal Street, Sam Mendes production company which is entangled in the Bridge Project, was also involved in bringing Mary Stuart to Broadway.

mad dogs & englishmen

Some rich men go in for art collections, gay times on the Riviera, or extravagant living. But they all get satiated. That’s why I stick to scientific experiments, spending money to discover valuable things that universities can’t afford. You never get sick of too much knowledge. -- Colonel Fabyan

Biked up to Batavia along the Fox River Trail this afternoon, home to Fermi Lab and the last great supercollider (before CERN ate our shorts) which was also home, at the beginning of the 20th century, to a rich man named Colonel George Fabyan and his wife Nelle, who spent a lot of money on science and scientists and scientific experimentation.

Some of it crazy -- in the fine tradition of Tesla and Marconi.

(Also worth noting: The colonel and his wife slept in beds suspended from the ceiling by hooks, for what I'm sure were perfectly rational reasons.)

We stopped for a tour of the Fabyan Villa because of word that Frank Lloyd Wright had a hand in the renovation of the home in 1907, and so he did: Compression and release was in evidence; the stairwell had been opened and the hallway slatted to breathe better; and Wright did that inverted wainscoting thing he loved to do with variable hues of color on the wall and a running horizontal oak trim dropped to just about eye level.

Photo by karla kaulfluss

Not on the tour was the Colonel's Riverbank Laboratories, right across the street, where the scientists and academics came to play then, and still work today.



One of Fabyan’s academics in residence was Elizabeth Wells Gallop, who moved onto the property with her sister, and under Fabyan’s patronage deciphered Shakespeare’s First Folio and published her theory that the Bard was actually the scientist, Sir Francis Bacon, who encoded secret scientific discoveries and inventions into his plays. [1]

One message that Gallop uncovered in Shakespeare’s First Folio read:

Queen Elizabeth is my true mother, and I am the lawful heir to the throne. Find the Cypher storie my books contain; it tells great secrets, every one of which, if imparted openly, would forfeit my life. F. Bacon [2]

Further decipherment produced the plans for the Baconian Acoustical Levitation Device, which Fabyan and his army managed to build. It was:

A wooden tube with metal strings attached to it, around which fit another wooden tube with metal strings attached to the inside of it. The center tube was supposed to spin and by sympathetic vibration cause the strings on the outer tube to vibrate. The resonance from the striking would create a force field, which would levitate the outer tube off of the ground.

They never did manage to make it work, and it’s now rumored to reside at the Geneva History Center.

Fabyan continued to attract scientists to his laboratory by the riverbank. William Sabine from Harvard joined him when Fabyan promised him a nearly silent location for his acoustic experiments. Together with Bert Eisenhour the Colonel built Sabine an Acoustical Laboratory between 1917 and 1918, which is still deployed for private industry today, and included a reverberation chamber, which remains:

An outstanding example of such a facility, and is still regarded as one of the best in the world. The chamber is completely insulated from the outer walls so far as sound transmission is concerned. Separate foundations are used for the inner and outer buildings, and felt insulation was employed wherever the walls came close together to form a connecting doorway. Sounds produced in the reverberation chamber can be tested with the utmost precision. Here Sabine calculated the Sabine Formula, universally used today to determine sound absorption coefficients.
(...)
Wallace Sabine is today considered to be the father of the science of architectural acoustics. His formula for sound absorption is still used in many standard acoustical tests, and the unit of absorption now bears his name, "sabin."

Also attracted to Riverbank Laboratories was William Friedman, who arrived as a geneticist and, in assisting Gallop, discovered that he had a penchant for cryptology -- and for Professor Gallop’s assistant Elizabeth Smith, whom he married in 1917.



During World War I the Colonel [3] volunteered his labs to the war effort and Riverbank became the “first unofficial cryptologic organization”. Friedman and Elizabeth provided cryptological training to reserve military officers and published a series of broadsides regarding decipherment that are “regarded as the prerequisite for a higher education in cryptology.” Friedman continued with his work through World War II and in 1952 was named a chief technical consultant in the nascent National Security Agency.

In his retirement he was awarded a cash settlement for nine cipher machines that he developed during the war years for the U.S. government (six of which remain classified); and together with his wife wrote a book debunking the Baconian Shakespeare Theory that first brought them together.

A first edition of which can be had for cheap on Abebooks »

I think it's interesting that, like Lavoisier shattering Becher's theory of phlogiston, Fabyan's Riverbank produced more than its share of whack science and theory, but from the cinders of crazy (stoked by the dollars of private enterprise) rose solid incarnations of soaring technology -- unless, of course, you consider supporting the war effort crazy.

If that's the case, then crazy birthed crazy.



Video: Diana Krall, Willie Nelson and Elvis Costello perform Crazy

[1] Folks are still promoting this theory on the Internet, of course »

[2] Many of the details excerpted here as blockquotes were extracted from the Riverbank Labs history written up by the City of Geneva, IL »

[3] And the Colonel? Not really a Colonel. (It was an honorary title, bestowed by the Governor.)

shakespeare was a hottie

It is the face of a good listener, as well as of someone who exercised a natural restraint.

