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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.2917  Monday, 31 December 2001

[1]     From:   John Ciccarelli <jon7057@msn.com>
        Date:   Friday, 28 Dec 2001 15:41:06 -0500
        Subj:   re: Trends in Post Modern Shakespeare

[2]     From:   David Evett <d.evett@csuohio.edu>
        Date:   Saturday, 29 Dec 2001 00:04:41 -0500
        Subj:   Re: Trends in Postmodern Shakespearean Performance

[3]     From:   Charles Weinstein <Charles1012@msn.com>
        Date:   Saturday, 29 Dec 2001 20:58:41 -0500
        Subj:   Trends in Postmodern Shakespearean Performance

[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           John Ciccarelli <jon7057@msn.com>
Date:           Friday, 28 Dec 2001 15:41:06 -0500
Subject:        re: Trends in Post Modern Shakespeare

To Mr. Weinstein,

In reading your “review” of the ART Othello production I have to ask:
Did you audition for the role of Iago and get turned down?  It seems
that you have an obsession with this actor that you spend the better
part of your post raging against his performance.  While you have the
right to your opinion regarding the production, your views concerning
the post modern interpretations are rather one-sided.  The great thing
about Shakespeare is it engenders various ways of performing them.
While I personally don’t agree with a gay Iago, that may have been the
director’s and/or actor’s choice.  So for this production that is what
you get.  That is not to say that all post modern productions of Othello
will follow suit.  Other directors and actors will make other choices.
I have seen a white Hamlet with black parents and a female Malcolm win
the war in Scotland, both of which came off quite well.

Although, the post’s homophobia has been commented on, I have to take
major offense with the other side of Mr. Weinstein’s post and that is
the type casting.  Exactly what is wrong with someone with the body type
of Mr.  Derrah in playing Iago or any other major Shakespearean lead?  I
don’t recall an exact physical description of Iago in the text or for
Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and scores of others.  I dare say the bulk of
Shakespeare’s characters are without precise physical descriptions, yet
somehow these characters come with centuries of prejudicial baggage of
what directors and producers thought the characters should look like.
Someone who is short might as well forget about auditioning for Hamlet,
regardless if he can play it, because this ideal exists that Hamlet must
be this tall guy.  How many good or even excellent actors have been
relegated to supporting or walk on status because they don’t fit “the
mold”, while watching other less competent people fill the roles.  If
somehow one does make it to play such a part, they are often referred to
as “Playing against type”.  Exactly where does this “type” come from?

While Mr. Derrah’s not knowing his lines is inexcusable, what’s wrong
with him playing Iago or any other role as long as he is capable.
Charles, have you ever heard of an actor stretching themselves?  The job
of an actor is to portray the human condition, to portray and imitate
life.  You can’t do that successfully unless you display the full gamut
of human experience.  That’s pretty tough to do if all you ever get to
play are one type of role.  Type casting has no place in theater.
Regretfully, racism and homophobia will probably disappear long before
this prejudice does.  Bravo to ART for at least taking a chance in doing
something different.

JC

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           David Evett <d.evett@csuohio.edu>
Date:           Saturday, 29 Dec 2001 00:04:41 -0500
Subject: 12.2909 Re: Trends in Postmodern Shakespearean
Comment:        Re: SHK 12.2909 Re: Trends in Postmodern Shakespearean
Performance

>The ART's
>treatment of Shakespeare grows from a Beckettian root whose main
>critical voice may be--may have been--Jan Kott. Alfred Harbage wrote a
>review of Kott's "Shakespeare Our Contemporary", titled "Shakespeare
>Without Words."

Citing Alfred Harbage in connection with an early 21st century
theatrical production makes little sense to me.  He was my teacher in
two graduate courses at Harvard in the early 60s, and the director of my
wife’s doctoral dissertation, and was a sensible, thoughtful student of
the plays, highly attentive to language, and with a great fund of common
sense which he used to counter interpretive excesses of all kind--one of
the fine later modernist critics.  But by the time we knew him he had
long stopped seeing ANY actual Shakespearean productions because none of
them adequately corresponded to the images of the plays that he had
constructed in his mind.  He therefore declined to attend, among many
other things, the RSC production of *King Lear*, directed by Peter
Brook, powerfully influenced by Jan Kott, performed in Boston in early
1962, when Harbage was still alive and active--I don’t know whether this
was before or after he wrote the essay to which David Bishop refers.

That production did, indeed, present a series of striking visual
images--I can still summon up many of them in my own imagination.  But
it was also a production in which every actor in every role sought to
make every syllable of the text tell on the audience: powerful visual
images and powerful uses of language are not inherently exclusive, as
many other productions of these and other plays can testify.

Mr. Bishop is perhaps too young to understand the appeal that the
Central European directors of the 50s and early 60s held for Robert
Brustein, the director of the ART, for Brook, and for many other
intelligent and sensitive theater people in Western Europe and America.
The theatrical Shakespeare they knew was essentially operatic--beautiful
voices in beautiful costumes delivering uplifting messages from a
culturally confirmed never-never land to people who mostly attended the
plays because it was a socially desirable thing to do.  Over against
this tradition the post-WW2 innovators from Poland, East Germany,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, presented versions of the plays in which the
voices made the sounds of bodies in pain, and the pain was caused by the
same kinds of social and political behavior that had just produced two
world wars, an international depression, and the Holocaust.  It was
revelatory.  That revelation has, perhaps, lost some of its energy,
half-a-century later--I would not quarrel strongly with the proposition
that it’s time for Mr. Brustein to retire as head of the ART.  But over
the years it has produced a lot of arresting, disconcerting
work--including the current ART *Othello*, which has its problems, but
which is not, in my judgment, merely “a noisy, distracting fashion
show”.  Though as my name may tell Bishop I have some grounds for
prejudice.

David Evett

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Charles Weinstein <Charles1012@msn.com>
Date:           Saturday, 29 Dec 2001 20:58:41 -0500
Subject:        Trends in Postmodern Shakespearean Performance--Iago in the
A.R.T.'s Othello

Mari Bonomi writes,

"To paraphrase a former president, there you go again, Charles...

PLEASE keep your homophobia OFF the pages of SHAKSPER postings.  They
become increasingly nauseating."

Dear Mari:

“Homophobia” actually means “fear of the same.”  You and others are
using the word to mean “fear of homos.”  I assume that this is unwitting
on your part.

In any case, rest assured that I care nothing about Derrah’s sex-life
and support his right to sleep with whomever he wants.  However, I do
care about the way he acts (or doesn’t act) Iago.  The issue is whether
the actor has transformed or sublimated his own sexuality in accordance
with the demands of his role.  If he hasn’t, the critic is free to
criticize him for it.  If that upsets you, you are equally free not to
read my posts.

Happy New Year,
Charles

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Hardy M. Cook, editor@ws.bowiestate.edu
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