Candida, A Minister's Wife

Question 1:

I'm emailing for wisdom about Marchbanks. I'm coaching someone for A Minister’s Wife. I read your blog on Shaw and of course went back to Candida but thought I’d be silly not to write to you.

Response 1:

I saw A Minister's Wife [Austin Pendleton’s musical adaptation of Candida] in Chicago and I thought it was pretty darn good, that it kept Shaw fairly intact.

Candida is not so much about The New Woman as it is about The Young Poet. And while A Minister's Wife puts more focus on Candida, the character of Marchbanks is pretty much the same in both.

Marchbanks is a physically slight young man who is terrified of strangers and certainly of physical roughness from others. Note the description of his behavior (in Candida) when he first enters the room. Like a stray puppy, scared of everything, shrinking from physical contact. His opposite? A brilliant mind, the capacity of the artist for profound comprehension dramatized beautifully in his scene with Prossy when he perceives the truth beneath her surface behavior and understands her more truly than anyone ever has. 

His body gets ready to run from Morell but his eyes flash with the fire of his ideas and his voice lands those ideas with the impact of a physical blow.  

What's the secret in his heart?

The play could be subtitled: The Artist Finds Freedom.

Question 2:

I sat with the play last night and kept going back to Marchbanks' passions. How he has all of these thoughts inside him, and although he is articulate, he can't fully articulate his own poetry. He surprises, even himself, when he allows his passions to fuel his voice and stand up to Morell. Yes?

I hadn't thought about the secret in his heart. Yes, that is where the actor must go. Connect his own secret to what ignites Marchbanks to voice all that is within him.

I would love for you to blog on this. I think what has always troubled me about Candida is that is it less about her and more about what she does to the people around her. How they all react to her.

Response 2:

Marchbanks makes lots of realizations during the play (One way to map out the progress of the play is to go from one Marchbanks realization to the next right up to the last big one, which happens when?) and, yes, he surprises even himself when his voice finds his soul in perfect poetry.

Let your imagination play with his name a little. Note what a different character he would be if his name were, for instance, Maybanks.

Shaw had originally called him Marjoribanks.

Further:

Let’s take a look at four major scenes in Candida and some of the realizations that happen within them.

Marchbanks and Morell at the end of Act I.

Morell is everything Eugene is not: he is outgoing, handsome, vital, charming. After all, Candida loves him. His concerns are social and practical. I imagine him helping out at the soup kitchen and giving the foreman at the construction site a talking to about working conditions. His great good will and charismatic nature consistently win over both men and women to his side.

He recognizes the genius in the “wretched little nervous disease” of a young boy that Marchbanks is. It’s the power of that genius that unsettles Morell in their confrontation and leads him to question the strength of his marriage.

Marchbanks pushes all of Morell’s buttons, gets at insecurities Morell isn’t even aware he has, and at last forces Morell to lose his temper and, as Marchbanks later describes it, to shake him like a terrier shakes a rat. 
It is at the moment when Marchbanks shrinks from fear of a possible pummeling at the hands of minister Morell that he has his first great realization: I’m not afraid of you. You’re afraid of me! And the entire speech that follows is a series of incrementally mounting realizations as his understanding of the power he possesses builds, intensifies, energizes. 
Too often actors deliver these lines as a series of statements of fact rather than as a series of amazing, growing realizations that embolden him with the power of his ideas. At last the courage of his convictions is more powerful than the cowardice of his physicality. And this realization sends him directly on his path to the end of the play.

Morell and Candida Act II.

Candida has returned after a three-week absence and she goes about the house to make sure things are running properly. At last she comes to the study to check on her husband. She sees him sitting at his desk working on his next sermon. His face is troubled, his spine collapsed. How often when she has seen him so absorbed in writing a sermon has she wanted to intercede, only instead to bring him a lamp and then leave? But the thundercloud in front of his eyes tonight is darker and more troubling than ever. (She has no idea that it is his confrontation with Eugene that is plaguing him.) 
She decides it’s past time for him to face a painful truth about his sermons, his parishioners, their fidelity, and about his and their love of the trappings of religion. She assumes an understanding between the two of them: a loving wife sitting at her husband’s feet, the two of them working through a problem together. And the wife-mother-sister-companion-counselor proceeds with irony, with gentle humor, with painful accuracy.

Meanwhile, Morell hears everything she says from the perspective of his misgivings about her love for him, as Eugene had suggested concerning King David: But his wife despised him in her heart.

As they settle into what she thinks is mutual trust and affection and understanding, believing that he is in perfect sync with her, she wonders aloud if Eugene, since he is falling in love with her, will one day forgive her for not helping him into his sexual manhood.

Morell the man and the minister says only that he relies on her goodness and her Christian purity.

She pokes fun at his ministerial myopia. Don’t put your faith in my goodness and my purity, she says. I would abandon them in a second to help Eugene grow up. Put your faith rather in my love for you. That’s what’s keeping me from teaching Eugene about sexual manhood and romantic love.

Morell freaks and truly Candida does not understand.

It is a misapprehension to think that Candida either sees Eugene as a romantic rival with Morell or as at all sexually interesting to her. It’s because she doesn’t and because she assumes Morell is in full accord with her about the situation that she says and does the things she says and does. She is not deliberately tormenting Morell; she’s believing more strongly in him and in their marriage than at the moment he is able to.

Candida and Marchbanks at the Beginning of Act III.

Candida senses but does not fully grasp the profound depths within the fearful young fellow before her. But it is time for the teacher within her to lead him to an understanding of the truth about his feelings for her. It is delicate territory and she proceeds sensitively.

Marchbanks: May I say wicked things to you?

Candida: You may say anything you want so long as it’s the truth of your heart and not some second-hand attitude.

Marchbanks [realizing]: Ohmygod, everything I want to say at this moment is just some attitude I’ve adopted or picked up from reading. Only one word is the utter truth: Candida, Candida, Candida. And every time I say it it is a prayer to you.

Candida [carefully leading him one baby step farther along]: Does it make you happy to pray?

Marchbanks: Ecstatic.

Candida: Well, that very ecstasy is the answer to your prayer. [And gently, carefully, pointedly, she asks him to realize something further] Do you want anything more? [That is, do you want to kiss me? do you want us to go upstairs? etc.]

And Marchbanks makes his biggest realization yet: Ohmygod, no! What I’m feeling now is utterly what my heart has been wanting all along! I don’t need anything more!

Morell, the mere man, enters and misinterprets what he sees and what Eugene means during the contretemps between the two of them that follows Candida’s exit. The only way he can see out of his misery is to insist Candida choose irrevocably between the two of them, something it has not even remotely occurred to Candida might be part of the reality of this situation.

The Discussion among Candida and Marchbanks and Morell that Ends the Play.

Candida discovers that James does not realize the signal part she plays in the success of his life and his domestic situation and their marriage. He has assumed that as the male he has been both provider and protector and she the pampered beneficiary of his industry. (Shaw said that with Candida he demonstrates that in the doll’s house of a marriage, it is the man who is the spoiled doll child, not the woman.)

To describe the huge realization Marchbanks makes about the secret in his heart, let me quote a letter Shaw wrote in 1898 to the critic and Ibsen translator William Archer:

When Eugene, with his apprehensive faculty raised to the highest sensitiveness by his emotional state, hears that long speech of Candida’s about the household, he takes the whole thing in, grasps for the first time what it really means, what the conditions of such love are, and how it is essentially the creature of limitations which are far transcended in his own nature. He sees at once that no such life and no such love are possible for him, and instantly leaves them all far behind him.

To put it another way, he jumps to the position from which the Master-builder saw that it was all over with the building of happy homes for human beings. He looks at the comfort and sweetness and happiness that has just been placed before him at its best, and turns away from it exclaiming with absolute conviction, “Life is nobler than that.”

Thus Candida’s sympathy with his supposed sorrow is entirely thrown away. If she were to alter her decision and offer herself to him he would be unspeakably embarrassed and terrified.

When he says “Out into the night with me,” he does not mean the night of despair and darkness, but the free air and holy starlight which is so much more natural an atmosphere to him than this stuffy fireside warmth of mothers and sisters and wives and so on. 
It may be that this exposition may seem to you to destroy all the pathos and sanity of the scene; but from no other point of view could it have been written. A perfect dramatic command, either of character or situation, can only be obtained from some point of view that transcends both. 

