Monsters on Stage

God is dead, at least in theater. No longer do audiences go to the theater to see allegorical struggles between Good and Evil. No longer are actors trained to portray the superhuman.

One of the tools of good actors, and here I refer to Michael Shurtleff's Audition, is their ability to play opposites. According to Shurtleff, considering the opposite of your character's object to be as true as the objective itself helps to create dramatic tension. Michael Elich, who plays the titular Builder in Actors' Repertory Theatre world premiere of Amy Freed's The Monster-Builder this month, is fully capable of playing the duality of a character. He just did it in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's The Heart of Robin Hood last year. Freed is fully capable of writing devilishly charming villains with a core of pathos - see her Earl of Oxford in The Beard of Avon. And that pathos is crucial. Monster-Builder lacks it, all we get is the Monster in her Builder - we never see the man Gregor Zubrowski. Without it in the text, Elich can't deliver it on stage, and without it on stage, the Builder is superficial and uninteresting. He's a medieval allegory - not the kind of protagonist an actor can sink his teeth into and compel an audience with.

The Monster-Builder, according to Freed in the program, is not a direct riff on Ibsen's The Master Builder. Instead, it takes its point of departure from Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, a condemnation of twentieth-century architectural trends that sprang from the Bauhaus movement in Weimar Germany. Gregor Zubrowski is the epitome of the conceptually inaccessible architect, and much of the play takes place in his glass house with nowhere to sit (a monumental and stark design by Tom Buderwitz). The play opens with a small party in which he finds idealistic, beautiful young architect Rita (Allison Tigard) and takes her under his wing. She wants to design modern Commons, accessible spaces where communities can grow together. Zubrowski will have none of that - his new mission is to corrupt this idealist into his vision of a world developed into rectangular gray monstrosities.

The Monster-Builder has the same basic aesthetic as The Beard of Avon - they're both farces meant to satirize a particular aspect of the artistic world. In Beard, it was the Shakespeare authorship controversy. In Builder, it's high-concept architects who design uninhabitable structures. On one hand, Freed and set designer Buderwitz succeed. Zubrowski is an inherently unlikable person - more and more so as the play progresses. There's no place to sit down on Buderwitz's set  - a compellingly simple obstacle that serves to point out the major flaw in Zubrowski's aesthetic. On the other hand, they fail. Freed goes too far in making Zubrowski unlikable. Without the pathos of her Oxford, or some other redeeming, relatable quality, it's too easy to dismiss him as merely a caricature, an allegory for Evil. At the same time, Buderwitz doesn't go far enough in creating an uninhabitable set. When the scene does shift from Zubrowski's glass house, we never have a full set change. Instead, the running crew brings a small flat, desk and chair. They put pillows on one of the glass house's structures to make it into a seat. This breaks the tension of Zubrowski's world, where austerity and art interfere with the ability to live.

It's been a long time since gods (or monsters) - monolithic representatives of good or evil or what have you - have been particularly interesting on stage. Actors are trained to explore the human nuances of their characters, and audiences have come to expect that they do so. So it becomes the playwright's responsibility to understand the actor's craft, and to write plays that work from an actor's professional standpoint. And Amy Freed knows how to do this - her Earl of Oxford is a nuanced man painted in the broad strokes of farce. But she slips in The Monster-Builder - here her sexily sinister subject has only Tom Wolfe's disdain, and none of the love an actor needs to fully engage in the role.

Our Town

This is the 75^th anniversary of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Hence, everybody’s doing it: it’s playing at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, as well as three Portland theaters. It was the third most produced full-length play in high schools last year. And yet, Southern Oregon University’s auditorium was only about two thirds full, while the devised piece next door was sold out.

Director Paul Barnes cites an unnamed “many” who consider Our Town to be “the great American play.” Why, then, doesn’t it pack them in?

Our Town is the dream of American conservatism: to take the idolization of Main Street and the insularity it represents and cover the earth with it. It takes the mystique of the American small-town, the simplicity of a bygone era, and explodes this nostalgia to universal proportions. Wilder’s universalization of historicized white American culture smacks of Manifest Destiny. For example, Professor Willard’s historical prologue spans millions of years. His mention of the indigenous inhabitants of the area serves only to underpin Caucasian claim to the land: the Indians were not there that long; they have entirely disappeared; if anything’s left of them, it’s an implied secret in three families’ genealogy.

The paradox is that Our Town maintains an inordinate amount of American stage time by playing into fantasies of American universalism, and yet it can’t compete with the unknown devised piece White Fugue next door. Do I think Our Town should be abandoned? No, Wilder has something to say about white American conservatism, and he really says it beautifully. Should it be done less? Well, we’re not all white conservatives, are we?

Liquid Plain

I went to Naomi Wallace’s Liquid Plain with high hopes. After all, Wallace is one of today’s most famous American playwrights. I left disappointed – my hopes had been drowned in a sea of clumsy playwrighting. 