From the brochure accompanying the Shakespeare Found exhibit at Stratford-upon-Avon, cited in this morning's New York Times, describing the Cobbes portrait, recently identified as the only portrait of Shakespeare painted in his lifetime.

More Shakespeare at detritus »

Update 3/19: Others disagree »

the scottish play

the scottish play
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

A few brief thoughts about the Scottish Play headlined by Patrick Stewart (oh hell: Macbeth. We saw Macbeth. This isn't a theatre. I can say it.) which I caught last night at the Lyceum with @karigee, because there isn't time enough to write up something thorough and thoughtful -– it was too big, and any approach I might make is heavily saddled with former English Major baggage, and I have to be at a meeting in half an hour.

So here it is:

• The sitcom Friends gets a lot of credit for introducing brief episodic scenes into the dramatic narrative. Shakespeare did it first.



• I thought this was a play about ambition. The director Rupert Goold wants me to know that it's about tyranny and tyrants and, maybe?, George W. Bush. And he's right. And I'm ready to rally against it.



• The thing of a play is: it must be inhabited. The life that is brought to this play through the blocking, through the body language, through the acting -– always and again I'm astonished by how powerful dramatic action can be. When it's well done.



• There's such a huge and clear difference between a mediocre Shakespearean actor and an accomplished Shakespearean actor. When a player can deliver that language with all the naturalism of breathing -- like Stewart did last night -- there's nothing better. It's potable poetry.



• Devastated by the scene where Macduff learns of his family's fate. Reminds me of the Henry production in Chicago -- the scene with Hotspur and his wife. How often did Shakespeare do this with the antagonist -– infuse them with a humanity that brings the big themes into startling focus? Making it all manageable. Evoking such compassion.



• Lady Macbeth: I wasn't your fan in the first Act, but now that you're washing out those spots I'm all yours. Such pure, believable madness.



• And, right: How old is Patrick Stewart again? Damn he's hot in those boots.

Posting by cameraphone from Union Square in NYC.

shakespeare marathon

h iv pts 1&2
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

The trouble with loving something like a play too much is that you’ve (let’s be honest here: I) have decided how the thing should play out. So it is with Henry IV.

Some folks are all over Lear, Hamlet, or those two Italian brats** – I’m just wild about Harry. Especially Part One. And after hearing on the WBEZ morning show, 848, that the conjoined production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, directed by Barbara Gaines, was playing to happy houses and was on its way to the UK at the invitation of the Royal Shakespeare Company, I figured the six hour investment might pay off. (And it didn’t hurt that my darlin’ companion was game – for a price, of course. But it’s barters like these that keep a marriage interesting.)

The next question that begs to be answered is: did it?

Well. Let’s get this much straight: The playwright certainly knew what he was doing.

There was a bit of a glitch with the production we saw – the regular Falstaff had fallen ill, and the understudy stepped in. It wasn’t clear from Gaines’ introduction whether or not we got the expected understudy or whether one of the other players stepped in to fill out the role. Either way, our Falstaff walked the stage with a script in hand. He was facile enough to pull it off, but it managed to break the fourth wall with repeated brutality. I supposed if it had been printed on something approximating parchment – rather than 8½ x 11 bright white printer paper with yellow highlights – maybe it would have felt more apiece.

But I’m not sure that that was what stood in the way of what, for me, is the most compelling piece of these plays. Hal was played a bit heavy and, I thought, one-dimensionally – as a bit of a dick, actually. (A very pretty dick, but very much a dick.) The piece missing was the filial love that, when played well, extends between the errant Prince and the faulty Falstaff. It’s that affection, and the alliances forged from it, that makes so poignant the gorgeous “base contagious clouds” soliloquy near the beginning of Part I, and so devastating the pentultimate scene in Part II.

None of that happened last night.

But what we lacked for poignancy and devastation, we made up for in the deft skill of a well-played play. The troupe knew what they were doing; dad Harry was brilliant; the throw-away scene in which the Welsh bride sings her goodbyes to her prince -- and is usually little more than a foil for Hotspur to get a little nookie from his sweetie before he heads off to war – had me shaking with sobs.

One last little irritation: due to the spare stage design (intended, I expect, to travel well to the UK), mist is heavily used in this production to create atmosphere and effect. Mist, of course, is wet, and the cumulative effect of sitting in the front row for 5½ hours under continual mist was not unlike encountering the well-known Chicago lake effect that brings the mean temperature down ten degrees within a certain radius of Lake Michigan.

The verdict: If Shakespeare’s language makes you ache, you won’t be disappointed in the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Henry IV. Go – but be sure to bundle up.

**Re the Italian brats: I’m going for effect here, of course. I cared enough about Juliet’s suffering when I was in high school that I memorized her death scene for no good reason and replayed it over and over to an audience of one (me) in our unfinished basement. Of course, had I known that the duct work was carrying my death throes into my brothers’ room I might have been more discreet.