American Shakespeare Center Research Articles

"Against Interpretation": Actor-Driven Shakespeare and a Love for Scholarship

Abstract: This article argues that José Zayas's 2022 production of Romeo and Juliet at the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) used Carla Freccero's essay "Romeo and Juliet Love Death" as a touchstone, and that this decision was an enormous departure for the ASC, which has made avoiding productions with clear directorial intention central to its brand. The essay takes readers through the history of that avoidance by finding an animosity toward critical theory, especially that related to gender and sexuality, in the scholarship of J. L. Styan and John Russell Brown that inspired the ASC's founding. I find, to the contrary, that Zayas's queerly focused production articulates a new step for the ASC which opens new doors for collaboration between directors and scholars. This production marked not only a new moment of directorial intervention at the ASC but is also a call for scholarship that explicitly aims itself toward production.

Thrive Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA, and: Twelfth Night Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA (review)

Thrive Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA, and: Twelfth Night Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA (review)

As You Like It Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA (review)

As You Like It Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA (review)

“Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company:” the American Performance of Shakespeare and the White-Washing of Political Geography

The paper examines the spatial overlap between the disenfranchisement of African Americans and the performance of William Shakespeare’s plays in the United States. In America, William Shakespeare seems to function as a prelapsarian poet, one who wrote before the institutionalization of colonial slavery, and he is therefore a poet able to symbolically function as a ‘public good’ that trumps America’s past associations with slavery. Instead, the modern American performance of Shakespeare emphasizes an idealized strain of human nature: especially when Americans perform Shakespeare outdoors, we tend to imagine ourselves in a primeval woodland, a setting without a history. Therefore, his plays are often performed without controversy—and (bizarrely) on or near sites specifically tied to the enslavement or disenfranchisement of people with African ancestry. New York City’s popular outdoor Shakespeare theater, the Delacorte, is situated just south of the site of Seneca Village, an African American community displaced for the construction of Central Park; Alabama Shakespeare Festival takes place on a former plantation; the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia makes frequent use of a hotel dedicated to a Confederate general; the University of Texas’ Shakespeare at Winedale festival is performed in a barn built with supports carved by slave labor; the Oregon Shakespeare Festival takes place within a state unique for its founding laws dedicated to white supremacy. A historiographical examination of the Texas site reveals how the process of erasure can occur within a ‘progressive’ context, while a survey of Shakespearean performance sites in New York, Alabama, Virginia, and Oregon shows the strength of the unexpected connection between the performance of Shakespeare in America and the subjugation of Black persons, and it raises questions about the unique and utopian assumptions of Shakespearean performance in the United States.

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

Henry V

Reviewed by: Henry V Matthew M. Davis Henry V Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse, in Staunton, VA. 17 June–27 November 2021. Technical direction by Rhi Sanders. Fight choreography by Jeremy L. West. With Brandon Carter (Henry V), Zoe Speas (Chorus/Hostess/Williams), Chris Johnston (Pistol/Ely), John Harrell (Fluellen/Canterbury), Meg Rodgers (Dauphin/Katherine), Jeremy West (Exeter/Erpingham), Meme García (Nym/Alice), Abygail Merlino (Bardolph), Nic Sanchez (French King/Gower), J Molière (Scroop/Montjoy), Elleon Dobias (Boy/Burgundy), and Sam Saint Ours (Bates/Constable of France) After a break necessitated by the COVID-19 virus, the actors of the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) returned to the stage to present the 2021 “Actors’ Renaissance” season, featuring productions of Macbeth, All’s Well that Ends Well, and Henry V. The ASC has passed through a difficult time recently. The virus forced an extended closure, and artistic director Ethan McSweeny left, amidst controversy and complaints, in [End Page 167] February 2020. The ASC announced it would move forward under a new artistic/directorial model, with four veteran actors (Brandon Carter, John Harrell, Chris Johnston, and Zoe Speas) serving as actor-managers. The actor-manager scheme is new, but it grows out of the company’s staging practices during previous Actors’ Renaissance seasons. Subsequent to this season, Brandon Carter was confirmed as the theater’s new Artistic Director. During an Actors’ Renaissance season, ASC actors work without a director, as the actors in Shakespeare’s day did. The actors learn their parts from “sides” and rehearse the play scene-by-scene, working out blocking with the other actors in the scene. The company’s vision of the play is thus built up from scores of “local” decisions made by the individual actors, rather than handed down from above by a director who has an overarching vision of the play. This democratic approach has resulted in some marvelous bits of theater over the years, but it is also risky. A show with no director—or, if you prefer, a show with fifteen directors—may end up seeming a bit disjointed; it may seem to lack a cohesive vision. Also, if a particular actor falls in love with an unfortunate idea, there is no director on hand to put the kibosh on it. The actor’s darling idea will be retired only if other actors in the troupe are willing to question it and the actor who embraced it is willing to drop it. On the whole, however, the Actors’ Renaissance approach worked quite well for this production of Henry V. The show was lively, entertaining, and fast-paced. The actors managed to make even hard-to-understand bits, such as the exchanges between Pistol and Fluellen, not just understandable but entertaining. The spectators I spoke with after an August performance told me they enjoyed the show a great deal. As Henry V, Brandon Carter was impressive, compelling, and likeable. Carter highlighted the king’s exceptional rhetorical skills. When he spoke as king, he delivered his pentameter lines with force and confidence, making his hearers eager to return to the deadly breach. By contrast, when he put on Erpingham’s cloak and went undercover the night before the Battle of Agincourt in 4.1, he spoke more haltingly—fluttering and stuttering like Hugh Grant in a moment of peak embarrassment. Clearly the king was using his linguistic skills to pursue his ends, and yet he remained a very likeable king. Actually, likeable is not quite strong enough. Carter’s Henry V was positively charming. When he proposed to Katherine in 5.2, he dropped to his knees and pulled out a ring pop, which he unwrapped and offered to her. “Awwwwwwww!” said the female audience members near me. For a second, I thought I was watching The Bachelor. [End Page 168] Click for larger view View full resolution The Chorus (Zoe Speas) in Henry V, American Shakespeare Center, 2021. Photo by Lindsey Walters, courtesy of the American Shakespeare Center. Chris Johnston was entertaining as the swaggering braggart Pistol, and, now that I think about it, he was also entertaining as Parolles in this season’s production of All...

