Behind the Arras

On the day of a snowstorm in February I arrive to the warmth of rehearsal room. I trade one tempest for another, and in the process of so doing find myself playing the role of spectator at a magic show, quite literally. ASP’s Prospero, Alvin Epstein, conjures up a storm of remarkable proportion, in which raucous sea-songs mingle with billowing sails, and the audience is swept, along with the characters, to a wondrous isle where rare sprites and creatures roam. 

Patrick Swanson, the director of the upcoming show, in so many ways captures the sensual magic of Shakespeare’s language.  Each moment seems poised to explore the impact of taste, sight, and sound on an audience’s intellect.  Prospero becomes more than a protagonist, but the director of a stunning entertainment sequence, a play-with-a-play, which progresses under the guidance of the show’s lead magician. Set on a catwalk-like raised stage open to a hanamichi, the play moves through a sequence of special effects. The scenic designer, David Gammons, artfully conceals any technical clumsiness, and it is amazing how the design crew transcends the limitations of the performance space. 
The show boasts a circus-like appeal, supplied by the ornate set and its bizarre array of characters.  Ariel’s (Marianna Bassham) buoyancy-of-being lends her wings, and Caliban’s (Benjamin Evett) monstrosity makes for a convincing outcast.  A giant thunder instrument creaks off-stage at various intervals throughout the play, and a wind-machine sings as part of the scenery.  Swanson’s carefully designed blocking allows Epstein to play the characters like pawns.  In one scene, Miranda (Mara Sidmore) and Ferdinand (Jason Bowen) engage in a game of chess, as if to hint at the larger game Prospero plays with the characters. 

As a Stage Management Intern, I wonder at the exploratory nature of Swanson’s adaptation.  He evokes the mystery of existence, and the possibility of a larger-than-life force operating somewhere beyond our human grasp.  I am consistently struck by the fluidity of the narrative— the humor, the tragedy all melded into a simultaneously thought-provoking and delightful piece of entertainment.  My experience working on the show has opened my eyes to the complexity of the relationship between playwright and cast.  It has reemphasized for me the power of Shakespeare’s language, and the ways in which a particular theme can best enhance the psychology of his writing.  From the jesters, Trinculo (John Kuntz) and Stephano (Robert Walsh), to the mischievous Ariel, Shakespeare imbues The Tempest with a wonderful eccentricity, and with Swanson’s exploration of the play’s capacity for dimension, it becomes accessible and enjoyable on a multitude of levels.

In short, I have enjoyed every minute of my work, thus far, and continue to enjoy the time I spend watching the cast draw the magic from the text; it is a gift to observe the process, and the various ways each contributor paints the stage with his/her talents.

-Augusta Thompson

"Tablework" is the actor’s term for the process at the beginning of a company’s work on a production, when the cast sits down with the director and stage manager to read through the play, starting and stopping, then going back to start again, as impulse moves them to ask questions and discuss issues. It’s a chance for old professional relationships to be renewed and new ones to form, for the intense little community that grows up around every production to take shape, and for people to begin the hugely important process of learning to understand and trust one another.

Tablework on the Actors’ Shakespeare Project Hamlet, predictably enough, turned out to be exceptionally absorbing and exciting. Though some of the key roles are being performed by company veterans, the director and assistant director, stage manager and assistant stage manager, and more than half the actors are making their ASP debuts. That meant a lot of exhilarating fresh energy, but a lot of exploring, too. Some of the newcomers were hesitant at first. By the end of the week everybody was contributing fully, and there was much laughter—and some moments of rich silence as the echo of a deeply moving reading died away. We heard some splendid new voices, watched some richly expressive new faces, picked up some new vibes. It’s a powerful group.

It'll need to be. The play is huge, of course, in more ways than one; not only are there nearly 4000 lines of text to be considered, but also the weight of more than 400 years of production history, scholarship, and criticism, and the pressure of expectation that necessarily surrounds Shakespeare’s best-known work. The process was correspondingly big: it took us 5 full working days, 28 hours minus a couple of 10-minute breaks each day, to make one pass though the full text. But the engagement of the people around the table was constant and intense.

A lot of our attention went to the matter of cuts. As we have inherited the text (see my forthcoming blog on this topic), it is too long to be performed in full. (The current scholarly consensus is that it was not performed in full in 1599, either.) The script the actors received at the beginning of the first day had been provisionally cut, to produce a total estimated performance time of a little less than three hours. But the whole text of the Second Quarto of 1604 (the basis for most modern editions and productions), plus most of the additional material from the Folio (1623) was there on the page. Almost everybody wanted to restore something—a phrase or line that clarified a motivation or might earn a laugh, a famous bit (“hoist by his own petard”), a vivid image, a missing iamb. The initial proposition—you could trade a restored cut for an excision someplace else—turned out to be untenable. By the end of the week there were more or less stagy groans at each new restoration, and cheers for each fresh cut. The final text will not be settled until very late in the rehearsal process, when it is finally possible to run the whole play, with all its associated business; it may be that some of the restorations will be cut again, and new cuts will be made. We now have a basis, however, for the next phase, putting the action on its feet in the way required by our performance space.

