Recently in Theater Category

Last night, I was lucky enough to see the opening night performance of a new production of Chekhov's The Seagull, a London import starring Kristin Scott Thomas as the actress Arkadina.

I've seen several Arkadinas in my time, and Thomas's is my favorite so far. She brilliantly sounded all of the notes of Arkadina's character: the vain, the coquettish, the self-doubting, the tender, the terrified, the magnetic. Hers was a truly attractive Arkadina: all of the characters on the stage are drawn to her, and you can see why. Their lives feel comparatively empty when she is not around (and there were times last night when Thomas was off-stage that the production seemed the same way).

I checked my iPhone at intermission, about twenty minutes into the debate between vice presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Senator Palin. I caught a snippet on cnn.com: "Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin disagree . . ." -- no news there.

Walking out after the performance, I checked the iPhone again and was greeted by a succession of text messages:

I am blinded by rage and can't see straight . . . She is so smarmy and not answering questions . . . But she says nuclear like Bush does AND she is attacking with her lipstick on ARGH.

The thing is she isn't fucking up. And so she will probably come out ok. Biden is doing REALLY well.

Whoops off the rails a little bit. She doesn't seem to know what Achilles heel means . . .

I found myself thinking back to one of the dramatic high points of any production of The Seagull, the scene in which the young actress Nina, returns to the lakeside country estate owned by Arkadina's brother Sorin, where the action of the play takes place. Nina is beloved by Arkadina's son, Kostya, but she herself is madly in love with Arkadina's lover, the famous writer Trigorin. It was at Sorin's estate that Nina first met Trigorin in the play's first act, and now, late in the play, she remembers a moment in which Trigorin tells her about an idea for a story.

In her first scene, Nina tells Kostya that "she is drawn to this place, this lake, like a sea gull." In the second act, jealous of Nina's growing infatuation with Trigorin, Kostya shoots a sea gull and lays it out as an offering to Nina. A few moments later, Trigorin launches into a longwinded account of his struggles as a writer and then tells Nina about an idea for a story that has just just occurred to him:

a young girl, like you, has lived beside a lake from childhood. She loves the lake as a sea gull does, and she's happy and free as a sea gull. But a man chances to come along, sees her, and, having nothing better to do, destroys her just like this sea gull here.

Seeing those text messages made me think of John McCain, venturing to Alaska, plucking out a country governor named Sarah, who until then had been happy and free as a sea gull, and putting her in the spotlight of the presidential race, where she seemed at first to flourish, but lately has seemed to be floundering.

When Nina returns to Sorin's estate in the final act, she tells Kostya about her life during the two years that have intervened since we last saw her. Kostya already knows (and has revealed to the audience) that Nina has had an affair with Trigorin and borne a child, lost the child to sickness, and struggled as an actress on provincial stages. Now Nina tells it to us from her point of view. She can't quite keep her thoughts straight or finish sentences, but in the midst of her rambling, she remembers:

I became petty and common. When I acted I did it stupidly. I didn't know what to do with my hands or how to stand on the stage. I couldn't control my voice. But you can't imagine what it feels like -- when you know that you are acting appallingly.

That's an incredible moment of self-awareness for the character, and it can be heartbreaking if played right. It's also treacherous, because the actress uttering those lines had better be convincing and not be acting "appallingly" herself or the lines will have an unintentional irony. (Carey Mulligan, who played Nina last night, carried it off pretty well last night; Natalie Portman, who can be superb in a well-directed play or film, fared a little less well some years ago in Central Park.)

I found myself wondering if Sarah Palin ever experienced moments of both self-doubt and self-awareness akin to Nina's. Her response to the question about the "Achilles heel" would suggest not:

GWEN IFILL: Let's talk conventional wisdom for a moment. The conventional wisdom, Gov. Palin with you, is that your Achilles heel is that you lack experience. Your conventional wisdom against you is that your Achilles heel is that you lack discipline, Sen. Biden. What id it really for you, Gov. Palin? What is it really for you, Sen. Biden? Start with you, governor.

SARAH PALIN: My experience as an executive will be put to good use as a mayor and business owner and oil and gas regulator and then as governor of a huge state, a huge energy producing state that is accounting for much progress towards getting our nation energy independence and that's extremely important.

But it wasn't just that experience tapped into, it was my connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills? About times and Todd and our marriage in our past where we didn't have health insurance and we know what other Americans are going through as they sit around the kitchen table and try to figure out how are they going to pay out-of-pocket for health care? We've been there also so that connection was important.

