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London 2012

August 23, 2012 by 2 Comments

I just flew in from London on the 11th, and boy, are my arms tired!

That’s just a little humor. Sorry.

Sorry.

Last week I returned from seven weeks in London. For the first three weeks, I researched at the British Library, the New Globe Archives, and, for thrilling and all-to-brief morning, at the English Dance and Folk Song Society’s Ralph Vaughan WIlliams Library. After those weeks spent primarily on research, I spent four weeks at RADA’s Shakespeare Summer School, an acting program that I hoped would give me a better sense of modern Shakespeare training.

Most pertinent to my research, though, were my experiences at the Globe Theater. I’ve spent a lot of time at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars. It introduced me to Shakespeare. My trip to London gave me an opportunity to experience the most famous Original Practices venue in the world, which showed me just how frustratingly dissimilar different “OP” comapnies can be. Here, I’ll just copy/paste from my notes:

“At the Globe I can’t be certain which opinions are mine and which are derived from what I’ve read and heard from others. I agree, immediately, with Jeremy Lopez’s assessment of the Globe’s Bankside surroundings. The area, Globe included, has a definite theme park feel to it: a high brick wall and gates guarded by ushers surround the theatre itself; there is a Starbucks to its left and the Tate Modern and Millenium Bridge to its right. Because the Globe has a reconstructed exterior as well as a reconstructed interior (as opposed to the Blackfriars in Staunton), we encounter it, and all the attendant notions of reconstructed theaters and original practice, sooner, from outside on the street, where we compare it to the surrounding modern architecture. Viewing the theatre from the street, we aren’t immersed in Early Modern reconstruction and are more aware of the Globe’s incongruity.

When I move into the courtyard ten minutes before Shrew starts on Tuesday, I consider waiting in line to buy lunch before going in. A very drunk man in an England sweater and sweatpants, with St. George’s cross painted on his cheek, is stumbling around, yelling at a bunch of worried looking Globe employees. I avoid him, thinking to myself, “poor son of a bitch.”  For some reason, it never occurs to me that his behavior is out of place. After all, they sell beer and wine, and the usher worriedly following him is a thin girl about my age, so maybe she doesn’t figure she can handle the taller-than-6-ft. drunk.

Turns out the drunk is playing Christopher Sly, along with Petruchio, which I realize only when he wanders into the yard behind me and I remember what play I am seeing. The play’s induction blends reality with fiction nicely, and before we know it, though not before the drunk has urinated on the front row of groundlings, we’re moving along into Taming.

I understand Jim Warren’s sense that actors at the Globe speak less, or less directly, with the audience, although I can’t tell if I’ve been biased by his suggestion from the start. A new façade, a colonnade with two staircases and peeling white paint, has been built over the Globe’s frons scenae. The effect is to force the action further downstage, which largely solves the Globe’s problem with its two downstage columns. On the other hand, this also seems to re-proscenium-ize the space. The gallery seats that curve around the stage are cut off. The actors largely play out to the front of the house (somewhere, someone writes about “the pull of the groundlings”), eschewing the diagonals that are such a large part of blocking on the Blackfriars stage. I notice that some dialogue is played parallel to the front of the stage between the two columns, which is fine for those of us out front, but must be maddening for audience members seated to the sides.

            Seeing Taming again on the 16th of July, and standing, in the pit, leaning up against stage left, I’m acutely aware of Jim’s point. The pillars definitely create a proscenium, and almost all the action occurs between them and is played to the center of the house. Despite my proximity to the actors and the light that we share, they do not look at me, interact with me, or acknowledge my presence in a world with them. They go by quickly towards their exits, never acting to us. I enjoy the show much more in the second half, after my friends and I have moved to house center.

Seeing the entirely ‘Original Practice’ Richard III on the 22nd of July yielded similar observations. The transition from ‘free-hand’ to ‘OP’ doesn’t yield a great rapport or communitas with the audience. Both are on a thrust, both have the audience right next to them, both are done with universal lighting.

Mark Rylance’s fantastic Richard does yield a greater rapport though, because he creates an immediate relationship with us from the first moments of the play. Part of that, I think, is Rylance, and part is Richard. Richard is a character that needs that relationship, that spends most of his time in the stage’s locus, who spends more time talking with us than anyone, other than Margaret, who at no point appeared in the Globe’s production anyway (darn). And then, there’s Rylance, who should be more aware than anyone of the way that the Globe theatre works, the way it [potentially] relates audience to actors in a seamless world.

