Two Days at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival

When I discovered the Illinois Shakespeare Festival last year, I was blown away by the setting: The open-air theater is in the back yard of Ewing Manor, a Channel-Norman mansion with stone walls and towers, a slate roof and timber framing. The sloping lawn is a great place for picnics, and the manor's courtyard hosts low-key musical acts before each show.

A project of Illinois State University, the festival offers solid acting and traditional interpretations of plays by William Shakespeare and other playwrights. Last season, I saw a hilarious production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the lightest and funniest version I have seen. This season, I stayed for two days, braving a rain storm to see The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Tempest.

With Merry Wives, I broke a fundamental rule: I did not read the play before seeing it. I've read much about the weakness of this text, however, particularly in terms of the character of Falstaff. Although this production was well done, I have to agree with the critics: The text is amusing, but it lacks substance. Falstaff is a shadow of his Henry IV self, a villain and fool in his own play. The actors here did the best they could with the material, however, and the evening passed quickly.

I was somewhat less impressed with this production of Tempest. (To be fair, I just saw the Stratford production with Christopher Plummer, which is probably impossible to top.) The actor who plays Prospero is not memorable here, and several of the roles seem miscast. Many comic opportunities are missed or underplayed, and the role of Ariel lacks magic and mystery.

The play did have one fantastic moment. One question people often ask about this play is: What are Prospero's original intentions for revenge, and why does he abandon them in favor of forgiveness? In this production, there is a clear moment of reversal:

Ariel: ... If you now beheld them, your affections would become tender.
Prospero: Dost thou think so, spirit?
Ariel: Mine would, sir, were I human.

Here, Ariel and Prospero exchange a long look, and Prospero's anger melts away. When he responds, "And mine shall," the turning point is clear, and Prospero chooses the "rarer action" of forgiveness rather than vengeance. It's a great moment in an otherwise average play.

This Week's Reading Assignment

We've read eight of Shakespeare's plays, and we're making great progress through the complete works. Now, it's time for a little change of pace. Your assignment for this week is Shakespeare's two early narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, written when the theaters were closed in 1593-1594 during an outbreak of the plague. I have never read these, so I'm looking forward to it!

Discussion: Richard II

The play: Richard II

The plot tweet: Terrible king pisses off the wrong guy; Bolingbroke rebels to claim inheritance and then claims whole kingdom. Richard makes poetry, dies.

My favorite line:
More are men's ends marked than their lives before.
The setting sun and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past. (John of Gaunt)

--

This is the first time I've read Richard II, and my marginal notes look something like this: "Wait, is Richard crazy?" "Why did he just do that?" "WTF?" "Okay, he's definitely crazy." Actually, he's not crazy, but he is a disastrous politician. In the hands of someone else, the situation with Bolingbroke could have been easily remedied (or may never have occurred in the first place). But Richard handles the situation so badly, he practically deposes himself.

Richard is a guy who truly believes in the divine right of kings ("Not all the water in the rough rude sea / can wash the balm off from an anointed king"), and that gives him free reign to think and behave as he pleases, even to his country's detriment. This introduces the central question of the play: What value does this doctrine have, when the "anointed" king is so clearly worthless and the usurper so much more qualified to lead his country?

Shakespeare doesn't seem to answer the question, perhaps because none of the characters is particularly sympathetic. Even Richard, who begins spouting beautiful poetry after being deposed, doesn't connect with the audience the same way a very similar bad politician, King Lear, does. I'm cheating a bit here, because we haven't read King Lear, but the similarities are striking: a bad politician who essentially deposes himself and then struggles with his own identity, with liberal usage of words like "shadow" and "nothing." Compare Richard's "Alack the heavy day, that I have worn so many winters out, and know not what to call myself" with Lear's "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" Yet, in Lear, we are all on Lear's side, and we mourn his death intensely. Meanwhile, Richard gets murdered by a couple of thugs, and I think, "Well, too bad. That might cause some problems."

The reality is this: England is in better hands with Bolingbroke, and if the "divine right of kings" doctrine hadn't put his authority in question throughout his reign, he might actually have done his country some good. (Perhaps Shakespeare posits an opinion about the divine right of kings after all.)

But here's one thing I can't decide: What is Bolingbroke's original intention when he foments this rebellion? Is he really just trying to claim his inheritance, or does he always secretly hope to claim the crown? If usurpation isn't his original intention, when does he realize that's where he is headed, and how does he feel about it? He does claim authority before he is actually king, ordering executions and the like, but he still makes a show of deference to Richard. What do you think?

Sarah Palin as Next Shakespeare, Part II

The chatter about Sarah Palin's "refudiate" gaffe continues. On Twitter, check out the trending topic #ShakesPalin, which answers the question, what would Palin say if she wrote like Shakespeare all the time? Here are a few of my favorites:

• Double, double toil and trouble; drill baby drill, and Gulf oil bubble.
• Something is rotten in the Socialist, over-taxed State of Denmark...and all those other kinky EU countries.
• But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and I can see Russia from my front porch.
• Et tu, Bristol?
  
• To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit half-term, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees.
• A moose! A moose! My kingdom for a moose!
• "It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing." Sometimes, you don't need to change a thing.

