Scratchings

Dave and I BARTed out to Concord Saturday night to see Pride and Prejudice, Part II, at the Butterfield 8 Theater Company. We didn’t wait to see Part I first because our schedules make it uncertain if we could then get to Part II still later in the run, but we figured we’d be able to figure it out. Not like I haven’t read the novel a half dozen times or so.

The adaptation is by Donald L. Hardy, who is an old friend of ours. Don’s goal with this adaptation has been to use Austen’s own words as much as possible, revising and rewriting as little as possible in the process of adapting for the stage. The play is in two parts.

I fooled around some years ago with the idea of adapting P&P for the stage, in my case as a musical — that has already tried once, as First Impressions, but it’s a terrible score that trivializes the characters and situations and doesn’t catch any of the flavor of the novel, and I had wondered whether it would be possible to do a better job of it. I even went as far as working out a rough outline of how such a work might be structured. It didn’t take long to figure out that I’d be faced with an impossible choice: either cut so many incidents and characters that those who love the novel would immediately bristle at the omissions, or race through the story so quickly that there’d be no time to develop characters, no time to linger over the most important situations and let them develop their proper emotional weight. (I suspect that that’s part of what’s wrong with First Impressions, though I’d still like to get hold of the book sometime and take a look.)

The issue of stage time is more critical for a musical than for a spoken play (and even more critical for an opera — as a rough rule of thumb, when you’re writing the words for a musical, you have to tell your story in half as many words as you would for a spoken play; when you’re writing the words for a fully sung opera, you have to tell your story in half as many words as you would for a musical), but even for a spoken play it’s still very important. A novel will generally have too much story to squeeze comfortably into a two-and-a-half-hour spoken play (let alone a musical or opera); a novella will more often have about the right amount.

It isn’t the way I would have done it myself, but given that it was Don’s desire to use Austen’s own words as much as possible, his decision to write the play in two parts was a good one. I can only judge from Part II so far, but it worked for me. The pace of the story is more leisurely than is usual for a play, but after ten minutes or so I got accustomed to it and enjoyed it. The performance really does capture the feel of the novel, and it reminded me in a very good way of a “literary cabaret” I used to go to regularly when I lived in Los Angeles, in which the performances consisted of nothing more than actors sitting and reading, but reading really, really well. This production is staged, but in a small and informal setting (the audience sits along three sides of the playing area, at tables set for tea — indeed, you can buy a pot of tea and sip it during the show if you like), and the overall effect is charming and engaging, like sitting in a living room and being told a story by a group of really good storytellers.

As I said, it isn’t the way I would have done it myself, and there were places I felt there wouldn’t have been anything wrong at all if Don had rewritten Austen’s words to make things less literary and more theatrical. But it’s a charmer and a lot of fun, and the acting is good — several of the actors I thought were very good indeed. We’re definitely looking forward to Part I this week.

On Saturday, Dave and I saw the opening night of The Verona Project at California Shakespeare Theater. I liked it a lot more than I was expecting to, neither rock musicals nor Two Gentlemen of Verona generally being high on my list of ways I’m eager to spend an evening. But I thought the show was endearing, the music was both enjoyable and interesting, and the performers were terrific.

Amanda Dehnert has made a lot of ingenious and fanciful changes to Two Gentlemen and shaped it into an engaging story about a bunch of likeable but flawed people looking for love and discovering that they need to learn and fix some things about their own characters before love has any chance to get through to them. Intriguing elements of fantasy and magic realism are scattered through the story, though the alternate society in which the characters live and travel isn’t really developed much and its peculiarities rarely influence the way the story develops. A highlight is a lovely, rambling song that Julia sings at the start of the second act, “Julia Says”, telling how she came to grow a fantastical garden inside her house, where few could see it, and then only through the windows.

One rather cool twist is that Ms. Dehnert has flip-flopped the sexes of one of the couples in Shakespeare, turning male Thurio and female Sylvia into female Thuria and male Silvio, without changing their roles in the story. Proteus becomes bisexual, then, and what’s more, nobody in the story finds it particularly startling or shocking that his desire wavers back and forth between a woman (Julia) and a man (Sylvio). Sexual orientation is fluid in this world, and it adds a few new layers to the complications. Ms. Dehnert and actor Dan Clegg make Proteus’s impulsive and shifting passions believable and even somehow naive and guileless rather than hurtful and creepy (which is how they tend to come across in the Shakespeare).

