The Tempest and the American Canon

Denis Arndt

The Shakespearean canon is an Anglophonic cultural cornerstone. In the 19th century, with the emergent Romantic movement, the Bard began to be venerated as the king of English literature, winning that throne even from King James (who has a Bible named after him). His work is perennial taught to school children and college students, maintaining his primacy in the American canon.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival's current production of The Tempest is a theatrical outgrowth of Shakespeare's literary canonization. Director Tony Taccone and dramaturg Barry Kraft give primacy to Shakespeare's text by avoided a pointed director's concept. They do give nods to The Tempest's complicated production history, but don't let any dramaturgy later than the Jacobean dominate.

Alexander V. Nichols' lighting drives the titular tempest along with the actors' movement. Those on board sway as if upon a storm-rocked vessel, and Prospero (Denis Arndt) kneels in the foreground manipulating a toy ship. Dancers (Will Cooper, Tim Rubel, David Silpa and Jordon Waters) are his servant spirits, manipulating the Neapolitans and Milanese unseen. Their heads are shaved like Arndt's, and they are painted chalk white. Daniel Ostling's set is austerely open, with hard monochromatic angles. The storm subsides, and Prospero exposites the information we need to know to understand the subsequent story to his daughter Miranda (Alejandra Escalante). The plot resumes with Caliban's (Wayne T. Carr) emergence. He is painted red and yellow and is bald as well. This is the palette on which Shakespeare's classic fable of forgiveness and discovery unfolds.

Taccone is conservative in his approach, yet gives nods to post-Jacobean dramaturgies in his use of staging, costuming the island's denizens and his casting choices. The open space is a clear nod to Peter Brook's aesthetic, and the Bhutto dancing and make-up are also reminiscent of Brook's interest in Asian theater. The rest of the cast is dressed in the height of Jacobean fashion by costume designer Anita Yavich. Only two black men are cast: Wayne T. Carr as Caliban and Bruce A. Young as Gonzalo. It makes sense to cast either an African-American or Native American as Caliban: he is a Caribbean islander, and such casting calls into focus the colonial origins of The Tempest. But, by casting an African-American as one of the Milanese, Taccone diffuses a postcolonial reading of the play while acknowledging that such a reading is possible and legitimate. These choices serve to educate the audience about the text without taking the text in either of these directions.

This Tempest is a piece of educational theater, meant to reinforce Shakespeare as a cultural cornerstone. It acknowledges Shakespeare's literary canonization by giving primacy to the text, while also acknowledging that his literature is meant for the theater by nodding to potent dramaturgies that are informed by Shakespeare's work. The breadth of Shakespeare's work and its effect on the English language and American stage make it important for Anglophonic Americans to understand and be conversant in. Taccone's direction of The Tempest gracefully reinforces this need by paying homage to its Jacobean origins while acknowledging the evolving readings of this play.

The Comedy of Questions

Rodney Gardiner

Some dramaturgies, like Brecht's, offer answers and solutions. And some dramaturgies, like Kent Gash's in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Comedy of Errors, pose questions.

This season's production of Shakespeare's classic comedy in which a series of erroneous assumptions about people's identities are made and then resolved is set during the Harlem Renaissance. Gash's idea was to bring Comedy's theme of disrupted families into relief by using the fallout of American slavery in which families were separated to sate the marketplace. This juxtaposition is problematic: Shakespeare was adapting a Roman play for Elizabethan England. Neither the Romans nor the Elizabethans shared our interest in racial equality, and issues of American identity didn't even exist yet.

New Orleans is the Syracuse to this production's Ephesus. Egeon (Tyrone Wilson) has illegally entered the Harlem port in search of his lost son (Tobie Windham plays both Antipholi). The set is a vibrantly colored impression of 1920s Harlem, and is dominated by a large clock whose moving hands emphasize that Egeon's time is running out. The majority of the cast is black, but the white Mark Murphey does play Gustave the Butler and the Jailer. Designers Jo Winiarski (Scenic), Shawn Duan (Video) and Matt Callahan (Sound) weave cinematic textures throughout, from the montage illustrating Egeon's expository monologue, to the cartoonishly colored slapstick, to the Young Frankensteinian sound cue every time the word "chain" is uttered.

