Men Playing Women Playing Men

Some are born great; some achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon them.  You'd think it would come from a history play.  It's from Twelfth Night.  Similarly, some men are born to play women; some men achieve the ability to play women; and some men have women's roles thrust upon them.  It comes across as really sad when it's the third one.

Reprising the quadricentennial production ten years later, Mark Rylance and the boys are back in an all male production of Twelfth Night.  Ten years later, a lot of the men are too old to be playing women.  Mark Rylance is a great actor and Olivia can be a very funny character, but Mark Rylance playing Olivia just seems pathetic.  Quite frankly, he's too old.  His mannerisms would be comical on a younger Orsino but come across as desperate when Rylance plays them.  It's impossible to believe that Liam Brennan, who plays a fantastic Orsino, would be attracted to her, especially in her almost kabuki style makeup and incredibly severe wig.  The production suffers from the hair and makeup design; Viola and Sebastian are made to look more alike through makeup and wigs, but they end up looking like ghosts wearing hair pieces made of yarn.  It also suffers a little as a result of casting.  The actors playing Viola and Sebastian should be switched.  The actor playing Sebastian, Samuel Barnett, looks much more feminine and is honestly a better actor.  Johnny Flynn, Viola, looks uncomfortable on stage (he takes some strange beats and conspicuously watches his feet during the dancing) and disconcertingly mannish.  Then again, some men are born to play women.  Or achieve that ability later in life.  Either way, Paul Chahidi, who turns Maria into a plumply roguish figure forever eyeing Sir Toby with lascivious enthusiasm, does yield a very funny performance.  Stephen Fry is almost too good as Malvolio; it's hard to believe that Olivia would spurn his advances.

The costume and set design are positively wonderful.  Even though Mark Rylance's costume reads a little like the old version of Elizabeth I as portrayed in many movies, the outfits are fantastic.  Jenny Tiramani's set – a decorated oak screen, with some of the audience seated in on-stage galleries – suits Twelfth Night wonderfully (it's being performed in rep with Richard III), and recreates the collegiate atmosphere the play must have had when seen at the Inns of Court in 1602.  

It comes together into an alright production.  Perhaps I'm ultimately questioning the directorial image of Tim Carroll.  He chooses to play up the more sombre aspects of Twelfth Night, the longing for an unrequited love and class warfare, as opposed to the funnier aspects, namely mistaken identities and class warfare.  

Theater on Both Sides - A Voyeur's Delight

Sleep No More is a tough thing to describe.

It enshrines voyeurism in a 1920's speakeasy Macbeth that is and is not the perennial favorite of high school English classes.  I read it my sophomore year, I'm sure you too were assigned it at some point.  It magically fits a town, a hotel, a banquet hall, a military man's private quarters, a hospital out of your favorite horror movie, a forrest, and a grave yard into the McKittrick Hotel which may or may not be a hotel.  It is silent and anonymous.  The audience is robbed of their voices and their faces by skeletal, Venetian carnival masks and a mandate not to speak once they have left the bar.  Absinthe flows.

It's a choose your own adventure.
I followed Macbeth himself for a while at the beginning of the evening.  Before the banquet, he whispered 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 in a grove in the banquet hall.  I was whisked up four floors by a blood covered Lady Macbeth where I found the hospital.  Crosses and little chapels are hidden everywhere.  I followed background characters through a tailor's and a taxidermist's.  At the end of the night I was brought back to the banquet hall where I saw Hecate dance and Macbeth's demise.  The latter I can only describe in terms of what song it inspired to haunt me for the rest of the week: "The Mercy Seat".  It stays with you.

I went with one of my English classes (Theater on Both Sides.  It's about theater.), which allowed me to compare notes with friends over pizza.  It's sort of the only thing you can do at thirty minutes into a new day after having your world rocked by experimental, environmental theater.
It was glorious.

Sing Muse… The Beginning

NOTE: I was without Internet for the duration of this trip, so I typed up my blog posts in advance, while everything was still fresh.  All of them will be posted in quick succession now.

Friday August 24 ATHENS, GREECE –

Greece in August is hot as balls.  It’s actually quite remarkable.  But, setting that aside, it really is a lovely country.

I had already been to Athens and various islands before I started blogging; so my post on Athens will be admittedly lacking.  But, to catch you up…

The National Archeological Museum is definitely worth a look (my family spent about three hours just wandering the first time we visited, but then we’re really into archeological museums.) and the Forum, the Agora, and the Temple of Olympian Zeus are worth stopping by for a few minutes to take pictures (there’s really not much left of any of them). 