Today's challenge: Come up with your own 140-character ShakesPalin tweet!

The Bit with the Dog

My dog-related questions have been answered! Click here for a picture of Auto, the dog who will be starring in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's production of Two Gentlemen of Verona. (Thank you to social media guru Aaron Kropf for posting this.)

Sarah Palin as Next Shakespeare?

This is not a political blog. I'm not going to tell you what I think of Sarah Palin. I'm just going to say, in a totally neutral manner, that she compared herself to Shakespeare this week after using the non-word "refudiate" in a tweet. Just thought you'd want to know. Totally neutral.

Weekend at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

When writing about the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, I am prone to overdoing my praise. I love this place, truly, more than any other in the world, and it seems to have been designed specifically for me. It wasn't, of course, but it was designed for people like us, the kind who live and breathe Shakespeare.

This is my first trip of the summer, and I find the place pretty much as I left it last fall, with all of my favorite restaurants and shops still open for business (and my least favorite store, the tacky Christmas shop, thankfully closed). As always, the shows are some of the highest quality productions in North America.

A few quick notes about the plays I saw this weekend:

As You Like It
When we read this play a few weeks ago, I confessed that I've never really seen the appeal, either with Rosalind as a character or with the play in general. None of the productions I've seen in the past year has managed to change my mind (especially not that disastrously awful America-through-the-ages production at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, which I may never be able to forgive).

Having seen the Stratford production, I'm still not willing to concede that Rosalind is, as Harold Bloom claimed, one of the best female characters in all of literature. However, I do like the play much better than I did, especially with theater-crush Ben Carlson as Touchstone and the excellent Andrea Runge as Rosalind. The charm of the play, and the magic and wonder of the Forest of Arden, are better expressed here than I have ever yet seen.

The play is set in the 1920s, during the rise of both Surrealism and extreme political movements such as fascism. The usurping duke's court is Nazi-esque, which should weigh down the production but somehow does not. The rest of the staging is decidedly bizarre; ensemble characters wander around with flower bushes for heads, giant apples dangle from the ceiling, and for one scene a deer leans casually against a tree, smoking his pipe. This is all very strange, of course, but it gels nicely with the characters' very subjective understanding of reality and time. Beyond that, it is simply beautiful. At one point -- when the red court banners are stripped away in an instant and the flora and fauna of the forest are revealed -- the audience actually clapped for the scenery.

Of course, the production isn't perfect. I'm not a fan of Cara Ricketts, who plays Celia; there's something about her delivery that jars me. (I've heard it described as "cheerleader on speed.") And Brent Carver, who played Jaques, was a bit flat.

Still, I loved that, in the final scene, Jaques was the only one dressed in black, amid a sea of characters costumed in white. It was a great way to set him apart. And the songs from the play, so often glossed over, are here performed with gusto and skill, bringing the forest wonderfully to life.

The Winter's Tale
Did I mention that I have a little theater crush on Ben Carlson? He did a fantastic Hamlet here a few years ago, and his Ernest (in The Importance of Being Earnest) was one of the funniest things I've seen, here or elsewhere. He brings the same talents to Leontes, who ranges so wildly between fury and despair. This production is touching and sweet, staged straightforwardly on the Patterson thrust stage with minimal distraction.

The best and most beautiful moment in the play is, as it should be, the revelation of Hermione's statue. I was sitting next to a women who apparently did not know the story of the play; when Paulina promised to make the statue move and speak, my neighbor gasped and whispered, "She's alive! Oh, she's alive!" It was a good reminder for me: This play may not be Shakespeare's most popular, but it is wondrous all the same. It is a perfect example of the themes of redemption and reunion on which Shakespeare so often focused toward the end of his career.

The Tempest
Starring Christopher Plummer as Prospero, this is the headline show of the season, and it deserves every ounce of that attention. The staging and costuming are pure magic, featuring enchanted swords, flying fairies, man/fish hybrids, a "floating" Plummer, a light-up magical cloak and other fun moments. In the wrong hands, these could be mere gimmicks, distracting from the text, but not here. I've never seen a production that so fully captures the magic of Prospero's private wonderland.

From an interpretive standpoint, this production focuses less on the master/servant dynamics of colonization and more on the bonds between father and daughter, father and son, brother and brother, and (soon to be) husband and wife. These are ordinary relationships, functioning in a distinctly non-ordinary place, which makes the production lighter and more relatable than its servitude-obsessed peers.

And, of course, the acting is superb, especially from Plummer; Julyana Soelistyo, who plays Ariel; and Trish Lindstrom, who plays Miranda.

I tend to be stingy with my standing ovations, but I was on my feet the moment the lights came up (and so, I might add, was every other person in the theater). Truly, this is a wonderful show. If you can get up here to see it, do.

P.S. On a totally unrelated note, I saw Christopher Plummer around town twice this weekend, on Saturday night for dinner at the Church restaurant and on Sunday night for dinner at Rundles. Apparently we have the same foodie tastes!

P.P.S. If you've ever wondered about the Shakespeare statue featured on the banner of this blog, you'll find him in front of Stratford's Festival Theatre.