Rare Air: Long Day's Journey Into Night at American Stage

The 2019 production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, directed by Brendon Fox at American Stage in St. Petersburg, Florida, has been explicated and justifiably praised in the Eugene O'Neill Review. Fox gave readers an account of his directing process in a Practitioner's Colloquium from EOR 41.2 (2020), where he discussed, for example, the three key themes that had guided his interpretation: “the pain and cost of truth-telling, the power of the smallest personal choices of each family member, and the surprisingly deep amount of love and investment the Tyrones have for each other.” Fox's approach registered well with Jo Morello. In EOR 42.2 (2021), Morello described the production as a “lively, vigorous interpretation” that “served O'Neill beautifully.” She applauded James Keegan's alternatively imposing and tender Tyrone, highlighted Rose Hahn's heartfelt portrayal of Cathleen, and, above all, praised Janis Stevens's Mary, whose “unspokeneloquence […] resonate[d] beyond the text.”I traveled from West Texas to Florida in July of 2019 to see the production for two reasons. First, I was drafting my doctoral dissertation, which explored and expanded Shakespeare's influence on Eugene O'Neill's Tao House plays. Second, the actor playing Tyrone, James Keegan, is a close friend. James and I worked together for seven years as actors at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. During that time, we performed in more than forty productions together: I played Hal to his Falstaff, Ferdinand to his Prospero, and even, in one particularly memorable show, a witch to his Macbeth.Being familiar with James's artistic talents, I anticipated an excellent show. But I was taken aback by the joshing humor, familial love, and soft-spoken poetry of American Stage's superb production. Brendon used the intimate playing space at American Stage to uncover new layers of complexity within the well-known characters of O'Neill's most famous play, and Janis Stevens's final moments as Mary left me speechless.In the following conversation conducted via Zoom, I revisited the production with Brendon and the cast. Brendon, who described directing as the process of “bearing witness,” helped me understand how fulfilling directing O'Neill can be. He emphasized the importance of creating a credible “family” of actors to enact the Tyrone family, of staging Long Day's Journey “organically,” and of seeking out unspoken moments and discordant notes in this operatic play. James revealed how an actor can excavate their personal history to truthfully embody an iconic role, and Janis explained how simple—simple, not easy—the task of playing Mary Tyrone can be. As her castmate Billy Finn (Jamie Tyrone) remarked, it only “takes everything youhave.”Joshua Odess-Rubin (Edmund) rounded out a superb cast and participated in the discussion. As I hope you will discover, this was an equally entertaining and edifying discussion that shed new light on one of O'Neill's best-known plays.