In spite of all the fun, and all good changes made that ought to give the show some emotional weight, I came away feeling that the show felt lightweight, completely charming and enjoyable but only intermittently emotionally engaging. This in spite of the fact that I found the story interesting and the characters, despite their various flaws, understandable and likeable.

I think there are two main reasons. One is that Ms. Dehnert makes a lot of use of the device of having a character turn to the audience and describe what’s happening to himself or herself in the story. This is a charming device at first, and at times even saves some stage time, as when a character turns to the audience and simply explains some unusual trait of the strange society in which the story takes place. But when it takes the form of, say, the actor playing Julia turning to the audience and saying “Julia felt such and such about what Proteus just said”, instead of finding a way for Julia to convey to us what she’s feeling while staying in character, I think it tends to keep the audience at arm’s length emotionally.

In spite of the best efforts of my theater history and playwriting professors in college, who tried so hard to pass along to me their boundless admiration of Brecht’s theories of epic theater and the “alienation effect”, I’ve just never thought that constantly calling the audience’s attention to the artificiality of theatrical conventions was a good idea. Here and there, sure. Breaking the spell now and then can be playful, it can be ironic, it can be dramatic, it can even be chilling, as when Sweeney Todd suddenly addresses the audience directly in his “Epiphany”.

But when this is done very frequently, I think it ends up sacrificing one of the biggest advantages theater has over other forms of art, its power to convey emotion with a directness and immediacy that no other form has. And, despite Brecht’s fondness for keeping the audience at an emotional distance from the play, I don’t think it gains you enough for what you’ve given up. This business of actors talking directly to the audience about their characters in the third person is used a lot in The Verona Project, and I think it gets in the way of giving the play the feeling of emotional weight and depth that the play really ought to have and deserves to have, given all the good stuff in it.

(If I’m remembering correctly, there was an adaptation of Emma at the Aurora Theater a few years ago made extensive use of the same device, and I had a similar cool reaction. And Emma is one of my all-time favorite novels.)

The same sense of emotional distance is true of the songs, which seem to me to be terrific songs, musically interesting and inventive and intriguing. Yet, with only a couple of exceptions, they are generally not sung by a character who is actually singing them in character, within the story. Most of the time, the song is written from a point of view outside the story and is used to comment on that character or explain something about him or her. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as any particular song goes, and they’re all enjoyable songs, but when so many of them are like that, it gets in the way of the audience making a strong emotional connection with the story and characters. Or at least it does for me.

Which seemed like a shame to me, because, as I said, I enjoyed the show a lot. It was totally endearing and it held my interest every step of the way; it just never touched me as deeply as I wanted it to, and as I felt it had the potential to. I hope Ms. Dehnert isn’t finished with it quite yet.

The cast is terrific and charming and energetic, and I was completely in love with all of them — psychological flaws and all — by the end of the evening, especially Dan Clegg as Proteus, Nate Trinrud as his childhood friend Valentine, and Arwen Anderson as Proteus’s girlfriend Julia.

I’ve fallen behind in blogging again and am just now catching up with a few things. Dave and I went to see Titus Andronicus at the California Shakespeare Festival a few weeks ago. I’d seen Titus twice before and wasn’t feeling any desire to see it again, but the play had a kickass cast, headed by James Carpenter as Titus and Stacy Ross as Tamara, and that was enough to get me wanting to see it.

The play was given an effective and creepy production. The director, thankfully, did not go all dour with the play, as some do with revenge plays of the period, and the horror alternated with scenes played for dark comedy — the dinner scene near the end of the play was a standout, with Tamara at first suspicious of the food and with trepidation taking the tiniest nibble at it, then finding it delicious and wolfing it down with gusto.

All in all it was an enjoyable roller coaster ride of a production, but it didn’t change for me the fact that the play is still Titus Andronicus and pretty shallow stuff, even for a revenge play. ‘Tis pity it’s by Shakespeare and thus gets dusted off more often than it needs to be, given its very limited merits, while there are so many other plays of the genre, most of them no worse and some of them quite a bit better, that I’ll probably never get to see staged even once.

