Murray Ross

The critics weigh in

For several centuries critics have been debating the merits of our summer play, Love's Labor's Lost. "If we were to part with any of the author's comedies, it would should be this," begins William Hazlitt, one of Shakespeare's best 19th century interpreters. You might think that would introduce an essay of condemnation, but you would be mostly wrong:  Hazlitt goes on to affectionately praise the characters of Armado, Moth, Holofernes, Nathanial, and Berowne, as well as quoting several feliciious passages.  And while he claims that in this play Shakespeare's might genius has never been deployed on so slight a subject (as if "Titian had been employed to give grace to the curtls of a full bottomed periwig"), Hazlitt can't help but delight in the curls he dismisses.

George Bernard Shaw, who liked to compare his own great genius with his dramatic forebearer's, begins his essay in a similar negative vein:  "A performance of Love's Labor's Lost is a sort of entertainment to be valued for Shakespear's sake than for its own."  But Shaw too is beguiled by this "sunny, joyous and delightful play" he says, "Much of the verse is charming: even when it is rhymed doggrell it is full of that bewitching Shakespearean music which tempts the susceptible critic to sugar his ink and declare that Shakespear can do no wrong." His essay ends with the same doublemindedness:  "On the whole, I am not sure that Love's Labor's Lost is worth reviving at this time of day; but I am bound to add that if were announced to-morrow with an adequate cast, I should make a point of seeing it."

Our distinguished Prologue guest, Stephen Booth, one of the world's leading Shakespeare authorities, confessed a similar ambivilance in his podcast interview with Kevin Landis, which you can hear here:

http://www.theatreworkscs.org/resources/podcasts/StephenBooth.mp3

For a long time Professor Booth thought Love's Labor's was a play that was better to think about than see, but he has changed his mind.  You can hear more at his free Prologue talk in our Rock Ledge Ranch tent, Saturday, August 4, at 6:00 p.m.  The lecture is free for all.

Finally, that Pasha of Shakespeare critics, Harold Bloom, makes this remarkable confession:  "we all have particular favorities, in literature as in life, and I take more unmixed pleasure from Love's Laboru's Lost than from any Shakepearean play."  He goes on to say, "Alas, I have never seen a production of theis extravagent comedy that could begin to perform to is vocal magnificence, but I always live in hope that some director of genius will yet deliver it to us."

We cannot promise such a director, nor a company that would satisy this sultan of Shakespeare, but I have sent camels to tell him that here at Rock Ledge Ranch we have actors who can sing as well as be very silly (and silliness is purity, as a friend once explained).  And I have notified George Bernard Shaw in his empyreum that we have indeed an adequate cast, and that indeed he should make a point of seeing the production.  And so should you!

 

 

 

 

High Fashion in Navarre

Shakespeare rarely has anything specific to say about the locations of his plays, other than identifying them by name.  His geography is notoriously vague, and sometimes unreliable (Milan is a seaport in The Tempest).  Though he likes setting his action in European places that would have seemed exotic to most of his audience (Venice, Vienna, Verona, Sicily, Bohemia), in his theatre all these places would have looked nearly identical, since the stage of the Globe remained virtually unchanged from play to play.  Scenic specificity would have come largely from the costumes, which would often reflect contemporary fashon (nearly all Shakespeare plays were richly "modern dress" productions). 

Much has changed in 400 years, and because Shakespeare's scenic directions are both suggestive and vague, and because Shakespeare's universality seems to apply to virtually all cultures and ages, the variety of scenic invention in modern productions has been almost infinite.  One of the great things about working with Shakespeare is that he sets you free, and contemporary designers have embraced this freedom with gusto.

Shakespeare's Navarre, the home of Love's Labor's Lost is a typical opportunity.  Navarre was a Medieval kingdom near the Pyrenees, bordering Spain and France, in what is now Basque country. The play takes place entirely in this kingdom; actually it all happens in the park outside the King's home.This is all we know, and all we need to know.There are no references to Basques, to cheese, to goats, to mountains, or to names with x's in them.  Navarre floats like a fairy tale kingdom, untethered from google pinpointing.

