The Fall Repertory 2004

Jack: You never talk anything but nonsense.
Algernon: Nobody ever does.
The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I

On October 16th of this year, we will celebrate the sesquicentennial of the birth of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. He was born 150 years ago in Dublin, Ireland, and the world hasn’t been the same since. Shortening his name simply to Oscar Wilde, he later declared, “a name which is destined to be in everyone's mouth must not be too long.” In 1874 he left Ireland and went to England to attend Magdalen College at Oxford, where he studied classics, wrote poetry, wore his hair long and sported velvet knee breeches. Pegged as an eccentric, Wilde later revealed that his greatest challenge at University was learning to live up to the perfection of the china.

His earlier works include a publication entitled Poems (1881), the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and the plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1891), Salome (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895). But it was his final play, the comedic tour de force The Importance of Being Earnest, which cemented his position as a comic genius.

The play debuted on St. Valentine’s Day of 1895. One of the theatre critics penning his opening night review that evening was none other than George Bernard Shaw, who found Wilde’s final play to be “rib-tickling” yet lacking in “humanity.” His criticism notwithstanding, Shaw later confessed that he picked up his “passion for fun from Oscar Wilde,” and indeed, the play has achieved the remarkable status as being arguably the wittiest play ever written in the English language.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a masterful play in no small measure because it is packed with moment after moment of sharp humor, clever dialogue, matchless wit and dynamic insight into human nature. It is a play which first and foremost celebrates the pure pleasure of language. “The great charm of the play is in the dialogue,” Wilde wrote in his letters, later noting that Earnest is truly “a fanciful absurd comedy.” His skill in capturing the behaviors of his own society and magnifying them exponentially on the stage is without peer. By doing so in a stream of continuously hilarious and memorable turns of phrase, Wilde has created nothing short of a masterpiece.

It is difficult to overstate the influence Wilde has had on ensuing artists and continues to have to this day. Ferenc Molnár (1878-1952), probably the greatest playwright to come out of Hungary, cited Oscar Wilde as a tremendous influence on his work, and his plays draw strongly on Wilde’s technique of creating farcical slants on everyday social and romantic situations. Molnár’s best remembered play, Liliom (1909), became the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1944), so it is remarkable to note the connection between Oscar Wilde and what Time magazine in 1999 hailed as “the best musical of the century.”

Furthermore, Wilde’s keen wit, heightened sense of style and his ability to cleverly ridicule society are clearly evident in what is today commonly referred to simply as “British humor.” This style of humor was unmistakable in the work of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, whose British comedy show “Beyond the Fringe” played London’s West End and on Broadway in the early 1960s, and set the stage for a virtual comic revolution in Britain. By the end of that decade, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin created the group Monty Python, whose surviving members carry on Wilde’s comedic tradition to this very day. And one of Britain’s finest playwrights, Joe Orton (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, What the Butler Saw), was dubbed by The London Observer, “the Oscar Wilde of welfare state gentility.”

Wilde is legendary for his memorable quotations, and perhaps none is more famous or moving than, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” In experiencing a play the caliber of The Importance of Being Earnest, we too are treated to a gaze at the stars, looking through the eyes of one of the most gifted writers in the modern era.

“…let slip the dogs of war…”
Marc Antony, III, i

The country’s most powerful leaders, espousing the noblest of intentions, make the decision to depose a dictator they contend is a growing threat to the well being of their nation. The appointed leader of this cause articulates the necessity of a preemptive strike, and an attack strategy is adopted. Although a plan for winning the peace after the dictator’s removal is deficient at best, nonexistent at worst, the plot moves forward as arranged. The dictator is toppled, the senators who oppose the overthrow go into hiding, and the appointed leader makes a congratulatory speech, triumphing the accomplishments of the honorable mission. But the celebration proves to be premature. The citizens are fickle, and quickly split into rebellious factions as opposing voices are raised. Bloody chaos quickly ensues. Supporters of the regime change vigorously defend themselves and their leader, battling ferociously against the growing number of individuals who in hindsight view the entire enterprise as a misstep and a tragic setback to the progress of their nation. In the events that ensue, innocent civilian lives are lost, the populace is harshly divided, and soldiers on both sides suffer significant fatalities as the growing war spreads to another continent. In the end, the leaders who instigated the regime change are themselves dispatched, never questioning the wisdom of their decision, never acknowledging any mistakes on their part and never failing to denounce their opponents. Welcome to William Shakespeare’s Rome, 44 B.C.