The absolute fitness which is the secret of the effectiveness of the ending of “Candida”, would be a mere sham if it meant nothing more than a success for Morell at the cost of a privation for Eugene. Further, any such privation would take all the point from Candida’s sub-consciousness of the real state of affairs; for you will observe that Candida knows all along perfectly well that she is no mate for Eugene, and instinctively relies on that solid fact to pull him through when he is going off, as she thinks, broken-hearted. The final touch of comedy is the femininely practical reason that she gives for their incompatibility.

Candida is the wonderful woman who makes and maintains a perfect nest for Morell to explore his gifts for sermonizing and lifting the hearts of his parishioners--something she realizes during the play he is not aware of and that she must spell out for him.

Morell is a magnificent man, an eagle domesticated with his wings clipped and all his needs taken care of, which he realizes by the end of the play is the perfect life for him.

But it is not to the discovery of their blindnesses about their marriage nor to the domestic balance achieved when Candida embraces James in front of the cozy hearth at the final curtain that this play has been leading. Rather, what has been dramatized is what the revelations about marriage have led the young artist Marchbanks to realize, what the secret in his heart is: he must be not domesticated; he must be a free soaring eagle artist.
And so he flees their hearth for the glorious night in search of his destiny.
End of play.

Post Script

The sequel.

Candida II: Eugene Finds His Way.

In which the young poet Marchbanks makes the acquaintance of Lord Alfred Douglas and the whole of who he truly is comes exhilaratingly clear to him.

Alvina Krause on Ionesco One-Acts, Style

Context:

To supplement yesterday’s post concerning style and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, this is Alvina Krause’s critique of Ionesco one-acts performed during the 1964 summer season at Eagles Mere. It has been slightly edited.

Critique of One-Acts:

All performances must have style, must have form. When a craftsman has something distinctly his own to say, he may say it so clearly, so emphatically, that his manner of expression is part of what he is saying. He gives his subject clarification, intensification and projection: he gives it style. It is the actor's responsibility to discover the style of the playwright, to identify with that style, to assume that style. Since meaning and style are one, the actor can communicate a playwright's idea only through the physical manifestations of the author's style. Voice, actions, movement, rhythms, cadences are suited to the line. 
Style is essential to all forms of dramatic expression. In some drama, however, failures in style may not be completely disastrous; in realism, for instance, interest in character or in plot or in dramatic situation may grip attention and sustain interest to some extent even when style fails. In other cases, style is the drama itself, it is meaning itself. Destroy style and nothing is left. 
The one-acts we presented may be extreme examples of this; the French, however, are stylists, formalists, and the focus on style itself will hold true of all their drama--Moliere, Giraudoux, Anouilh. 
There is wit in the style itself: in sounds, rhythms, cadences; pantomime can be witty (Al and Jane made this evident. Al in particular has the capacity to make a slight movement an arrest, a witty comment). Broadway too often fails with French drama because it tries to substitute the wise crack, the gimmick for style.

Style is the degree of variation from life, from nature; it is an agreed upon falsehood used to communicate a true comment, a true view of life, of man, of society. As realistic actors you found it difficult to agree on the variation from life: you wanted to resort to the "real" response, to the complete character, when the dramatist wanted focus thrown solely on the manifestation of man's emptiness: his empty speech, his empty emotions, his failure to communicate, his machine qualities. 

Style is Focus. Style permits no diversion of attention. Style throws a sharp, clear, bright light exactly where the dramatist wants it. In Bald Soprano the focus must be on the cascades of words that drown out everything else in our absurd world.  To throw focus on character, as M kept doing, blurs the focus. If we get interested in the individual, we are distracted from the dramatist's comment on the state of man. We should not be interested in personality. When emotion overflows, as M let it, we are again brought back to the personal and we are confused as to dramatic purpose. On Friday night M achieved the brilliance of the impersonal style. She achieved the tonal quality and the pace necessary to throw focus on language. She still lacked the ability to time a line in such a way that it gave the audience the maximum of enjoyment: the ability to lift a single world out of a rush of words so that it sticks in the mind and telegraphs ahead that the line will have a surprise at the end which will be released with a snap. On Saturday she began to play with an audience in mind, she included the audience in her timing--not enough, but she had progressed far. She has moved in the right direction. The audience reaction, whether laughter, through tears or what you will, is an integral part of every drama, realistic or non-realistic. Each line, each sequence, each scene, each act is designed to produce a definite effect on the audience.

I hear actors in Ibsen and in Shakespeare saying line after line with no idea of what it should do to an audience, who should be adding up every moment. An actor so lost in emotion or in character, or in situation that his audience sense is not alert is not completely an actor. He may be merely an impersonator, or a bundle of personal emotions. To be truthful is important, but truthful to what? He has not been completely truthful until he has been true to the author’s purpose, which is to illuminate a truth: to make an audience see the truth in this viewpoint of character or situation or state. Develop truth in this viewpoint of character or situation or state. Develop character, inner states, etc., in improvisations, but the moment you step on stage in rehearsal (don’t wait for performance), realize that your job as an actor is to communicate, reveal, illuminate this truth to an audience.

RB has an excellent grasp of all these principles. His mind is alert to meanings, his speech has clarity and direction, his ear catches rhythms and tunes in sequence; he is quick to sense the build in a scene, and is fairly alert to the moment to play an opposite, although he did not always do it with the agility he used in Life with Mother.  This sense of opposites is a quality you all need to achieve  (J brought off some good ones in leader: My Darling). This variation in tonal qualities is an essential in style in realism or non-realism. A good dramatist writes with orchestration in mind. He puts characters together who complement one another, or oppose one another, or harmonize, etc. If actors are all speaking on the same pitch, at the same pitch, the same rate, it should be clear to the director that the actors have not found the character traits which the drama requires. Learn to listen to the symphony of your drama even as you respond “truthfully”.

J began to sense the need to do this playing of opposites. Sometimes she brought it off, but too often she got caught in a rush that kept her from crystallizing, from clinching, what she wanted to do. She needs to get a tighter grip on her material, a stronger discipline, which will make her land her points as decisively as R does. J quickly caught the over all style--now learn to make that middle caesura in a line and to land and sustain the end of a line.  
P needs the same discipline only more of it. I think perhaps he has a fear that truth and style are incompatible, that reality and style are enemies. The opposite is true: style is more real than reality for it throws focus on reality, on the essense of reality, whereas doing everything that accompanies reality distracts from focus on the point to be made. What P does is real, is truthful, but there is too much of it. Style comes from the word “stylus” which is a kind of chisel which chisels away all the extraneous matter leaving the clear image exposed. P needs to use a stylus and get rid of all the unnecessary bits that obscure the truth he wants to convey. When he can do this, there may be a real actor exposed.

Sue has an excellent comic sense; she gives totally into what she is going to do—totally and fearlessly trusting her sense of theatre. Her audience communication is excellent. She has a good sense of fun on stage that is kept in form. 
M achieved this sense of enjoyment in the last two performances. He managed to suggest that there was a lot more that he could give if he wanted to, that there was more restrained that coming over—an excellent dramatic device. In the first two performances he was not landing and clinching lines and points, not permitting the audience to express their enjoyment. After Thursday, he took focus and kept it.

CH needs to learn to find the right way to communicate a line, an idea, and then to be able to repeat that way indefinitely. Crystallization is an essential. Without it you may be a victim of all the things that can happen during a performance. Crystallization does not mean that the creative forces are stifled. Rather, it frees them, for form releases tensions, fears. With a stronger sense of form disciplining him, CH would have sensed that the right way to land the big points was a straight to the point delivery. All such lines got big audience response. When he used effusions around a line, focus went from the line to the effusion of emotion. Result: no laugh. “Sucks his thumb” failed nearly every time for this reason: the straight, strong vocal attack could have been a strong opposite to the image conveyed by the line. The sense of direction toward the final effect should start during the memorization process or bad habits will be set up. Choreographed patterns must be strictly maintained. Experiment while you are finding them. Once found, intensify but maintain them.

T’s problem was much the same as P’s: concentration on emotion rather than the style of expressing the emotions.