Twelfth Night

Reviewed by: Twelfth Night Molly Beth Seremet Twelfth NightPresented by the American Shakespeare Center, Staunton, VA. 2020 SummerSafestart Season. 2507– 1810 2020. Directed by Dan Hasse. Costumes by Victoria Depew. With Mia Wurgaft (Viola/Sebastian), Zoe Speas (Viola/Sebastian), Brandon Carter (Orsino), Constance Swain (Olivia), Michael Manocchio (Malvolio), Chris Johnston (Feste), Jessika D. Williams (Antonio), John Harrell (Sir Toby Belch), Matthew Radford Davies (Fabian), Sarah Suzuki (Maria), Topher Embry (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Danielle A. Festa (Valentine/Officer), Cat M. Thomas (Curio/Officer), and Sam Saint Ours (Musician) As part of what it heralded as its "Safestart Season," the American Shakespeare Center took over several stages in Summer 2020, launching two repertory productions inside the Blackfriars Playhouse and on the lawn at the nearby Blackburn Inn. In the midst of the strangeness of a global pandemic and subsequent closing of (nearly all of) the playhouses, the ASC became a theatrical oasis, succeeding in doing theater on the frontline. It was fitting, then, that one of the company's dual offerings in these tempestuous times was Twelfth Night, a play that opens with a catastrophic event that distances a woman from her twin, stranding them each amidst new friends, estranging them from their routines, and alienating them from the comfort that their physical proximity breeds. In a socially distant 2020, this Safestart Twelfth Nightshowcased an Illyria that realized the togetherness the audience was already longing for, with some bittersweet perspective on why closeness does not always feel the way we expect it to. This production highlighted estrangement in its use of a coin toss at the start of each performance to determine who would play Viola in each performance. To embed this gimmick into the play's dramaturgy, the cast gathered onstage together during pre-show to perform Ingrid Michaelson's song, "The Chain." The two actors, Zoe Speas and Mia Wurgaft, flipped a coin between them in a show of sibling camaraderie. They were dressed identically in white trousers and jackets, each inhabiting a [End Page 131]vaguely Sebastian-like masculine energy, jostling each other and hitting shoulders more like identical twin brothers might do. On the night I attended the show at the playhouse, Wurgaft won the toss and left immediately to don her woman's weeds. Accordingly, Speas took on the role of Sebastian, creating a dynamic in which the actors playing the roles of the play's central twins knew each other's inward parts as intimately as the characters themselves. Sebastian began the play, remaining onstage as the song concluded to flip his coin one last time before making way for Orsino's entrance. The similarities of these actors in terms of appearance, physical type, and energy invited a question about just how much chancethis choice-making engendered, however. On the one hand, it offered a glimpse into a world in which Sebastian and Viola might realistically be mistaken for one another, similar grains of sand irritating the tender flesh of Orsino's Illyrian oyster. On the other, the physical and energetic differences between these Violas were so slight that the ripples dissipated shortly after either Viola washed to shore, both outdoors at the Blackburn when I saw Speas take up Viola's mantle and inside the Playhouse when Wurgaft took her turn. In Shakespeare's play, by contrast, Viola and Sebastian encounter different Illyrias when they land. As Cesario, Viola is never quite "man" enough to avoid attention, causing Olivia's obsession, Aguecheek's pique, and Feste's gloom. By contrast, Sebastian's masculinity rests on him comfortably and affords him the opportunity to take advantage of both Antonio's and Olivia's interest casually and without too much self-examination. In passing as Cesario, the male-presenting avatar of his beloved sister, Sebastian compounds his male interest, and it pays out dividends by the play's end. Hasse's Safestart production took relatively few risks in terms of challenging Illyria's binaries. Instead, this production realized a world in which Viola and Sebastian were always already mutually interchangeable. Given the diversity of the acting company, it might have been interesting to put this device of deterministic doubled casting to...

