The experimental and the traditional: the 2006 Alabama Shakespeare Festival's A Midsummer Night's Dream and the 2006 Stratford Festival's Henry IV, Part 1.

Barrow, Craig

Over the years I have tried to see as many different Shakespeare Festivals as possible, but usually I use the Stratford Festival of Canada as a standard to measure the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which I have been reviewing for over twenty-five years. This 2006 season I have compared an experimental production in Alabama with a traditional production in Canada. Geoffrey Sherman, the Producing Artistic Director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, invited another company, Obie Award-winning SITI of New York, to use its stage to educate and entertain its audience. SITI's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream not only included the actors but the technical staff as well--only the 750 seat Festival Stage was the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's; everything else was controlled by SITI. The emphasis of this acting company founded by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki in 1992 is on creative movement, and the company's background is in dance. The controlling idea behind the group's work, which I first heard put forth about forty years ago by Eric Bentley in a lecture entitled "Language as Gesture," is to partner dialogue with deliberate action, and in this partnership in A Midsummer Night's Dream, actors, as much as possible, attempted to elucidate Shakespeare's language with carefully chosen body movements. Though many of us speak with our hands, our shoulders, our facial gestures, our walk, and our posture, we seldom freeze these gestures. SITI actors, however, frequently do, creating body metaphors to complement Shakespeare's text, so that graphic actions, such as Helena's attempt to win back her Demetrius in 2.1.201-210 by letting him see under her skirt, froze her posture with her legs in the air. (1) Perhaps the cleverest movement was to have Oberon, Titania, and the rest of the fairies always standing on the balls of their feet so that their feet looked like hooves and the actors like elves. That physical movement, apart from costume or words, made the fairies appear as different beings, creatures of the woods.

The set, designed by Neil Patel, and the costuming, designed by Gabriel Berry, were meant to suggest the Dust Bowl, and the few props that suggested that age, a gigantic radio, a huge phonograph, and floor lamps that were brought onstage throughout the play, created metaphors of dreams and desires as actors draped themselves over them or performed physical movements on them. The actors invited the audience to recall how music on the phonograph can incite fantasy or dream, or how radio can appeal to the imagination in conjuring up images--baseball games on radio always seemed more exciting than on television, for example. The floor lamps that began to fill the stage seemed to be metaphors of ideas and intelligence.

Any time Shakespeare's world is modernized through costuming and props some problems arise. On the one hand, Anne Bogart in her "Director's Notes" describes the landscapes of Shakespeare's imagination as "hot and moist" while in the next paragraph she talks about the Dust Bowl as "a stark but beautiful place." (2) How an era of depression can be tied to "imagination," "hope," and dreams" puzzled me at first, but when I recalled some of the elaborate Hollywood musicals and comedies that appeared in the 1930s, I began to see the dreams Bogart hoped to connect to the play.

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Apart from the emphasis on tying together word and body movement, Anne Bogart tried to make a case for the number of actors that were needed to perform the play. In the "Director's Notes" of the program, Bogart states, "We have managed to do the entire show with eight actors. Not only does this make production economically feasible, but also now I am convinced that Shakespeare definitely must have meant for it to be done with only eight actors." Bogart is not the first to concern herself with the minimum number of actors needed to perform Shakespeare properly. I remember working with my Shakespeare teacher, William Ringler of the University of Chicago, over forty years ago on such a project. In Bogart's production, except for the role of Puck, all the actors play at least two roles, and most play three. While most audiences are accustomed to doubling, the extent of the practice in this production leads to some unusual moments, as characters change costumes while onstage on several occasions. The greatest challenge for the eight actors came in the performance of the Mechanicals in Act 5 when actors bounced back and forth between the performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe" and their roles as audience to the play within the play. While the cast handled the quick changes of role seamlessly, the audience seemed more amused by the trick of the instant metamorphoses than they were impressed by Shakespeare.

The SITI company believes in cultural exchange, and to that end the company is international in its composition. The actress who performed Hermia, Starveling, and Moth is Japanese, Akiko Aizawa. While her movements did her credit, her speech did not; many times her Japanese accented English made Shakespeare's lines either incomprehensible or foghorn clear. Since Aizawa has been a part of SITI since 1997, audiences would expect these difficulties to have been worked out by now.

