Shakespeare, William

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Living the ‘Dream,’ on Your Laptop or Phone

      by

      Gorgeous but thin, this half-hour experiment from the Royal Shakespeare Company turns Puck into an avatar and “theatergoers” into fireflies.Do you know of a site where the wild thyme blows? You do now.“Dream,” an interactive experience from the Royal Shakespeare Company, which runs through Saturday and lasts about as long as a power nap, transports its thousands of viewers to a sylvan grove, then to a rehearsal space in Portsmouth, England, for a live Q&A. Tickets are free, though those who prefer a lightly interactive experience can purchase seats for 10 British pounds (about $14) and appear onscreen as fireflies.Inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — in the wispiest, most gossamer way imaginable — “Dream” signifies a bounding leap forward for theater technology and a short jog in place for theater itself.A different “Dream” was meant to open in Stratford-upon-Avon about a year ago, as a showcase for Audience of the Future, a consortium of institutions and tech innovators assembled in 2019 and tasked with exploring new ways to make and deliver theater remotely. (Theater on your phone? They saw it first.) The 2020 “Dream” would have played to both a live audience and a remote one, integrating actors, projections and live motion-capture into a verdant whole.Jamie Morgan as Peaseblossom, a character rendered as sticks and flowers.Stuart MartinBut in-person audiences are rare these days, and this remote “Dream,” however gorgeous — and it is gorgeous, enormously gorgeous — feels thinner for it, less a forest of imagination and more a small copse of some really lovingly rendered trees. It begins with Puck (E.M. Williams), that merry wanderer of the night, imagined here as an assemblage of pebbles in the approximate shape of a human body. Why render Puck — nimble, fleet and girdling the earth in the time it takes most of us to load the dishwasher — as a pile of rocks? Dunno. Looks cool.In traveling around the forest, Puck encounters Shakespeare’s other fairies, like Moth (an accumulation of moths), Peaseblossom (sticks and flowers) and Cobweb (an eyeball inside a squirrel’s drey). Apparently, Puck also met Mustardseed (more sticks?). I missed it. And the singer Nick Cave contributed some voice acting! I missed that, too.“Dream,” performed live, is exquisite, denatured and almost entirely contentless. It isn’t quite theater, and it isn’t precisely film, though it could pass for a highbrow “Avatar” short. For stretches, it resembles a meditative video game, but it isn’t that either, mostly because the interactive elements (clicking and dragging fireflies around the landscape) are wholly inconsequential.Those who purchase tickets are represented onscreen as fireflies.Paul MumfordWatching it, I felt inexplicably cranky, like a toddler who has been offered a variety of perfectly nice snacks but doesn’t want any of them. Because maybe what the toddler really wants is to safely see an actual play in an actual theater with an actual audience. And that just isn’t available right now.So I don’t really know what to say about “Dream.” Because it represents an obviously fruitful and seemingly happy collaboration among top-of-their-game actors, directors, designers, composers and technicians, many of whom assumed some physical risk in the making of it. (Among them are Robin McNicholas, credited with direction and narrative development; Pippa Hill, credited with script creation and narrative development; and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the production’s music director and co-composer.) It also signals real progress in the use of live motion-capture (something the Royal Shakespeare Company has already experimented with) and offers a tantalizing glimpse of how that technology might be used when proper in-person theater returns.But this isn’t proper theater. Or even improper theater. It’s a sophisticated demonstration of an emergent technology. Shakespeare is the pretext, not the point. The pentameter, pushed into random virtual mouths, helps us better appreciate the software architecture — which is great if you like software and less great if you like the language itself, or the original play’s plot or characters or keen insights into our big, dumb, desiring hearts. This “Dream” is beautiful. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all wake up now?DreamThrough March 20; dream.online More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      A ‘Roman Tragedies’ for the History Books