In thinking about what Navarre might look, we began with the play itself--not its stage directions but its specific character.  Love's Labor's Lost is a wonderfully stylized comedy, light and playful, full of linguistic and choreographed patterns; it's an aristocratic world far more fanciful and artificial than any we actually live in. Kenneth Branagh's film version of the play subtracted most of the play and added a lot of Cole Porter, and the results were mixed--but his impulses are understandable, since style, elegance and silliness are what this play needs.

In London this spring I walked past the Prada store and saw this is the window:

And immediately I thought that looks like Navarre!  Or rather, this looks like what Navarre's visiting young ladies from France might wear, and the ladies always set the stage for fashion. Truly these are outfits for a Princess and her entourage. They are contemporary without belonging to any one decade. They are clothes for now, combining elements of the 20's and the 50's. They are light, and wittily patterned without being fussy.  They make you think of holiday and romance. And then there's the preposterous ostrich skin luggage.  

And the hats! European ladies of class and fun and distinction absolutely  must have hats, and very nice hats too.  Here's a cloche of Prada's, in the next window.

Lovely, no?  I was so taken with the Prada spring collection that I asked our board if we could spend our entire endowment and buy out the London store for our show--well, half the store.  After a not very long deliberation, this proposal was rejected. So I showed these pictures to our gifted costume designer, Ashley Gamba, and asked if she could create a comparable collection for our girls on shoestring budget, and since she works for THEATREWORKS, where there are no limits on aspirations, she said sure, no problem.  You will see her lovely work on our lovely lasses in two weeks.  And I asked a young milliner of our acquaintance, who has just returned from triumphs in Paris, if he might possibly make us adorable great hats---for free.  With perhaps just a few surrealistic touches, since our Navarre is also derived from the dream-like surrealism of Miro, Magritte and Dali. He said of course, no problem.  And so he has; the hats are winging their way to us from London as I write. Ladies and Gentlemen, here are the hats of Navarre, designed by the incomparable Harvy Santos.

The Princess of France:

Her very good friend, the snappy Rosaline, who has a stinging wit:

The lovely and very fetching Katherine:

And the fair flighty Maria:

Aren't they wonderful?  Take that, Prada!  You can see more of Harvy's fabulous work here:

www.harvash.com

And you can see more of the wonders of Navarre out at Rock Ledge Ranch beginning August 2. Navarre has never looked so good!

 

Moments to Remember

On the last night of The Lost Boys I sat next to a gentleman who had seen many of our shows in the distant past. He reminded me of a play we did about 30 years ago, The Nerd, and of how funny it was.  He said he and his son have never laughed so hard, and they still talk about the moment when the nerd (the hilarious Leonard Riley) emerged from the bathoom, trailing a long strip of toilet paper in his shoe.  I too can recall this moment vividly, always with a laugh, and it occurs to me that long after a show has been swept away there are still moments that remain in the heart and the mind's eye, even decades later. 

So thinking back over this last year at THEATREWORKS, what moments, what images abide from this year's season?  Here is my list, show by show.

Boeing Boeing: This was one of the most popular shows in our history, but thinking back no specific moment jumps into my mind--instead I recall lots of pleasant sensations, indeed a continuous wash of pleasant sensations without one surmounting another.  But when I close my eyes, what do I see?  All right, I confess: it's the girls. All three of them, Air Italia, Lufthanasa, and TWA.  They were sensational to look at, especially in the beautifully tailored air hostess outfits Jan Avramov put them in. No wonder that Lothario Bernard could not give any of them up. Who can blame him? No man, I say, no real man!

The Inspector General: There's a lot to remember from the stylish and energetic student production, but there is only one image that is firmly imprinted above all: the final tableau when the entire compnay froze into mannequins of astonishment after learning the real inspector has just arrived. Our production followed the famous direction of Meyerhold by sustaining this freeze for 90 seconds, a very long time in the theatre, almost as long as a sixties foreign film.  Long enough for the audience to wonder, laugh, squirm a little nervously, and feel almost as trapped as the characters themselves. Great stuff.