Plays about slavery in America are in vogue right now, and it felt like Wallace was trying to tap into that for her installment in OSF’s American History Cycle. Wallace seemed to be tackling every single story she felt hadn’t been told about slavery in America yet, and this made the play feel unfocused. She fell into the amateur playwright trap of too much exposition and too much concern for her own prose at the expense of the play’s actability. Otherwise capable actors struggled with Liquid Plain’s seemingly endless litany of expository walls of text.

The weight of failure rests mostly on Wallace’s shoulders – such a renowned playwright should be expected not to present something so unfinished. But, since the dramaturg’s work appeared with such clarity in the copious research that clearly went into Liquid Plain, dramaturg Julie Felise Dubiner also shares the blame. As a new play development dramaturg, her job wasn’t just to provide the playwright with a plethora of stories to write about. Her job was also to encourage Wallace to focus, to find the story that compelled her and then provide research to help her dig into that. Both playwright and dramaturg finished about half their job, and then put Liquid Plain on the boards. Another year in development and Liquid Plain might be ready for an audience, but it wasn’t this season.

The Tenth Muse

When I taught my class of undergrads at Stony Brook University, I infused my graduate research in Native theater into my syllabus. I taught plays by Lynn Riggs, Bruce King and Luis Valdez. The impact on my students, especially those of Native and/or Hispanic descent, was noticeable. Students are brought up on a scholastic diet of the Western Canon, which is made up almost exclusively of dead white male writers. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – in my last review I wrote about the multiple points of access to King Lear. But there’s always a disconnect if the artist doesn’t come from a background similar to that of the audience. My students of Native and Hispanic descent were able to engage with Mummified Deer better than perhaps any of my students of whatever background could with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

So imagine my delight when I opened up my program and found out that The Tenth Muse would feature Indian characters! And not the racist kind that are POC servants who give wise advice to the white protagonists. No, the protagonist in The Tenth Muse is a mestiza. Other characters occupy other positions on the colonial Mexican social ladder. The play itself represents an exploration of the social hierarchy in 17^th century Mexico. “Why, that’s irrelevant to us 21^st century Americans,” you may opine. “Not to me,” I might respond. My own family was colonized in the 19^th century by the United States. Granted, the structure of colonization between California in 1850 and Mexico in 1650 are markedly different: in Mexico, the Catholic Church was a major player and the goal was to enslave the indigenous population. In northern California, the goal was to kill us all, irrespective of anybody’s religion. That said, both Karuks and Nahuas (my tribe and the tribe represented in Tenth Muse respectively) suffered colonization. In both instances, people of mixed-race (like me) constituted a challenge to the racial hierarchy established in the Western hemisphere. So, yeah, this play resonated with me, and it’s not even about the kind of Indian I am. In a theatrical culture where Shakespeare is the bane of the working playwright, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a Shakespeare festival commissioning a new work. And its especially invigorating for that new work to be by a playwright outside of the Anglo mainstream. And that it’s a play with strong Native over-tones? I love it.  

King Lear

Shakespeare has been dead for about 400 years. He wrote for an audience that was just starting to get into colonialism and threw their poop out of windows. Why, then, do we still produce/watch/read/study his plays?

Because they’re stories a multiplicity of people can sink their teeth into. Because they have so many ways to access them. Because of productions like OSF’s close-to-closing King Lear.

My grandpa just died. I loved the guy, and he was the grandpa I was closest to. And grief is a funny thing for me, because I tend to analyze it and over-think it and rob it of its emotional effect by putting it all in my head. Watching Lear and Gloucester get old and die in horribly dramatic ways helped me shed my tears. As an audience member, the play effected me in a way Lear never has before. But as a dramaturg, I have to understand why.

To do that, I want to go back to Aristotle. He holds (and I quote Ingram Bywater’s translation of Poetics) that the “tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear…” (1453b 12) What does that mean? According to Aristotle “…pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves…” (1453a 5-6) Lear and Gloucester make mistakes, but do they deserve the extent of their misfortunes? Does the old Lear really deserve to be cast out by his daughters and wander half-naked and mentally unhinged? Does Gloucester deserve to have his eyes ripped out? They aren’t villains, who knowingly sow discord and destruction like Iago. Nor are they heroes who save kin and country like Henry V. No, Lear and Gloucester are “…the intermediate kind of personage, [men] not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon [them] not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment…” (1453a 6-8) So that’s pity. What about fear, the recognition of one like yourself. King Lear needs to have his train of one hundred knights. “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.” (King Lear II.4 vs.267-270) Sometimes old men struggle with the need to give up those things that they’re accustomed to, that give them a sense of independence. “And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.” (IV.7 vs.62-63) It’s normal for people, when they get older, to feel their minds start to slip. And the humiliation that can come from admitting it was clear in Michael Winters’ performance as the titular king.

That brings us to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Any play with as many access points as Lear is easy to do poorly. So how did Bill Rauch and Company do it well? By trusting the story, and not getting in the way of it. The Aristotelian pity is present in the text, but the Aristotelian fear comes from finding the truth in the text. And there’s no recognition of truth without trust. Rauch enunciated it finely in his program note:

“We have chosen a simple, contemporary approach for this production in our most intimate space to minimize any distance between you and the play’s bracing truths. The designers and I are here to serve the actors, and our entire cast is awash in skill and courage.”