Dave and I saw Anna Deveare Smith’s new one-woman show Let Me Down Easy at Berkeley Rep last night, and it’s terrific, both the writing and the performance. The show is a series of vignettes in which Ms. Smith portrays a number of people talking mostly about their experiences with hospitals, illness, and death; the words are taken from actual interviews Ms. Smith made with them. Several of them are well known — Lance Armstrong and the late Ann Richards, for example, both talking about how their lives had been changed and shaped by battles with cancer — and others are not — a doctor at a hospital in New Orleans talking about the days after Katrina, for example, trying to give her patients the best possible care while waiting for help that never came. Both the words in the vignettes and Ms. Smith’s portrayals are wonderfully vivid and lively, taking delight in the variety of strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies her characters display.

Terry and Mauricio and Dave and I went to Circus Oz at Zellerbach Hall last night, as Dave’s birthday present to Terry. The show is a delight, sassy and crazy and a lot of fun. The performances are more improvisatory than polished, but that’s the point. It’s a small troupe, just eight or nine acrobats, plus a small but terrific live band and a sensational ringmaster/singer, Sarah Ward. Nobody shows off the kind of polished skill you find in, say, a Chinese circus, where an acrobat may devote his or her lives to perfecting one kind of act; here, everybody does several acts, all of them well but none of them the best you’ve ever seen. But it’s still one of the best times I remember having at a circus — it reminded me at times of the spirit of the old Pickle Family Circus.

Dave and I saw Much Ado About Nothing at CalShakes on Friday evening. I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about going, frankly — not only have I seen Much Ado in more productions than any other Shakespeare play, but I’ve written not one but two librettos based on it, one of them for a musical comedy called All’s Fair and the other one an entirely new libretto (not just a translation of the existing libretto) for Berlioz’s opera Béatrice et Bénédict. So, as much as I love the play, I know it too well for my own good. Money is very tight for us and we’ve had to limit our playgoing drastically (which depresses me more deeply than I can convey), so I don’t know whether we’d have gone when there are so many other things we also want to see right now. However, we have a friend at CalShakes who got us a pair of comps to the Friday night preview (thank you!), and, well, if I’d known it was this good, there wouldn’t have been any doubt in my mind about it. This is a one-for-the-life-list Much Ado, probably the best production I’ve ever seen. (Not counting the productions of my own adaptations, of course. I reserve the right to be unreasonably prejudiced about those.)

The performances are fantastic all the way down to the small roles. Andy Murray may be the best Benedick I’ve ever seen, and as I’ve seen Kevin Kline in the role I wouldn’t have thought that I’d ever be saying that of anyone else in this lifetime. Domenique Lozano is wonderful as Beatrice. The two are enormously funny, with lots of the proper commedia dell’arte spirit in their performances, yet always human and often very moving.

Dan Hiatt doubles the parts of Leonato and George Seacole (a member of Dogberry’s watch). He’s terrific in both, and I’ve never seen him look so damn hot as he does in his pirate-y getup for the latter role. Woof! I’ve always found Mr. Hiatt endearingly attractive, but after this production it may have flowered into a full-blown crush. Danny Scheie doubles the parts of Don John and Dogberry, which is a terrific idea that I’d never seen done before; I’m usually not a big fan of Mr. Scheie’s, who is usually too campy a clown for my taste, but I thought he was spot on as Dogberry, hilariously silly and foolish without taking it over the top into camp. On the other hand, he did sometimes take Don John there, which seemed unnecessary to me considering that he was already getting big laughs on his first appearances doing nothing but glowering, before he’d even had anything much to say or do.