Comedy is more like a cartoon than a historical drama: it relies on slapstick and broadly drawn characterizations meant to delight and entertain, not educate. And therein lies the rub. It doesn't provide a one-on-one correlation for telling the story of the familial disruptions brought about by African-American slavery. An accident of nature tears apart the family in Comedy, and human agency tore apart enslaved American families. All that suggests that Gash's juxtaposition is a bad idea. But the loose dramaturgy is actually this productions strength. It doesn't quite tell the story of the Harlem Renaissance: if it did, Mark Murphey's Irish cop wouldn't have been nearly as friendly to the black denizens. And it's not a rollicking good time: the black Antipholi own and beat the black Dromios (Rodney Gardiner). But historical errors and stomach-turning slapstick inspire questions about how class and race work in America, and that's this production's strength.

So what is the relationship between race and class in 1920s Harlem? And how does that relate to race and class here and now? The dramaturgical holes in OSF's current production of Comedy of Errors ask these questions while intriguingly offering no answers. And they're important questions to ask: race-based classism persistently unravels America's e pluribus unum, and we can't understand how it works now if we don't know about its history. For all the bad rap that directors get for transplanting Shakespeare into different historical milieus, Kent Gash's Comedy of Errors shows how it can work: by posing compelling questions about the historical milieu in which the play is produced.

Action or Ennui?

Ron Menzel

We live in a world rife with inequality and oppression. Loraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, currently playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, asks us, will you take action and die for the uncertainty of an egalitarian future in which you would have no part, or will you take no action and survive with the certainty of oppression?

A realist mid-century American play, Sign brings us a group of marginalized individuals asking that question. Not one of them finds a satisfactory answer. Therein lies the plays strength: Hansberry asks the question, and, while she may tend towards taking action, she doesn't presume to answer for us.

The story takes place in 1964 Greenwich Village, and revolves around Jewish Sidney (Ron Menzel) and his mixed-race Cherokee wife Iris (Sofie Jean Gomez). Sidney is a leftist agitator who surrounds himself with a cast of like-minds, all in a friendly competition to out-proletariat each other. There's Alton Scales (Armando McClain), a proud black man who is constantly mistook for a white man, due to his mixed-race ancestry. There's Wally O'Hara (Danforth Comins), the political candidate whose sign is in Sidney Brustein's window. And there's David Ragin (Benjamin Pelteson), the gay playwright upstairs. Iris is a showgirl, generally considered within the cast of characters as talentless. Nevertheless, she has dreams of making it big on Broadway. Her sisters, the anti-Semitic Mavis (Erica Sullivan), who is caught in an unfaithful and stable marriage; and high-end call girl Gloria (Vivia Font), who is addicted to pills, round out the cast.

The first act is filled with dramatic dialogue, fraught with characters' objectives and conflicts. Its function is to allow us to get to know these people, and serves as the foundation and context for the second act. It's in the second act that the characters offer their answers to the question of action versus ennui. It's monologue-heavy, with most of the characters laying out their case to Sidney, who is struggling to answer the question himself.

"Monologue-heavy" may sound like code for "pedantic, declamatory and boring," but, in this case, it's not. The monologues are dramatic in that they represent a struggle to between action and ennui. And, in the context of the Freedom Rides and the threat of violent death posed by a monolithic conservative resistance to egalitarian agitators, it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you do, you could be brutally killed. And your death may not matter. There's no way to know that things will change. But if you don't, you'll live, but live oppressed. You will never be able to realize everything you want out of life, but at least you'll still have life.