And style is an aid to memory. Once a physical pattern is established, muscles remember and strain is taken off the mental process . Set up a total pattern of muscle response and then trust your muscles.

The lover interludes were delightful: a good example of wit and meaning in pantomime. Al, in particular, has learned how to create suspense in a single small movement. Here is excellence in focus: he does so little, but how meaningful the little is! J participated, responded beautifully. She can afford to heighten suspense before beginning a movement. These interludes demonstrated how feeling may be cast into form, choreographed, and remain true.

The first half of New Tenant is a test of acting not many would like to take. It runs the gamut of emotion which has to be played against a blank wall for too long a time. S acts totally; every fibre of her being participates; from the toes up she is responding. In this drama, she overcame to a large extent her reluctance to amplify to the size of the auditorium. She learned to put a stop in the middle of a line very effectively, and to land lines. She needs to play vocal opposites, and for this purpose she must achieve a well-directed straight tone: directed against the hard palate. Such a tone, undercutting sharply, would have brought off the comic effects which were needed--the sudden sharp contrasts and contradictions.

M can give you some exercises, hard palate exercises, and support from the ribs. 

Saturday night pauses got too long and too evenly spaced in this opening sequence. The tension did not mount in nightmare horror. S believed in the feeling back of the pauses, but the audience did not. This is another instance of the need for the actor to keep his finger on the pulse of the audience. M should have begun to break them with more and more, faster, faster, and more relentless machine-like measuring and racing—anything to recapture attention. The result was that the mover’s scene started at a disadvantage. Al’s first response did not register sufficiently and perhaps he panicked a bit. In an instance like this pull a surprise, something that surprises yourself as well as the audience: a vocal squeak of unusual timbre, or an exaggerated jump out of the way—followed by the shrug and smile: do anything to capture interest rather than let the performance lag. Something needed to be done to set up again the comic business of carrying in small articles as if they weighed tons. Al is a superb pantomimist. He plays unrealities as if they were the most real things in the universe. He has the creative invention of a child magnified to theatre proportions. It is complete belief in his created reality that is comic and believable. Al has what F calls “an actor’s commitment to pretend”.  And Al’s pretence is truth. He believes in it, and acts it with every muscle of his body in use but control doing only what must be done--no more. Because his concentration is so true, so real, he makes his audience believe as he does in his fantasy. In his work you may see exemplified the essentials of style I described in this paper. Al does not “try” to do an act, he simply does. He does not think, analyze—he goes into action on the spot. Too many of you think it over for a time and then “try” to act. This is the mark of a non-actor.  

F’s work was excellent too—in concentration, in doing, in playing responses. His voice and body do not have the flexibility necessary for range and variety, but his concentration, timing, responses, are excellent and comic.

The Man is a more difficult role than we had anticipated. M’s voice with its lyricism got in his way sometimes, but for the most part he controlled it pretty well. We needed to build with a more shot-gun-machine-gun effect. Somehow we missed a bit in the nightmare, cumulative effect of this piece, especially on Saturday. Wednesday and Friday we were traveling in the right direction.

The importance of style which you have become aware of must carry over to all drama: Ibsen, Shakespeare, etc.

Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco

Context:

The following question is an edited version of emails I got from the director of a high school production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

The Alvina Krause critique has been slightly edited as well.

Question:

I'm finding Berenger difficult to explain to students. Why is it that the one person who has the will power to resist the "epidemic" is the one who in the first act consistently says he doesn't feel comfortable in his own skin, that he just "can't get used to life" and turns to alcohol daily? I feel I've discovered that one of his strengths is that he is not very concerned with what others think of him (wrinkled clothes, mussed hair, always late)--and he's not particularly observant (he doesn't even take notice of the first rhino that runs through), which seems to justify why he isn't swept away by mob mentality---but what is the significance of his drinking? Why does Ionesco make the "strong" one, the one who finds the transformation of people into rhinos "unnatural", distinctly an alcoholic?   Is it the "unlikely" hero element?[so many of those who turned into rhinos are of "superior" character--and tell him so (Jean, Papillon, Botard, etc)] I'm afraid I'm missing something….what I can put together now is this idea of the fallibility/weakness of the human condition is what makes us truly human. The other characters who strive for "superiority" and perfection, who rationalize everything have lost their "humanity".  The modern/anti hero is he who retains his humanity, and his strength stems from what may be taken for weakness (what makes us special/individual makes us strong) and life is meant to be difficult--a struggle vs. utopia.

There are 2 difficulties in communicating this to both my teenage cast and to an audience:

1) Berenger is not happy with himself or his life...he feels awkward and unhappy/uncomfortable in every situation except when he's drinking. So, the mesage here is not a clean and inspiring "Be yourself! March to your own drummer--don't worry about what others think, be happy with who you are!"  There's something more...and the "switch" must be strong and apparent. (Its no longer about me and my happiness...its about all of us/humanity)

2) There's such a difference (I believe) in the way teenagers now view alcoholism than in the 40s or 50s. I'm afraid it not just a humanizing "weakness", but seen as a very specific and taboo choice. It has a stigma. And although I have made some cuts to the script and tried to pare down the alcoholic/drinking references, it certainly can't be eliminated. This is a very specific but important challenge.

Finally... my greatest challenge is to take a very intellectual idea/theme (Berenger  as anti-hero) and put it into sensory terms for my students. I've been reminded by looking at your archived notes of a way to start the questioning/search:   "If I were.... struggling in school/work and with my family/friends (a very teenage experience!)...so much so that I can only take refuge in meaningless, detrimental and temporary behavior (drinking/ video games/internet relationships) If I were.... at a point where I knew I wanted to attempt to make a change to feel better....If, at the same time, I saw everyone around me being seduced by something I KNOW is wrong.......If they wouldn't listen to me and became unrecognizable..............etc.  Would the urgency of this emergency--one that is so deep that it hits me in the core of my being--stir in me an absolute knowledge of who I am and what I know is right--so much so that I could fight as if my life depended on it---and suddenly CARED to preserve it?

Response:

The great Twentieth-Century British actor John Gielgud said, “Style is knowing what play you’re in”. How deceptively simple, especially when you consider what “knowing” truly suggests about what actors must do in their behavior-based creative process. 

The word “style” refers to the process of how artists create and how art communicates. It emerges powerfully in the final stage of creating a work of art when the artist eliminates every unnecessary detail (unnecessary to what?); but it is present in the initial selecting of the elements the artist will create with.
For the actor those elements are human behavior.

This beginning selection process is when asking the right questions of a play is vital to the final production.

It seems to me you’re asking great questions, but ones that have no answers in Rhinoceros because the play doesn’t concern itself with them.

Rhinoceros is not a character drama. The play isn’t “about” complex motivations  and Berenger’s interior life. A critic—I can’t remember who just now—said that Berenger isn’t Everyman,  he’s Any Man. And I would add that not only is he not a hero but that he's not an anti-hero either. He drinks for the same reasons that a lot of people drink—and I’ll bet your students know lots of adults who do just that. The play neither applauds nor condemns Berenger's drinking even if Jean does.

He’s just an ordinary guy with no special traits that account for his being the last human being in the play. Why Berenger is the last man standing is not what the play has been building to. 

And there’s meaning in that.

Rather than go into more detail just now, I am attaching the critique of the production of Rhinoceros that Alvina Krause produced at The Theatre in Eagles Mere with her student company in the 1963 summer season.  Perhaps it can address some of your concerns and help you to clarify the whole attack you will take in helping young actors to create and to communicate this play.

Read it, let its implications play upon your own creative mind, and then by all means write back to me if you continue to have questions or discover other concerns about the production that the critique doesn’t fully address for you.

Critique of Rhinoceros:

French drama is drama of speech, of words, of composition of words and phrases, of expressive musical nuances. Of dissonance, of cacophonies, of sounds in conflict that play against each other epitomizing ideas in conflict. Even if a blackout occurred and the audience could not see the actors, or could only see shadows of actors, the sound of the dialogue, the language itself, should keep them rooted in their seats responding, laughing, thinking, stimulated by words, language, speech. Action, gesture, facial expression only supplement and heighten this drama of words. The language of wit, of the intellect, the language of form, of explicit meanings, of connotations aimed at the mind, not the senses. Even clowning is aimed at the head through laughter. Pantomime must have the same sharp clarity that the French language has: funny, ironic, but with sharp, clean, clear aim. Think of the word “brilliance” — what does it mean? -- sharp clear light, revealing vividly sharp, clear outlines, vivid highlights. This is what French drama must have: brilliance — even when it is dramatizing the meaninglessness of speech today.

