Will then, Shakespeare now.

On Ex Libris, I discovered an article written by Leland Ryken (English professor at Wheaton) about Shakespeare and the Geneva Bible.

I shall have to spend a bit of time reading Ryken’s essay more deeply.  A chunk on the bus, a chunk after work, a chunk with my cup of tea, and so on.  I can certainly appreciate these sorts of essays for whatever fruit they may potentially bear when the time comes to not only interpret Shakespeare’s writing in the rehearsal room, but understand the components of the man himself.

However, some thoughts did immediately surface.

Shakespeare’s Use Of The Bible

“There are passages in which reference to the Bible is not strictly required to construe what Shakespeare has written, but where we are invited to see an allusion or echo.”  (Ryken)

When we analyze Shakespeare now—we sometimes forget that we’re reading from our vantage point, atop the mountains of scholarship amassed in the 393 years since Shakespeare’s death.  When Shakespeare was alive, times were different, religion was different, popular culture was different,  household names were different.

In Shakespeare’s day, if someone wanted to make an illustrative comment about suffering, nothingness, or poverty, they may likely conjure up images of Job.   That would have been a story with which many people were familiar.  (Shakespeare makes this allusion himself, in fact, when he has Falstaff saying, “I am as poor as Job, but not so patient.” in Henry IV 2)  Today, if we wanted to make a similar comment, we might conjure up the image of King Lear.

Today, we quote Shakespeare frequently.  Shakespeare quoted (or wrote phrases that resembled) passages of the Bible.

It’s absolutely foolish to deny the fact that Biblical themes and characters are very frequently included as part of what makes Shakespeare’s writing work.  But also included are many mythical references (Roman, Greek, and other).  The Player’s speech about Priam in Hamlet, is just one huge example.

Shakespeare’s Religion

As for arguments about whether Shakespeare was Catholic or Protestant and how important that is to his success as a playwright.  It’s clear that Shakespeare had (though not forever) received some support from a Catholic patron (Lord Strange/fifth earl of Derby).  For a time, that meant some financial stabilization.  I have also read some scholarly ruminations that Shakespeare may have had some minimal connections (friends-of friends-of friends-of friends) to people connected to the Gunpowder plot.  However, I can’t see that as anything too profound.  Lots of people have friends, including our friends.

At the end of the day, Shakespeare was a working, writing adult in a time of enormous change for England. The death of Elizabeth, James’ ascension to the throne, the very slow and gradual change from a Oral/poetic tradition to a printed, literary culture.  Everything was being shuffled around.  This shuffling—and its components—certainly influenced Shakespeare’s body-of-work as much as anything else.

Shakespeare was a writer.  He worked with a company of players.  It was imperative for their survival that he—and the players—work frequently, quickly, and successfully in order to bring an audience, keep them happy, and keep them coming back.  I can’t help but believe then that Necessity, coupled with a keen sense for what would/wouldn’t work for his audience, were likely the Mother and Father of Shakespeare’s invention.

©  Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

An update? An essay? A blog.

I shall start with the format suggested by Twitter, and countless improvisation games.  What are you doing? Well, I’ve made myself a lovely cup of tea, and lit a cigarette.  (Perhaps I should not have written that, any health conscious reader has probably just clenched their teeth, and will stop reading at this point.)  Now, I sit at the desk in the ‘bedroom hide-away’, stare at the computer before me, and attempt to type out some thoughts.  There’ve been many thoughts, lately, too.

I’ve been missing my Dad immensely, since he’s moved to the beach.  I miss our get-togethers.  I especially miss the get-togethers of times gone by, when the Pub at Edgefield was still smoke friendly, and the chess board was always on the table, precariously situated in between our drinks.  I’ve been thinking a great deal about theatre.  I’ve slowly been reading the Trevanian novel, Shibumi, which in a strange, abstract way, has only been encouraging me to think more about theatre.

I’ve always been the ‘quiet, introverted, lost-in-thought’ type as it is, but the last few weeks, even I feel like my thought processors have been on overdrive.

The boy whom I so often write and tweet about is gone for a weekend dose of respite.  With the flat deliciously quiet, my Beloved One says: “You’ve obviously been wanting to write.  You should write.  I’m tired of seeing the same old ‘A book is a book, yes?’ on your website.”