Othello

Reviewed by: Othello Noel Sloboda OthelloPresented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse and the Blackburn Inn, Staunton, VA. 3107– 1810 2020. Directed by Ethan McSweeny. Costume design by Victoria Depew. Fight direction by Benjamin Reed. With Jessika D. Williams (Othello), Mia Wurgaft (Desdemona), Brandon Carter (Cassio), John Harrell (Iago), Chris Johnston (Lodovico), Constance Swain (Emilia), Matthew Radford Davies (Brabantio), Michael Manocchio (Duke), Sarah Suzuki (Bianca), Topher Embrey (Montano), Zoe Speas (Roderigo), and others. This Othellowas built with flexibility in mind, a necessity for theater in 2020. Still, I was unprepared for the flexibility that I would need to complete this review. I watched the first half of the show at a new outdoor venue for the American Shakespeare Center: the lawn at the Blackburn Inn. To accommodate those who might be uncomfortable visiting an enclosed theater, the company completed half of Othello's run there. The remaining performances took place, on alternating nights, at the Blackfriars Playhouse, the company's traditional home. On the night I visited the Blackburn to watch Othello, the weather was pleasant, until a major storm rolled in during intermission, leading to flash floods that damaged homes and businesses throughout the Shenandoah Valley. The second half of the evening was rained out, and I was obliged to view the remainder of Othellomounted at the Blackfriars, via a live streaming service (Marquee TV). Lean practices that enabled the Staunton-based troupe to move from one location to another, from one day to the next, are a point of pride [End Page 135]for the ASC. The company claims in its program that due to its flexibility—along with its performers' willingness to rehearse in a bubble—it is currently "among the only not-for-profit arts organizations in North America capable of producing right now." Facilitating mobility, the set featured little in the way of furniture, and pallets were stacked against walls in both performance spaces. These gave the impression that everything might be quickly packed up, and the transient atmosphere suited a play about people who are obliged on short notice to travel far from home. In terms of design, sound effects were minimal, and though a few spotlights illuminated the stage at the Blackburn, the Blackfriars continued its longstanding custom of keeping the lights up. Nevertheless, McSweeny's interpretation of Othellodid rely upon a few key technical elements, with pointed choices about music, costumes, and props. Before the show, and again at intermission, the majority of the ensemble took to the stage to engage the audience with acoustic versions of contemporary songs. All of these touched at least passingly on themes from Othello, with titles including "Sinnerman" by Nina Simone, "Busted" by Dustbowl Revival, and "Good Intent" by Kimbra, which singer Sarah Suzuki dedicated to the hapless Michael Cassio. Some songs more pointedly addressed contemporary issues. Topher Embrey belted out "Glory" by Common and John Legend as a stated demonstration of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. At the end of each of the two sets, the last song served as a bridge from our world into that of the play, asserting an immediate connection between select singers and characters they played. The first act was preceded by Jessika D. Williams (Othello) and Mia Wurgaft (Desdemona) being left alone onstage to sing a duet of "I Will Follow You into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie, clasping hands and staring intently at one another. It was obvious they were transitioning into character as Wurgaft gave Williams a handkerchief, anticipating the fateful prop that would be used in orchestrating Desdemona's murder. In a similar moment of musical metacommentary, before the second act began, Iago—who had effectively taken over the drama before intermission by directing Othello to slay Desdemona—was left alone by the other musicians and singers. In manic tones, he strummed a ukulele and belted out "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. Hinting that the enigmatic motives of the villain might be tied to a stalker's obsession as much as to anything else, the moment hauntingly recalled the last line Iago had spoken in the production's first half: "I...

