American Shakespeare Center Research Articles

The American Shakespeare Center: “They do it with the Lights On”

The American Shakespeare Center: “They do it with the Lights On”

The Fair Maid of the West (review)

Reviewed by: The Fair Maid of the West Michael J. Hirrel The Fair Maid of the West Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse, Staunton Virginia. October 6-November 27, 2010. Directed by Jim Warren. Costumes by Erin West. Fights by Colleen Kelly. With Ginna Hoben (Bess Bridges), Patrick Midgley (Spencer), John Harrell (Goodlack), Allison Glenzer (Clem), James Keegan (Roughman), Benjamin Curns (Forset), Paul Jannise (Carrol), Daniel Kennedy (Mayor, Alcalde and sea captain), Sarah Fallon (Alderman and narrator), Chris Johnston (Joffer), and Jeremiah Davis (Sea Captain). Among Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, few were more popular than Thomas Heywood. He wrote, he tells us, or participated in the [End Page 418] writing of, more than 200 plays. His play about Elizabeth, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, was reprinted no fewer than eight times. Yet the reasons for Heywood's popularity then are seldom perceived today. His masterpiece of domestic melodrama, A Woman Killed With Kindness, is performed once in a while. Performances of his other surviving plays never rise to that level of frequency. With respect to Fair Maid of the West, at least, one has to wonder why not. That play, which breathlessly amalgamates unshakable love with precocious feminism and swashbuckling high-seas adventure, was given a rousing revival in the Autumn 2010 season by the acting company at the American Shakespeare Center. Heywood wrote his original Fair Maid of the West, or A Girl Worth Gold, sometime between 1597 and 1600. The play features the exploits of Bess Bridges. She is a tanner's daughter from Somersetshire who somehow keeps her virtue even as she serves as tavern mistress to the rowdy sailors who pass through England's southern sea ports. She is resolutely, but chastely, in love with Spencer. He is a gentleman who plans to join the expedition against the Spanish in the Azores, a transit point for their gold-laden fleets, not for "hope of gain or spoil" but "for honor, and the brave society of all these shining gallants." Before he goes, Spencer gives Bess charge of the Windmill, a tavern he owns in Foy (i.e. Fowey), Cornwall. There, Bess encounters the braggart and bully, Roughman, a patron of the tavern, and Clem, an oafish but subtly clever indentured employee. In the Azores, meantime, Spencer thinks he is dying, and asks his friend Goodlack to convey his estate to Bess if she has proven true. Goodlack tries to keep the estate for himself but relents in the face of Bess's indomitable virtue. She uses the inheritance to fit out a ship in which she, Goodlack, Clem, and the reformed Roughman set out to raid Spain's shipping for themselves. They end up in Fez, where the Moorish King Mullisheg is infatuated with beautiful Bess. Amazingly enough, Spencer, very much alive, has also landed in Fez. The besotted Mullisheg allows them to be married, and all ends happily. Several allusions suggest that Fair Maid enjoyed great popularity in the seventeenth century. Since then, performances by professional actors have been rare. The best known was relatively recent, the rollicking 1986 RSC Swan Theatre rendition by Trevor Nunn. Nunn cut the play substantially, and created the last third of his production by mixing elements from the play's ending with a larger number of elements from a sequel that Heywood wrote many years later. The stage was rigged out to resemble a ship; the action included fights in the aisles and swinging from the rafters. The whole was converted into a Lloyd Webber-style musical, [End Page 419] complete with score and songs. All of which was good fun, no doubt, but perhaps not the presentation Heywood envisioned. The ASC's production would have seemed far more familiar to our author. It offered his original play alone, almost uncut. It restored a measure of his own sobriety to the affair, but lacked none of his script's zest. A highlight of the play occurs when Bess dons men's clothes and arms to challenge Roughman in a field. Roughman has been swaggering in Bess's tavern, harassing her patrons and servers. When Bess challenges him, however, he abjectly submits, untrussing...

Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished Fratricide)

Reviewed by: Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished Fratricide) Michael J. Hirrel Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished Fratricide) Presented by Mary Baldwin College at the Blackfriars Playhouse, Staunton, Virginia. January 18–19, 2110. Directed by Christine Schmidle, with assistance from Paul Menzer, Jemma Levy, Cassie Ash, and Hilde Schmidle. Costumes by Theresa Coleman and Amanda Devlin. Fights by Colleen Kelly. With Thadd McQuade (Hamlet), Jack Morgan (King Erico), Linden Kueck (Queen Sigrie), Johnny Adkins (Corambus and Phantasmo), Casey Caldwell (2nd Sentry and 2nd Ruffian), Emily Gibson (Ophelia), Zach Brown (1st Sentry, Leonhardus and player king), Maxim Overton (Horatio), Paul Rycik (Francisco and 1st Ruffian), Brett Gann (Jens), and James Loehlin (Ghost). What if you gave a play in a language that almost no one in your prospective audience understood? Would they come? Would they stay? And, most importantly, would they pay? Those questions actually mattered to English actors who traveled to Germany and nearby parts of the Continent from roughly 1585 to 1630. In the first two decades, at least, they performed their plays in English, a language which few Germans knew. Seeking to understand this phenomenon, Christine Schmidle calculated that the actors could succeed if their performances emphasized action rather than words. No better play exists to test her hypothesis than that of the very verbal, and Melancholy, Dane. English actors took that [End Page 578] play, or rather a version of it, to Germany probably early in the 1600s. Their version was translated into German sometime before 1710 as Der Bestrafte Brudermord, The Punished Fratricide. Schmidle's idea was to present that version of the play in its own German. Would an American audience, few of whom knew German, come to the performance, respond to it, and enjoy it? Brudermord certainly seems to reflect an effort by its authors to remake Shakespeare's play along the lines envisioned by Schmidle. It calls to mind a performance by English players seen by Fynes Moryson on his visit to the Frankfurt trade fair in 1592. The performance consisted of "peeces and patches of English playes." To Moryson it was cause for "great wearysomenes." Yet, although the players were "speaking English, which they vnderstoode not," the Germans "flocked wonderfully to see theire gesture and Action." Brudermord is likewise patched together from Shakespeare's own play. It lacks virtually all that play's cerebral elements. Every soliloquy, for example, save a truncated "How all occasions," is gone. Instead, elements of physical comedy alien to the play we know are added. The ghost boxes a sentry on the ears. A delusional and love-stricken Ophelia pursues a court clown whom she believes to be Hamlet. Hamlet tricks two ruffians assigned to kill him into shooting one another. Schmidle produced and directed this mélange as a sequel to her M.Litt degree in the graduate Shakespeare and Renaissance drama performance studies program at Mary Baldwin College. She recruited an eclectic cast composed of other students, alumni, and instructors in the MBC program, plus an actor or two from the nearby American Shakespeare Center. The performers first needed to learn or reacquaint themselves with enough German to pronounce and make sense of their lines. And not just any German either: Brudermord's seventeenth-century language is almost as different from German today as Shakespeare's language is from ours. Acquisition of those language skills took up much of the four months in which the group rehearsed. The actors made that effort for just two public performances. The venue was the American Shakespeare Center's grand replica of the original Blackfriars Playhouse, and in ASC tradition the play hummed along with no sets, few props, and minimal costuming. The performance began with Brudermord's prologue, which features the figures of Night and her Furies. In text the prologue seems rather odd to readers familiar with contemporary English drama. Its figures and imagery are extravagant. Its speeches seem to describe a play other than the one that follows. A reader imagines that in performance the prologue [End Page 579] would best be omitted. Yet Schmidle's production made the prologue seem relevant. Night and her Furies were made up and costumed fantastically. They...

Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (review)

Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Harry Sudakoff Conference Center, Sarasota, Florida. February 3 and 4, 2009. Directed by Jim Warren. Costumes by Erin M. West. Fights by Colleen Kelly. With Luke Eddy (Hamlet), Daniel Kennedy (Ghost), Jonathan Reis (Claudius), Kelley McKinnon (Gertrude), Dennis Henry (Polonius), Josh Carpenter (Laertes), Brandi Rhome (Ophelia), Rick Blunt (Rosencrantz), Ginna Hoben (Guildenstern), and others. Skull? Check. Inky cloak? Check. It was a production of Hamlet alright. American Shakespeare Center began their performance by hawking their wares (both plays and trinkets on the merchandise table), an authentic Renaissance bit of pre-theatre and a perfect segue into their performance philosophy. cast announced that, as with all their shows, the lights would be left on and the actors would interact with the audience because these conditions better approximate the original conditions under which Hamlet was performed. All the actors donned Elizabethan dress, and the thrust stage stood sparse, with few props and scenery, much like the Globe. From the beginning, Jim Warrens production sought to make the play accessible to novice Hamlet viewers. Before Bernardo and Francisco took the stage, the cast put on a brief song-and-dance summary of Hamlet. To keep the running time at about two hours, with no intermission, they trimmed a number of the play's more difficult bits of banter and cut most of the Fortinbras plot. Among the parts retained, the comic sections were particularly emphasized. But Warren also appeased scholars of the play's intricate textual history. In his informal preamble to the performance, Guildenstern addressed the differences in sequence between the Quarto and Folio versions (including a detailed handout). To decide which version would be performed that night, he flipped a coin (a nice symmetrical touch, considering Rosencrantz's opening scene the following night): heads for Quarto, tails for Folio. Heads it was. Performing on the thrust, with the lights on and few props, a cast of eleven played the twenty-five-plus characters, with the supporting cast doubling many roles. Daniel Kennedy first appeared as the Ghost, and reemerged later as the Player King and the gravedigger, all strategic roles that trace Old Hamlet's absent presence in the play. Kennedy, who trained as a Clown, also brought humor to each part: the Ghost pestered Hamlet with his repetitious Swear! causing Hamlet to roll his eyes; the Player King was frustrated by Hamlet's didacticism; and the gravedigger verbally sparred with the young Prince. He also asked a nearby audience member to hold a skaill for him. Dennis Henry doubled as Polonius and Osric. His Polonius was the bumbling senex, and he delivered his rambling, longwinded lines in such a way as to keep the audience laughing through the first two acts; his Osric, too, was a slow-witted buffoon. Josh Carpenter oscillated between the serious and the comic, as he played both Laertes and a cross-dressing player in The Murder of Gonzago. His strong physical presence, as both protective brother and flamboyant player, added depth to his two supporting roles. Thankfully, Claudius (Jonathan Reis) and Gertrude (Kelly McKinnon) did not double parts; both appeared artificial and uncomfortable in their roles on stage--perhaps much like the figures that they played. …

Performing Race on the Original-Practices Stage: A Call to Action

This article reflects upon the presence of (and dilemmas caused by) race in the casting practices of major original practice Shakespeare companies: namely, Shakespeare's Globe in London, the Blackfriars Playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA, and Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA. Given the immense draw of these companies to audiences old and new, they inhabit, the essay suggests, a privileged position in being able to create true dialogues about race both inside and outside of the playhouses. An examination of the casting choices made in the ASC's 2007 season, however, leads the article to illustrate the precarious nature of 'colorblind casting,' which in the season in question unintentionally created patterns of meaning even in plays (such as The Winter's Tale ) where no statement about race was being made by the director or performers. In drawing attention to the ways in which race may be unintentionally brought to the forefront of a production as a result of the racial make-up of its cast, the study calls upon original-practices companies to recognize the casual (and sometimes overt) racism of Shakespeare's texts and to wish to do something about it. Ultimately, it seeks to enforce the idea that criticism, honest conversations, and active work with race in performance by these companies can help to overcome this casual and pervasive racism: both of Shakespeare's plays and of the world in which we live today.