But even more important is that world view that I share with John McCain. That world view that says that America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here. We are not perfect as a nation. But together, we represent a perfect ideal. And that is democracy and tolerance and freedom and equal rights. Those things that we stand for that can be put to good use as a force for good in this world.

John McCain and I share that. You combine all that with being a team with the only track record of making a really, a difference in where we've been and reforming, that's a good team, it's a good ticket.

Uh-huh. This non-answer to Gwen Ifill's question was characteristic of Palin's approach to the entire debate. Maybe she simply heard the word "experience," and it was a matter of "Print Screen": she simply spewed out what she'd been coached to say on the subject of "experience."

Maybe she really doesn't know what an "Achilles heel" is. Or maybe she's just constitutionally incapable of being self-aware enough to evaluate her own faults. (Biden, of course, immediately answered in a way that indicated that he not only knew what the phrase meant but also knew how to be both self-aware and self-deprecating: "You're very kind suggesting my only Achilles Heel is my lack of discipline.")

In The Seagull, Nina, if played right, becomes a figure of both pathos and sympathy. With Sarah Palin, it seems to be one or the other. Quite a few people, we're told, find her to be a sympathetic figure. But quite a few more, I suspect, find her simply to be pathetic.

The Seagull is, in the end, a tragedy. We'll see what kind of narrative this election turns out to be.

[Image: A seagull in Homer Spit, Alaska. From http://www.http://www.brittabeeck.info.]

Last night I saw Kevin Kline play King Lear in the New York Public Theater's current production, directed by James Lapine. I've seen quite a few Lears in my time, but Kline was the first I've seen who entered in the finally scene and utter the lines "Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: / Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so / That heaven's vault should crack" without howling. Kline spoke the lines in just above a whisper, imploring rather than demanding or railing. This was an exemplary moment in Kline's grandly understated performance. His Lear was indeed an egotist, but not a rash or naturally volatile man. He was, rather, a rationalist, a man of a calculation ... who miscalculated -- and was too self-confident and self-absorbed to consider that he might be in error until it is far too late. He can see madness approaching but tries to hold the line: "Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow," uttered without histrionic display that other interpreters often affect. Kline's Lear, in contrast, for example, to the Lear that Christopher Plummer powerfully presented at Lincoln Center in 2004, is not yet a man on the verge of infirmity: he is driven to infirmity and madness by those around him.

Around Kline's Lear, the production swirls noisily, with actors climbing up and down the scaffolding erected in the Anspacher. The blinding of Gloucester has a touch of Tarantino about it, with quivering eyeballs held up and then thrown down. The heath scene is staged in a way that sets it off from the rest of the production. White gauze curtains stream down on all four sides of a square downstage, surrounding Lear, Kent, and the Fool: light simulates rain pouring down, punctuated by flashes of that illuminate the whole auditorium. The staging has the effect not only of dramatizing the stormy heath but also of dramatizing the isolution and claustrophobia that these characters feel. The Fool was played, for a change, by an older man, allowing the production to emphasize the likeness between Lear and the Fool -- and allowing Lear to emerge as himself a Shakespearean fool. The wise Fool disappears halfway through the play: in this production, his place is taken by Lear.

My favorite directorial touch, however, was an addition to the text: a Shakespearean dumb show presented as the audience is sitting down before the play. Three young girls, dressed in red, green, and blue, portraying Lear's daughters when they were children, are playing with bottles of brightly colored sand, slowly creating a map of Britain, the coast outlined in red, the land green, marked by blue rivers, surrounded by a bright blue ocean. As the play opens, the girls are replaced by their adult counterparts: Goneril in a green gown, Regan in red, and Cordelia in blue. The girls appear again later, as apparitions: young Goneril and Regan in the trial scene that Lear directs in Tom's hovel, young Cordelia as a vision that Lear takes with him to the grave.

I found myself moved by the exchanges between Cordelia and Lear in the play's second half. Kline's Lear showed me things in the text I hadn't seen before, and I'm grateful to him for the experience.

Over the years I've been fortunate enough to have seen many productions of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. My favorite has always been the production directed by Andrei Serban for the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1989. The production starred Cherry Jones as Viola and Diane Lane as Olivia (both pictured at right), with a marvelous supporting cast that included ART stalwarts Thomas Derrah (Feste) and Jeremy Geidt (Sir Toby). The Romanian director has always been known as an experimentalist, and his Twelfth Night featured Sir Toby watching cartoons on television and Sebastian meeting Antonio in a gay bar for sailors with an actor dressed as Shakespeare sitting in the back drinking a beer and taking notes.