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater ReviewA ‘Roman Tragedies’ for the History BooksThe International Theater Amsterdam presented Ivo van Hove’s exhilarating Shakespeare marathon in a one-off, livestreamed production.Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra giving in to grief at the death of Mark Antony in Ivo van Hove’s staging of “Antony and Cleopatra,” part of the director’s “Roman Tragedies.”Credit…Jan VersweyveldFeb. 18, 2021, 4:05 a.m. ETSix hours have rarely passed so quickly, or been so smart.That was the immediate take-away from the livestream last Sunday of the director Ivo van Hove’s “Roman Tragedies,” an exhilarating distillation of Shakespeare’s three Roman plays performed throughout an afternoon and into the evening as part of the International Theater Amsterdam’s ITALive program.This marathon, modern-dress sequence of “Coriolanus,” “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” first performed in the Netherlands in 2007 and widely toured since, was revived for one mid-pandemic performance. And where similar offerings often remain online for later viewing, in this instance live meant live. If you blinked last weekend, you missed it — though six hours, to be fair, is quite a long blink.Van Hove wasn’t yet a Broadway and West End favorite when “Roman Tragedies” was first produced, but the Belgian maverick has since moved into the mainstream, winning Olivier and Tony Awards for his searing reappraisal of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” Now as much of a star as the actors he draws to him, van Hove had just overseen the opening of his first Broadway musical, a production of “West Side Story,” when the pandemic shut down New York theaters almost a year ago.Despite van Hove’s gathering renown, I can’t think of a later production than “Roman Tragedies” that better exemplifies his skill for eliding past and present so that centuries-old texts acquire a hurtling immediacy. Precarious governments rocked by political infighting are common to all three plays, and van Hove links those machinations to our current age by playing video footage of contemporary world leaders in the background.The stage is set in van Hove’s signature anonymous style, with no time for period detail. And there are cameras at the ready — another favorite van Hove device. (At one point in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Bart Slegers’s anxious Enobarbus broke the fourth wall to bolt outside into Amsterdam’s wintry streets, catching dismayed passers-by unaware.) But what has perhaps become predictable about his aesthetic over time works stirringly here, as does his insistence on the timelessness of the plays, which seem more apposite now, perhaps, than ever.The stage for “Roman Tragedies” is set in van Hove’s signature anonymous style, with no time for period detail.Credit…Jan VersweyveldHe could never have guessed, in 2007, that talk of advancing upon the Capitol in “Julius Caesar” would link the death throes of the Roman Republic to events in Washington last month. When Hans Kesting’s bearish Mark Antony in the third and longest of the plays spoke of “a sudden passion for mutiny,” you couldn’t help but think of assaults on democracy then and now, from the classical world to modern-day Myanmar.The smoothed-out rendering of Shakespeare’s text — Sunday’s streaming was presented in Dutch, with English and French subtitles — dispensed with Elizabethan archaisms, allowing the plays’ meanings to emerge afresh. Key lines remained intact — woe betide anyone who messes with “Et tu, Brute?” — but elsewhere Tom Kleijn’s translation streamlined and brought clarity to the proceedings, highlighting themes that connect the plays without letting the obfuscations of language get in the way.Only in Cleopatra’s death scene did I miss the luxuriant wordplay of the original, which contains some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. And yet that cavil fell away with Chris Nietvelt’s piercing performance as an Egyptian queen so poleaxed by the death of her Roman lover that she let rip with a series of screams. Could this have been the same actress from the opening play, “Coriolanus,” where she embodied a TV anchorwoman always smiling, no matter how grievous the news she had to report? Nietvelt completed a tremendous theatrical hat trick with her performance in “Julius Caesar” as a Casca full of foreboding about the chaos to come.If Nietvelt stood out amid an astonishing cast of players from the International Theater Amsterdam’s ensemble, no praise is too high, either, for Gijs Scholten van Aschat as Coriolanus. He played the Roman leader not as some blood-spattered action movie hero but as a graying figure of great volatility who won’t be reined in by a jacket and tie when his natural habitat is the battlefield.Both Cassius and Octavius Caesar were played by women, and a neat reordering of the scenes in “Coriolanus” allowed a determinedly macho play to begin with a conversation between the mother and wife of the prideful general of the title: Van Hove, in a clever touch, grants these women voices well before the play’s surrender to toxic masculinity.How thrilling, too, to see a large cast onstage, unfettered by the constraints of social distancing. (The theater said in a statement that Sunday’s show “complied with all current governmental measurements surrounding the regulation of livestreaming for cultural institutions in the Netherlands.”) Shakespeare demands intimacy, but I’ve never seen such a hyper-affectionate “Antony and Cleopatra,” with so many lingering smooches, and not just between the title characters.And yet it’s the countdown toward extinction and death, whether politically or individually, that unites these three plays. “Roman Tragedies” began and ended to the strains of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” a song that looks forward to a waiting calamity. The implication, as van Hove made plain, is that the times haven’t really changed at all.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Shakespeare’s Baddies Convene in ‘All the Devils Are Here’