The rest of it, in terms of audience actor rapport, is consistent with what I’ve seen. There’s little direct contact with us, little taking us into consideration (although Paul Chahidi’s Tyrell speaks right to us), and the vast majority of the action occurs out to the front of the house.

“OP” here means really ‘OP,’ costumes, props, etc. The costuming doesn’t particularly help. Actor’s doublets are rigid and bulge in the middle, in a vaguely-phallic-in-the-Greek-comedy-vein-but-not-quite way. When the ghosts of Richard’s victims appear to him in his dream, they’re dressed in giant white bags, gathered at the top, with holes for the actors’ faces. They look like big white lunch sacks, and while I’m certain it’s a historically sound choice based upon copious research into 16th century perception of ghosts’ appearances, it’s just silly looking here. The armor, though, is beautiful. Richard himself has a tiny, shriveled and burned up hand attached to his left side, which looks pretty impressive.

Men play all the women’s parts. James Garnon’s Duchess of York (doubled with Richmond) is great in a sort of withering Maggie Smith/Dowager Countess of Grantham way. Johnny Flynn’s Lady Anne is extremely reserved though. His major scene with Rylance, in which Richard seduces Anne, never accumulates any intensity, and it felt to me as though if Flynn hadn’t been working so hard to play a woman, it would have gotten to the place it needed to be. The performance seemed monotone, unvaried, and emotionless. The casting of men, in the aggregate, isn’t very helpful.”

I also was able to research in the Globe Archives, where I spent most of my time flipping through old reviews and front of house reports. Critical response to most Globe shows seems mixed. Usually, there’s plenty to love, but also some to hate. Interestingly, reviewers often include the audience, frequently in their complaints. 1997′s Henry V drew reviewer’s ire percieved audience jingoism (it was during the run of this show that audience members threw cabbage at actors, both French and English, depending upon who was in the audience and whether they were armed). The audience in 2005′s Winter’s Tale, an “OP” production, apparently laughed too much and in the wrong places.

I also got to look through Front of House reports, which were fascinating for the revelation that at almost any given Globe performance, an audience member will pass out. In five shows, I’d say maybe three have fainters, and many have more than one fainter. I watched a recording of the 2005 Winter’s Tale in which an audience member, standing near the stage, passed out during the first scene. Right there on the tape. It is, when you think about it, the most remarkable business model. They (Globe management) know that, at least during the summer, someone is going to pass out. They know it. You pay five pounds for a chance to stand up for three hours, and maybe, if you’re lucky, pass out at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Anyway, now I’m just plugging away at my paper. I think, though, that I was right, which is nice. Flipping through Joe Falocco’s Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse and Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper’s Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment yesterday, I decided that the inspiration of a certain brand of actor-audience, Shakespearean communitas is a central impulse of the Original Practices movement. Now I have to be able to explain why.

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Interviews and Research at the American Shakespeare Center, Staunton, VA

June 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

            Got back on Wednesday from Staunton, VA, home of the American Shakespeare Center. The ASC, which has recreated the Blackfriars Theater, Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse, is central to the original practices movement, although it has distanced itself from that term and begun to promote its use of “Shakespeare’s staging conditions.” Performing in the Blackfriars, the companies (a resident and a touring troupe) act on a thrust stage under universal lighting. Casts are doubled, so that one actor in the 13-15 person company will play multiple characters, and women often play men, a counter to the English Renaissance practice of boys playing women. Most importantly, actors directly address audience members, some of whom are seated onstage and in the balcony.

            The term “original practices” and the idea of an “original practices movement” mean very little. Different companies have taken the concept of a return to the theatrical practices of Shakespeare’s time to mean different things, and have applied them differently according to their interests or business models. When Shakespeare’s Globe (http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/) was reconstructed in London, enormous attention was paid to construction practices, and when it opened, the company focused heavily on costuming, creating beautiful, elaborate costume pieces 100% faithful to the materials and construction methods of 16th century England. Now, under artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, faithfulness to original practice has been eschewed for a more experimental brand of warehouse theatre. The Atlanta Shakespeare Company (http://www.shakespearetavern.com/) is sold on the concept of original practice, but its New American Shakespeare Tavern is also a dinner theatre, and Jim Warren, artistic director of the ASC, asserts that most of the audience is in darkness. The American Shakespeare Center itself (http://www.americanshakespearecenter.com/) works to faithfully approximate Shakespeare’s physical staging (thrust, universal lighting, etc) but eschews the Globe’s costuming practice or other practitioners’ insistence on all-male casts. It’s worth beginning with the note that “original practices” is a term with little significance that is beginning to go out of vogue with some practitioners.