That raises a lovely point about girlfriends/boyfriends/lovers/spouses/partners:

There is no doubt that any relationship includes a healthy dose of maintenance.  It’s that maintenance—especially in the forms of commitment, intimacy, or sacrifice—that typically scares people my age away from participating in relationships at all.  However, whatever work there is, is well worth it.  The lovely perk that slowly sneaks up on you over time, is that after you’ve invested your trust and love in someone, they will surprise you time, and time again with care.  They care about you.  They crave your well being as much as you crave it yourself.  And sometimes, when you might be feeling rather confused or conflicted about what to do, they will make a suggestion that totally serves your best interests.

She surprised me—yet another time—the other day.  I was—yet again—in my chair in the bedroom ‘hideaway’ looking at the website of one theatre company or another.  She came in, rested on her knees beside the chair, kissed my hand as I glared at the computer screen, and said “You’ve got it bad, huh?”  (The itch.  The bug.  The gnawing teeth of the addiction.)  For a moment, I thought she had summoned her paranormal girlfriend skills. I had forgotten I’d confessed a few days earlier that the deep, unresolved need to return to directing, and to keep at it, hasn’t left since around Shakespeare’s birthday (April), when it always bites me especially hard.  Yes…I’ve got it bad.  I’m not ashamed of having it bad, either.  Why I’ve got it, is put better here, than I could hope to put it myself:

“A theatre is the laboratory of civilization; the dreamspace where we probe the soul, dissect politics and religions, and re-enact—always with our own particular spin—the universal struggles of humankind:  survival, love, ambition and reconciliation.  Who would not want to spend a lifetime investigating this?”

(Robert Cohen, director/scholar/theorist.)

My theatre career, if one could even call it that without laughing, has been comprised of about ten years of artistically ambitious choices, backed by poor personal decisions, and not enough balance, or clarity to really allow the goodness to come through.  The events of the last half-year have led me to break down and accept, (or grow up and embrace) two things.

1. There’s no doubt that I need to go forward, and include theatre as an equally central part of my life again, if I’m going to live up to my own expectations of living life on this planet, and not feel like a hack.
2. There is—however—no way that I am prepared to go about it in the same, flawed way.  There may not be a “right” or “wrong” when it comes to the aesthetic elements of theatre.  But there is a line between right and wrong when it comes to running a business.  Artists can be selfish and manipulative, and they can unwittingly cross that line in pursuit of getting the most use out of supporters or colleagues, and—quite simply—trying to survive.  I’ve made some poor choices, and some very wretched errors-in-judgment in the past.  They resulted in mistakes, and promises being broken.

I slightly feel like the last few years of not doing much theatre at all—at least, not on the scale which I prefer—has (in a way) been a personal form of atonement.  I’ve been homeless, I’ve been bored, I’ve lost some very talented collaborators who I used to think of as ‘crucial’.  There’ve been points I’ve felt a bit like I was drowning, under an ocean-liner’s load of regret collapsing on my shoulders.

I can’t go back and fix the past.  But, I have learned a great deal, and I can remember to reflect—going into the future—upon my poor choices in the past.  If I bump into people I used to know, with whom I fallen from grace, I can try to apologize.  But that’s all I can do for the past, along with learning from it, and doing things better, fairly, and right in the future.

Now that I’ve climbed out of the ocean onto the shore, I look to the future.  Theatre. I think.  What about theatre, I ask.  What is my place?  What will theatre be, a lifetime into the future?

I once—for being only one person—had an admirable personal library of plays, theatre history, scholarship, acting theory and so on.  With a three year history of moving, putting boxes in storage units, selling books at used bookshops for cash (desperately needed at the time), I only have a few remaining books of Shakespeare.  Whatever research I do now, I do online.

The more I peer into reviews, current culture, and current ambitions in theatre, the more I begin to feel like I was born too late to live a lifetime doing the sort of theatre I’ve trained to do.  America—that is, the United States, the churning kettle of diversity that it is—came late onto the scene of global civilization.  We’re a nation that’s only some 233 years old, if we count from the Declaration Of Independence.  Forgive me if I sound unpatriotic, but the United States does not—in my opinion—have a long, illustrious history of theatre.  (Mind you, I’m excluding the more ceremonial/ritualistic definitions, for the moment.)  Since the Greeks, I’d say Europe has a longstanding history.  Even before Shakespeare, traveling groups of players roughed their way across Europe presenting Miracle, Morality, or Passion plays, illustrating on contrived stages the motifs of religious teaching.  Britain has a longish history, when we look back at Shakespeare.  Russia would have to be Britain’s counter part, in my view, with the contributions of Stanislavski’s theories, and the Moscow Art Theatre.  But, America?  What does America have?  We have Broadway and its history of musical theatre, we have the Regional Theatre movement, and there we slightly burn out.