Each Is Me

Each Is Me Pamela Royston Macfie (bio) 1 For more than a year, as I pursue my daily life, two razor-sharp yet ghostly performances from the American Shakespeare Center’s 2019 season flare in my imagination. When I try to remember an early morning dream, I see, over and over again, the woman who foils a flame-faced predator with nothing but her wit. As I fix my morning tea, I see the girl who shivers at her teacher’s touch. The friend who cozens secrets she will not keep appears as I open my office door or hurry to a meeting. Each of these specters is a character in a play by Shakespeare or Amy E. Witting. Each is me. 2 These performances — of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Witting’s Anne Page Hates Fun — were the inaugural offerings [End Page 581] in the ASC’s “Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries” initiative, which proposes, over the next twenty years, to debut thirty-eight new (and previously unproduced) plays that engage Shakespeare’s thirty-eight in conversation. In 2018, the company invited playwrights to submit work that might respond to and interrogate The Merry Wives of Windsor. Witting won that year’s competition and its $25,000 prize, and the ASC brought her to Staunton, Virginia in January 2019, when her play was rehearsed in their Blackfriars Playhouse (the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre), and again in mid-February, when Anne Page, in repertory with Merry Wives, kicked off the company’s three-month Renaissance season. That February, I traveled to Staunton determined to see how Witting might turn a new lens on one of Shakespeare’s less frequently performed plays. I also wanted to gauge how a contemporary playwright would take advantage of the early modern theatre practices that define the Blackfriars and the ASC: universal lighting, double and triple casting (within a relatively small troupe of players), and the inclusion of audience members on the stage, where they become part of the action. My experience exceeded this focus. Together, the plays riveted me not to Shakespeare’s past but my own. 3 On February 14, I watched The Merry Wives of Windsor, the play Shakespeare is reputed to have written at the request of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see fat Sir John Falstaff (whom she had enjoyed in Henry IV, Part 1) caught in love’s throes. Merry Wives tracks Falstaff ‘s desperate attempts to seduce two married women in the town of Windsor. The next night, I attended Anne Page Hates [End Page 582] Fun, whose action unfolds in Windsor, New Hampshire. Though Witting includes a large-bellied wit-cracker among her townspeople, she does not ascribe to him anything resembling lecherous misconduct. She concentrates, instead, on the hidden life of a woman named Anne Page, who cannot trust any man because she has been molested by her high school English teacher. Initially, Shakespeare’s rough comedy seemed an odd foil to Witting’s bittersweet play, which is haunted by loss. I realized, however, in the middle of my second night in the playhouse, that both plays explore the power (and threat) of community where sexual aberration is concerned. Shakespeare’s wives, who determine they must publicly humiliate the seamy seducer who would corrupt their bodies and reputations, demonstrate what a community may gain in scourging a predatory male. Witting’s Anne Page, who determines she must hide her victimization from even her closest friends, makes us consider what a predator’s exposure may cost his victim. As I write the above paragraph, I consider Anne’s silence with the coolness of recollection’s tranquility. As I sat in the audience that night, I was anything but calm. 4 Witting borrows her heroine’s name from one of Merry Wives’s relatively minor characters. Shakespeare’s Anne is the daughter of one of the wives Falstaff endeavors to bed. Though she is modest in speech, she is the object of vociferous debate among three suitors, who compete for her hand in marriage, as well as between her parents, who favor different (and utterly inappropriate) foppish contenders. Witting...

The Fair Maid of the Exchange

Reviewed by: The Fair Maid of the Exchange James S. Lambert The Fair Maid of the ExchangePresented by the American Shakespeare Center at Blackfriars Playhouse, Staunton, Virginia, USA. 03 22- 04 3, 2017. Directed by Rene Thornton, Jr. Costume Liaison by Jenny McNee. Stage Management by Sarah Dale Lewis. With Ginna Hoben (Phyllis Flower), Benjamin Reed (Cripple), Grant Davis (Frank Goulding), David Anthony Lewis (Master Flower), Allison Glenzer (Mistress Flower), Lauren Ballard (Moll Berry), Josh Innerst (Humphrey Bowdler), and others. When the advertisement for a show claims that it has not been performed in over 400 years, one must go, I suppose. As part of its Renaissance season, the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) at Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, threw together a performance of 1607's The Fair Maid of the Exchange, probably written by Thomas Heywood. I say "threw together" out of sheer admiration for the actors involved in the ASC "Renaissance Season," which consists of putting on five plays over the season (running simultaneously) within the limitations of thirty hours' rehearsal for each play. The idea, of course, is to recreate as much as possible the rehearsal conditions of the early modern period. The result is an actor-driven season that sparkles with energy rather than polish, prefers spontaneity over plan, and emphasizes discovery over theme. The actors often forget their lines and cues (during the Renaissance season, they use only cue scripts anyway, which makes listening the primary technical skill here), but they often react with delight when they do so. All these variables perhaps make a light city comedy the fittest genre to perform. Besides, in the case of Fair Maid of the Exchange, the only performance [End Page 183]precedent is now 400 years old, so avoiding a director-driven theme and maximizing the play's elementary energy seems to be the only viable approach. The company used an as-yet unpublished edited text provided by Genevieve Love, who is working on an eagerly awaited new edition of the play for Routledge. The play opens with uneasy farce, as two bumbling bandits attempt to "pillage" two middle class women shopping at the Royal Exchange in London. "Cripple" (he is unnamed throughout) hears the commotion and saves the women's lives, using his crutches as weapons. Cripple's triumph is short lived when the bandits notice his physical disability and commit a second attempt at theft and rape, and this time Cripple is fooled, harangued, and then subsequently saved by Frank Goulding, one of three brothers lovesick for Phyllis Flower (who is, as it happens, one of the victims and the titular character). Between the threat of rape, the exploitation of disability, and the piratical farce of the bandits, the opening is off-putting on the page. The ASC dealt with this tonal discomfort by emphasizing the incompetence of the bandits and giving some agency to the "fair maids," Phyllis and Ursula, who verbally resisted the attempted theft and rape. As played here, Phyllis and Ursula, although physically overpowered, seemed amused by the whole ordeal. The light parodic touch of the scene also introduced Cripple into the action: the almost ironic cry of "Help! Help! He'll ravish me!" was met with Cripple's exclamation of "Methinks I hear the sound of ravishment." The parodic call and response established a comic affinity between Cripple and the women, whose physical disadvantages in the attack were read as indicating thematic and romantic compatibility. In this production, Benjamin Reed as Cripple and Ginna Hoben as Phyllis countered the physical attacks of the stronger bandits through improvised craft: Phyllis struck with her verbal invective and Cripple literally struck with his crutches. After the attacks at the end of the scene, both were left prostrate on the stage, amused at how their mutual experience of being physically overpowered had irrevocably bonded them; in a couplet, Phyllis laughed, "No more now; for God's sake, let us hence!" to which Cripple responded, "If I do live, your love I'll recompense." The affinity was established, and perhaps the most confusing element of the play—Phyllis's enduring love for Cripple—emerged from a moment in which both characters exploited a physical...