The Seagull:  This beautiful play is composed like a painting, full of resonant pictoral moments: Nina in the moonlight, as the earth spirit in Konstantin's play; three women on a bench on a hot summer's day; a dead seagull dropped at a girlfriend's feet.  But for me the image that stays most in the mind occurred in the last act, on the Russian estate, with the wind howling outside.  Nina has come in from the rain, and she hears the laughing voice of the lover who adandoned her in next door. And immediately she flies, she flies like a small bird, to the door, pressing herself against it to hear everything.  Jamie Ann Romero was so lovely, so delicate in her mouse gray travelling dress, and with her hands and face pressed against the door, saying nothing in the darkness with light gleaming under the door in the next room, she spoke volumes.  She was a seagull.  One of the most beautiful moments ever on our stage.

The Merchant of Venice: Another play studded with vivid verbal and visual imagery.  I'm tempted to say most memorable were the signs I posted full of biblical proscriptions against usury, since they were the source of some unusually vehement protest.  But inside the tent you can hardly forget Shylock, and especially the entire trial scene, wonderfully and forcefully acted by the whole company, led by Christopher Lowell and Jane Noseworthy.  It's one of Shakespeare's most lucid and thrilling set pieces; it makes the audience completely reverse their opinions about nearly everything. But the moment from this production I most treasure was the very last one.  The lovers are dancing to a hot Charleston in Belmont,and Launcelot Gobbo is spewing out money from a money blower all over the stage.  The tent is raining money, the joint is jumping, everyone is so happy excepting the lonely Antonio, alone on stage as someone nearly always is at the end of a Shakespeare comedy, and then Jessica sees on stage her father's yarmulke---she stops dancing, she picks it up, and looks at it.  Blackout.

Church.  There's a lot to remember about this play, but most of it was what happened afterwards--it was easily the most controversial show in our history.  And that's rather surprising when you consider it consisted mostly of four earnest if slightly odd ministers preaching the Word of God, and telling stories. And yet I venture to say that everyone who saw it will remember the final  image that the entire play was pointing towards: the arrival, one by one,  of a full gospel choir singing "Ain't Got Time to Die."  The music was powerful,and even more powerful than the music was the feeling of joy and faith written on the faces and hearts of the choir members. You just can't beat that.

Women of Will. Tina Packer is a force of nature, and when powered by Shakespeare she is titanic, as she demonstrated over and over in her one woman show dedicated to Shakespeare's women.  But the image that abides with me comes not from her potent performance, but from her workshop with our theatre students, and particularly one instance where she took in hand a young man who was rather timidly mouthing a few lines from Hamlet. In the space of five minutes she coaxed him, lead him, mauled him, and beat him--using his body like her putty to remold, like her drum to beat, and suddenly this mousy young actor was speaking Shakespeare from the center of a new being.  Astonishing.

The Lost Boys. Another show studded with images bursting from Roy Ballard's remarkable set, which in effect converted our entire stage into a vet's nursing home.  I won't soon forget the flying scene on scooters and trapezes, or Tinker Bell almost dying, or the parade of boys, pirates and redskins, or Hook swimming to his ship, or little Wendy and Peter shaking hands as they say goodbye in Neverland, or Pan flying on his wheelies, Peter standing heroically on the rock, or an old man staring into an aquarium, or the fight on the lagoon with trays and toilet plunger.  But my favorite, I confess, was the dance the lost boys did with Peter and Wendy on their last night on the island:  "Such a deliciously creepy dance it was, in which they pretended to be frightened of their own shadows."  Our wonderful old lost boys will never make it to the finals of  Dancing with the Stars, but that's just that show's loss. They put a spell on us with charm, gusto and semi-precision timing.  You had to love Melvin Grier shaking his booty (in rehearsal I asked him if could dance, and he said, "I'm black, of course I can dance!"--and he could).  You had to love Peter and Wendy's rock star entrance, he with his aviator glasses, and she flipping like a flying fish over his shoulders.  Speaking as a lost boys myself, I loved it, and was ready to jump up and join them.

 

So that's my list.  It was  kind of a tough year all round in many ways--but rich on our stage.  If you have other moments from 2011 you remember and want to share, please do!