The only other thing I remember thinking was less good than it could have been was Claudio’s scene at Hero’s “tomb”. All his youthful arrogance and rashness is understandable enough to me, but in order to feel forgiveness toward him by the time we get to the happy ending, I want to believe that he has learned a painful truth about himself (and about the true nature of humanity), something that is going to change him for the better, and forever. I yearn to feel at the end of the play that the Claudio who ends the play is not the Claudio who began it, that all his flattering illusions about himself have been shattered, that the searing heat of self-examination without the protective masking of illusion has melted his soul and flesh and reforged it into something that is stronger now for having gone through the fire. Okay, okay, this may well be an unreasonable expectation, and based as much on the choices I myself made about Claudio’s emotional through-line in my own two adaptations as it is on hard evidence from the play itself as to what Claudio is going through; but for better or for worse, that’s how I feel about Claudio. Nick Childress as Claudio (who is otherwise very good indeed) felt to me like he never got to that level, that his grief was sincere, but not searing enough to be reshaping his very soul and redeeming him. And without believing that, I end up feeling a bit wry rather than teary-eyed about his reunion with Hero.

No such feeling about Benedick and Beatrice, though — those two had clearly been on a journey of the soul that had reshaped them for all time.

Even the smaller roles are strikingly performed — Catherine Castellanos has a remarkable doubling as Ursula and Verges, and Thomas Gorrebeeck makes a dangerously handsome Borachio. Emily Kitchens makes Hero a much fuller and more believable character than Shakespeare deserves, having given her so few lines. Delia Macdougall as Margaret and Nicholas Palczar as Don Pedro likewise flesh out their relatively small roles in memorable ways. Andrew Hurteau is a hoot as Friar Francis. (Though even he couldn’t avoid getting a laugh from the audience with the very awkward line in which he tells Leonato that if Hero is really guilty after all, she can be sent to live in a convent. It’s a bad laugh there, the kind where the audience is laughing uncomfortably, not at the characters and the situation, but at the heartlessness of the Elizabethan attitude toward women. The only way I’ve ever found not to get a laugh there is to say that line in anger to Leonato, as if to say, “Even though it completely disgusts me, if I have to add this appalling condition to the bargain I’m making with you, in order to get you to accept it, then I will; but I think you are being loathsome in requiring it before you’re swayed”. If you say the line as it appears on its surface, as though it were one more logical argument in favor of the scheme the friar is proposing, it comes off as horribly lame and heartless.)

And the attention to detail in all the acting and staging — wow. Director Jonathan Moscone has done an astonishing job. I wasn’t expecting to find so much fresh delight and pleasure in a play I’m so overly familiar with.

Okay, geek time now: It annoyed me, as it always does, to hear Borachio pronounce covertly as co-VERT-ly. I’m just old enough to remember how this pronunciation became common among television newscasters reporting on espionage during the Vietnam War, and I find it disconcerting to hear a Shakespearean character pronounce it in a way that became commonplace only within my own living memory. It should have the stress on the first syllable, CUH-vert-ly, as though you were saying coveredly, in a covered manner, which is what the word means.

I know there’s nothing to be done about it. Few hear it as I do, and I’m sure that we get fewer every year. Both Borachios in the two productions I’ve had of my Berlioz adaptation were very agreeable about it, but it was clear neither of them heard the same connotations in the pronunciation that I do, and were probably thinking Well, you know how writers are, I suppose I’d better just humor him on the small stuff like this. So I have no expectations that things will or should be different on this point just to suit me. But this is my blog so I get to say it bugs me.

Dave and I saw Macbeth at CalShakes again last night. Wow. The show has gotten much sharper and clearer all around since we saw it at the last of the previews. Everything ties together better, the characters’ throughlines are all more sharply defined. The significantly trimmed script doesn’t feel quite as rushed as it did (though it still moves awfully fast) and we do have time now to see the MacB’s make the journey from awe at their good fortune to the sense that the good fortune is no less than their due, to resentment that their share of good fortune is still not large enough and willingness to murder allies and friends if it might get them a larger portion. We seemed to speed toward the murders too fast before to know who the MacB’s were before ambition took control of their souls; this time we got to see it.

The acting all around is more polished and secure, except maybe for James Carpenter who was already there in the preview; now the rest of cast is up to that level all the way through the play. Particularly powerful performances by Jud Williford as MacB, Stacy Ross as Lady MacB, and Craig Marker as MacDuff.

