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Review: Folding Chair Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Stefanie C Peters — Thu, 26 May 2011 09:00:37 +0000

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play of changing roles. Theseus gives up being a warrior to be a groom, and turns Hippolyta from a prisoner into a bride. Lysander is the lover of Hermia, and then Helena, and then Hermia again. Titania falls from Queen of the Fairies to sport for her husband, and Bottom changes from a weaver to an ass and then to something of a poet.

Kirtland as Bottom.

So this is an appropriate play to choose for an experiment in which the actors themselves also change roles—an experiment taken on by Folding Chair Classical Theatre in New York City, directed by Marcus Geduld.

The marketing of this production uses the headline: “six actors have memorized all the roles. YOU choose which parts they’ll play.” The promise seems to be that the six actors—Erin Beirnard, Lisa Blankenship, Gowan Campbell, Justin Gallo, Andy Kirtland, and Chris Richards—have each memorized all 21 roles, and that the audience can direct the play they wish to see that night, choosing parts for actors in true improv style. But the promise turns out to be a bit disingenuous: each actor has memorized two “sets” of roles, or 5 or 6 roles each. And prior to the performance, Geduld handed out slips to audience members to read aloud, on which were written that night’s assignments.

So no audience participation was involved at all, which forces the question: why present the play this way? Folding Chair Classical Theatre describes itself on its website as a company that is “not about concept,” by which they mean they will never insert an idea on top of a play—like Romeo and Juliet in the Middle East—but instead will focus on story, language, and character. Concept productions, properly carried through, can illuminate new aspects of a play—think Ian McKellen’s film of Richard III set in an alternate universe where 1930s England is ruled by Fascists. If Folding Chair had embraced improv fully, and let the audience choose, say, should Blankenship play Helena, Hippolyta, and Snout, or should she play Bottom and Egeus, there might well have been interesting results. But as it is, no gender-bending is possible (which would certainly happen often if the audience did assign roles), and the Theseus and Egeus never have the chance to relive younger days by playing on alternate nights one of the young lovers, Demetrius or Lysander.

Yet this production actually labors under a second concept: the play is presented as a teenage slumber party, a concept that works better because it helps to illuminate Demetrius’s lines in IV.i, after Theseus declares the pairs of lovers can be married: “Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream.” Before the play begins, while the audience enters the theater, the six actors are already onstage, sitting in a circle on pillows and happily gossiping. All are dressed in pajamas, the men in plaid pants and the women in thin nightgowns (giving a new meaning to the line “Transparent Helena!”); all are barefoot. Once roles are distributed, the play begins with the added storybook line, “Once upon a time, in Athens…” The pairs of lovers race around the forest like Pepé Le Pew after his bewildered feline love, as if just to catch one another is enough. There is even a pillow fight. Puck makes a mess of who should love who just as teenagers often do in their first love affairs, but because Shakespeare is generous, everything sorts out.

Richards as Puck and
Campbell as Oberon.

What doesn’t jive with that concept is the treatment of the fairies. At first, though wearing crowns of flowers, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed are far from the sweet diminutive flower folk usually expected. In their first scene, their screaming makes these four relate more to Macbeth‘s witches, and as all fairies, including Puck, have in this production the magic power to freeze, pinch, and abuse others from afar, they might have learned their art from Ariel’s abuse of Caliban. Later in the play, however, the four fairy attendants turn into sock puppets. While entertaining, the change in tone doesn’t do the production any favors.

But any concept in a production is useless without solid acting holding it up. The night I attended, Blankenship played Helena and Hyppolita; Beirnard played Hermia and Titania; Kirtland played Bottom and Egeus; Campbell was both Theseus and Oberon; and Gallo was Demetrius while Richards was both Lysander and Puck (the one unfortunate doubling decision of the play, since in III.ii, both Lysander and Puck are on stage). It might be hard, when switching roles every performance, to really succeed in bringing a character to life, but Richards’ Puck and Kirtland’s Bottom stole the show, between them providing the magic that “bodies forth” director Geduld’s Dream into a very entertaining evening.

Folding Chair Classical Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs through June 4 at the Access Theater in New York City. Tickets available. Images courtesy of Marcus Geduld/Flickr.

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Mad Bios: Joan Puzell–Warrior and Witch

John Zinn — Wed, 18 May 2011 09:00:18 +0000

Joan Puzel. Image from F. V. Du Mond
and karenswhimsy.com.