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickReview: Shakespeare’s Baddies Convene in ‘All the Devils Are Here’Patrick Page writes and stars in a meditation on the Bard’s villains, moving swiftly through a catalog of characters as if he were a chameleon.Patrick Page in “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” filmed at Sidney Harman Hall in Washington.Credit…via Shakespeare Theater CompanyFeb. 11, 2021Updated 1:00 p.m. ETAll the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the VillainNYT Critic’s PickProspero steps out onto the stage, a sturdy white staff and book in hand. He kneels, opens the book and strikes the stage three times. As the last heavy thud echoes throughout the empty theater, the lights dim to an icy, concentrated glow. This is the magician, and this is his art.But it isn’t actually Shakespeare’s vengeful sorcerer we’re seeing; this is Patrick Page, and when he opens his mouth, it’s not Prospero but Lady Macbeth who speaks, in a jagged whisper. It’s a summoning: “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts.”It’s enough to make you shiver, and fitting for a play called “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” an enchanting one-man show full of Shakespeare’s vilest, silliest and most misunderstood characters: the baddies. Produced by the Shakespeare Theater Company at Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, and directed by Alan Paul, “All the Devils Are Here” is a chronological catalog of Shakespeare’s villains — including the lady with stains on her hands that no amount of Purell can get out, and the cuckolding, crown-stealing sibling. Page, who also wrote the script (and is lately known for his performance as another grand villain, Hades, in the musical “Hadestown”), begins with some general context, bringing us back in time to the flimsy villains that showed up in 16th century morality plays and how a young Shakespeare, influenced by such shows and those of his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, first broached the role of the villain in his early works.In the roughly 80-minute production, Page peppers in tidbits about his personal relationship to the texts, like how he remained haunted by “Macbeth” even when he stepped off the stage, along with a few nods to Shakespeare in pop culture — like the imprint of “Hamlet” in “The Lion King” and the echoes of “Richard III” and “Macbeth” in “House of Cards.” Addressing some of the nuances behind the characterizations of these rapscallions and miscreants, Page asks worthwhile questions: Is Iago a sociopath? Does Shylock reflect Shakespeare’s early prejudices, and does Othello later subvert them? Is the jolly old rascal Falstaff not just a fool, but another villain to contend with?In the production, Page blends casual analysis with personal reflections on Shakespeare’s plays.Credit…via Shakespeare Theater CompanyThe production reminded me of another I’d enjoyed recently: the Irish Repertory Theater’s “On Beckett/In Screen,” written by and starring Bill Irwin (and available to stream this month as part of the theater’s Home Winter Festival). Both work in a form that speaks to the audience as not just vessels of the actor’s performance, but also as fellow scholars examining the text with him. I’m a student at heart, one of literature especially, so I count any piece that melds the virtuosity of stage performance with the intellectual rigor of a classroom, minus any didacticism, as a precious night of theater.And yet for Shakespeare stans like myself, the contextual analysis is a touch light, no more than the connective thread between villains. But when we do arrive at those villains — alas! — Page, with his bottomless bass (soon to be set to audio in a Shakespeare@Home production of “Julius Caesar”), seems possessed by such a mastery of his craft, moving teary-eyed through the pain of Shylock and the comic pomposity of Malvolio with such swiftness that it’s like watching a chameleon change hues before your eyes: stupefying, effortless.Does Page have the Weird Sisters casting spells by his side? I don’t think so, but just as well, he has Elizabeth A. Coco’s revelatory lighting, heralding and punctuating his tonal and oratorical shifts. Then there’s Gordon Nimmo-Smith’s exacting sound design, to create an air of mischief and terror, or usher in a scene in a verdant garden or rowdy pub.But it’s Page — looking exceptionally svelte in an all-black ensemble, standing or sitting at a lonely desk and chair onstage while the cameras follow him with a pristine eye and perfect attention — who is the devil, the mage, the usurper.In the final scene, he arrives at Prospero, who ends “The Tempest” rehabilitated and delivers one last monologue to the audience — here, the camera moves to show Page facing the empty theater — denouncing his magical games and bidding us farewell. Page does the same, snaps the staff in half and closes his book onstage.But has the spell really ended, just like that? Hours later, I’m still utterly beguiled.All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the VillainThrough July 28; shakespearetheatre.