Dave and I saw Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession Thursday night at CalShakes. The production is really good. Stacy Ross is terrific as Mrs. Warren, Anna Bullard holds her own very well as her daughter Vivie. Dan Hiatt is very endearing as Praed. The whole ensemble is delightful — the direction, the pointedly ironic set (literally, too), the supporting roles, the colorful costumes.

It’s still Mrs. Warren’s Profession, though. It was Shaw’s second play and it has always seemed to me with this play that he hadn’t yet figured out how to make his lecture-hall points and tell a good story at the same time. There are too many times where the lectures cause the story to stop in its tracks for too long. Mrs. Warren seems to me to be a well-drawn character, but the same isn’t true of Vivie, who often seems to me to be who she is, and to do what she does, not so much because she’s a woman in a story as because she’s a symbol in the equation Shaw wanted to construct to describe the world as he saw it.

Still, this production made the play work better for me than it’s worked before, and I think it’s mostly because of the approach taken toward Vivie. A reviewer of this production harshly criticized the way Vivie is presented in this production, saying that it wasn’t worthy of Shaw’s character,

… the brave young woman who makes a hard choice to go it alone, at a time when conventional wisdom — and hindsight — declared a woman couldn’t.

Well, that’s one of my big problems with the play, right there: By the end of the play I don’t think Vivie is brave. I think she makes the easy, selfish, heartless, and ultimately cowardly choice, choosing to pretend to “go it alone”, when the really brave thing to do would be to admit that she knows she is only equipped to do well in the world because of the countless advantages that she’s received from her mother. But she doesn’t want to have to acknowledge them or admit any gratitude for them, because that would require her to give up her black-and-white, this-is-good-and-that-is-evil view of the world.

I understand that Shaw makes her that way because she’s his representative for the privileged world’s conventional attitude toward prostitution, loudly condemning it and staying aloof from it while in a state of carefully preserved denial about all the ways in which it quietly profits by it. But that’s not a living character, that’s an allegorical statue. The few productions I’ve seen have tried to present Vivie in a positive light, her and Mrs. Warren as equally strong-willed women who have opposite and incompatible, but equally valid, points of view. It’s always managed to make the play about as compelling to me as a problem in long division.

What I’d really like to see is for Vivie to struggle her way toward some new understanding and acceptance and wisdom about her situation and her mother — not to give us the usual conventional, sentimental attitude about motherhood and/or prostitution, but to show us how Shaw wished that people like Vivie could change, rather than showing us how they don’t change. Shaw did take just that approach in so many of his plays, letting one or two of his central characters come to new and more complicated understandings of their worlds, even as the more conventional supporting characters around them held fast to their conventional, sentimental, black-and-white attitudes. But Shaw hadn’t tumbled to doing that yet with Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which was only his second play.

This production, though, does something that I don’t remember seeing before or remember ever occurring to me before in reading the play, and that is to make us see Vivie’s inflexibility as her way of coping with her profound fear of the world, of its sensuality, and of her own feelings. The production shows us that she is not so much going out into the world on her own as she is locking herself up tightly in a fortress she’s building higher and higher around herself. I still didn’t completely believe in Vivie as a human being, but the approach in this production came closer to making the play work for me than I can remember it ever doing before.

I thought Timothy Near’s direction contained a great many memorable and telling moments, maybe the most powerful of all being the sequence at the very beginning, all done silently before a line of dialogue is said, as we watch Mrs. Warren and Vivie, each in her own home, getting dressed in the morning. Vivie dresses herself in comparatively simple and lightweight clothing, while Mrs. Warren puts on layer after complicated layer with the help of two maids, starting with a corset (trying stoically not to wince as a maid puts a knee to her back and gives a firm tug to tighten the laces just another tiny bit) and a bustle and ending with a jacket and full skirt in a rich, beautiful, and very heavy-looking fabric. Her day hasn’t even begun and already she’s breathing a little harder just from getting dressed — but by God, she has created exactly the effect she wants and needs to create. It’s a brilliant opening, and Stacy Ross’s acting through it is brilliant, too — she seems to do very little, just stands and looks at herself in a mirror as she is dressed by her maids, and yet by the end of the sequence we know, before a word has been spoken, a great deal about Mrs. Warren, her character, her position in the world, her attitude toward it. And about the differences between her and her daughter.