When A Midsummer Night's Dream works, the audience feels the constant juxtaposition of town and country, day and night; daylight reason, law and order with nighttime dreams and fantasies. Puck and the fairies should seem more dominant than Theseus's day-light world. Reason in the ideal production grounds nothing. Demetrius and Lysander always appeal to reason when explaining their changing objects of affection. As Lysander explains to a surprised Helena, "Who will not change a raven for a dove? / The will of man is by his reason sway'd; / and reason says you are the worthier maid" (2.2.114-116). Even Bottom with his ass's head and his braying, on hearing Titania's reasons for her love says, "reason and love keep little company together now-adays (3.1.143-144). While Egeus by law and Theseus by conquest try to force love, law and conquest do not produce cheerful obedience, and yet lovers have difficulty justifying their love just as audiences have difficulty keeping their identities straight. Northrop Frye sees the world of the fairies as having "affinities with what we call the unconscious or subconscious part of the mind: a part below the reason's encounter with objective reality, and yet connected with the hidden creative powers of the mind." (3) At best, the lovers can have interlocking illusions, as Terry Eagleton suggests.(4) He continues, "In the play's fantasia of the unconscious, what looks through the individual eye is less than the unconscious itself, causally indifferent to particular bodies, ransacking appearances in its desperate pursuit of some ultimate truth which refuses to be uncovered. The desire of the unconscious is bottomless, like the dream which it generates in Bottom; and this unfathomable place of the Other is figured within the text as the inhuman Puck, who can assume any shape or persona because he is nothing in himself." (5) I did not see or feel the psychological underpinnings necessary to a good production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Bogart's version.

Despite my reservations about the whole production, several performances were very good. Jeffrey Frace as Theseus and especially as Oberon was excellent, and so too was Ellen Lauren as Titania and Hippolyta. Of the lovers the most effective was Karron Graves, who played each of her roles with comic authority, especially that of Helena. As in most productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a good Bottom dominates the play, and in the SITI production, Christopher Spencer Wells provided an emotive center for the audience, whether the two wings of his hair were ass's ears or not.

Certainly, I have never seen a performance of a Shakespearean play with more dramatic movement supplementing the language of the text. In many cases the actors did a creditable job interpreting the lines, but I can think of many more productions of this play by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and other Shakespeare companies that I have enjoyed more. Perhaps I am too attached to stage spectacle to appreciate the relatively bare stage of this touring production. On the other hand, the production contained too much aimless running around in the forest--a relatively bare stage--for my taste. The voice can carry most of Shakespeare's meaning. The emphasis on movement by SITI might have been better in another play, such as The Comedy of Errors. Such a process might also be really useful as an acting exercise.

Whereas Anne Bogart thinks of her production of A Midsummer Night's Dream as revolutionary, Director Richard Monette of Canada's Stratford Festival thinks of his production of 1 Henry IV as traditional, as suggested by the interpretations of critics such as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman. (6) Monette sees the central interest of the play "on the making of a king--on Prince Hal and what he learns in this play that enables him to become a great leader of men." (7) Furthermore, no attempt is made by costuming or props to update the play's associations with allusions to more contemporary eras. Dana Osborne, the designer, attempted to create an equivalent to medieval dress, and color-coded the four groups of characters to assist the audience in making political connections so that Falstaff and his friends are dressed in harvest colors of "golds, greens, and rusts," Henry's court in "black with accents of brick red and gold," the rebels in brown and green earthtones with a gray undertone, and Glendower and his family in costumes of indigo, navy, and gray, which Osborne associates with water and Glendower's claims about his ability to control the elements. Of the props created for the play, the most impressive was a map of England so big that it carpeted much of the stage. When the rebels walked on it deliberating who gets what in the division of the country at the beginning of Act 3, the audience almost feels as if a flag has been desecrated--the horror of the division of the country is made clear. While some critics, such as Harold Bloom, have seen Hal as just as manipulative and Machiavellian as his father, Henry IV, Monette separates the two. (8) He sees the character of Hal as "very optimistic"; the audience "should be rooting for him." (9) On the other hand, Monette sees Henry IV as "tormented" and "worried about how to hold on to power because he has not obtained it legitimately." Monette dismisses the possible tragedy of Hotspur, whom he labels a "hothead and a bit of a meathead." Honor drives him single-mindedly; "he talks a lot; he doesn't think." Though Monette describes Hotspur as "charming," he thinks he would not make a good king. Because of Monette's view of the primacy of Hal's development in the play, Monette is unlikely to allow the play to become, in part, the tragedy of Hotspur.

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In terms of the effect of his production overall, Monette wished to avoid a 1 Henry IV that is dark and cynical. In mounting a bleak production, "the implicit in the play [becomes] explict"; consequently, there would be "no depth, no subtext." He wants his production to be "funny and vivid: a chronicle rather than a history play." With this aim in mind, Monette's Falstaff is to be essentially comic, an alternative father-figure for Hal, but not a spokesman against war or honor in a satire on the political hypocrisy and the lying readily seen in Henry IV and the conspirators opposing him.