Focus. Focus. Focus. It is the central element of style. Without it: no style, no meaning. The French are superb masters of drama that aims at the head, drama of ideas, of intellect, of controversy. When you perform or direct French drama, shed your love of playing emotional involvements; discard your probings into psychological roots of character, and in heaven’s name, alter your concept of sincerity. Three abstract lines arranged in meaningful pattern produce an impact as sincere and as truthful as sobs from the bottom of your souls – perhaps even more because all that is extraneous has been stripped away and the single, penetrating idea is starkly before us. Is a branch of a tree, stripped of leaves, of bark, not more meaningful in its nakedness than it is covered with leaves, dust, bugs? Have you ever seen bare roots, dry, clean, stark? Are they not more meaningful in their emphasis on sheer form, in their pure emphasis on the essence of the function of roots, than all the twistings and clinging soil and bug bitten markings? When it comes to the meaning, the stark reality of roots, are they not “sincere”, “truthful” revelations? And so with emotions, with responses, with character traits. And emotion revealed in one single act which receives focus will say more and say it more truthfully than the whole realistic combination of muscle reactions which are life responses. One slight turn of the body can say more of human despair than all the writhings and sobbings which we believe mean “feeling so deeply”. Study statues: frozen despair, thought, etc., frozen character traits. Yes, revise your concepts of sincerity and truth, for your realistic acting interfered with projection of Ionesco’s concept. Yes, all style is rooted in realism – just as the bare branch and bare roots are “real”.

Now: in acting, this requires first the mental ability to penetrate to the essence of the author’s meaning; in this case: before we can meet man’s dilemma, find answers, we must face his complete emptiness expressed in clichés of thought, of words, of behavior. You knew this with your heads. I am not sure that you had let the horror of this realization become a total experience, whether the thought had become a “depth” experience. For J it had and this lent distinction to his work (not always thrown into sharp enough focus by production and direction elements). It was behind M’s work, and this led to the most brilliant Ionesco of the production the Friday night Daisy/Berenger dance episode which was brilliantly executed and which heightened the frozen horror back of it all. These were moments to remember. These two performers here captured Ionesco style, to project Ionesco’s meaning in his theatrical terms of entertainment through vaudeville, through clowning, through pantomime, anything you will, and behind it a dramatist’s concern about man’s dilemma. We needed more such moments. R and M caught it for a moment in Act I when Berenger started reading the report rhythmically and M picked it up. For a moment: a group response to the Logician which fell into a quick, rhythmic response – if only you had heightened the vocal pattern to match it! F was on the verge many times of bringing it off, but was still a bit afraid of heightening and directorially sufficient focus was not put on him at such moments.

You no doubt see by now that this kind of performance requires the greatest vocal and physical skills of expression. It requires voices and speech production skills of great flexibility and the ears of musicians with good senses of pitch. You all tend still to play the same tone, the same note, the same intensity, the same pitch instead of playing opposites and variations. The very sound of the drama, even though it were spoken in a foreign language, should have meanings, implications, as music has meaning as each cadence, each phrase, each rest, trill, etc., touches off vibrations in the listener. So this spoken drama should do. It may be necessary to work for these effects technically, but the end result is the essence of reality: in this case the reality of emptiness. And physically you are inexpressive or only partially expressive with no sense, no true sense, of the body and its parts as an expressive instrument. R has learned to use his body effectively, pleasantly, fluidly, expressively. G has some sense of expressional movement. When he develops it he may be a great comedian: all elements are there. M has a good beginning. G is stiff in the spine. F began to see what was demanded. As a basis for further work, remember the day we discovered oppositions in body positions, in postures and movement; remember the effect of “move --- freeze” catching you in an opposition movement. Work on it: everyone. You may not need it in such heightened form as in this drama, but it will affect all of your acting, making it more vital, vibrant, meaningful. Your body, your voice; these are your instruments. Train them to be the best. I remind you again: no pianist who is a great pianist will play on an inferior instrument.

I suggest that you study carefully the pictures of the production. They are extraordinarily good, and they are most revealing. They are frozen action: they are heightened intensity achieved through strong focus. They have what we should have achieved throughout. They show how close we came to excellence. The one of Daisy and Berenger speaks volumes: bodies say futility expressed in meaningless action, the eyes say horror and incapability of action. Study these pictures. In the Act I full shot note: if we had turned R’s body just a bit more to right stage keeping his beard and hands as they are, we would have thrown focus much strongly on Berenger, and thereby emphasized his attitude as a contrast to all the clichés of petty emotions. The tilt of S’s head could have emphasized more by line the focus on Berenger. So throughout the play we needed this careful attention to seemingly small details and frozen moments that point meanings. Ionesco does not lecture nor preach, but the theatrical impact can make you think if you want to. It is to be regretted that we have no vocal record of the show to study for it might have pointed up for you the moments that came closest to brilliance and the ones that failed or were inadequate.

L’s work was very fine throughout, yet we could not quite bring off the last act dialogue because we had not quite found the balance of tones we needed, the contrast and especially what we needed was to find the quality that would most forcefully express and comment on the banality and emptiness of clichés of speech and thought throughout. This is the most difficult scene in the play and we needed more experimentation with devices that would have produced the dry as dust emptiness in the lawyer that we achieved in the logician, in the chief (which needed heightening in the Old Gentleman). M came closest to getting it in his ex-school teacher the last night when he worked less hard. For F it crystallized when we tried the answering service device. He did not quite hit it with L so that the audience suddenly through laughter would wake to the horror of hearing their own banality.

The horror, theatrical and otherwise, needed intensifying. G has a wonderful sense of the value of words: he relishes them, tastes them, uses them. This sense was a wonderful reinforcement for his excellent physical clowning. But the horror of the act needed to intensify and build and build. Man turning into beast should have been more horrifying that we made it. This needed careful moment by moment building through careful selection of detail, through maybe cinematic techniques and a culmination in production elements. We settled too easily for no production. Because a technical problem is difficult to solve does not mean it must go unsolved. Jumping over the ground row was no substitute for a wall demolished. The end of that act must be theatrically shattering. All “effects” should have been more carefully planned and executed. The exit of Madame Boeuf did not come to its climax because a hand was visible giving R the skirt and so “all that was lift of the woman was a skirt” did not come off. Ends of acts generally needed more careful timing and implication. The office scene went dead toward the end, needed production detail. What should Berenger do after “capitulate” – Jump into bed? Rush on out? Eat a carrot? We stopped short of some frightening implications about one little man alone in a world of rhinoceroses. What should the last scene of the play say? Or do? Or imply?

Instead of discussing each person’s work individually in this, I have tried to clarify an overall approach to Ionesco in the hope you would apply it specially. Because I have discussed flaws means only that we still have much to learn; but you are well on to achieving style. The objective of this discussion is to sharpen your awareness of what is involved in style and to encourage you to work toward it.

Measure for Measure

Context:

The June 17 post asked questions of three plays: The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. In that post I responded to the Shrew and Merchant questions.

This is the question about Measure for Measure: Why does Isabella say nothing at the end of MEASURE--is the Duke her true match or is she being misused?

Response:

All plays cast lifestuff into storytelling form. The form gives meaning to and communicates the stuff. The playwright is ever concerned with how to stay true to the realities of lifestuff while accommodating the conventions of story form. Part of the continuing engagement of the audience with a play is their experience of the interaction between truth to lifestuff and the requirements of story form. How far is the audience willing to let Truth to Life strain in order to get the most theatrical engagement from Story Form?

With parts of Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, truth to lifestuff and the conventions of story find an uneasy balance. But Shakespeare mines gold from such seeming problems; for example, the fairytale silliness of the caskets codicil in Signiore Belmont’s will dramatizes something about wealth and entitlement in a play where mercantilism and privilege play significant roles.