 

Happy New Year to one and all!

 

 

 

 

Signs of the Times

People coming to our production of The Merchant of Venice at Rockledge ranch follow a lovely winding path from the parking lot to our tent. On they way they may see and read four small signs in blue letters on white boards. I had them made and I put them there. The signs were meant to be provocative, but I confess I had did not know they would be the hottest buttons pushed at Shakespeare's button pushing play, but so it has proved. At a very lively discussion with members of the Jewish community, the signs were a principal reason for a gentleman accusing me of being "morally reprehensible." This morning I have had two long phone calls from people asking me to remove them, and a message from from Rabbi Glazer telling me he has already received six very angry calls from congregants about my insensitivity.

What do these signs actually say? Each one is a Biblical injunction against moneylending. Here are the quotes:

"If you lend money to any of my people . . . you shall not be like a moneylender to him"--Exodus 22:25

"And Jesus entered the temple... and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers" Matthew 21:12

"Lends at interest and takes profit; shall he then live? He shall not live"--Ezekial 18:13"

"You shall not charge interest on loans"-- Deuteronomy 23:19

The signs are designed to introduce the audience to the world of this play, whose social and religious values are incarnated in the play's title character, Antonio, the Merchant of Venice. Antonio is not only a Christian, he is a Christian vehemently opposed to lending money at interest. You don't actually hear much of that these days, at new Life Church, First Pres, St,.Mary's or anywhere else. It seems to me that any reasonable person reading these words might be struck by how oddly they ring now. Should we really eliminate the people who charge interest, as Ezekial suggests? Are banks, credit unions, credit cards, and home mortgages evil because they charge for lending money? How many venture capitalists these days carry picket signs in front of the banks asking, rhetorically, "when did friendship take a breed of barren metal of his friend?" These are Antonio's words, the Warren Buffett of Venice, violently opposed to using money to make money. He is a character almost impossible to imagine today. In this respect Venice is not us. These Christians read and value a different Bible from the one we read now. The signs are there (as if placed by Antonio's congregation) to introduce the audience to a Biblical injunction we now largely ignore and dismiss, but which is actively present in Antonio, and which indeed is responsible for his radical anti-semitism (The Jew, as we all know, is the moneylender, and because of this--not his religious belief--Antonio finds him worthy of being kicked and spat upon).

But obviously, at least in some quarters, my design seems deeply flawed. The signs have been seen and taken as further expressions and even sanctioning of the virulent anti-semitic stereotyping still all too present today. That this involves a clear misreading (the antiquated injunctions are not simply Christian,they are Biblical--three are from the Old Testament) is perhaps irrelevant. The Merchant of Venice is rife with anti-semitic feeling, and the signs have been seen as adding insult to injury since the play already features a greedy money minded Jew, a real villain. The play is more than suspect. It understandably makes Jews very uncomfortable, and the signs have made it unbearable.

I will now risk further insult and injury by suggesting that Jews may not be this play's ideal audience. Certainly they were not when it opened at the Globe since there were no Jews, not even Sam Wanamaker, attending. The play was not written to be seen by Jews, any more than Huckleberry Finn was written to be read by black people. But this does not mean that the play promotes, foments or encourages anti-semitism. Quite the contrary. What the play does is represent a world of pervasive and casual anti-semitic expression and feeling. the word Jew ricochets through the play, its u sound echoing in "choose" and "use"--two other words sounded over and over Jews are devils, they are dogs, they are Jews. The habit of Jew mocking may easily extend itself to the audience, who may find themselves laughing along with the jokes, as many of us have at jokes made at the expense of people not of our race, gender or culture (lots of good--I mean funny-- jokes are exclusionary--made by "us" about "them"). Shakespeare begins with a stereotype familiar to his audience and he fufills their expectations of the part the stereotype was created to play. Shylock is indeed an incarnation of the greedy evil Jew. If Shakespeare stopped there, his play would indeed be morally reprehensible.

