Brave New Shakespeare
Posted by Sean Kelly on 5/12/2009
For the first time in my life, I finally saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream last Wednesday night. How could it be that I had waited so long to see this play? Why had it eluded me all this time? And to be very honest, I had never even read the play!
I knew there was someone named Hermia, a play within a play, that someone turned into a donkey, and a lot of magic. After working as an assistant director on The Tempest, I was intrigued to see this sister play, to be able to check ‘See A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘ off of my To Do list, and to test my Shakespeare ear, hopefully well-tuned over several weeks of Tempest rehearsals.
There is a scene around a group of would-be actors who are debating how to represent the fantastical elements of their play. How might one represent a tiny hole in a great wall onstage? One cannot bring in an entire wall. They conclude “Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast about him, to signify wall; and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper.”
For me, this was a miraculous revelation: Shakespeare promoting suggestion, theatricality and imagination on the stage! That a man, entering from stage right, planting himself firmly in one place, holding a bucket of plaster and proclaiming “I am a Wall” is SHAKESPEARE! That’s Shakespeare?
I have assisted Tina Landau twice, working with her first on last summer’s Superior Donuts. Two very different worlds: a Chicago donut shop and a magical island. And yet, each understood fully and captured essentially by a director who sees the laws written on the heart of a play and uses them to design a world which perfectly matches the play’s life, love and limitations.
Tina surrounds herself with the play’s history, the playwright’s intentions and her actor’s intuition and becomes a lens through which all passes into a singular harmonious vision of the world that the play needs. She learned from Midsummer’s that Shakespeare encouraged suggestion. That the real magic of the play is theatrical. That a bare stage, a seemingly modern invention, is actually entirely traditional and of the playwright’s original schema. That’s Shakespeare.
“As you from crimes would pardoned be/ let your indulgence set me free.” It is a long journey to these final lines of The Tempest. We held fast to the theme of freedom and release during rehearsals, using it as a kind of mantra, a reminder, a goal to relinquish our preconceptions about ‘Shakespeare’, ‘The Tempest‘ and even ‘Steppenwolf’ and to enter with an open mind and an open heart into a play that, as Tina said, ‘is like sponge and will take what you give it and keep growing and growing.’ That’s The Tempest.
And to match it, we had to set ourselves free from treating the text preciously. We had to question it, mine it for truth and dare give Shakespeare a reverse apotheosis. We set ourselves free of the popular history of the characters, and found: the spontaneity within Propsero’s plan; that Caliban is more affecting as a man, not a monster; that a speech is only a speech because who you’re talking to is allowing you to go on for so long; that the characters were permitted, nay, demanded space to conjure these perfect words in the moment and coin the language as they went; that a four-hundred-year-old play about an aging magician and his beloved daughter can make students of us all, from Frank Galati to an apprehensive patron.
For within one play, a master playwright has encapsulated for all of us, young and old, what it means to be human: “I have done nothing but in care of thee.”
The parallels between our time and his time are striking: the power of theatrical suggestion, the potentiality of a bare stage. But mostly potently, Shakespeare shows us that all of us, then and now, here and there, are “such stuff as dreams are made on/ and our life is rounded with a sleep.” That’s honest. That’s brave. That’s Shakespeare.