Some critics think that by the time he wrote Measure for Measure, Shakespeare had outgrown the form of romantic comedy epitomized by Twelfth Night and As You Like It; that perhaps with M4M he wanted to demonstrate the shortcomings of the form. We happily celebrate the partnerings at the finales of Twelfth Night and As You Like It because the stories of these plays are about the rocky paths to love and because the form demands that the characters end the play in couples. But the story of M4M is not about the difficulties of coupling, except literally and even then only legally. It is not a romantic comedy. And yet it ends with the romantic comedy coupling convention. Uneasy fit.

But I think it’s best to embrace the so-called problems with this play and see where they might lead. If form is meaning, perhaps those problems and the uneasiness between Life and Story are part of its meaning.

M4M is a genius example of Life asserting itself against Form and Form pushing back to give meaning to Life. It dramatizes the struggle between the power of sex and the force of legal restraint, both secular and religious. Society must make laws that regulate the citizenry and those laws often regulate sexual behavior; but the earth must be peopled and that rule is enforced by the irresistible complex driving force of sex.

Measure for Measure says (pace Michael Crichton) “Sex finds a way”.

Almost all critical attention on this play is devoted to the Duke/Angelo/Isabella story and most of the performing interest is with Angelo and Isabella: I want to do Measure for Measure—you know, Angelo and Isabella and okay the Duke too, but then, rats, I have to include all that Pompey/Overdone/Elbow/Abhorson/Barnardine/Froth/Lucio stuff, though of course, I can cut a lot of that since it’s just comic relief with old jokes that nobody gets anyway.
We thus run the risk of concluding that the real play, the real meaning, happens only in the grave scenes of dark corners. But what the whole play is dramatizing includes the roisterous comedy subplot that takes more stage time and has more characters than such plots in any of the other comedies. Why is this? If it were just for the comedy, just to give the clowns in the company something to entertain the groundlings with, the play would need much less of it.
We avoid this substory, I think, because we don’t think it’s funny and because productions create with these scenes not comedy but tedium. Too often actors present detailed characterizations that demonstrate how inventive the actors can be when Shakespeare asks only for single-stroke clowns who focus on the situation and not on character complexity. Too often we get clever, charming Alfred Doolittles when Shakespeare asks for simple Elbows and unimaginative Pompeys.

Alvina Krause’s description of the mechanicals in her discussions of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream applies to the clowns of M4M (See blog posts for May 20 and May 22). And Beyond the Fringe, the comedy review that introduced Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook to the world, offers two wonderful tracks: So That’s the Way You Like It is a brilliant parody of Shakespeare, attention to which can yield insights into creating the several aspects of Shakespearean production, including clown characters. Sitting on the Bench is a hilarious monologue by a simple, literal, unimaginative working class man—a Shakespeare clown. 

Then into the mix of clowns toss Lucio the fool with his lordly blinders on, let him stir things up, and you get raunchy hilarious comedy.

With a point.

As Lucio and Pompey both say, Execute those who have sex outside of marriage and you will soon have an empty town. 
When the Provost offers Pompey the Tapster Bawd a chance to become Abhorson the Executioner’s Helper (too many executions recently for one man to handle), he says If it keeps me out of prison, I’ll happily take the morally upstanding legal profession of Executioner of Human Life over the venal illegal one of Procurer of Human Sex. 
Barnardine, the drunken criminal long forgotten by the criminal justice system, refuses to be executed at just anybody’s whim.

And Froth, the gentleman who may have done something untoward with/to Constable Elbow’s wife. Or maybe not.
And all the characters who don’t actually appear--Master Rash, Master Caper, young Dizzy, Master Shoe-tie, and more—all of whose stories multiply the sense of life lived with vigor in Vienna beneath, beyond, around the rules.

Religion and Government create rules of clear, clean absolutes and humanity is expected to live within those artificial moral and legal grids. But in the streets of M4M’s Vienna, life is messier than the law can ever order. Each comic scene makes an implicit comment on the serious scenes that surround it—a sort of yes, but you’ve forgotten something. It all adds up to a teeming, complex human society with life and sex lived energetically outside the box, outside the lines, all over the grid. No laws either secular or religious can contain the sheer inventive vitality of the power of sex in human life.

Try to stifle that power within yourself as the Duke and Angelo and Isabella have done and it will assert itself aggressively (see Euripides’ Hippolytus) as these three discover publicly by the end of the play.

The Law versus Human Sexual Behavior opposition exists along a continuum from Complete License on one end to Stifling Restraint on the other with Responsible Freedom somewhere at the midpoint. In M4M, the Duke, having allowed society to move into Complete License, is trying to find a way to get things closer to Stifling Restraint by having his deputy Angelo step in to enforce strict, rigid laws he has let go slack. The plan is then for him to return to rule without having seemed to waffle. He makes no mention of Responsible Freedom.

The Duke goes undercover to observe the governing and the governed but soon finds himself working behind the scenes not only to keep his government functioning but to prevent Angelo from abusing it, and eventually publicly to reveal Angelo’s moral duplicity.

The story form of the ruler secretly moving among his people must needs end with the ruler learning lessons from the people and, armed with insights, setting everything to rights, which in the conventions of romantic comedy includes the ultimate partnering of the main characters. M4M’s Duke has a lot to learn about people and how they truly behave. He’s no Prospero and Vienna isn’t an enchanted island under his magical sway. At every turn people assert themselves and subvert the Duke’s plans—even as he improvises on-the-spot solutions to breaking crises. In their determined vitality, the characters threaten to subvert the very conventional givens of the story form they find themselves in. Be absolute for death, the Duke/Friar tells a receptive Claudio, but the moment Claudio senses the surest chance of living, he chucks the Friar’s counsel and begs his sister to give up her virginity for his life. Once Angelo thinks he’s bedded Isabella, the Duke assures the Provost that he, Angelo, will pardon Claudio. That’s the way the story should go; but Angelo doesn’t play by the rules, so the Duke improvises a decision to execute the criminal Barnardine in Claudio’s place (a grotesque mirroring of the conventional bed trick the Duke employs to deal with the Angelo and Isabella dilemma), but Barnardine simply refuses: he’s hung over and he’s not dying today.

And throughout it all Lucio, the gadfly in the Duke/Friar’s plotting ointment, buzzes about to keep things from ever settling into predictability.

For a play that dramatizes the power of sexuality (resistance is futile), Shakespeare chooses as his main protagonists a head of government who has a complete bosom (a protected heart) that the dribbling dart of love cannot pierce; a young woman who avoids life and sex by entering a strict religious order whose law she wishes had a more strict restraint upon the sisterhood; a deputy who has repressed his sexual urges and turned his blood to ice water and who doth rebate and blunt his natural edge/With profits of the mind: study and fast.

But sex finds a way.

The icicley deputy cracks first because, while previous experience may have prompted his carnal retreat, it also etched a fault line in his defenses.

Both Angelo and Isabella begin their interview with formal, passionless interchanges. Isabella can’t even say the words for sexual activity. And were she here alone, she would leave after Angelo’s first refusal and Claudio would die. But boundaryless Lucio urges her on. She gets more aggressive. Angelo remains cold and civil. Isabel retreats. But Lucio urges, insists, infuses her with energy and finally her passion asserts itself. She speaks fervently, moves forcefully, eventually perhaps a lock of hair comes loose from beneath her wimple. Her chest heaves with her breathing. She falls to her knees, her hands clasped in prayer to the high heavens. When she says Go to your bosom, she may be close enough to him to lay her flat hand on his chest.

Even Lucio is impressed.

And after she leaves, the upright bloodless deputy has been knocked off balance: What’s happening to me? And am I responsible? or is she?

Ohmygod, what is it that I am thinking?

Angelo finds himself overwhelmed by sexual need--Now I give my sensual race the rein--and he gives Isabella the utimatum:  fuck me and save your brother; refuse and he dies.
 

At the jail, why, after counseling Claudio to accept death, does the Duke stay and eavesdrop on Isabella’s conference with him? How interesting that the Duke makes a point of calling the Provost in just so that he can tell him to leave him here. And the first thing he says to Isabella after the Provost leaves is that she is beautiful (to a near-nun). Then he adds that she is good. Did he stay out of simple curiosity or has something about Isabella intrigued him? 

How might a production communicate this?