In any case, the process took us deep into the play; it is impossible to talk about keeping or losing a word without taking into account the character who speaks it and the context in which it is spoken. Those issues arose in other ways, too. Director Rick Lombardo threw out frequent challenges. What are you feeling and thinking here? What past acts and speeches shape this present? What future acts and speeches are here set up? How can this moment—the cannon shots that signal that the King has drained his cup, the arrival of the Players—fit into our overall conception of the world of the play? The actors had many questions, from the literal meaning of an archaic word to the big issues that critics have wrestled with for two centuries and more. Many had performed the play before, and threw in questions and comments based on earlier experiences. Many had been reading about the play, discussing it with their friends, watching films. As dramaturg and resident scholar, I did my best to fill in pieces of the historical background. A small library of reference works and editions littered the table, and repeatedly somebody would compare the Quarto with the Folio or look up a word in a glossary or (since we had wireless internet access in our BU rehearsal space) Google a reference.

Since modern actors are very often trained to look at characters as real people, with whole lives behind them of which the play is only the most recent piece, we talked a lot about the backstory. Are Hamlet and Horatio boyhood friends, or did they meet as students at the University of Wittenberg? What was Polonius’ role in the government of Hamlet’s father? Was the throne of Denmark Fortinbras’s real objective when he set off to fight the Poles? These questions carry on into the timeframe of the play. Hamlet says he has been “in continual practice” at swordplay. For how long? Where? With whom? Why? Some of our talk concerned our necessary effort to connect the concerns of the play, in the language of the play, to our modern ways of thinking and talking. Can the post-Freudian understanding of human sexuality really help us understand the relationship between Gertrude and her son, or her son and his uncle? Can we give the word “election” its modern force, or should we try in some way to historicize it? Should we accept the way Ophelia’s father and brother treat her as merely a function of the way society viewed women at the turn of the 17th century, or use it as a lever to open up a feminist dimension of the production?

By the end of the week we had given everybody a solid sense of the play as a whole, found at least line of attack for every actor, and discussed if not settled all the major problems. Most of the important questions will remain. That is partly because Hamlet really is in many ways the first fully modern literary text, the first one that fully and repeatedly confronts the contradictory claims that individual human beings have to try to reconcile as they live their lives. The Ghost asks his son to avenge his murder: the sixth commandment absolutely forbids murder. The two imperatives cannot be equally maintained as intentional goals; one or the other must come first (though Hamlet perhaps finds a way to be at peace with his dilemma). In other places, however, the problems involve a different kind of choice. And unlike critics, who can keep such conflicts up in the air, actors have to make choices. Hamlet has to be 18 or he has to be 30; he can’t be both. Either Gertrude does or she does not still love Claudius at the moment in the final scene when she picks up the cup of wine. This means that the Hamlet we will witness on the stage of the Strand Theater in Dorchester Oct. 19 and thereafter will be only one of a million possible Hamlets—the one the choices of this director and these actors generate. Given the energy, intelligence, passion, humor, craft, vocal and gestural prowess, commitment, and sheer professionalism demonstrated in last week’s tablework, however, it may also be one in a million. We’ll see.

David Evett
Dramaturg and Scholar in Residence
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After a mere three days of blocking rehearsal in a cheery but chilly basement, there's a rough shape for half of the play. It's very intriguing, in only a rehearsals, what themes are beginning to thread through. At the start of the show, the large circle that forms the playing space is bisected by two poles hung with banners; the area downstage becomes what a real estate agent would call "cozy". While some of the company joked their blocking would be simple to remember as there wasn't much room, the effect is actually the opposite. With a smaller playing area, even small movements become significant from an audience perspective. And as the company begins to balance the circle unconciously (figuratively, not literally, no see-saw set here), some really interesting and telling stage pictures happen.

The other balance growing in the play is between its dark and the light moments. Unlike other Shakespeare works that blend the comic and the tragic, All's Well That Ends Well doesn't have a turning point; it swings back and forth between the two. Helena's rejection by Betram in front of a full court is followed immediately by a scene in which spry Count Lafeu gives poor Parolles "most egregious indignity" in all manner of ways. Ben and the cast have really embraced this duality (which is also highlighted in the show's music); abandoned lovers share the stage with banana peels. It's really fun watching the development of a vaudeville bit, as each cast member in a scene adds his or her layer. Does it need to be done in threes? How many times can you step over the peel? Does a peel lose its power once someone picks it up? The answers are: not always, not as many times as Ben would like, and without a doubt.

And so this is an Actors' Shakespeare Project rehearsal. The past week has been incredibly interesting, as it represents not only my first outing with ASP, but also my first opportunity to see a professional rehearsal process for one of Shakespeare’s plays. For me, as Assistant Director and first timer with ASP, this process is doubly exciting because All’s Well That Ends Well is a virgin text; having never read it before my interview with Benjamin Evett, I had no preconceptions about the text. For me, it made this first week of rehearsal, when everyone gathered for “table work,” all the more fulfilling.