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Lost in 2020: Epic Shakespeare, and the Theater That Planned It

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookLost in 2020: Epic Shakespeare, and the Theater That Planned ItBrave Spirits Theater expected to mount an ambitious cycle of eight history plays. Instead it became yet another victim of the pandemic.Brendan Edward Kennedy, center, in the title role of “Henry V” at Brave Spirits Theater in Virginia.Credit…Claire KimballDec. 29, 2020I’ve written several versions of this story. First it was supposed to be an account of a small theater company’s ambitious stage project, then a story about that interrupted project and the company’s plan to regroup because of the pandemic. Now it’s an elegy for a small theater that the coronavirus shut down.On a bright but chilly Saturday afternoon in February, I hopped on a train to Alexandria, Va., just outside of Washington. I was visiting Brave Spirits Theater, which was presenting the first part of a bold endeavor: staging eight of Shakespeare’s history plays (the two tetralogies, from “Richard II” to “Richard III”) in repertory, over the course of 18 months, culminating in a marathon performance of all eight works.I was there to see the first two plays in the series, beginning with a matinee performance of “Richard II.” On the car from the train station, I peeked at the quiet suburbs of Alexandria — brick houses with wraparound porches, American flags by the door — until I arrived at the theater, which channeled the small-town whimsy of a playhouse in a storybook. The space, a converted church building, had pale yellow columns out front and bright turquoise trim around the windows, with red accents throughout.Charlene V. Smith, a co-founder of Brave Spirits. Credit…Greg Kahn for The New York TimesCharlene V. Smith, who co-founded Brave Spirits in 2011, told me that the idea for the project occurred to her in 2008, when she saw the Royal Shakespeare Company in London do a marathon performance of the histories. Brave Spirits was claiming to be making history by being the “first professional American theater company to mount full productions of Shakespeare’s two history plays tetralogies and perform them in repertory.”A few feet away from where we were sitting, in one corner of the lobby, was a chalkboard. Four calendar months were neatly drawn in perfectly symmetrical boxes — January, February, March, April — with a color-coded schedule of performances of the first tetralogy, which the company named “The King’s Shadow”: Richard in bright red, the first Henry in clover green, the second Henry in yellow and the last Henry in a crisp, royal purple.In a humble but well-done production, Brave Spirits had Richard II crowned and killed, and his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, a.k.a. Henry IV, was named the new king. After the audience left, the cast milled around the space, chatting in the kitchen, which doubled as the box office. “Is your bag of heads upstairs?” I heard someone call out from the hall. A few wore shirts that were being sold by the company, black tees with gray block lettering that read “Richard & Henry & Henry & Henry & Richard.” (Ever the Shakespeare nerd, I bought one.)That evening I saw “Henry IV, Part I,” and every seat was filled. Older couples and families and a couple of teens gabbed and waved at one another; everyone was a local. I left on the train the next morning, still buzzed with the energy in that tiny converted church.I wrote the article, but before it was published the pandemic shut down the performing arts across the nation, and the story of Brave Spirits changed. Like many other theaters, it was forced to cut short the histories project, which DC Metro Theater Arts predicted would be “one of the must-sees of the 2021 season.” April 19-20 was supposed to be a big weekend for the company, when all of the plays in the first tetralogy would be staged in repertory, ending in the capstone of the first half, “Henry V.”From left, Tom Howley, Duane Richards, and Michael Bannigan Jr. in “Henry V.”Credit…Claire KimballJacqueline Chenault, left, as Alice, and Nicole Ruthmarie as Princess Katherine in “Henry V.”Credit…Claire KimballJohn Stange, above, as Henry Bolingbroke and Gary DuBreuil as the title character in “Richard II.”Credit…Claire KimballOn March 12, Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia declared a state of emergency and, shortly after, the White House issued a proclamation declaring Covid-19 a national emergency. Brave Spirits decided to cancel the marathon weekend but still go out with one last performance — the opening-night show of “Henry V.”