The Man of Mode by George Etherege

Reviewed by: The Man of Mode by George Etherege Brett D. Wilson The Man of Mode. By George Etherege. Directed by Christopher Marino. American Shakespeare Center, Blackfriars Playhouse. September 5–December 2, 2018. Long after its initial run, George Etherege’s The Man of Mode, Or, Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) became a flashpoint in the debate that unfolded in the early eighteenth century about the purposes, effects, and affects of the comedies of the previous generation. In the taste-making periodical The Spectator, Richard Steele—who was developing ideas of stage comedy’s potential for modeling goodwill, good nature, and other salutary influences—saw The Man of Mode as “a perfect contradiction to good manners, good sense, and common honesty; … there is nothing in it but what is built upon the ruin of virtue and innocence.” Excoriating its characters’ “corruption” and “degeneracy,” he opined that “nothing but being lost to a sense of innocence and virtue can make any one see this comedy without observing more frequent occasion to move sorrow and indignation than mirth and laughter” (Steele, 280). Steele’s acrimony toward the play and its protagonists received a delayed rebuttal from John Dennis’s A Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter (1722). As he observed, “I remember very well that upon the first acting this comedy, it was generally believed to be an agreeable representation of the persons of condition of both sexes, both in court and town” (Dennis, 18–19). The Man of Mode was for the aging Dennis a tableau of a receding moment in elite London life. The polemical portion of Dennis’s essay targeted Steele’s new play The Conscious Lovers (1722) as a betrayal of the purposes of comedy and harked back to Etherege’s play for a counter-example. Dennis rejected the proposition that comic protagonists must “set us patterns for imitation” to assert that The Man of Mode suffices to edify the audience rather differently: by manifesting foolish or even vicious behaviors to avoid, for “[t]hus comedy instructs and pleases most powerfully by the ridicule” (Dennis, 10; 21). He avowed Man of Mode’s educative value—convinced there was one—to stem from the ridiculousness of Sir Fopling’s adoption of foreign fashions and of Mrs. Loveit’s absurd confidence that she can secure a bounder like Dorimant. In his program notes to the American Shakespeare Center production of The Man of Mode at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, director Christopher Marino calls the play “not only unconcerned with seriousness and deeper issues, but . . . also solely exist[ing] to celebrate the artifice (both verbal and worn) of the age.” In distancing Etherege’s play from “deeper issues” and upholding its style over its substance, Marino’s statement evokes the Steele-Dennis squabble by negating the entire proposition that anyone is meant to be instructed by the doings of rakes, fops, town-ladies, heiresses, and courtesans. Judging by their evident delight, which I very much shared, the audience of the Blackfriars Playhouse found much to approve—contra Steele, although hopefully not a sign of the dissipation of our collective sense of virtue. The main plot of the play revolves around Dorimant, an incorrigible rake, who thrills to a newly arrived heiress, Harriet Woodvill, and discards both of his previous mistresses, Mistress Loveit (whom he loves to torment) and Bellinda, to get her. In classic Restoration fashion, the second plot involves earnest young lovers Young Bellair and Emilia, persecuted by meddlesome parents. The scene-stealer—who works his way into the play’s [End Page 143] subtitle despite not appearing until Act III—is Sir Fopling Flutter, recently returned from France fashion-obsessed and intent on becoming a celebrity. The action revolves around seduction, jealousy, wit, quick thinking to get out of one more scrape or into one more bed, and an upstart generation thwarting “the forms and civility of the last age.” The Blackfriars Theater space and its thrust stage generated effects of intimacy that Etherege’s audiences would not have been able to experience from its proscenium-framed performers—but so much the better. I had never thought about the implications of play-goers’ being visible from the stage under...