And such a production might stage Isabella’s passionate outburst with Claudio so that it mirrors her outburst with Angelo, linking the two in the audience’s imaginations and suggesting a similarity between her effect on Angelo and, in a subtler and as yet nonconscious way, on the Duke.

In a flash the Duke comes up with the bed trick as the best way to trap Angelo. Story form indeed.

And Isabella agrees to it—something the Isabella who asked for more restraints from Sister Francesca would not do.

Eventually this all leads to the scene outside the jail when, learning that Claudio has been executed, Isabella weeps and I think falls, even if only momentarily, into the Duke/Friar’s arms. Something happens here. To both of them. With Angelo she falls to her knees, perhaps touches him. Here she falls into the Friar’s arms and sobs.

Is this the first time such a thing has happened to the Duke of dark corners? To Isabella?

And what an image of novice and friar.

Over the course of the play, Isabella and the Duke share more intimacy with the each other than either has ever shared with anyone. By the time of the public meeting of Act V both have been changed by their immersion in the messy complexities of life, especially of sex.

Of course, the critic may write in authoritative conceptual terms, but the theatre practitioner must ask: What will communicate this to the audience? What cumulative sequences of experiences will take the audience meaningfully from Isabella’s There is a vice that most I do abhor to her shouting out in the public square Virgin-violator! Fornication! Concupiscible intemperate lust!

What photo-op moments will lead the audience experientially from the Duke’s I have ever lov’d the life removed… I love the people,/But do not like to stage me to their eyes to For your lovely sake, give me your hand, and say you will be mine before all his people present in the public square?

The public finale begins with Isabella’s passionate denunciation of Angelo and the Duke’s feigned refusal to believe her. Then comes Mariana and her seemingly unsuccessful charge against Angelo. Then the Duke hands questioning over to Escalus as he, the Duke, “must leave for a while”—at which, surely the audience laughs, being as it is a confidante in the working out of the story. The sequent unmasking of the Friar/Duke leads to Angelo’s wish for speedy execution and the Duke’s ruling that Angelo must marry Mariana. Then he says to Isabella, I am still attorneyed to your service, and she replies with a deference that indicates how all respond to their sovereign ruler in this formal public setting: O, give me pardon,/That I, your vassal, have employ’d and pain’d/Your unknown sovereignty!

So far so good.

But still the Duke pretends that Claudio is dead. He’s got a great Claudio reveal moment planned. Why does he push executing Angelo as “measure for measure” with the execution of Claudio when Claudio is alive? (I love that in the situation that is the only mention of the title there is actually no equitable measure for measure.) Mariana begs Isabella to intercede. The Duke ups the ante. Mariana presses and Isabella does the passionate, Grace-full thing, both of them reminding us of Lucio and Isabella in Angelo’s chamber. And Isabella raises herself above everyone else in the play for generosity of spirit, of Grace, of forgivingness.

Something big, I think, happens to the Duke in response to Isabella as something earlier had happened to Angelo. And I think the Duke has been pushing for it even if he’s not quite certain what “it” actually will be.

(And as always the theatre practitioner within me asks of the critic, And how is this dramatized and communicated in production?)

What I find more intriguing than Isabella’s silence here is the Duke’s decision outside the jail to tell her that Claudio has been beheaded with the rationale that she’ll be so much happier when she finds out that it’s not true. At this moment Lifestuff and Story Form merge. As the one who’s making all this happen, the Duke practically addresses the audience directly, practically says: It’ll make such a great climax to hold off telling her and keep the genie in the bottle a little longer; I’ll get a bigger payoff from her reaction when she finally finds out. And so will you. The play would fail as a story if the Duke were to reveal the truth to Isabella at the jail, even if truth to lifestuff suggests that that is when it would happen. The audience delights in their confederacy manipulating lifestuff for the promise of greater story delight to come. And when in this final public scene the Duke pretends still that Claudio is dead, delaying the reveal even further, the audience is still his collaborator, heightening the anticipation of Isabella’s response.

When finally it comes, it is wordless.

In Shakespeare.

The Claudio reveal astonishes everyone, not just Isabella. The scene is alive with gasps and movement and vocalizations. But no poetry, no words. The play gives her no opportunity to speak with Claudio, as the Duke immediately tops in with his proposal.

I think the Duke is nearly as surprised as Isabel is at his voicing his proposal to her at this precise moment. And it’s that mutual surprise, rather than some sensed negative response from Isabella, that prompts his But fitter time for that.

Another way of imagining this moment: What happens during the close-up on Isabella after the Duke’s proposal? I think the answer is: Not much. For the instant after Claudio is unhooded her attention is on him, her mind reeling with all that has led to this moment. The Duke says what he says. Cut to a close-up of Isabella whose focus goes to the Duke as she registers what the Duke is saying. Then BAM a close-up on the Duke as he also hears himself saying it and registers his own surprise. And then perhaps a shared understanding from which comes But fitter time for that.

Just as this is not the occasion for Isabella to speak with Claudio--they will have lots to say to each other after this public gathering, whose central figure of absolute authority is the Duke--so it is not the time for so personal an interchange between her and the Duke. While it may be the occasion for passionate public denunciation of Angelo and a passionate plea for saving his life, this is not the place for intimate exchange. The Duke acknowledges as much with his But fitter time for that and moments later if you’ll a willing ear incline.

I think audiences who are experiencing the play in performance have less difficulty with Isabella's silence than do play readers and theatre practitioners. In production, the impact of the “problem” of Isabella’s lack of a response depends upon how the play has led up to that moment and how the last section of the play is performed.

I do think, however, that it’s ill-advised to make a definitive statement about “why Isabella is silent” and to provide a clear indication of what Isabella’s full response to the Duke is. At this moment, she surely doesn’t have a full and absolute response. And the Duke is right there with her. This will take some further offstage post-finale discussion.

From here til the end, the play is whirlwindy enough for the production to focus the audience on the fun of wrapping up the story form rather than on further psychologizing the characters. It’s not until now that, having resumed being the Duke, this man has any chance at all of imposing order on the vital chaos of all the lives he governs. He proceeds to the fun of dealing with Lucio, who in this scene practically literalizes the idea that some human passions will not conform to plan.

The final cataloguing of the mandatory couplings functions in the same way that a symphony lets its audience know the music is ending. And the audience freely goes along. There is some reason for the Duke to hope that Angelo and Mariana can make a go of it. His perception of a “quickening” in Angelo when it is revealed that Claudio is alive suggests a bit of joy in the possibility of life and his Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well might suggest that Angelo has indeed softened a bit through his ordeal and perhaps is returning to a former kinder, gentler Angelo; Lucio should do right by the woman he impregnated, though one quick response from him can tell us what the likelihood of that is; the Duke and Isabella have experienced intimacy with each other and as Friar and Novice have discovered compatibility.

But….

While Shakespeare's other comedies end with a promise of a future new world order of love, happiness and stability, Act V of Measure for Measure ends with the promise of an Act VI that will be rambunctious and surprising and just as unwilling to conform to artificial rules and patterns and forms as the rest of the play has been.

Perhaps the uncomfortable fit in this play between Lifestuff and Story Form is part of what’s being dramatized. Perhaps the play is dramatizing the impossibility of making definitive statements/predictions about human behavior as the all-too-pat partnerings at the end of romantic comedy prescribe. Perhaps it’s dramatizing the necessary, constant, continuing struggle between the human need for order, rules, restraint and the relentlessness of Lifestuff’s drives. And perhaps it is dramatizing the futility of assuming that there can ever be anything more than a temporary peace in that struggle.

Life will find a way.

Shrew, Merchant, Measure

Question:

My questions would be with the endings of any of three of Shakespeare's comedies: SHREW, MERCHANT, MEASURE, all viewed as problematic. Why does Isabella say nothing at the end of MEASURE--is the Duke her true match or is she being misused? Is Kate's final speech in this day and age chauvinistic or incredibly well-balanced, mature, and thoughtful? And what's with Portia's demand that Shylock turn Christian? I don't see the quality of mercy there--and then having to go back to Belmont in the fifth act and care about their silly lives...

I would love to hear any of these addressed if they strike your fancy. But truly the blog puts me in touch with something it is very easy to lose sight of--why theatre is something to devote yourself to that has nothing to do with the culture of entertainment.