James Blendick was wonderful as Falstaff; his comic timing in the tavern scenes and the robbery and its aftermath was great, but he was careful not to become the cynical spokesman that Monette feared in such speeches as the one on honor at the end of 5.1 or following the death of Sir Walter Blunt. His character's many faults and vices as played by Blendick seemed only the appetites and play of a child incapable of correction. Few of the speeches in the play where Falstaff appeared to regret his fallen state were given with any conviction, such as in 1.2.95-97, when Falstaff says he is "little better than one of the wicked. I must give over this life, and I will give it over." While Falstaff continually exploits Hal and clearly hopes for more from him when Hal becomes king, Blendick's portrayal of the fat man nonetheless showed affection for the future king.

Just as the portrayal of Falstaff is a key to the play's effect, so too is the portrayal of Hal by David Snelgrove. Hal must not appear to be as conniving a person as Henry IV or the lying Worcester and Vernon; otherwise, the play could become the satire on Machiavellian political hypocrisy that Monette feared. When Snelgrove delivered Hal's speech on his intended reformation at the end of 1.2, Snelgrove's tone was that of a youth who is aware of playing with Falstaff and the rest of the tavern crew; however, he did not sound like Henry IV or the calculating rebels. Snelgrove looked boyish, appearing delighted by Falstaff's slippery wit and clever avoidance of logical traps. And when Snelgrove as Hal in 2.4.480-481 responded to Falstaff's "banish plump Jack, and banish all the world" with "I do, I will," his voice was determined but not calculating. As the action got closer to the battle of Shrewsbury, Hal provided Falstaff with opportunities, such as putting him in charge of some foot-soldiers, but Falstaff again and again forfeited these opportunities his friend provided. The closest Snelgrove as Hal got to anger at Falstaff is when he reached for a pistol but pulled out a bottle of sack in 5.3.55.

Adam O'Byrne as Hotspur looked even more like a tall, lanky adolescent than Snelgrove did. He exuded a boyish charm with Jennifer Mawhinney's Kate and was comically delightful when torpedoing the exalted claims of Glendower at the beginning of Act 3. While Monette cut some lines from the play, he was careful not to cut the criticisms of Hotspur by his father in 1.3 or by Mortimer and Worcester in 3.1, which stress Hotspur's inability to listen to others, his immaturity and lack of judgment. While O'Byrne's handling of Hotspur's death scene was touching, neither he nor the director allowed the character of Hotspur to take over the play emotionally.

Monette further avoided the pitfalls of his goals for the production with the portrayal of Henry IV by Scott Wentworth. Even though Henry IV is a scheming king who has had Richard II killed and is tormented by his crime, the focus of this production is less on Henry's maintenance of power and more on his relationship to Hal. Wentworth was careful in 3.2 to project the discouragement of a father who sees his son seemingly throwing away the opportunity for kingship that Henry has provided, and he was able to project the king's joy and gratitude toward Hal when Hal rescues his father from Douglas in 5.4.47-50: Stay and breathe a while Thou hast redeem'd thy lost opinion, And show'd thou mak'st some tender of my life. In this fair rescue thou hast brought to me.

While Henry is tenacious in holding on to power, Monette and Scott Wentworth keep the audience's focus on Henry's desires for his son, a complex of feelings all good parents understand.

While I have focused on the roles that create the emotional effect of the production, many people gave fine performances in this production, such as Raymond O'Neill as Glendower and Domini Blythe as Mistress Quickly. The only time I felt time hang heavy in the production was in Laura Condlln's singing in Welsh near the end of 3.1. Her voice was good, but the song and Welsh dialogue seemed to go on too long.

The Stratford Festival's 1 Henry/V was a deeply satisfying production. The performance felt like a comic, heroic romp with fascinating political intrigue. While Monette's 1 Henry/V was not revolutionary, as Anne Bogart claimed for her production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the audience seemed pleased by what it saw and heard.

Craig Barrow, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Notes

(1.) Quotations accord with The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1974).

(2.) "Director's Notes" in On Stage program for A Midsummer Night's Dream.

(3.) Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robed Sandier (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1986), 47.

(4.) William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 22.

(5.) Eagleton, 24.

(6.) Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman, Understanding Drama (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1948), 376-387.

(7.) "As Quoted: Director Richard Monette" in play program of Henry IV Part 1.

(8.) Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Penguin Putman, 1998), 285.

(9.) Monette, play program.