Revisiting The Bard, With Four Productions
I wish I could remember exactly when I became obsessed with Shakespeare. It could have started with Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet, which hit cinemas in my formative teen years. It could have been in college — I remember one of my literature classes delving into Antony and Cleopatra, but then I don’t remember thinking about Shakespeare much after that. It could have been in my mid-20s when my then-boyfriend and I went on a quest to find every Shakespeare movie remake we could and watch them all (this was back in the days when Netflix sent you DVDs in the mail, and you had access to what felt like every movie ever filmed from one source, three at a time). At some point in there, I bought a digital version of the Complete Works and used it as bedtime reading. I’ve read every single play at least once, although I can never tell one Henry from another, and I can’t tell you which plays Falstaff is in.
There are other boundaries to my Shakespeare love; a completionist I am not. I don’t read many books that are retellings of Shakespeare, and in some cases, I actively avoid them. (Couldn’t tell you why!) I don’t read histories about Shakespeare himself or any of the discourse about whether or not he actually wrote the plays (nor do I care). I don’t read annotated versions of the plays, and I haven’t read the Sonnets.
But ask me if I want to go see a production — literally any production — of a Shakespeare play, and the answer is always going to be yes. I don’t care if it’s local community theater or on Broadway, or anywhere in between; in fact, I often prefer it if it’s local community theater! You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Cymbeline done as a Western in a graveyard in Jersey City (shout out to that troupe wherever they are), or a glam-rock Twelfth Night in the park near your house (my hat is forever off to Shakespeare in Clark Park). And I have seen some truly amazing productions. This summer, I was lucky enough to see yet another one, one that I almost didn’t go see, and it got me thinking about all the ways that modern productions are leaving the text almost exactly as-is, but making Shakespeare uniquely their own, and uniquely modern.
This is the part where I tell you that Romeo and Juliet is possibly my least favorite play. I will see a thousand Twelfth Nights, a million Tempests; Much Ado About Nothing, bring it on! I will see any and all of the Histories before I will seek out Romeo and Juliet. But when my partner and I were in London last month, and he asked me if I wanted to go see this production that was getting really great reviews, and it was only two hours with no intermission, I said yes. Mostly because of that last bit — two hours and no intermission basically never happens in London theater, in case you didn’t know that, and I was willing to risk two hours of my vacation on the off chance that it would be enjoyable. (I found out only the day-of that Romeo would be played by “Sam from Ted Lasso,” Toheeb Jimoh, which was an unexpected bonus!)
Friends, it was incredible. (The New York Times thought so too.) By judicious condensing and cutting, and with an unexpected focus on movement and choreography of several kinds, Rebecca Frecknall and her creative team collaborated with the actors to turn this into timeworn, dare I say cliche?, tale of star-crossed lovers into a completely different kind of story.
It has a violent energy to it; the death scenes are absolutely brutal, and the weight of the bitter conflict hangs heavy over every moment. But even more heavy are the (inevitable, because we know how it ends) consequences of young, obsessive love. Jimoh and Isis Hainsworth play their parts perfectly, harnessing that turbulent force to carry them toward the final act and everyone else along with them. Hainsworth also plays Juliet in a way I’ve never seen before — she’s angry, she’s sharp, and she’ll make you side-eye all the wilting, breathy Juliets that have come before her. And it’s that anger and violence, whether its text or subtext in any given scene, that makes it feel so timely. Gun violence, social media, depression, and extremist legislation are some of the current threats to our current teens’ existence, and they are just as apt to warp young lives as two warring houses and an ill-timed meet cute. (I can only hope that this will get recorded for posterity because, truly, it is a revelation.)
Likewise harnessing a darkness of our time via the Bard, but in a very different way, is Phyllida Lloyd’s The Tempest. I knew it was an all-female cast when I went to see it (shout-out to Molly for making that happen!), which is a delightful bit of a flip from the original Elizabethan era when it would have been all men. What I wasn’t expecting was the genius of the staging. It’s set as if it were being put on in a prison by incarcerated women, and the actors are using found items as props.
It’s a special kind of cognitive dissonance to see sweat suits, plastic cafeteria chairs, and soda bottles paired with the lofty, abstruse language of Shakespeare, and that’s part of the magic of Lloyd’s productions. The cast is unbelievably talented and brings a desperation to the staging-within-the-staging that feels wholly correct. These are women locked up, trying to distract themselves from their dire circumstances, throwing themselves into escaping their own confined lives for the length of the play. It’s discomfiting, breath-taking, and it’s something you can actually watch at home thanks to the magic of streaming. Do it — you won’t be sorry.
You know what else you can watch? The Bridge Theater’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is rompy, queer, absolutely hilarious, and sexy as all hell. If the previous two productions perfectly capture the darker tones of Shakespeare’s tragedies, The Bridge took this comedy and dialed it up to eleven. They keep the characters but swap Titania and Oberon’s lines, then add aerial silks, Beyoncé dance sequences, a punk-rock Puck, and I will never stop being obsessed with the Rude Mechanicals’ jackets. It’s got an almost manic glee that you can feel even through the trailer:
If you’ve spent any time studying Shakespeare, you know that his plays are raunchy as all get-out. There is wordplay, entendre, innuendo, and badinage galore, and this production makes the absolute most of it. You’ll also know that these plays were the pop culture of their time, which this team decides to go all in on. Here, we get to see the best of pop culture from our time, bringing out the best in pop culture from 500 years ago. It doesn’t hurt that Gwendoline Christie is an absolutely legendary Titania or that the set seems designed to blur the lines between cast and audience to the point that, even watching it on a screen, you feel like you’re right there in the thick of it. This is the production I want to show to everyone who thinks that Shakespeare is boring or dry. This is the production that I want to say to people: if you only see one, see this. I would bet money that it won’t be your last — and even if it was, you couldn’t choose a more joyous, exuberant, captivating one.
Nothing makes me sadder than to say that this last (but far from least) production is no longer available for streaming. It was a bright spot in the dark fall of 2020 when PBS made it available. An all-Black cast doing Much Ado About Nothing, with Danielle Brooks playing Beatrice? Be still my heart, y’all! I didn’t realize this was part of the Shakespeare in the Park series until I read reviews later, but I can only imagine how incredible it would have been to see this in person. Just watch Brooks’ delivery of “Signor Benedick:”
And then Grantham Coleman on “hard heart!” I am deceased! The Stacey Abrams 2020 banner, the choreography; I know just enough to know I’m not even getting all the side-jokes and references, but what I’m getting is fantastic. As Executive Producer David Horn says himself, “This modern reinterpretation by Kenny Leon couldn’t be more timely, showing how Shakespeare addressed issues that we are still facing as a country today.” You wouldn’t think that Much Ado could be a vehicle for a celebration of Black culture and lives, but you would be wrong. This production feels like a rebuttal to anyone who believes that Shakespeare is the property of academia and the Ivory Tower and a reassurance to someone who feels like Shakespeare is not for them.
The Bard’s work contained multitudes then, and as these four productions show, there’s more than enough room for all of us now.
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