Richard II presented by the American Shakespeare Center at Blackfriars Playhouse

Richard II presented by the American Shakespeare Center at Blackfriars Playhouse

Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center by Paul Menzer

Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center by Paul Menzer

Practice-as-Research and Original Practices

Since the 1990s, two related but distinct movements have influenced the way in which scholars of early modern drama have used performance practice in their research. On the one hand, emerging from practice-based theater studies departments, is the discourse of practice-as-research; on the other, coming largely from the professional theater, is the Original Practices movement exemplified by work of the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe and the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. Though these movements had different origins, they now overlap to a considerable extent in the work of scholar-practitioners exploring the drama of the early modern period. This article traces the histories of these practices, unpicking their differences but also exploring the productive middle ground between the two. It addresses some of the commonly-held apprehensions (and misapprehensions) about PaR as a tool for theater history, makes some observations about best practice, and argues that what are sometimes held to be PaR's greatest liabilities—its indeterminacy, its open-endedness, its situatedness within the present, and its collaboration with non-academics—may in fact be its greatest assets.

Music, Movement, and Word at the American Shakespeare Center

Music, Movement, and Word at the American Shakespeare Center Pamela Royston Macfie (bio) While attending A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VI, Part I, and The Winter’s Tale this season at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, I found myself haunted by words that close another play. In the final act of The Merchant of Venice Lorenzo muses that “soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.” In the moonlit space of Portia’s gardens Lorenzo, reading the star-fretted sky as if it were a score, links the music produced by the turning spheres with that created by human voice and instrument. We cannot hear the singing orbs. We can, however, note their earthly equivalents, whose harmonies transform our very nature. Lorenzo crowns his celebration of the earth’s “concord of sweet sounds” with an imperative that is both immediate and mysterious: “Mark the music.” Music is a vital part of this company’s offerings, and this year “marking the music” enlivened all three productions. Through the magic of music this company engages their audience’s imagination even before a play begins. From the gallery above the stage the actors present songs before each performance and again at the interval. They play guitars and fiddles, drums and tambourines, saxophone and bass (to say nothing of tabor and pipe). They sing together and alone. Their sets establish mood and movement within the audience: some people dance in the aisles; some raise a familiar chorus; everyone claps to the beat. In course, when the plays call for a catch or a ballad, for satyr dance, funeral dirge, or fairy benediction, the company’s energies keep perfect time. Their energies also confirm the promise informing Lorenzo’s directive. To mark the music is to be open to revelation. At the American Shakespeare Center, in the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare’s death, to mark the music is to realize the importance of hearing Shakespeare. Early modern Londoners did not talk of going to see a play. Like Hamlet anticipating the performance of “The Mousetrap,” they said they were to “hear a play.” When A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Puck discovers Nick Bottom and his homespun cohort rehearsing “Pyramus and Thisbe” in the fairy forest, he thrills that he will be “an auditor” and, perhaps, “an actor too.” Noting these cues, the American Shakespeare Center emphasizes the primacy of what we hear in the theatre over what we see. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will introduce contemporary translations of certain plays during the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death. The ASC sustains a different conviction: Shakespeare’s language will move its audience. A beautiful reconstruction of Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse at the [End Page 354] Blackfriars, this company’s modern facility is lit by candelabra suspended from its oak ceiling and sconces fixed to its paneled walls. In this setting the ASC re-creates the intimacy of the space where Shakespeare’s company performed during the winter months. Bolstered by universal lighting rather than lighting projected onto the stage, that intimacy permits its actors to engage their audience, and the audience to become part of the play: Peter Quince requires a young woman perched on a gallant stool to consult an almanac (so he may know when the moon shines); Joan of Arc challenges those seated front and center to hiss her curses out of hearing; a shepherd conjuring a tempest directs those “gallants” seated on one side of the stage to toss like waves and those seated opposite to roar. Beginning with each performance’s musical prelude and running to its final speech, the American Shakespeare Center’s players connect with their audiences to release the insistent charge of Shakespeare’s words. Universal magic was released in Ralph Cohen’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Conjuring the fairy forest from the play’s loveliest language, Cohen countered recent interpretations of its green world as an anarchic wilderness. In 2013 Julie Taymor created at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience a dark wood she compared to the savage island in The Lord of the Flies. In 2015 Nick Bagnall interpreted the wood at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre as...