Loraine Hansberry took action. A black gay woman, she certainly did not fit the description of those who held the key to the kingdom, the white straight men. But she was a playwright - she spoke out. She could very well have taken the pedantic, declamatory, boring route. But she didn't. She wrote complicated characters from a realist perspective, not simplistic caricatures who are little more than propaganda. As humans, their struggle rings true from a human perspective. By showing us people who share our strengths, our weaknesses, our hopes, our fears, she forces us to ask this question for ourselves: action and a meaningful death, or ennui and a meaningless life?

So how do you answer that question? Do you have an answer, or are you still working on it? Because you oughtn't for a minute think the Civil Rights Act solved everything. Class in America is still race-based: the top 1% is mostly white, and the bottom 1% lives on reservations. Our LGBT neighbors are still not afforded equal protection under the law. It's worth noting, however, that going to see plays implies a certain level of privilege. And, as Wally opines, one needs the power that privilege affords to be able to effect positive change. But, if one simply goes to plays that struggle with issues of equality in order to feel progressive, one is little more than a salon socialist. The function of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window isn't to make us feel like good leftists. Instead, it asks us a complicated question that we are then to take home with us and struggle to answer.

Affirming Life in the Face of Certain Death

Adam Bock's A Small Fire sets out to explore what remains of a person's Self when their physical connection to the world is stripped away. But the question the audience is left with is, why does he back off before completing his project?

In A Small Fire, currently playing at Portland Center Stage through March 23rd, Bock clinically removes the senses of the protagonist Jenny Bridges (played by Hollye Gilbert) in an almost Beckettian fashion. Artistic Director Chris Coleman contextualizes this project by quoting Joseph Campbell:  

"...you can't identify with the body, as the body is going to fade: it's temporary, it is designed to fail. But there is another part of you that goes on, that is not attached to the body, that can see the whole story from a distance. And if you are identifying with that part of yourself, with your soul, then the falling away of the body is just another chapter in your story."

Jenny is a forewoman on a construction crew. She's foul-mouthed, in charge, and very much alive. At least until she temporarily goes deaf, signified by a loud tone blasted from the speaker system. Her next physical failure isn't temporary. Her sense of smell and incumbent sense of taste disappear. Then the lights, rapidly gaining in intensity and brightness, indicate that now her vision is gone. Her blindness brings with it decreased individual agency. She snaps at her daughter, Emily (Peggy J. Scott), while being dressed that she is "not a sack of potatoes." The loud tone comes back, permanently deafening her and cutting further into her independence. Up to this point, director Rose Riordan has told the story using a mostly Chekhovian realism. But, subsequent to the failure of Jenny's fourth sense, she and her lighting and sound designers (Diane Ferry Williams and Casi Pacilio respectively) blank out the space with darkness. Jenny stands alone in a tight spotlight and her disembodied voice delivers her despair. But then the lights come on, and she and her husband (played by Tom Bloom) make love. She ends the play affirming that "I'm still in here."

The conceit of the play is to strip away the protagonists' senses one by one. The goal, as stated by Coleman in his program note, is to find the part of the Self that exists beyond the five senses. But we never get there. Instead of exploring death and how the cessation of bodily functions affects a person's identity, Bock ends with a false affirmation of life. It's an affirmation reminiscent of the Restoration script doctors who gave King Lear a happy ending, and equally unsatisfying. In plays about death, pre-mortem denouements do the audience a disservice. Theater ought to be a place where the community can explore issues that effect them together, and what do we have in common more than our mortality?

Instead of allowing us to ask a question about ourselves, Bock calls into question his own artistic decision making. Why does he end the play before it's over? Why does he honey us with a pleasant falsehood? One of the benefits of American theater's obsession with Shakespeare is that it gives American audiences a high standard to hold our playwrights to. And modern playwrights ought to know this, and wrestle as aggressively with difficult human questions as their primary competitor for the American stage.