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has crafted a timeless political thriller, derived entirely from Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. The above paragraph is, admittedly, a carefully calculated characterization of selected plot elements from this play shaped in such a manner as to have a deliberate contemporary resonance. To some, this may read as a testament to the prescient genius of the Bard and an alarming commentary on the recurring nature of human events. To others, it may be merely a well crafted manipulation that vaguely describes certain actions, but is clearly slanted and taken completely and unfairly out of context. The beauty of Julius Caesar is that it is a strong enough play to evoke powerful reactions from multiple perspectives hundreds of years after its creation, and this is one reason we are exploring it on our stage for the first time in thirty-four years.

Director Risa Brainin is in distinguished company by recognizing the power of setting this play in modern dress during times of political strife. Shakespeare’s players, of course, performed the play not in togas and sandals, but in the contemporary clothing of their day when Julius Caesar opened the Globe Theatre in 1599.

And a generation ago, Orson Welles and John Houseman’s inaugural effort as leaders of the newly formed Mercury Theatre was a contemporary staging of Julius Caesar, starring Welles as Brutus and Joseph Cotten as Publius, just four years, incidentally, before the release of Citizen Kane. This 1937 production was unapologetically overt in its contemporary political parallels, as the actor portraying Caesar (Joseph Holland) was explicitly designed to evoke Mussolini. However, this unequivocal choice for the title character was not without its limitations, as New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson cited in his review: “And Caesar’s resemblance to Mussolini in appearance and manner defines the play so exactly that the dialogue sounds curiously restrained, as though the author could not speak the words he needs for so ominous an occasion.”

Unlike the Orson Welles production, the Festival’s current Caesar does not explicitly mimic recognizable political leaders in any of the characters. Rather, we have decided to take our cue from Shakespeare himself, who perhaps had it right from the start: perform the play in modern dress and let the parallels take care of themselves.

Daniel Hahn is Great Lakes Theater Festival’s Director of Education and has been with the Festival since 1995 when he served as an actor-teacher. Mr. Hahn holds an M.A. in theater from The University of Akron

The Summer Repertory 2004

shrew 1. Any of various small, chiefly insectivorous mammals of the family Soricidae, resembling a mouse but having a long pointed snout and small eyes and ears. 2. A woman with a violent, scolding, or nagging temperament; a scold.

Shrews are fascinating animals. There are over 300 species of them on the planet. One species is the smallest mammal on earth, weighing approximately two grams as an adult. Another has hairs on its feet which increase the surface area of the foot, trapping air bubbles, so that it can actually run on the surface of water. Most are extremely nervous animals; when frightened, their heart may beat 1,200 times per minute, and they often die of fright from loud noises, even from thunder. Probably the most common cause of death shortly after capture is shock. In some species, males attempt to mate with the maximum number of females, while females try to establish long-term relationships with specific males. The noise that shrews make sounds like the pronunciation of the Chinese word for money. In Taiwan, a shrew at one's home should never be killed, since the presence of the small animal signifies that money is coming. And one central European species displays a most interesting behavior. When the creature comes out of its cave, it follows the same path, over and over again. If one attempts to alter the shrew’s path, it becomes very surprised and disoriented, then retreats into its cave for some time. But when the creature re-emerges, it starts out by beginning on its old path, but then will give the new path a try. So the shrew, of all creatures, is a being capable of change. Put another way, even the tiniest mammal is capable of transformation.

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is in many ways a play about transformation through reversal. Based on an earlier play of unknown authorship entitled The Taming of a Shrew (published in 1594), it is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays to have an Induction. These two introductory scenes show how Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, becomes transformed from a dismal underling into an honorable Lord. This reversal from working class laborer to distinguished Lord sets the stage for the even more improbable transformation of Katherina, the play’s title character, from a woman of violent temperament to one who publicly obeys her husband’s commands. Deciding how to reconcile this transformation has challenged actors and directors for generations.