Response:

Thanks for the generous comment about the blog.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the phrase “culture of entertainment” (“a fertile ground where one keeps hold among”) applied to how Sophocles keeps hold on his audiences as well as it does to the latest appeal to the shallowest of human needs for engagement?

Your questions articulate the essential problematic issue of each of these plays. And they are questions that probably will never find fully satisfying answers. I won’t try to be definitive in my responses since I don’t think that’s possible. Rather, I’ll jot down some ideas and perhaps they’ll provoke some thoughtful comments.

Shrew and Merchant in this post. Measure in the next one.

The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice

More obviously so than with other works of art, I think, plays exist in two time/places at once: they are real fragments of their past time of creation and they are also living reflections of their present time of production. The older the play, the more I think its “pastness” is part of its meaning and should be embraced in contemporary production.

With The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, the young playwright Shakespeare was showing off his wares with his takes on popular story forms. The shrewish woman went back to the mystery plays (Noah’s wife) and was still popular in Shakespeare’s time (the lost Taming of a Shrew) and the Jewish villain had found the spotlight with Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. In our time, "The Woman Question" goes back to the Nineteenth Century and continues to morph with the times and "The Jewish Question" must forever root itself in the horrors of the Twentieth Century Holocaust.

Where we are with each of these two “Questions” is what we bring to the pastness of these two plays in production.

The Taming of the Shrew

I think it’s unhelpful to view The Taming of the Shrew as a comedy in the form of As You Like It or Twelfth Night or even Much Ado about Nothing, all of which imply more complex characters and relationships than the plays Shrew is more like: A Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Also, the induction scene moves it one story telling step further from “reality”, presenting the story of Kate and Petruchio as a play within a play.

It’s a farce rooted in commedia traditions.

That means focus is on the situation and not the characters and that no character is ever in danger of being really hurt—slapstick. That means it requires two excitingly acrobatic actors animating their Kate and Petruchio masks.

More Punch and Judy than Benedick and Beatrice. Or perhaps Benedick and Beatrice a la Punch and Judy--energized, even elevated, by Shakespeare’s wit and language.

So, yes, Kate and P are equal matches for each other in wit, in vitality, intellect, sense of humor and comedy. Each is indeed what the other seeks in a mate.

Keep the focus on their mutual joy in the contest. If Petruchio’s fight is aimed at getting a wild and determined Kate to see and to value him without the need for macho posturing and if Kate’s fight is to keep him off-balance while she discovers if he’s worth her time, the play can work. It might help to remember that Kate was written for a male to play. I think the implication for the actress today is to focus her sexual and gender energies on the physical, carnival, farcical aspects of the part. If you create a rambunctious, circus-y, even gymnastic, play-within-a-play atmosphere, the play works.

But then there’s Kate’s last speech.

Doing the speech straightforwardly—even in a farce—I think won’t cut it today. We bring more than a century of concern over the relationship of the female to male-centric society, of women to men.

And for the same reason, if you’ve tried to create a character comedy with this speech as a thoughtful final note--disaster.

Not to mention that in the past decades we have become a culture that has even criminalized the kinds of physical interactions that Kate and Petruchio engage in.

The answer for Lynne Fontanne in her 1935 performance with husband Alfred Lunt still makes some sense: Play it with a subtext suggesting that this is just a pause in their tussle meant to placate Petruchio, who may perhaps then let his guard down so that, off stage, Kate can come back full force for another round. In effect, the conflict hasn’t been resolved. It will continue to be a joyful, farcical, on-going match.

It’s likely that however engaging and, yes, entertaining this play continues to be, any production will include aspects that rankle some contemporary sensibilities.

The Merchant of Venice

Merchant has two story forms in one play: the fairy tale romance and the folk tale turned into social, courtroom drama. The two stories come together with Portia as the bridge.

To take sides and to make absolute villains and heroes in this play is, I think, to miss something vital to its dramatic life. A production that makes “the Christians” as wicked as other productions make “the Jews” hasn’t done anything more to explore the lifestuff of the play. It’s subtler than that and more complex.

*First scene:

We get involved with the vitality and the gusto and the camaraderie of the boys of Venice and the older merchant who delights in their company. Love and Money. Friendship intertwined with Commerce.

*Second scene:

Vitality, laughter, excess and bigotry in the wealthy gated community of Belmont. And a romantic future controlled by secular contract.

*Third scene:

The Outsider confronts The Entitled.  Drama confronts Comedy. The Judaic Them and the Christian Us engage each other in the arena of secular law.

I think we are meant to find the Christians attractive, generous, life-loving people who are both consciously and unconsciously chauvinistic and racist and jingoist and xenophobic.

But no more so than everybody in the audience is.

It’s just another mirror held up to nature.

Merchant assumes the inevitability of such bigotry in the sustaining of any social group. Societies exist as much in relationship to what they are not as to what they are. There must always be those who are “in” (Us) and those who are “out” (Them) and there will always be tension when the “ins” and the “outs” must deal with one another. In the world of The Merchant of Venice that conflict reaches conclusive arbitration in the secular court of law, where the play says the dominant cultural group will always prevail. Antonio, the merchant of Venice, is of that group and will therefore prevail; Shylock, the Jew of Venice, is not and therefore will not.

What is being dramatized in the first Belmont scene with Portia and Nerissa?

Too often we get actresses way too old for the characters, which turns Portia into a proper, slightly stuffy, early middle-aged woman with just a hint of humor and Nerissa into her proper middle-aged gentlewoman in waiting. If, however, we imagine two young sorority sisters (one weathy and privileged, the other a scholarship student from a working class family) cracking each other up and laughing and poking fun at the fraternity jerks and townies that one of them has to deal with while the other eggs her on--we get a better idea of the comedic tone of the scene. It really is great comedy; it’s funny. The audience should be laughing, not just smiling in that tolerant bemused way typical of contemporary productions of Shakespeare.

Portia says, In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker, but he!…. and we laugh and become confederates in making fun of The Other: the English, the French, the German, the Neopolitan. The Other.

(If the play were written today, who might Portia include in the list? Who would you want to put on it?)

The subsequent casket scenes heighten the comedy of ridiculing The Other and also intensify our confederacy in the racism. When the Moroccan fails in his suit and leaves Belmont, Portia tosses off, Let all of his complexion choose me so. And, yes, we laugh.

The gold, silver, lead casket arrangement asks the suitors to conduct courtship in terms of wealth and contracts and riches and laws, which is common social currency in this world. So in their turns, both Bassanio and Portia woo in legal, contractual language. The ring device is Portia taking Bassanio’s legalistic language of courtship to its extreme just as in the law court she counters Shylock by taking his legal literalism to its extreme.

Love and Commerce and Bigotry and The Law.

We delight in the exuberant joy of living embraced by the boys of Venice and the girls of Belmont. We become involved in a world structured by the legal language of commerce in which a fairy tale romance is cast in the terms of a wacky legal construct set up by Portia’s father. At Belmont, the beautiful mount occupying the place in a Shakespeare comedy that is usually a refuge from the harsh realities of the court, everyone engages in bigotry and legalese in matters of life and love. And in Venice, Launcelot the clown even gets us to laugh with him as he ridicules his old blind father.

It’s funny and it’s harmless, right?

Then Portia goes to Venice and confronts the legal world of Us versus Them.

The trial scene should build in horror and suspense, but too often it flatlines because it focuses so much on Shylock the character (actors can’t resist it) that it steals focus from the terror of what Shylock is actually doing. The few minutes during which Shylock presses to extract his pound of flesh right there in court should have the excruciating tension of the best of melodramas; say, the last minutes of North by Northwest as Cary Grant hangs on to Eva Marie Saint with one hand and the edge of Mount Rushmore with the other as Martin Landau presses his foot onto Grant’s knuckles. Although we know how Grant gets out of it, the suspense of the scene still manages to grip even today. What could a production of Merchant learn from Hitchcock about the generating of suspense for the trial scene, especially the last minutes leading to Portia’s Tarry a little, which is akin to the gunshot on Mt. Rushmore?

There’s probably a courtroom scene in some film that illustrates this more felicitously than North by Northwest or lots of thrillers where the villain gets perilously close to cutting the heart out of the hero in a particularly intimate, graphic way, but I just couldn’t resist Hitchcock’s genius techniques for creating suspense.