But he does not stop there. After fufilling our expectations he does what he always does, he goes beyond them. At the midpoint of the play, when everyone has become almost too comfortable with the play's anti-semitic feeling, Shylock is given the most moving and most indelible speech in protest of anti-semitic stereotyping ever spoken on the stage. The play stops. The air changes. His indictment extends beyond the play to the audience, to those of us who have been complicit with the pleasures of its cheerful dehumanizing generalities. It is a truly astonishing event, and the play doesn't stop there. Shylock's forced conversion in the trial scene again fulfills our hopes and expectations to a point that makes us uncomfortable---you want to see a villain defeated: watch this! It's what we were hoping for--but suddenly this is not what we wanted. Not at all. The villain we wanted to lose has become the victim of a brutalizing society, a society rather like our own. Jews don't need to know this. They already know it all too well. But the rest of us, well, we learn.

 

Hamlet Tonight!

Two weeks ago a few of us were lucky enough to see Rory Kinnear's Hamlet at the National Theatre in London, and then to have him come round to talk to us after breakfast the following morning. 

 
He turned out to be an awfully nice guy, and a very natural human sort of chap.  But even if you can't ask him a question or see him in person, you can still see his Hamlet up close and personal on the big sceen in our theatre Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights this week at 7:00.  I'm really looking forward to it.  The broadcasts have been excellent, and the National mounted an eastern block surveillence style spectacle on the Olivier stage that should transfer well to the big screen.  But best of all is the chance to see and hear Rory Kinnear, the latest in a remarkably good series of Hamlets to recently appear on the English stage (Simon Russell Beale, Ben Wishaw, David Tennant being other notable Danes).  Kinnear is the very best thing about this often self conscious new production--his Hamlet is sympathetic, intelligent, with at least as much hair as another prince recently in the English news.

In conversation, Kinnear said he grew up in unusual circumstances, as the child of two actors (his father Roy was a much beloved character actor and funny man). This meant he thought of acting as a job you could do, something you could make a regular living out of, like plumbing.  And so it has proved.  Kinnear has steadily plied his trade as a working actor on the British stage.  A few years ago he played Laertes, now he plays the Prince of Denmark.  His Angelo in Measure for Measure last year was much admired ---and he was selected by some critics as the British actor of the year. He's not a super stud.  He's not haunted looking.  He's not especially tall or handsome or impish or rugged or demonic. He looks very much like a nice looking English bloke who could be standing with a scarf and coat next to you waiting for the train to Charing Cross. His wife has just given birth to their first child.  He would be the first to tell you he's had a good life so far.

When someone asked him if he had accessed the grief he felt over his father's death in playing the role of Hamlet, he said no.  In the first place he was 11 years old when his dad died suddenly; in the second he said the the grief he felt for his father's death was not the same as Hamlet's grief.  Grief is not interchangeable.

He said approaching Hamlet he was concerned to represent a man who was not really cut out for the revenge business. He said he also wanted to be quite clear about Hamlet's madness---or rather to present a Hamlet that might play mad but that was not actually mad himself; he felt that "madness" was a generalized trap many Danes have fallen into. Seeing his performance in the Olivier, you can see he has been true to his intentions.  I have rarely seen a Hamlet who drew the line so clkearly between his sanity and his "antic disposition."  And his Hamlet remains sympathetic throughout-- he's even visibly shaken and saddened to have killed Polonious (this in spite of a text which is consistenly ironic and mocking: "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room").   His mother is a drunk, his stepfather is Putin, Laertes is a roaring boy, Ophelia is a cypher, his pals are twerpy spies, Polonious is a bureaucrat pol, and there is no one else in Elsinore with any claim on our affections.  We are alone with Hamlet, and yet with Rory Kinnear we are in a world of tragic but excellent company.

 

 

The Light Through Yonder Window

Two weeks ago, after lunch with my son Orion, I repaired to my London hotel with my magic iphone.  This message appeared in my mailbox:

"Hello, Murray,

I was walking through Regents Park on my way to work in Charing Cross listening to some Buddhist talks (it comforts me, ok?) when I thought of Orion.  What is he doing now, I wondered?  Who did he turn out to be?  I remember babysitting for him all those years ago. A quick google search revealed he is in London,and further following my train of thought I was quickly led to your blog and the Theatreworks newsletter, to discover that you were in the neighborhood just last month.