“At that point,” Smith said when I checked back in with her in late April, “people had put so much into it that everyone was like: ‘We need to open “Henry V.” We need that opening-night performance tomorrow. We just need it.’” Brendan Edward Kennedy reported that after the show, in his dressing room, he started to sing the wartime ballad “We’ll Meet Again.” (“We’ll meet again/Don’t know where/Don’t know when.”) He sang it briefly to me on the phone.After that “Henry V,” the theater froze: costumes still on racks and props in bins, stored under the audience risers. As for the tools of war — swords, spears — Smith had them stored for safekeeping in her home in McLean, Va.The theater put up a fight through the spring and summer; an annual fund-raiser netted over $7,000, compared with its usual $3,000, giving the cast and crew some hope. (Smith told me the company’s annual budget was around $50,000, but for the first histories project season it was tripled, to roughly $150,000.)For several weeks, the cast kept up with online script readings and planned for a fall with more virtual rehearsals until, they hoped, they would come back with the second half of the project in January 2021.That was supposed to be my new story: one about a small theater enduring despite the consequences — something that captured the stakes and scope of the difficulties but that still ultimately ended up being about hope and resilience.By this point you already know that’s not the story I’m telling now, 10 months after I first visited Virginia and nine months since the lockdown began. On Nov. 21, Brave Spirits announced its closure: “Without the ability to plan for future performances, Brave Spirits is unable to recover financially from the loss of Shakespeare’s Histories,” a news release stated, the last two words in bold as though spoken through a megaphone.Brave Spirits produced more than 20 plays and employed over 300 artists, and was known for its quietly subversive interpretations of classics, usually through a feminist lens. But the company announced it had one parting gift: audio recordings of the plays in the histories project, which they hope will come out in late 2021. It’s hard not to think of it as another reminder of all the things the coronavirus destroyed in just a couple of months.Brave Spirits Theater, which was housed in a former church.Credit…Greg Kahn for The New York TimesThe fact that Brave Spirits lost this battle would have been sad enough if it weren’t also so utterly, ironically Shakespearean. This spring, during a follow-up call with Kennedy, I asked the actor how he had attacked King Henry V’s famous St. Crispin’s Day speech.The speech is usually said to fanfare and fireworks. King Henry V, no longer the childish, mischievous Prince Hal, has become the brilliant leader, inspiring his men to perform a feat of greatness. Kennedy said that their approach to this scene was a bit different — a glorious moment that is nevertheless fatalistic, with the soldiers fully understanding the cost of war.Kennedy told me that he and Smith had imagined the soldiers’ bleak logic: “‘Let’s go out in a blaze of glory, and let’s hit them so hard that people are going to be talking about this for centuries. They’re gonna remember all of our names, and this deed is going to make us heroes in the annals of history.’” Kennedy was aware of the parallels — that, like the soldiers on St. Crispin’s Day, he and his fellow actors were going into the performance aware of “the possibility that this could be the last time that we ever do this.”The end of Brave Spirits isn’t the story I wanted to end up with. And yet this small theater in Virginia, which persevered until it couldn’t any longer, is just one of many that won’t make it out of 2020. It’s a shame, not just the closure itself, but the fact that the circumstances that led to it were preventable: The government’s poor response to the pandemic, and our country’s general refusal to value and subsidize the arts as it should, guaranteed that some theaters wouldn’t survive.I thought back to that day in February, when after I interviewed the cast, they celebrated a colleague’s birthday with pizza and cake and a round of “Happy Birthday” in the theater’s lobby.I packed up as quickly as I could, not wanting to interrupt, but they had happily forgotten me. Their conversations and laughter filled the space, a separate world and a safe haven for a community of artists. However briefly, I felt that. But this is all I can offer: the image of kings on a stage, a church-turned-theater in Virginia, a post-show pizza party. With Brave Spirits now closed, it’s all I have, and I wish it were enough.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More