Those are the major sites I skipped this trip.  Retrospectively, I wish I had made the trip out to the Archeological Museum (basically everything except the Museum is within walking distance of Syntagma Square) instead of going to the Benaki Museum; but at least I now know that the Benaki museum isn’t really that interesting.

The Benaki Museum essentially takes a look at Greek art from Neolithic to modern day.  I like Classical Greek sculpture as much as the next girl (actually, considering my peer group, I like Classical Greek sculpture quite a bit more than the next girl) but I get mildly annoyed when it isn’t clearly curated.  I’m pretty good with mythology, but I don’t know all the symbols tied to each God; so it’s nice to have a sign telling me what I’m looking at.  Personally, I walk pretty quickly past the religious Icons.  I do informally study religion for my Global Scholar certificate, but I can’t even come close to keeping the saints straight and the older paintings of the Madonna and Child are kind of creepy looking, so they’re mostly lost on me.

As you work your way up, the exhibits get more and more modern.  The stuff from the Romantic period is especially interesting to me because that is the period of the Greek War for Independence.  There are lots of gloriously nationalistic paintings to be found from that period.  Interestingly, during the period of occupation by the Ottomans, the Greek Orthodox Church served as the safeguard of Greek history, culture, and language.  Most of the precious sculptures from antiquity (for example: the massive, ivory and gold statues of Pallas Athena from the Parthenon and Zeus from the Athenian temple of Olympian Zeus) were stolen away by the Ottomans and were destroyed along with most of Istanbul in a fire, but the Church protected the history of Greek culture even in the face of occupation.  So that’s pretty cool.  When I was there, there was also a special exhibit on about artists as jewelry designers, which I have to say was much more interesting solely because it was better curated.  It was very easy to figure out what I was looking at, which is always a plus.

After the Benaki Museum, I pretty much just wandered around down a few side streets.  While I can’t tell you what streets I was on, I found a few blocks of chocolate shops, a few super fancy looking jewelry stores, and a supremely creepy store run by a “poet sandal maker”.  The walls were essentially lined with pictures of famous people – and occasionally family members of famous people – who had shopped at the store, but that didn’t stop it from feeling incredibly creepy.  According to my guidebook, that particular store is a must see in Athens but I must disagree.

And, of course, I visited the Acropolis and New Parthenon Museum.  Not quite realizing how close it was to my hotel I took a needless metro ride one stop from Syntagma to Akropoli.  Trains in Athens come about every 6 minutes at around 8 AM, which, if you’ve just missed a train, seems like an interminably long period of time.  On the plus side, everything still looks very new.  To me, it’s insane that the Parthenon is still standing.  Thanks to a few architectural tricks, it has withstood a number of earthquakes, but the universe has basically worked to destroy the building since the Persians invaded Athens.  The first time the Persians came after what is now Greece, they burned down the Parthenon so Pericles (Full disclosure, I thought he was another one of Shakespeare’s inventions until I went to the Parthenon the first time I was in Athens.  Then I found out he was a real dude.) organized a campaign to rebuild a newer and better temple to Athena.  That actually stuck around for a while.  Then the Byzantine Christians came and turned it into a church.  To do this, they felt it necessary loot the place and chip off a lot of the pagan friezes and decorations.  A little later it was turned into a mosque when the Ottomans took over.  These same Ottomans later stopped using it as a mosque, and started using it to store explosive materials.  This did not end well for the walls of the temple; the ordinance exploded and took out about half of the building.  After this, the ravages of time took over.  And you know what, there’s still a building there.  The propylea and the Temple of Nike is pretty damn intact; the Estrucheon is in really good shape; the Carytids (now located in the New Museum) are in pretty good well preserved; there’s still an olive tree where Athena supposedly planted it; and the columns of the Parthenon are still standing.  Sure there’s been some restoration work done (ok a lot of restoration work), but it is amazing to me that so much is still there.