In his review of the renowned New York Public Theatre’s 1990 production (starring Tracey Ullman as Kate, Morgan Freeman as Petruchio, Helen Hunt as Bianca and José Perez as Grumio), Frank Rich noted how that particular company finessed "the problematic sexual politics of a play that humorless contemporary audiences might regard as an endorsement of male supremacy and female submissiveness.” But receiving an intended comedy in a manner devoid of humor is a peculiarity not exclusive to the contemporary New York audiences familiar to Mr. Rich. In 1667 diarist Samuel Pepys recorded his own response to an early production of the play: “To the King's house, and there we saw ‘The Tameing of a Shrew,’ which hath some very good pieces in it, but generally is but a mean play.” While staging the play as a tragedy rather than a comedy likely contradicts the intentions of the playwright, a great play can sometimes overcome such interpretations, and even yield illuminating results in the process.

A New York director I recently spoke with on this subject recalled a version of Shrew done in Turkey over twenty years ago, where Kate was portrayed as a progressive, secular woman marrying into Petruchio’s traditional, fundamentalist Muslim family. In the final scene of this production, Kate was going into seclusion, or purdah, and was completely draped in burka and hijab. When she said her final line encouraging wives to place their hands below their husband’s foot to “do him ease,” she released her arms from her robe to reveal slit wrists. Death was the only means by which this Kate would be tamed. In a nation where, on the campuses of some universities, women’s head scarves have been banned and men have been forbidden to wear traditional Islamic beards to enforce a government decree designed to keep the country secular, one can only imagine the impact such a version of The Taming of the Shrew might have on audiences comprised of both progressives and fundamentalists.

However, the overwhelming majority of productions play Shrew for its pure comedy. In 1935, New York Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson declared, “Good friends, the tumult in Fifty second Street last evening was Shakespeare. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were pouncing on ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and playing it in the Guild Theatre like a game of ninepins.” This famed production was the inspiration for Cole Porter’s sensational musical Kiss Me Kate.

Yet whether played for laughs or tears, perhaps of significant importance is not so much whether Kate is more shrewd than shrew, nor the degree to which she has or has not been tamed, but rather that she has at the very least allowed herself the possibility of becoming transformed through the dramatic means of reversal. In theory, a less shrewish Kate would require a less severe Petruchio to alter her conduct, but this would yield a much duller play than Shakespeare’s inventive creation. Without judging her conversion, the notion that living beings, however set in their ways, can transcend their current conditions and become completely transformed is indeed a powerful concept. If “Kate the curst” is capable of such a change, what might the rest of us achieve? It may be an interesting exercise to consider what demeanor is the opposite of our own, and what might come to pass were we subjected to a Petruchio-imposed behavior reversal. The character of Petruchio himself was exposed to such a literary process when in 1647 John Fletcher penned a sequel of sorts to Shakespeare’s Shrew, entitled The Tamer Tamed. Of course, whether or not any of us would be better off at the end of such a process is debatable. But Shakespeare has laid the groundwork enabling us to at least ponder such a journey: to contemplate the possibility of our own transformation.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is designed to be nothing short of an absolute theatrical celebration for those who love Shakespeare and adore rambunctious comedy. The communal joy we experience in laughing at and with the things we most treasure, in this case the plays of the Bard, is one of the fundamental purposes of our art form. In the second scene of The Taming of the Shrew’s Induction, a messenger suggests the following remedy to cure Christopher Sly of his apparent medical ailment:

“Your honour’s players, hearing your amendment,
Are come to play a pleasant comedy;
For so your doctors hold it very meet,
Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood,
And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy:
Therefore they thought it good you hear a play
And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,
Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.”

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is just what the doctor ordered.

Daniel Hahn is Great Lakes Theater Festival’s Director of Education and has been with the Festival since 1995 when he served as an actor-teacher. Mr. Hahn holds an M.A. in theater from The University of Akron.