Throughout Shakespeare’s history plays, little good is said of the French. This is especially true in Henry V and 1 Henry VI, where French leaders are portrayed primarily as incompetent braggarts. The one exception is not a French man, but a French woman: Joan Puzel, more popularly known as Joan of Arc.

When Joan first leads the French army to success in battle, she more than holds her own in one-on-one combat against Sir John Talbot, the English hero. Then, when fighting isn’t enough, Joan proves a skilled diplomat, wooing the Duke of Burgundy to the French side. Joan’s efforts pay off when Talbot is abandoned by his own countrymen; the French not only win the battle, but kill Talbot, a devastating defeat for the English.

There is, however, a sinister reason for Joan’s success—she is a witch! Shakespeare shows Joan alone on the stage, communicating with evil spirits. No matter why Shakespeare chose to portray Joan as a witch, her demonic nature is an important part of the play. Whatever else 1 Henry VI is about, it is a story of English defeat and failure. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare provides alternative explanations for the defeat, and especially for the failure of English leadership. Joan is offered as a possible explanation or even as an excuse – the French can only win through witchcraft.

By portraying Joan as a witch, Shakespeare offers a choice as to whether the English failure is due to their own mistakes or to French evil powers. The English have a strong temptation to accept the latter explanation, because it means the defeat is beyond their control. Yet for all her demonic skill, Joan only prevails when the English leaders abandon their hero Talbot, suggesting they themselves are to blame. The English learn nothing from the experience, and their infighting degenerates into civil war.

While no one today would blame personal failure on witchcraft, the temptation to use things outside our control (Joan’s witchcraft) as an explanation or excuse for failure (the English defeat) remains strong. However, choosing such an explanation robs us (like the English leaders in the play) of the opportunity to do better in the future by learning from our mistakes. Perhaps Joan Puzel’s greatest power shows, not during the conflict, but after, in tempting us to avoid the hard questions that inevitably follow failure.

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Poem: “If I Were a Woman”

Dr. Noel Sloboda — Wed, 11 May 2011 09:00:36 +0000

Mad Shakespeare is delighted to present an original poem inspired by Shakespeare, written by Dr. Noel Sloboda of Penn State York.

Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet.
Image source: Library of Congress

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Shakespeare and the invention of…the teenager? #HBWS

Colin Myer — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 09:00:29 +0000

The ‘teenager’ would seem to be a recent invention. Thanks to social and economic factors in the West (i.e. we’ve got more money and more time), our transition from boys to men/girls to women is no longer simply a matter of a half-day bar/batmitzvah event; rather it takes place over several years in the hinterland between childhood and adulthood. Representations of this gradual transition—teenagerhood—in television shows like My So-Called Life, Dawson’s Creek, and The OC, films like Easy A, Clueless, and Ten Things I Hate About You, and by comedians like Harry Enfield (see his inspired Kevin character) have all helped to form, as well as reflect, our awareness of this new developmental stage. But what’s this all got to do with Shakespeare?

Quite simply, he anticipated it, and did so in a way that I found and continue to find quite affecting (hence this post). Shakespeare’s teenager, like most of us, has both the time and money to explore the hinterland between childhood and manhood, and like us, is beset with worries about the prospect of becoming an adult. I am talking, of course, about Prince Hal, in Henry IV Part I, my favourite play. In his pivotal ‘teenage’ soliloquy, which follows hard on the heels of a scene in which he has acted in a very un-princely fashion with his low-life friends, he says:

Although some people have seen this speech as Machiavellian—with Hal plotting against Falstaff and his companions, I hear in it the voice of a teenager who knows he has been wasting time and needs to excuse his behaviour—whose only reason to believe he will be able to shoulder the burdens of adulthood is something within himself, something which is as much made up of hope as anything else, because his actions (drinking, sleeping around, etc.) have ‘never promised’ he will amount to much.

When I read this originally I recognised the thought, and the desire to ‘redeem’ the time I had spent socialising, lazing around, even studying—the time when arguably I hadn’t added much to the world, only taken from it. Centuries before the invention of the teenager Shakespeare reached out his hand to tell me that my anxieties were not uncommon and, more importantly, that growing up was something I could choose to do.

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A man for all ages #HBWS

Kohinoor Sahota — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:27:22 +0000

Shakespeare is a man for all ages. If you tried Ben Jonson’s rave review on your average school student they probably wouldn’t agree; instead, the very name William Shakespeare could be enough to make them look confused, yawn with boredom, or tremble with fear. If you sat them down in front of a play, however, they just might believe it.