            In Staunton, I was fortunate to be able to speak with Jim Warren, the Center’s artistic director; Paul Menzer, head of Mary Baldwin College’s M.Litt/MFA Early Modern Performance Program; Doreen Bechtol, now the coordinator for the third year experience of the MBC MFA program, and formerly the director of the American Shakespeare Center Theatre Camp, which I attended for three years; and Edie Turner, whose research on communitas has inspired my project. I also was fortunate to be able to see six shows in four days: John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Midsummer, The Winter’s Tale, a dress rehearsal of James Glodman’s A Lion in Winter, the Ren Run of Two Gents, and a preview of Merchant.

            Midsummer, the Saturday night performance, was one of the most fascinating theatrical experiences of my life because, it seemed to me, that it generated a particular level of communitas that incorporated actors and audience alike. There was a large audience, many of whom, I thought, had some form of prior relationship to the ASC and the Blackfriars, even if that relationship extended only to having seen ‘Tis Pity earlier that day. Before performances, troupe members play music up on the balcony while audience members buy food or drinks, mill about and talk. While the troupe played “Superstition,” a young boy standing in line for the snack bar, probably about 8 years old, started dancing. As more and more people began to notice him, and the actors began to notice him from the balcony, he started to bust out cooler and cooler moves. Suddenly, he does the worm— fantastically— and moves into a baby freeze center stage. The audience went wild, and the little boy jumped up and threw his black and white checkered fedora into the audience. As the audience applauded, laughed, and cheered, the kid started doing backflips. He’s was this fantastic, totally spontaneous center of attention. He takes many bows. Rick Blunt, an actor from the company selling raffle tickets around the theater, called him out in his raffle ticket spiel (“If you buy concessions, you’ll be able to dance like that”) , and the audience yelled that he should do a cartwheel, to which he replied “I’m not doing one after that.” Apparently, he had done one before I arrived at ‘Tis Pity earlier in the afternoon. The actress singing the next song, “Ain’t Too Proud,” sings it to the little boy, who went to foot of the balcony and looked up at her quizzically, messing with her.

            During this Midsummer, I felt a particular give-and-take from actors and audience. Interactions between the two were frequent, and they were built upon to the point at which they became a part of the show, the individual event. Michael Amendola, as Puck, had a dance break to cover a tricky costume change for the fairies (after Oberon and Titania’s reconciliation). After getting the audience started in a communal rhythmic clap along with backstage music, he ended up doing the worm, just as well as the kid from the pre-show. I couldn’t tell if he that during every show, but because of the added significance of the worm in the history of this event, it took on more meaning. Blunt, as Bottom, finally did a cartwheel in the middle of his absurd death scene in “Pyramus.” Because of the heckling, the back-and-forth during the pre-show, that too took on new meaning, significance. Even if it was a standard part of the performance, this evening it was more: it was a response to a request from earlier in our collective history as a community. Denice Mahler (Hermia) came up to me and ran her hand over my face, (I think during II.ii) knocking my glasses askew and getting a big laugh. Later, she laid hand on me again, and again got a laugh, because, I think, she’d incorporated a call back. Patrick Earl, as Demetrius, got a laugh using my hair as a bush (IV.ii: “Speak! In some bush?”) Blunt built flirty relationships with women in the audience. The young boys, especially the dancer/acrobat, were repeatedly referenced (“As waggish boys in game themselves forswear”). The laughter was contagious. People continually talked back to the actors. The community of the event built a history together, and the actions that we agreed upon, interactively, became significant, meaningful parts of the show in their own right.

            This would have been impossible without the ASC’s unique combination of staging conditions: universal lighting, music before performances, food and drink in the playhouse, direct address to the audience, etc. It was an experience worth noting because here, the staging conditions under which the ASC operates directly allowed for a production of great communitas.

            This week I’m researching more in Washington to try and gain an understanding of the conditions of actual early modern playhouses, including acting theory and audience action and interaction. It’s interesting to see what the original practice movement’s research is based on and to begin to understand the staggering differences between “original practice” and original practice. And, a week from today, I’ll be on a flight to London to research at the British Library and the Globe.

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What the Hell is Communitas Anyway? Good Question, Ben.

June 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I’m currently entering my third week of work on my project, which examines theatrical communitas and relationships in “Original Practices” Shakespearean performance. The “OP” movement began in the late 1980s as some practitioners called for a return to the staging conditions under which Shakespeare originally would have worked in order to reinvigorate and better understand his works and those of his contemporaries.