Madi Weland was a young woman when you knew her, and you plucked her from her high school to play a virginal Juliet in your production of Shakespeare's classic.  Her world changed when you opened that door.

I'm an executive for a publishing company now, a mother of and 11 year old daughter, celebrating fifteen years of marriage to a film maker, and living in North London .. .

When you find yourself in town again, won't you give me a ring?  It would be wonderful to share a meal, a pint, or a cuppa, and thank you for my life."

Even in the brave new world wide web, this is not the sort of email I get every day---or ever.  Madi was 17 years old when she appeared in Dwire auditorium to audition for our very first Shakespeare production.  She was bright, light, quick and radiant. She had just come over from Air Academy High School, but she seemed like a gift from heaven.  We cast her on the spot, and she was a truly enchanting Juliet.  I looked forward to going to the performance every night so I could fall in love with her again and watch everyone else in the audience do the same.  She was innocent but alert, tender but tensile, a Juliet with beauty and go power, and watching her at herbalcony after the dance no one bothered to think it was rather a short balcony (about four feet high in Dwire auditorium)--we only saw her face, her hand upon her cheek, a young moon in moonlight, her heart high and rising on a summer night.  Madi was magic.

Not long after she died for the last time in the Capulet tomb, Madi went off to collegein Boston,and I never saw her again. We heard a thing or two--she was on a short lived television series . . . she was working for a wealthy art collector in L. A. . . . otherwise nothing.

I wrote Madi back in the instant, saying she was off by a month and was she by chance available for dinner tonight at the National Portrait Gallery? She was, and she was waiting for us at the top of the gallery's escalator.  I told Orion, who joined us, there would be a mystery guest at dinner, and he saw her by the lift and recognized her immediately, almost before I did--- rather impressive considering he last saw when he was five years old.  Madi must have been a great babysitter too. We had a very good dinner.

I am fully conscious that if one lives long enough, the chances of improbable chance meeting are surprisingly likely.  There she is, your high school prom date 40 years ago, selling cobras in the Calcutta market!  Such things are too strange not to be true.  I learned this as a five year old child on the Queen Mary in the middle of the Atllanic when my dad suggested we write a note and put it in a bottle and throw it overboard.  We did, and two months later I got a letter from a fisherman in Ireland who found the bottle in his net.  Still, it is remarkable to find yourself having dinner with a lovely person who was special in your life but who you haven't seen or heard from in 35 years.  And of course we both looked exactly the same!  And Madi still knew all her lines!

Here she is as a 14 year old Capulet in Verona, 1975:

 

And here she is as Mrs. Solomon of London, Director of Content Standards for Pearson, with the same foolish gentleman who put her on that short  balcony 35 years ago.  O, She doth the teach the torches to burn bright!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Windsor, Colorado

This little town is showing signs of life. Here are a few of our local characters

Master Brooke in a towering rage:

The very fetching Mistress Page:

The adorable Mistress Ford on Sir John's knee:

The Deputy Sheriff

Pistol with candle

Doc Holliday

 
 The Menage a trois

 
 
 
 A few worthy citizens

 
 Three village idiots

Bemused ystanders

 

 Sir John Falstaff

 
 
  
Town frolics:

Final revelations:

 
And two merry wives

It takes a village

Here's a look at the first reading of THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, this summer's Shakespeare production.  Windsor, Colorado, is already a very merry place to be.

 

Of course there's always someone just a little concerned.  The director for instance. It's his job.

And Master Ford, more than a little worried his wife is having it off with an old fat knight.

But not to worry.  All will come happily right in the end.  We promise. It takes a whole village.