“The Joys and Accessibility of Shakespeare’s Theatre”: Notes on the American Shakespeare Center’s Summer/Fall 2015 Season

“The Joys and Accessibility of Shakespeare’s Theatre”: Notes on the American Shakespeare Center’s Summer/Fall 2015 Season

Edward II by The American Shakespeare Center (review)

Edward II by The American Shakespeare Center (review)

The Reconstructed Dramaturg

The Reconstructed Dramaturg William Casey Caldwell (bio) and Amy Kenny (bio) The public interface between scholarship and theatre practice at theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the American Shakespeare Center’s (ASC) Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, has been the subject of intense debate. Early on, Dennis Kennedy’s take on the Globe as a “touristic” site set the now standard move of comparison with (or distancing from) Disneyland,1 and theatre critic Michael Billington has had a longstanding enmity for the Globe’s putative search for authenticity and the way it seems to authorize “distractions.”2 W. B. Worthen has celebrated and critiqued the Globe’s peculiar form of performativity in relation to history.3 There is also, of course, the inter-institutional argument over the status of scholarship in relation to theatre practice enacted between these theatres themselves in Paul Menzer’s Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (2006) and Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper’s Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2008). These are just a few examples of the critical work generated by the contentious combination of historical research and entertainment these theatres mobilize. However, while the interface of these elements at the sites has generated much debate, the internal side of the relationship between scholarship and stagecraft embodied within these institutions in the practice of dramaturgy has been neglected. This neglect is due, in part, to dramaturgy’s still highly provisional status in both theatres, in addition to its placement “off stage” and away from direct public display and scrutiny. By presenting here a revisionary model of dramaturgy for these theatres, we are critiquing not only the current state of this practice nor simply the politics of institutional knowledge-generation; ultimately, we call for a dramaturgical space that needs to be instituted in these theatres for the first time—as a place of relay and counterpoise vitally different from, but in negotiation with, the other spaces and modes of creative process in these reconstructed early modern theatres. The other operative and established “departments” in these theatres need to extend or pass on financial and political authority within the institution to their dramaturgical teammates.4 Dramaturgy in general is, of course, an abstract practice to define, as it is still provisional in many countries, and in many different theatres within a single country. The dramaturg resides somewhere between academia and theatre and is expected to have intimate knowledge of both. As Mary Luckhurst points out in Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (2006), the United States and especially England have been the slowest to adopt the German/Eastern European model of in-house dramaturg. Significant strides have been made in theatre labor relations in these two countries, in particular toward incorporating the role of the dramaturg as a fusion of academic and theatre practices. However, as Luckhurst observes, “the academy and the theatre industry may mix more than ever before, but their suspicion of each other is still strong” (40). The dramaturg is expected to bridge the often-sizeable gap between the academic and theatre worlds, and is often considered untrustworthy or incapable of properly engaging with either side. We wish to change this paradigm of resistance toward the dramaturg by observing and analyzing our experiences working as dramaturgs on both sides of the Atlantic.5 The authors of this essay have worked within the fusion that dramaturgy enacts at the Globe and Blackfriars, trained academics who have also worked as dramaturgs in the current models that each theatre deploys. We are the first, and so far the only ones, to participate in a reciprocal work [End Page 11] exchange between the two institutions, where we worked as dramaturgs for each other’s theatre amid the still-intense phases of development in dramaturgy at both. Now that we have worked with each other in each building, performing the standard function of dramaturg as it is defined in these theatres, in what follows, we push forward the conversation about research in so far as it is embodied in dramaturgy at these reconstructed sites. The debate enacted between Inside Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Globe over scholars’ use of these buildings has settled some of the terminology...

The American Shakespeare Center’s “Actors’ Renaissance Season”: Appropriating Early Modern Performance Documents and Practices

Since 2005, the American Shakespeare Center's resident troupe has produced an "Actors' Renaissance Season" (or Ren Season) in which the actors, after a shortened rehearsal period, stage the plays without a director or design team. In addition, since 2006, and now for the majority of the Ren Season plays, the actors have experimented with memorizing their lines from individual parts, texts that provide the actors with their own lines and cues instead of the entire play. In personal interviews, Ren Season actors discuss the ASC troupe's process of cutting the text and creating actors' parts; rehearsing and performing with actors' parts, scene charts, and individual plots; and blocking the plays for performance. ASC actors' reliance upon and modification of original practices in rehearsals and performances have shaped an alternative rehearsal process that encourages ensemble members to be collaborative and independent as they fuse together early modern rehearsal systems with contemporary ones during the Ren Season.