Of course so much more would be there if it hadn’t been for that asshole Lord Elgin.  It’s actually weirdly sad to walk through the New Museum (which is gorgeous) because about half of the artifacts have notation saying “reproduction, BM” because about half of the remains of the Parthenon are in the British Museum.  Now I get that the British stole their diamonds, the Rosetta Stone, and a bunch of other stuff fair and square, but I find it mildly annoying that they won’t give back the Parthenon Marbles.  Greece was never a British colony.  Those marbles need to go home.  I mean hell, the Greeks built a whole new museum for them.  They’d have a lovely home.  In fact, the way the New Museum is laid out, they’d have a better home.  In the British Museum, the marbles are basically at painting height, which (if you’re even close to on the smaller side or too shy to push through masses of people) makes them kind of hard to see through the throngs that come to look at them every day.  At the New Museum, they’re raised so that you have to look up at them.  This makes them a lot easier to see.  So, in summation: seriously England, give back the Parthenon Marbles.

Finally I will leave you with this link.  It will take you to my creative writing blog where I have told the story of the patronage of Athens for fun.  It’s definitely at the top of my list of favorite stories from Ancient Greece, so it was kind of fun to retell.  Enjoy.

As You Like It... IN A PARK!

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Public Theater and the public themselves have shown their love - as hopefully will continue to show - by snapping up tickets to sit outside, regardless of weather, to watch Shakespeare.  The first production of this season at the Delcourt is Shakespeare's As You Like It.  Even though I've lived in NY for the past 15 years of my life, I had not until recently seen a production of Shakespeare in the park.  Now I have.


One of the things that I find really interesting about the Shakespeare in the Park experience is the technical challenges posed specifically by the venue.  A similar experience could be said to be had at Shakespeare's Globe in London, but they don't do much in the way of Tech.  At The Globe they do set and costume design and that's about it.  In Central Park, The Public fully techs their productions.  Lights, sound, costumes, and set.  Everything.  Which poses some interesting problems.  For example, even on a clear night, the lighting design can be completely changed by humidity; what was once a tightly focused special becomes a wash across the sage.  I find this kind of thing super interesting because it's not like they can change their plot based on the weather.  They just have to deal with it which is so beyond my skill set that it confounds me.  


I got really lucky with regard to weather when I went to the park.  We couldn't have asked for a clearer, dryer night.  A little chilly, perhaps, but the show certainly took my mind off that.  I'll admit that going in I was not a huge fan of As You Like It.  I had previously seen a rather mediocre production from the Bridge Project, a group that aimed to unite the Old Vic and BAM by way of world tour and classic theater.  I wasn't pumped to see this particular show.  But once the music (Bluegrass, incidentally composed by Steve Martin) started playing as the audience finished filing in, I was hooked.  Daniel Sullivan, the director, chose to set this production on the 19th century American frontier and it totally worked.  When Shakespeare is taken out of it's time, I get a little leery of what the results might be.  I feel like if the setting does not make the story loose its sense, then it's fine.  But (for example) I once saw a production of The Merchant of Venice set in a prison and I spent the entire show thinking "Well how does that work in this setting?"  But the American frontier is quite conducive to the story told by As You Like It (for efficiency's sake I won't synopsize).  Lily Rabe plays an excellent Rosalind; she captures the changes of heart that Rosalind/Ganymede goes through with ease and realism.  Oliver Platt also plays an excellent Touchstone, the court jester Rosalind and Cecilia take with them into the woods to help them cope with their separation from court.  However, to me, the standout supporting character was Stephen Spinella as Jaques.  He plays the droll, sarcastic character perfectly.  He makes it seem like a perfectly logical conclusion for his character to [SPOILER ALERT] choose to join the bad Duke Frederick in his commitment to religious life.  This is coming from the guy who spent most of the play complaining about where he was.  But also from the guy who spoke for three hours off stage to a wounded dear.  What I'm saying is that Jaques is complicated and that Stephen Spinella plays him excellently.  It's totally worth it to see this nearly perfectly performed production of a play that only betrays its oddities in the hands of such a talented cast.