 

 
  

One Night Only---or Two

There's action tonight (Wednesday, 5 May) upstairs and downstairs at THEATREWORKS. Upstairs in the Bon Vivant, there's our first screening of THE HABIT OF ART, a broadcast of a live performance of Alan Bennett's new play direct from London's Royal National Theatre.  I saw the play in January, and it's a treat.  A bit of a mess of a play, but entertaining throughout, with marvellous performances.  It's a play about making art, and making theatre, and also about the poet W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten, two men with the habit of art, and also about their homosexuality, their growing older, and their imagined meeting together. The play on the big screen works surprisingly well--- you see and hear everything perfectly, even better than if you were actually there. The last few moments of the play, given over finally to the stage manager (the play is staged as a rehearsal of a play in progress), are moving and memorable.

Downstairs, on a smaller stage, there's some actual live theater.  LOVE! FIGHT! DIE! is an evening of Shakespeare scenes, some wild and crazy, peformed by our talented theater students in the Osborne Studio.  The show begins at 8:00---admission is free, and on a first come basis.  The kids are good--take it from a man who knows them--and Shakespeare can't be beat.

If you find yourself torn in agony about which show to see, we have a solution.  See the Shakespeare tonight,and THE HABIT OF ART next Wednesday, when there will be a second screening of the play in the Bon Vivant Theater.

Whatever your pleasure,this is another good night to spend with THEATREWORKS.

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare

It's Shakespeare's birthday, or so we like to say. He's 446 years old and doing just fine, very much in his prime. In news from his native land, he's still making headlines even as the election draws nigh.  Today, for instance, we learn that Simon Russell Beale will be playing King Lear at the National Theatre, hopefully in 2012.  We'll be there, though even Simon will have to go a ways to match Bob Pinney in out tent, the winds howling, the thunder cracking its cheeks on his 70th birthday.  I also see that over at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the actor playing Marc Antony has shot himself in the arm with a revolver during rehearsals, which some barolators will interpret as a sign from the gods that Shakespeare should never be played in modern dress.   We're not doing Shakespeare at this exact moment (though we'll be back in the tent this summer), but he'll make an appearance on our stage tonight even so.  In the third act of Arsenic and Old Lace, Officer O'Hara, a member of Brooklyn's finest, has spent the whole night telling the plot of the play he has been writing.  When the lieutenant shows up he looks at O'Hara and says sourly, "O, Shakespeare!"

Like O'Hara, Shakespeare wrote a lot. He seems to have been writing all the time, while also acting and being a partner in the Globe Theatre.  But curiously, and very unlike Officer O'Hara, he seems not to have always been enthusaistic about his principal day job. Over and over again he makes bold claims for himself as a poet, but never as a playwright.  Indeed, he even famously apologizes for being a man of the theatre in Sonnet #111 where he seems to regard his theatrical life as a kind of stigma:

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

The lines resonate with anyone who works in the theatre, a profession so regularly obsessive and consuming that it often seems to exlude any other "nature."  I won't begin to tell you the many times my marriage has been on the rocks the week before a show opens-- it's fair to say that at these timnes I am nowhere else but in the theater.  And that's not always a good thing, as Sheakespeare well knew.

In the previous sonnet (#110) Shakespeare seems to be dwelling on the same theme.  He confesses his life as a playwright/actor has led him astray.

Alas 'tis true, I have gone here and there

And made myself a motley to the view

Gored my own thoughts,sold cheap what is most dear,

Made old offences of affections new.

Most true it is I have looked on truth

Askance and strangely. . .

That's about as direct a condemnation of the life of the touring actor playwright as you can find-- adrift, narcissistic, clowning, devaluing the inner life, taking liberties with the truth.

But then, Shakespeare says something else about these blemishes on his character:

 . . .  But by all above,

These blenches gave my heart another youth

This too will speak to anyone who has loved and worked in the theater--it keeps you eternally young, it's good for the heart. And that perhaps is defense enough for Shakespeare, and for all of us.

Of course it's not just the theatre that gives us another youth, it's Shakespeare.  He's still at it showing no sign of age or decay.  "After many a summer dies the swan," sayeth Alfred Lord Tennyson, but he could not have meant the swan of Avon, who is still afloat, still paddling, still gracing our streams, and whose immortaliytt ha been anything but cruel. 

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare!  We'll see you again this summer at Rock Ledge Ranch. And tonight too, garrulously represented by Officer Patrick O'Hara.