Last night, I saw a production of the play that was equally memorable, a wildly cosmopolitan version of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. It was directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Oremerod, who are the founders and co-Artistic Directors of the Cheek by Jowl Theater Company, which now makes it home at the Barbican Centre in London. What makes it "wildly" cosmopolitan, however, is the fact that it is performed in Russian with English titles. The titles are taken from Shakespeare's text, but according to a Russian student who accompanied me, the Russian was far more verbose and far less "literary" than the titles. The production was originally produced by the Chekhov International Theatre Festival in 2003; three years earlier Donnellan and Ormerod had formed a sister company in Moscow (Donnellan jokingly refers to it as "Cheek by Jowlski").

I'd just been making the argument, earlier in the day during the lecture for my "Conversations of the West" class that as the students read Hamlet over the weekend, they should think about the ways in which Hamlet suggests that Aristotle may have underestimated the importance of diction to the succesful creation of tragedy onstage. In the Poetics, Aristotle valorized plot above all, but is plot the most powerful element of Hamlet, I asked. Is there not something in the way Shakespeare puts words together in all of those marvelous speeches ("To be or not to be ..."; "O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I!"; "The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.") that is crucial to the play's evocation of tragic experience?

And here I was watching a production of Twelfth Night whose implicit premise was that Shakespeare's play can transcend the language in which it is written. Ben Brantley in it this way in his review for the New York Times:

The glorious surprise of this ''Twelfth Night'' ... is in how it finds an alchemical substance in Shakespeare that transcends the verbal. ... Mr. Donnellan and Mr. Ormerod ... make the heretical case that the essence of Shakespeare isn't exclusively linguistic. The words, it seems, are but steppingstones to a universal pattern of images and insights about human behavior and the perplexing world that thwarts and shapes it. Shakespeare's first language, it would seem, is not English, after all; it's Theater.

Well, it worked marvelously, because the actors were superbly evocative in both speech and gesture; the elegantly minimalist set and lighting created beautiful tableaux and arresting moments; and Donnellan's direction emphasized physical comedy, constant movement, and quick pacing. Frankly, I'm not sure it would have worked with a play like long, wordy play Hamlet.

The all-male cast meant that the production could draw on some of the ambiguities of Shakespeare's original stagings, which featured men playing women playing men in plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It. The "women" in this production -- the Andrey Kuzichev as a lithe Viola; Alexey Dadonov as a straight-backed, almost regal Oliva; and Ilia Ilin as a limber Maria -- were uniformly persuasive. The ambiguities of the final recognition scene came across beautiful (especially in the tense shrug offered by Orsino [Vladimir Vdovichenkov] after he has mistaken Sebastian [Sergey Mukhin] for Viola/Cesario. Ormerod's design emphasized the contrasts of black and white, with black dominating the first act, full as it is of mourning and melancholy, and white dominating the second, with its hopes for renewal and rebirth -- with a stunning intrusion of black in the person of Malvolio at the very end. Every now and then, Donnellan would freeze the action during an aside by a character, as if to suggest the momentary imposition of order amidst chaos, but these moments seem, in retrospect, motivated by the desire to build up to the final freeze-frame, Malvolio's "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you," which Donnellan turns into the final spoken line of the play. While the rest of the cast, dressed in off-white costumes, is revelling to Feste's lounge-lizard version of "the rain it raineth everyday," Malvolio returns, clad once again in the butler's black tuxedo, to serve champagne and offer his promise of revenge -- as an aside to the audience. I've never seen it played this way, but it made for a stunning theatrical moment.

My students seemed to enjoy the play, though almost none of them seemed to have ben familiar with it beforehand. I found myself wondering what it what be like to encounter Twelfth Night for the first time in this way. What was getting across to them? And how different was it from what would have gotten across were the watching a standard, untranslated production of the play. Did they, paradoxically, get more out Shakespeare's text last night because they were reading it as they watched, rather than listening to it? I also wondered how different an experience my Russian student in attendance was having. Did the play she was watching seem more contemporary because of the translation, with the titles seeming like a bad translation written by non-native speakers of English? (An effect enhanced, perhaps, by the fact that the titles were full of typos.)

What I found myself wondering, finally, was lost in the translation. And what was gained?