In January 2010 I joined the eight to twelve-year-olds of Claremont School, Kingsbury, as the Royal Shakespeare Company performed a seventy-minute version of Hamlet. Black and Asians pupils made up most of the audience, and many were watching Shakespeare (and even theatre) for the first time. Children are the harshest critics, but this group offered their undivided attention and had absolutely nothing negative to say at the end.

I, a Hamlet virgin, joined them. I was reminded of when I’d make my way to the Oxford Playhouse as a young teenager, often surrounded by an older white middle-class crowd. I felt out of place. But once the action started, and the jester laughed, lovers kissed, siblings reunited, there was nothing differentiating me from everyone else.

So if someone were to ask: what does Shakespeare mean to you? Shakespeare breaks down barriers. Everyone, including the pupils of Claremont School and myself, can be transported into his world.

Years after being in the Oxford Playhouse, I went on to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was responsible for attracting new audiences to the theatre, and have continued to seek out weird and wonderful Shakespeare plays, seeing his work danced, rapped, and even tweeted. A man for all ages? Certainly.

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Writers talk about Shakespeare #HBWS

Mad Shakespeare — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 18:09:34 +0000

For our celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday today, we thought we would complement our own blogging about Shakespeare’s influence on us with some quotes from writers on how Shakespeare has influenced them. Read below for quotes from William Carlos Williams, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, Roger Ebert, and Harold Bloom.

William Carlos Williams

INTERVIEWER
But you say you are a “word man.”

WILLIAMS
Yes, that took place early in my development. I was early inducted into my father’s habit of reading—that made me a poet, not a painter. My mother was a painter. Her brother Carlos won the Grand Prix—the Gros Lot it was called—then he financed her to go to Paris, to study painting. Then the money ran out.

INTERVIEWER
And she met your father through Carlos, whom he knew in—

WILLIAMS
Puerto Plata. My father was a businessman, interested in South America. But he always loved books. He used to read poetry to me. Shakespeare. He had a group who used to come to our house, a Shakespeare club. They did dramatic readings. So I was always interested in Shakespeare… (Source.)

Ray Bradbury

I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry about the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout. And I came upon a section toward the end where Ahab stands at the rail and says: “It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.” I turned back to the start: “Call me Ishmael.” I was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare. I’d been in love with Shakespeare since I was fourteen. I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board. (Source.)

Jack Kerouac

INTERVIEWER
Allen once said that he learned how to read Shakespeare, that he never did understand Shakespeare until he heard you read Shakespeare to him.

KEROUAC
Because in a previous lifetime, that’s who I was.

INTERVIEWER
Is that spontaneous composition?

KEROUAC
Well, the first part was Shakespeare . . . and the second part was . . . (Source.)

Katherine Anne Porter

I was reading Shakespeare’s sonnets when I was thirteen years old, and I’m perfectly certain that they made the most profound impression upon me of anything I ever read. For a time I knew the whole sequence by heart; now I can only remember two or three of them. That was the turning point of my life, when I read the Shakespeare sonnets, and then all at one blow, all of Dante—in that great big book illustrated by Gustave Doré. (Source.)

Roger Ebert

I have always read for pleasure. I once thought I might be a professor of English, and made it through one year of PhD study at the University of Chicago before recognizing that film criticism had captured me full time. I was not congenitally a good student, but I was influenced by my teachers as role models. In graduate school at Illinois I had one of the great Shakespeare scholars, G. Blakemore Evans, general editor of the Riverside Shakespeare. I’d read Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school, and then not another word until I entered his classroom. It was clear Evans knew Shakespeare and loved him. Visiting his office, so filled with musty volumes, I was captured by the romance of his occupation, started reading Shakespeare with a passion and never stopped–always using my worn-out Riverside edition, although I have three or four others. (Source.)

Harold Bloom

Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind a Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, and then brooding out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare. (Source.)

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Shakespeare in “The Bathroom Book” #HBWS

Stefanie C Peters — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 16:21:31 +0000

When I was very young—in first or second grade perhaps—my aunt gave my parents a book called, if I remember correctly, The Bathroom Book. It was an anthology of short selections from literature, each of which was meant to be the right length to read while on the john. I thought this was hilarious and took to paging through the book and reading the pieces aloud.

I was quickly drawn to one selection in particular, a few lines from “the famous play of Romeo and Juliet.”