You ask: What’s with Portia’s demand that Shylock turn Christian? I don’t see the quality of mercy there.

Let’s review the exact sequence of how that judgment comes about:

By the way, Portia says to Shylock, now that you’ve lost the case, the law stipulates that anyone seeking the death of one of Us can be executed. And then half your wealth goes to him and the other half to the state.

Mercifully, effortlessly, the Duke rescinds the death penalty. It's almost shocking how easily he can do it. He then gives Antonio half of Shylock’s wealth and decides that the state will collect only a fine rather than its entire other half. It reminds me of the court in Saint Joan that tells her in its mercy it won’t execute her; she’ll just spend the rest of her life in prison.

Shylock, like Joan, says You might just as well kill me.

In response, Portia asks Antonio what mercy he can show Shylock.

Antonio offers to turn down his half of Shylock’s wealth and asks the Duke to rescind the fine as well so long as Shylock agrees to put the other half of his wealth in trust for Lorenzo.

What Antonio wants in return for this mercy is for Shylock immediately to convert to Christianity and that upon his death, his whole estate should devolve to Lorenzo and Jessica.

The Duke tells Shylock to accept the offer or die.

Portia asks Shylock to respond.

I am content, he says. Do you mind if I leave now? I am not well.

I wish I knew how Shakespeare’s audience would have reacted were Antonio’s only stipulation the one naming Lorenzo Shylock’s heir. Why did Shakespeare need to make Antonio force conversion on Shylock? And without the slightest question from Portia or the Duke?

I think it has to do with Shylock’s brazen stepping out of his place as The Other in Our Society. And doing it in order to use the laws of the secular court for his own Old Testament purposes. He says if he doesn’t get his bond exactly as stipulated, he’ll bring the whole system down. After all, We, Antonio’s people, devise those laws and Shylock has stepped presumptuously way over what We think of as that Other’s line.

It’s true that most of the non-Jewish merchants of our Venices and the inhabitants of our Belmonts today—the perceived audience for the play--no longer live with a line drawn so absolutely between them and The Jew. It doesn’t mean that such inexorable lines no longer exist; it just means that they separate Us from different Thems now.

Still, there are today audiences of good people who have no trouble seeing the Duke’s and Antonio’s and Portia’s actions as merciful and soul-saving for Shylock. They approve the Christian magnanimity.

And there are those who see those actions as actually unconscious, though undeniable, bigotry.

And there are those who view it as the crowning proof that the play is out and out anti-Semitic.

I find similarity, though admittedly not quite analogy, in the attitude of some of American society today toward the push for same-sex marriage. Something is perceived as dangerously fractious and over-stepping and violating about The Homosexual Other presuming to push out the boundaries of secular and religious laws that We have created to define Our Healthy Society.

I don’t think Shylock is being punished for being a Jew; he’s being purged of the trappings that motivated him to threaten the majority society. And I think it’s being done more to neutralize him than mercifully to save him.

The external “social drama” story line ends with the trial, after which Portia (and we) flee the social realities of Venice for the fairy tale romance of Belmont and where, as you say in your question, things are “silly” by contrast. But we don’t forget Shylock when we’re at Belmont even if the Belmontians do. We don’t forget that it was Portia who spoke so eloquently as she articulated things about mercy that she had never before had to think about; and that it is she who subsequently makes no mention of Shylock to his daughter and who now re-engages in the fun of the ring deception (another wacky legal contract dictating personal relationships) as fully as previously she presided over the horrific trial.

Jessica has fled Shylock’s house (The man that hath no music in himself...Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils) for the freedom and frivolities of Belmont. But she is still The Other. Or at least The Outsider.

I live in a working class Latin neighborhood in Los Angeles where, I have jokingly remarked, Bullets is our second language. People have been gunned down only a few blocks from my house. 

I get in my car and twentyish minutes later I’m at a house party given by friends around the pool where the concerns are by comparison “silly” and where I am reminded of the first scene between Portia and Nerissa:

By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world says the beautiful young woman with the gorgeous clothes and hair and jewels; to which her companion responds, That would be understandable if you were as miserable as in reality you are truly fortunate.

A look from her beautiful friend and she adds: But I guess if you’re glutted with too much you can be just as unhappy as those who are starving and have nothing. Moderation in all things, eh?

And the lovely lively young rich girl replies, I know, I know, but it’s hard to live moderately when you have so much.

The Belmontians should be delightful and gregarious and fun and we should find ourselves giving over to their sillinesses. Each episode of this final movement of the play, however, should, I think, end with a close-up on Jessica.

My friend’s Mexican housekeeper was invited to one of those poolside parties and she came with her husband and teenage son. They sat like Jessicas and said little, even when they were actively included in conversations. But when one of the partygoers chided her boyfriend for losing that money clip she bought him and when she, yes, pushed him fully clothed into the pool and everyone laughed, who at the party thought to look to the housekeeper and her family to see how they were responding to the antics?

Productions that keep Jessica on the outside looking in throughout the act—even ending the play with her alone on stage holding the deed from "the rich Jew"—make sense, I think.

Play Shylock’s closed, musicless, calculating nature fully. And when he gets a chance to exact revenge, play him fearlessly as the Ultimate Other. But create a world that gladly treats him that way and in fact will keep him that way through its social mores as well as its laws. He devises his diabolical bond only after Antonio smacks him with his and after this is over, I’ll go right back to spitting on you.

And when The Other hammers at the system that keeps it all humming along, the system neutralizes him.

Play Portia’s vitality and her grace, her intellect and wit, her sense of humor and her great generosity, but play her bigotry and her spoiled-rich-girlness too. One does not preclude the other.

Play Antonio’s anti-Semitic hatred of Shylock as fully as you play his bountiful generosity to Bassanio. One does not preclude the other.

While there is no necessity to play Antonio’s love for Bassanio as a wholly out older gay man’s obsession with a young man who freely takes advantage of that obsession (productions, for example, that set the Venice scenes in a gay bath house), there is also no reason to underplay the otherwise irrational intensity of Antonio’s love.

The ambiguity is the point.

The play starts with ambiguity: In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. A few minutes later, when Bassanio lays it all out for Antonio and Antonio pledges to borrow money to help him, we have a good inkling why, even if Antonio knows not why.

And after all the couplings at the finale of the play, Antonio the Merchant of Venice is left the lone outsider.

Perhaps Jessica isn’t the last to leave the stage.

That Shakespeare was a transcendent genius who saw things in his world that his contemporaries didn’t doesn’t mean he therefore saw the world as we see it, though it’s easy for us to wish it were so.

Perhaps he saw deeper than either his world or ours sees things.

In order to write a play dramatizing the inevitable if unfortunate necessity of bigotry and racism, the necessity of creating The Other to contrast The English, he was a man of his time and so he created The Jew, the heathen, the joyless money-lender, who gets hoist with the legal system. If today he were writing for an audience of The West he might create The Muslim, the jihadist, the soulless terrorist (How dare we afford them legal rights?), however narrow and bigoted--and uninformed by firsthand experience--both of these depictions may necessarily be.

If he were writing today with the American Evangelical Christian Right as his audience, he might easily dramatize The Homosexual as The Other and The Homosexual Other would surely get his comeuppance. Rather than stoning him to death, the merciful Christian judge might send him to a Gay Cure camp, after which he might profitably be Christianized.

You might try this one with The Abortion Doctor as The Other.

Or try these:  
If the Orthodox Jewish Communities of Urban America were the audience (Us) for such a play, then who might be The Other?

If extreme Tea Partiers are the Us?

PFLAG?

I think the play knows that the basic questions it asks have no absolute answers and that that, in fact, is part of what’s being dramatized. I think a major concern of the play is that to sustain any culture or social polity we must of necessity exclude some people and define ourselves against them; that there must always be people we think of as somehow less worthy because they are not like us. So long as we all keep our place, everything’s okay. Behind it all is a concern about a world in which, because other traditional systems have failed, issues of love and family and religion must be framed in, and can only be satisfactorily worked out in, the language and the logic of secular law courts.

Or perhaps all this is only what I think the present production moment can bring to the past creation as a way of keeping this play alive today.