After the first read-through, the biggest surprise for everyone seemed to be how unproblematic this problem play was. Yes, the central conceit an audience must accept is that of a devoted and worthy woman loving a seemingly unworthy man. But as Ben pointed out to me during my incredibly formal interview in the Central Square Au Bon Pain, “Who doesn’t know a person dating someone completely unsuitable for them?” Relationships are rarely perfect, affections rarely meted out evenly. But as a listener, I had dismissed those concerns in by act 1, scene 3; so caught up was I in Helena’s quest (as she gallops on horse from Rousillion to Paris to Florence to Marseilles to Rousillion again it feels nothing but epic). Instead I felt satisfied with the neatly tied plot ends that, while I fear I’m giving too much away, lead some scholars, as Ben noted, to think this play is the lost Love’s Labor’s Won. While it contains all the problematic quick turns of affection (Romeo and Juliet), complex virgin-swapping (Measure for Measure), and tangential plots overtaking the main story (Twelfth Night) which dog Shakespeare’s most popular works, it is a sweet, mystical tale of love won with clear modern parallels. Why isn’t it done more often?

What a treat it is to “unpack” the text. Before being allowed on their feet, the cast sat for an entire six days (with intermittent musical rehearsal) and worked through the text. Some time was devoted to parsing out the characters. All’s Well That Ends Well doesn’t exist in a quarto form; it wasn’t published until the 1623 Folio. Ben remarked before the first reading that many scholars belief this work unfinished; two of the main characters are referred to in the text as the brothers Dumain, but labeled only as Lord 1 and Lord 2, not to be confused with the also appearing First Lord and Second Lord. So one of the orders in reading through was to decipher when it made the most sense for a line to be spoken by Paula Langton’s Lord 1, as opposed to Greg Steres’ Lord 2 as opposed to Risher Reddick’s Second Lord. Some time was devoted to paring down a few speeches and scenes for clarity. When Helena replies to the king that she can cure his disease in two days time, perhaps three poetical repetitions of different images for 48 hours are unnecessary; the king is suffering from a fistula, not a mental impairment.

But some of the most exciting time was devoted to interpretation of certain words in the text, which are recorded differently in different editions. For example, in Helena’s monologue in act 3, scene 2, where she curses herself for having chased her husband from the haven of court into the Florentine war, she pleads that the bullets will “fly with false aim, move the still-peering air that sings with piercing.” At least, that was the reading in the text that was printed for the cast. Some members of the cast were using the Arden Shakespeare that replaced “still-peering” with “still-piecing,” which was also featured in the Norton edition. In that reading, piecing was reported to mean “constantly closing itself up again.” Some were of the opinion that “still-peering” connected back to an earlier section of the soliloquy in which bullets were compared to amorous glances. Others like the repetition of the word “piecing.” Still other consulted the Folio, and found that the word has originally spelled “pearing” and sided with that footnote which held it to be a shortened form of “appearing.” I personally like motif of the air as “peering” but honestly preferred whichever version kept the hard “pear” instead of the soft “piece,” which didn’t seem harsh and warlike enough for this section of the monologue. So there you have it: fifteen minutes of discussion, at least four different texts and fourteen different brains, all consulted on one word. What could be more invigorating? Having a scholar David Evett in the room is another luxury, as often he is able to provide context (information on the Florentine-Sienese War of 1512, for example) that only makes the text richer. This table work plants some very intriguing seeds that I am excited to see bloom (did I mention this show’s flower imagery) in the coming weeks.

So, now that everyone has the beginning of a mental landscape, the next layer is the physical. Tomorrow we move from the downtown rehearsal space to the Waltham hinterlands; the nomadic nature of the Actors’ Shakespeare Project definitely reinforces the notion that people, both actors and audience, make a theatre—not the edifice. Ben is reinforcing this idea of traveling players with his conceptual framework for the show; I love the idea of taking the challenges before the company and turning them into strengths. But that probably needs to be left for another post.
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Today we worked on Malvolio’s entrance with the letter. Ken did some character work relating to the space and found that he liked playing part of Malvolio from the balcony as it was high off the ground and added to the regal feeling Malvolio is trying to affect when he is in his head. “Maybe the balcony is more ‘Malvolio’” as he perceives himself. When Malvolio is on the ground, he is being honest about how it feels, but still yearning to be up in a higher place. When choosing between a cruel hard Malvolio, and one more pitiable, “Which Malvolio do I want to live in?” “Which Malvolio serves the play best?” are questions Ken asked himself, he also commented that “this could just be my desire as the actor to be likable”.

Because Ken is such a genuinely likable person in real life, embracing the cold attitudes that are part of Malvolio’s character could present a challenge. It all comes down to how the audience is going to connect with the character. Should Malvolio have gotten his just-desserts at the end of the play, or are the tragedy of the circumstances going to be more prevalent?