All the World's A Stage

I maintain that only Brits can do Shakespeare right.  This assertion was proved more right on Friday night when I made the trek down to Brooklyn to see Simon Callow in Being Shakespeare at BAM.  One-third one-man show, one-third Shakespeare survey, one-third lecture, this production is a fascinating look at who Shakespeare was in the context of his life and times using Jaques' famous "All the world's a stage" speech from As You Like It as frame work.  The text of the production was written by Jonathan Bate (preeminent biographer of Shakespeare) and the design and direction is the brain child of Tom Cairns.  The moment Callow steps on stage we are treated to a somewhat disheveled looking professor and guide through The Bard's life and words.  And it's not just the classics that everyone knows.  In addition to a fantastically realistic Falstaff, Romeo's "psychotic chum" Mercutio, the Rude Mechanicals from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a weary Macbeth, we are introduced to some more obscure works.  Like a monologue from Sir Thomas Moore.  Don't worry, it's not part of the official cannon.  It's from one of his collaborations with other writers.  Which, as it turns out, is how he got his start.  Will Shakespeare rose from glove maker's son, to horse carriage valet for London theaters, to technician, to ensemble cast member, to script fixer, to author, to William Shakespeare.  It makes me unmeasurably happy that he was, at one point, a technician.  As he grew older, he continued to write his own plays, but also contributed a monologue or two to the works of others.  Hence, Sir Thomas Moore.  We are also introduced to what little William would have learned in school.  Which is to say Latin Grammar and Rhetoric.  Callow takes apart the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen..." speech to show the audience each rhetorical device employed by Shakespeare to convey his point.  It's super cool.  All in all, it was a fascinating look into the seven ages of William Shakespeare that I would recommend to anyone.

Competitive Shakespeare

I do some weird things...

Last Tuesday I had the opportunity to compete in my high school's Shakespeare Competition and this week I'm moving on the the branch competition of the English-Speaking Union's Shakespeare Competition.  I will be performing Timon from Act III sc. vi of Timon of Athens, which (in the words of a friend of mine/my english teacher from last year) is an unusual choice.  This monologue will be coupled with Sonnet 130 in competition.

I'm really excited about this opportunity, crazy though it might be.  My monologue is a grand "F*** you" to Timon's false friends, and my monologue, though perhaps less than complimentary to the woman to whom it is directed, is incredibly sweet and truthful at the end.  And I have the added bonus of clearly playing men in both performances.  I make no attempt to feminize either.

If any of you are in the area, it's in the Cole Auditorium at the Greenwich Library at 3 today (Leap Day, 2012).  It should be really interesting....

Addendum: because of inclement weather, the competition has been rescheduled to March 7. So look for that.

UPDATE: I placed 4th out of 20 competitors.  I won $25!  It's awesome to be paid to act.

Talkers Be Not Do Gooders...

I hope I caught that right.  If I did, it's from Richard III.  Specifically, the Richard the III featuring Kevin Spacey playing now at BAM.  And it's awesome.  Seriously, you should all go see it.  I think the ballonatic Menendes' Bridge Project has finally turned out something worthwhile.  Since this is Shakespeare, I'm going to go ahead and spoil the ending a bit because its been around for 400 years.  If you are averse to that, read no further.

Richard III is Shakespeare's second longest play (after Hamlet), but you wouldn't know it to see this production.  There's never a dull moment in the court of England when Kevin Spacey is present, and even when he is off stage there is rarely a pause in the action.  As he himself says, this play is destined either for heaven or for hell; and while Richard himself is certainly going to hell, this play is ecstatic. If only for the technical feats of focusing on the lights, check out the play for the staging.  The multi-doored set seems to have a single light focused on each door, which let me tell you is a feat.  I'd love to sit down with this lighting designer to talk to him about his shadows, because they were gorgeous.  It is impossible to escape the feeling that the sun is setting on all of them. This sense is compounded by the projections, the text of which seems to lengthen faster or slower depending on when each character dies.  And a lot of them do.  The omniscient, mad Queen Margaret curses the whole court within 45 minutes, and they all seem to meet the fate she sets out for them.  It is she that places x-es on each door as each character passes on, creating an inescapable sense of predetermination.  It seems that the characters could do nothing else but fall.

As for the bunch-backed, toad himself, I have nothing but wonderful things to say.  Spacey seems to taunt the rest of the cast with his grotesqueness of character and physiognomy.  It seems that he's testing them to see how far they'll let him go.  All in all, he manages to take in Anne - whose father and husband he has killed - various lords and dukes, the princes regent, and the populace of England (thanks to a spectacularly media savvy Buckingham); all the while telling the audience how much he should be hated.  And not for his physical features.  He seems to have come to terms with that.  No, we should hate him because he has consciously decided to be a villain.  And he loves it.  He begins the play with a Nixonian sweating problem, graduates to the Kim Jong Il-style aviators, and ends the play strung up by his feat a-la Mussolini.  As I said, the staging is spectacular, but it is made that much better by the way the actors play with the space.  (Yes, I just gave credit to the actors.  Deal with it.)  They know exactly how to run their show, and they make a truly memorable Richard III out of a spectacular technical environment.

So go see this show.  NOW.