I’ve spent the first few weeks of my research commuting to Washington, D.C., where the Library of Congress and the Folger Shakespeare Library are conveniently right across the street from each other. It’s good to study Shakespeare in Washington because if you have access to both libraries, it’s relatively easy to access any text you need, especially if it’s a modern book (the Folger, of course, defines “modern” as any printed post-1800). The Folger also has its famous rare book collection, which includes 82 First Folios, while the Library of Congress has practically every book anyone could ever want along with an easy to use and extremely efficient scanner that I’ve been using to make digital copies of entire books.

My goal thus far has been to lay groundwork for interviews and primary source work I hope to do in the upcoming weeks. The idea has been to understand the anthropological concepts of liminality and communitas, especially through the works of anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, and to understand the ways in which they might manifest themselves in performance, especially in “OP” performance. I’ve spent the past three weeks researching communitas and understanding the many forms the “OP” movement has taken, especially at London’s Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London and the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Theater in Staunton, VA.

“What is communitas?” has proved to be an occasionally frustrating question. Communitas, a term that, at least in this descriptive capacity, was coined by Victor Turner, is a particular heightened state of communal joy. Turner describes it as a “modality of human interrelatedness” which “can play across structural systems [liminal, liminoid, or otherwise] in a way to difficult for us at present to predict its motions” (From Ritual to Theatre, p. 45). It is an unstructured modality in which abstract social structures, roles, and statuses cease to matter, in which people begin to relate to one another in a non-transactional, non-quid pro quo manner, and in which people feel united and able to experience the humanity of all people. Frequently, communitas manifests itself in liminal phases of society, the transitional times and spaces frequently seen in ritual characterized by societal inversion and anti-structure.

Does “original practices” production help us to achieve communitas in Shakespearean performance, as a result of its use of thrust staging, universal lighting, and direct address? Actors interviewed in Pauline Kiernan’s Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe frequently suggest that the conditions produce a stronger relationship between actors and audience. This, of course, inspires new questions. Can we rely upon the personal accounts of actors for interpretation of audience sentiment? Following some of the objections of Dr. Paul Menzer of the University of Mary Baldwin, how can we determine the historical value of these accounts, and what ideas do we have about the substantially different communal conditions that prevailed in Shakespeare’s actual productions in the 16th and 17th centuries?

I also wonder about the differences between actor-actor, actor-audience, and audience-audience relations. Communitas, it seems, must be common among actors, who work daily in a highly collaborative exploratory/rehearsal process together and are bound by the pressure of putting on a good show, which must go on, or so I’ve heard. It also must be common amongst the members of an audience— after all, what is laughter? I wonder about the state of actor-audience communitas? Do their different moment-to-moment concerns mean that theatre produces two distinct communitas states in the same event and contiguous space? Does the frequently clear distinction between actor and audience, marked by space, levels of preparation, etc., render anti-structure impossible? Good questions, Ben.

Another place this brand of anthro-theatre crossover and interest in communitas has appeared is in the Environmental Theatre movement and the works of Richard Schechner, the director and performance studies pioneer who directed The Performance Group in its late-‘60s/early-‘70s productions. Another feature this movement shares with some practitioners at the Globe and Blackfriars is its preoccupation with space. The “Original Practices” movement has, sometimes to a fault, increasingly latched on to its performance spaces, embracing the reconstructed theaters it has produced through a collaboration of scholarship and practice and buying into the notion that these spaces have a power and character of their own that affects actors and audiences. This same belief is articulated by Schechner is his book Environmental Theater, in which he expresses “the assumption that human beings and space are both alive” (12). Some of his explorations and exercises remind me of work I did as a student at the ASC’s American Shakespeare Center Theater Camp in 2006, 2007, and 2009, and as a result I am growing increasingly curious about a concept of spatial communitas in which people interact with the spaces around them in the same non-transactional, anti-structural manner we see in human communitas.

This Friday I’m leaving to make a five day trip to Staunton, where I’ll see hour of the ASC’s current shows and a Ren Run for one or two more. A Ren Run is a totally undirected and unrehearsed full-length production of a show, in which actors provide all props, costumes, and imagination. Such runs are standard practice at the ASC, which experiments with Shakespearean rehearsal conditions as established primarily by the works of scholar Tiffany Stern (Shakespeare’s actors, we believe, only rehearsed a show once or twice, and not for very long either time). I’ll also interview Edith Turner, the wife of the late Victor Turner and an anthropologist and professor at UVA (check out Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy), Jim Warren, the artistic director of the ASC, Dr. Paul Menzer, head of Mary Baldwin’s MFA program, and some of the ASC’s resident actors.

Filed Under: Monroe 2012 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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