Updated: 8/16/15; 18:41:40


pedantic nuthatch
Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.

Monday, 19 January 2004

Much Ado about Nothing, by William Shakespeare, directed by Ralph Alan Cohen, and King Lear, by William Shakespeare, directed by Joe Banno, produced by Shenandoah Shakespeare, Staunton, Virginia

Shenandoah Shakespeare employs an audience-friendly "open air" performance style that you may have experienced at your local Renaissance festival. Moved indoors to the Blackfriars Playhouse, an impressive recreation of the theater of Shakespeare's London, the style calls for much interaction with and direct address of the audience. So, for example, when Beatrice explains,
He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man...
the actor (Kate Eastwood Norris) picks out people from the crowd to illustrate her point. Since the company performs without dedicated stage lighting (house and stage are lit evenly with cleverly-designed indirect electric light), victims (sorry, examples) are easy to find.

There is little stage machinery, save for a red curtain at the back wall of the stage, and a wonderfully rumbly thunder machine. The cast creates nearly all of the effects—an orchard, a sibilant storm—with their bodies and voices, while doubling and tripling roles. Eleven actors fill the roles of Much Ado, while thirteen suffice for Lear. Indeed, Ralph Alan Cohen dispenses with set pieces altogether for the comedy, while Joe Banno strategically uses a settee, armchair, two tables, and a set of stools to furnish the tragedy.

I tell a lie: Cohen gets a set piece on stage, by a clever trick. Another feature of the Blackfriars space is a row of stools for audience members on each side of the thrust stage. In Act III, when Beatrice, thinking that she is undetected by Margaret and Ursula, "like a lapwing runs/Close by the ground, to hear our conference," Norris "borrows" one of the stools and studies a program, hoping to disappear into the crowd. (The theater patrons, meanwhile, perhaps feel that they've dropped into a Gallagher concert.) As her friends move about, Beatrice/Norris schooches her seat to follow them, until ultimately she is prominently downstage center, still believing that she is invisible. It's a great comic moment.

The comedic intimacy with the audience also gets us through the crustier Shakespearean quibbles and wordplays that have lost their juices through the passing centuries. If you tell a joke and it doesn't go over, you can give the audience a take that says, "I know it's lame," and you can get a laugh that way.

Cohen's Much Ado takes place in frontier Texas, insofar as its costumes indicate, while Banno's Lear is a modern-dress corporate boardroom scandal, with letters conveyed by pager and servants summoned by cellphone. The songs in each play benefit from the locales. "Sigh no more, ladies" gets a nifty Tex-Mex setting, while Lear's Fool (Norris again, as a miniskirted personal assistant) has a high lonesome wail for one of her ditties.

One more thought about the costumes, designed by Jenny McNee for both shows: she's given the women opportunities for movement without sacrificing femininity, for example, putting Regan and Beatrice in long split skirts, and using trousers where appropriate. The women in Hero's wedding-dress scene are chastely clad in their corsets and bloomers.

Among the cast, John Paul Scheidler stands out for his work as the bitter, scheming Don John and the scheming, bitter bastard son of Gloucester, Edmund. He does less well as doddering Verges in Much Ado, but he has a terrific moment of triumph early in Lear, as his plans are a-hatching, when he does a side flop onto the conference room table.

At times the company's broad playing style is at odds with the material of the tragedy. Sunday afternoon's audience seemed to be on the side of Edmund, hoping for his plots to turn out well. Lear's scenes on the moor shade more to the comic than the pathetic, but perhaps that's not all bad.

Banno's production is certainly the more expansive for its use of the performance space, taking advantage of the gallery, trapdoor, and two entrances from the audience. And his final stage picture, of the dead Lear and his three daughters. together again on that boardroom settee, echoing a tableau from Act I, resonates with us once we've returned home.

This is Shakespeare accessible to the casual visitor, but with enough meat to feed the more experienced viewer.

posted: 10:49:41 PM  

From Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See, by Pat Holt:

Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally - these and others are words that promise emphasis, but too often they do the reverse. They suck the meaning out of every sentence.

(Thanks to things magazine.)

posted: 1:41:52 PM  




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