What happens next?

I’m starting to submit to the opinion that if there is an off-camera tradition for actors in the future to belong to, that theatre of the future, may resemble some of the avant-garde, performance arty work that one can see (or read about) cropping up in places like the Romanian National Theatre Festival.  Theatre that re-invents theatre.  Theatre that tries—as much as to simply do good work and to put on a good show—to change the relationship with its audience, or at least, the vantage point.  The further down that road one goes, one thing becomes clear.  The well attended theatre of the future, will be the ‘exciting’ theatre.  The best performance of text will become less and less important.  It will increasingly become about the most interactive experience.  Think Tony & Tina’s Wedding.  A specific example of what I mean, on our own shores, is at American Repertory Theatre. . .

Artistic director Diane Paulus has transformed the theatre into a club, to produce Randy Weiner’s The Donkey Show, a disco explosion of the words, images, and themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Now, I’m not in Boston, so I haven’t seen it.  But I don’t think the audience at the Donkey Show is seeing a beautifully acted performance of text.  What the photographs and video excerpts make clear that they are seeing, though, is beautiful men in g-strings, beautiful women wearing nipple-pasties, beautiful people dancing on platforms, and diving into mosh-pits.  That doesn’t sound like Shakespeare to me, necessarily.  But it’s not supposed to be Shakespeare, it’s the aftermath of Randy Weiner having been inspired by Shakespeare.

Is it theatre?  I don’t know.  It certainly seems Dionysian, and we must remember, Dionysus—with all of his spirit—has been the reining God of Theatre for some while.

One thing is clear.  In recent years, theatre companies all over America have been asking: Where has our audience been going?  Why isn’t a new one coming?

The first question is easy to answer.  That good old audience, who loved nothing more than to see a play on Friday evening or Sunday afternoon, has slowly gone to the graveyard.  The second question, Why isn’t a new one coming? is difficult.  Perhaps it’s not even the right question.  Perhaps the question to ask instead is where the next audience will be coming from.

Either way…  I can’t be doing all of this thinking for no reason.

It’s brewing.  Something comes anon.

©  Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

The second coming of the Britney catastrophe

I was quite infuriated earlier this afternoon to learn that reruns of House and Lie To Me were being replaced with “The Teen Choice Awards”.

Nonetheless, I made my way through the day.  Because my Beloved One’s ex-hub declared he needed to drop the other two munchkins off at our house for a bloody week, I went to the store and brought back four armloads of groceries (with two hands) on the bus.  I made breakfast for dinner.  We’d had our iced cream, and so far, kept the 11 year old (going on tabloid teen queen) Caitlyn from realizing that these wretched “Teen Choice” awards were taking over the television.

The ruse didn’t last long.  The television somehow made its way to the Teen Choice channel just as Caitlyn’s idol, Miley Cyrus, was making her way on stage.

Then, I saw it:  the reprise of the Britney catastrophe.  You might remember, once upon a time, young miss Spears was actually marketing herself as a wholesome teenage girl with talent.  Then, the downward spiral.  Pornographic clips appeared on the Internet, the babies came, the court case about the babies, the shaved head, the power of attorney fiasco taking center stage on the fishwrap stands.

It’s happening again, this time with ‘wholesome’ Disney endorsed Saturday Morning Hannah Montana teenstress, Miley Cyrus.

She appeared in short shorts, a shirt revealing (instead of covering) a bra, and a fedora.  At one point, a prop. pole was actually brought out on stage for her to swing from and dance around.

I remember recently hearing on a radio interview that her Father, Billy Ray Cyrus, had taken offense to a comment made by a comedian, which said “Make your sex tape, grow up!”

If I were a Father, I’d have taken offense too.  However, there’s no denying, if the polesports continue, she’s well on her way.

I’ve always had a grudge against the media for streaming images which are encouraging thirteen year old girls, children to dress and compete with thirty year old women.  And based on this evenings “teen choice” presentation, I can’t say I’m inspired to lighten up about it anytime soon…

© Jeffrey Puukka, 2009