It’s easy, as an artist, to get caught up in your own creativity. It’s much harder to let go and trust your collaborators. And Shakespeare, in spite of being dead and not having had a conception of basic bathroom hygiene, is one of the best collaborators a theater artist can work with. There’s a reason his plays remain popular after 400 years.   

My Fair Lady

All three of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival plays I’ve seen this year (Cymbeline, Heart of Robin Hood, and now My Fair Lady) not only feature dynamic female protagonists, but the women playing the protagonists find depth in the most light-hearted plays and humor in the heaviest. 

Everyone knows Lerner & Loewe’s musical adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion. It’s standard fair for community and high school theaters across the country, not to mention a delightful film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. So one can imagine how it could become over-wrought and boring. That makes it up to the artists retelling this classic to do it in a way that makes it worth going to the theater instead of just popping in the DVD. Rachel Warren, under the direction of Amanda Dehnert, tells the story of Eliza Doolittle in a way that I’ve never considered, and yet perfectly explains my single greatest problem with the script.

Why does Eliza go back to Higgins? He’s clearly an awful, abusive man. For years and years I thought it was just the American happy-ending pastiche – the guy gets the girl, consequences be damned. But Warren found a part of Eliza that I’d never seen before. The simple body gesture of flinching when Alfred P. Doolittle (Anthony Heald) or Higgins (Jonathan Haugen) makes a sudden movement in her direction tells a story of a girl who was beat by her alcoholic father. Her relationship with him, being scared of him and oh so easy for him to manipulate carries over into all her other relationships with men in the play. This is especially true of that with Higgins, but also with Freddy (Ken Robinson) and Pickering (David Kelly). When she leaves Higgins, she jumps right into the arms of the first man who will have her, even though Freddy clearly has nothing going for him – he’s spent weeks literally rolling around on the street where she lives. Why? In the scene after the break-up in Mrs. Higgins’ house (played by Kate Mulligan) she tells Higgins that the difference between a lady and a flower-girl is not in how she acts or speaks but in how she is treated. She denies herself any agency, and puts it all into the hands of Higgins who treats all women like flower-girls and Pickering who treats them all like ladies.

So when she told Higgins goodbye forever and slammed the door behind her, I was happy for her, like I always am. And that slamming door was so final! Director Dehnert approached the story wanting to find the messiness in it, and to that end put the chorus in seats on stage, let the wires hang out, and put all her actors on stage for their warm-ups before the show started. All of this paid off when the huge shop door up stage opened at the end of the “good-bye forever” scene and slammed in Henry Higgins’ face. It felt very Ibsenesque. But where the power of the slamming door in A Doll House is that that’s the end, its power of OSF’s My Fair Lady is that it isn’t. It’s irony that A Doll House, by a playwright who reveled in the messiness of life, has a clean happy ending – Nora gets agency over her own life. But My Fair Lady, a light-hearted musical by the American fantasy-makers Lerner & Loewe, has an untidy heart-breaking ending – Eliza is trapped in a cycle of abusive relationships and this story will repeat itself until she’s dead or becomes Nora Helmer.

The Heart of Robin Hood

I’ve been reading Michael Shurtleff’s Audition this past week. It was a book I was assigned in undergrad but never read. I found it in my parents’ house this summer and, since I’m doing a bunch of auditions again, I thought I might as well do my homework. 

I wonder if I could still get credit for it…

Anyway, one of the tips that Shurtleff has is to play opposites. For example, let’s pretend your character is trying to get Hamlet to stop swinging his sword around Polonius’ tapestry, because, hey, you don’t really want your son to become guilty on manslaughter. What’s the opposite of that? Maybe that you really would like him to kill Polonius because the old creep is basically your homicidal husband’s canary, and it would make sure that Hamlet no longer came near you with his theatrical mousetraps and visions of the dead. If you keep both of those opposites in play, it makes your performance much more dynamic and gives you as an actor much more to work with.

And how does this ties into OSF’s The Heart of Robin Hood? That play is a good example of playing opposites in an entire production. On its surface, it’s a silly play. Almost Monty Python silly. Eduardo Placer’s Bishop of York called Eric Idle’s performance as Pontius Pilate in The Life of Bryan vividly to mind. But what made this play really good was the pervading rot of violence and injustice that the silliness was in constant conflict with. Playwright David Farr wrote a villain with no redeeming qualities: Prince John thinks nothing of rape, infanticide, or using religion to legitimize his misdeeds. Michael Elich sells the role by, once again playing opposites. He does all these awful things, but he does them with a sense of playfulness and glee that makes his character all the more disgusting, and thus the conflict in the play so much more dire.

So opposites. They’re a part of the craft that I never gave any thought to, but now that I do, I see how they can not only exponentially increase the quality of a single actor’s performance, but that of an entire production as well.

I really should try to remember who assigned me that book.