I read Romeo’s lines and made my sister read Juliet’s; then I would make her be Romeo, so that I could say, “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” This strange, poetic language seemed to me the epitome of love. I didn’t completely understand it—I wasn’t a child prodigy—but it made me feel buoyant, as if I were lovesick myself, as if I were sharing in Romeo and Juliet’s love, too.

Years later, I moved to England to earn an MA in Shakespeare studies, after which I got the idea for this blog. But now, reading these lines again, I feel exactly the same way I did when I was a girl.

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Reading Shakespeare in one year #HBWS

Tom Salyers — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 15:38:48 +0000

Shakespeare is almost directly responsible for the huge change in direction my life took about six years ago. I was a software developer, but I wasn’t satisfied doing it, and I’d turned to acting in community theatre to give my right brain something to do and have an activity I’d enjoy. I’d performed a couple of minor Shakespearean roles, but wasn’t much more than an occasional enthusiast until I decided (almost on a whim) on a self-improvement project: to read all the rest of Shakespeare’s plays before the end of the year.

By the time I finished (just in time, completing The Two Noble Kinsmen at ten PM on December 31st), I was hooked. I began giving serious thought to going back to school and devoting myself to full-time Shakespeare study, and did just that the very next year. I completed a BA in theatre in Colorado and eventually wound up moving to England to complete my MFA in Staging Shakespeare at the University of
Exeter. I’m currently working on a PhD thesis centered on Titus Andronicus, living in London, and loving it. Thanks to Shakespeare, I’m poorer (being a student doesn’t pay all that well) but much happier.

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An Age of Kings #HBWS

John Zinn — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 14:41:52 +0000

My introduction to Shakespeare came over 50 years ago when I was 14. Our high school English teacher gave us an assignment to watch “An Age of Kings,” the BBC’s multi-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s two tetralogies of history plays which was being shown on a local television station. I was the only one “dumb” enough to complete the assignment and although it took a while, by the third episode, I was hooked for life. I remember disliking Richard II, liking Hal/Henry V and being fascinated with the intrigues of the Henry VI plays.

Since then my interest in the history plays in particular and Shakespeare in general has never waned. A high point was a 2008 trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see all eight plays at the RSC. Besides life time enjoyment, no small thing in itself, that first Shakespearian experience touched my life in other important ways. I learned at an early age that reading great literature, while not always easy, is worth the effort. In addition, the history plays sparked an interest in my English heritage that has grown into an ongoing effort to research my English ancestors. I am deeply grateful to that long-ago English teacher for an assignment that has enriched my life beyond measure.

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The second man in my life #HBWS

Sandra Lawson — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:49:31 +0000

I often joke to my husband that he has to share me with William Shakespeare.

My first encounter with Will was neither auspicious nor epiphanic. We had to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school when we were eleven years old; frankly I found him rather boring. However, we met up for another date five years later, having been re-introduced by a Scotsman called Macbeth. At the age of sixteen I had acquired the maturity to understand what this man, born more than four hundred years before me, had to offer. He wooed me with his stories, words, turns of phrase, imagery, revelations of inner psychology, doubt and ambivalence. I have never forgotten the explanation that the usurping king’s words–‘this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnardine, / Making the green one red’–can be read more than one way. By the time I saw the play acted on stage (with Paul Scofield in the title role) I was well and truly in love.

Shakespeare has been a part of my life ever since then. I read him in private, savour the language, marvel at the huge range of characters and their exploits, enjoy the puns, and find myself amazed at his non judgemental abilities and how powers to coerce the reader and the playgoer. How can I love a villain like Richard III, when I know what a nasty piece of work he really is? How can I give credit to Henry V, when I am aware the dramatist is producing Tudor propaganda, whilst using the Chorus to countermand the plot? Can I really believe that non-identical twins, Viola and Sebastian, can truly be mistaken for each other? Do I truly accept that women like Mariana and Diana can take men like Angelo and Bertram to their beds, and that these men have no idea who is receiving their sexual favours? Like Coleridge I’ve learned to suspend my disbelief, especially when I see the plays performed, and find even more pleasure in the experience. My lover even surprises me when new productions of his works reveal things to me that I’ve never considered before.

Ours has not been a clandestine affair. My husband and friends and family are all aware of my double life. I came out to the world when I completed an MA in Shakespeare Studies at University College London. My friends need to remind me that there are plays by other playwrights and that I don’t need to restrict my theatre going to works written more than four hundred years ago by a man from a town in the West Midlands. My answer is simply ‘That in black ink my love may still shine bright.’

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