By taking courageous liberties, this year’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival recaptures the original audience’s experience of the phenomenal bard’s two classics, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. For on this matter you have to take liberties to be true.
For there are two ways of trying theatrically to present Shakespeare as originally produced. By the letter: actors in Elizabethan dress, with minimal props and setting. Or by the spirit: minimal props and setting, but with the actors in their contemporary garb. Shakespeare’s original performers did not wear 400-year-old fashions.They wore what their audience wore, the more easily to connect. In wardrobe as in setting, Shakespeare strove for continuity from stage to audience. While his poetry created the imagined world, the wardrobe helped his audience feel at one with it. The imagined world still reflected theirs. As also did the occasional prose intrusion into the poetry.
This year’s Ashland Shakespeare is so trenchantly of our time, with our concerns and our cultural references, that it reflects our lives the way his productions did his audiences’. Specifically, our experience is inflected by both colour- and gender-blind casting. Both make the plays express our times, our political relevance, as they did his.
Of course, in Shakespeare’s day the gender-blind casting inhered in boys playing all the women’s roles. That was a theatrical convention, not strictly political.
However conventional, though, it enriched the layering of performance and identity. In Twelfth Night, when Olivia loves the boy Cesario, he is really the girl Viola, who is courting Olivia on her beloved Orsino’s behalf. The audience knew (but suspended the knowledge) that a boy was playing the disguised woman. Olivia and Orsino ultimately transfer their love to the other twin.The layering of gender-role was especially appropriate for the play’s original setting, the January 6 conclusion of Christmas festivities, when the citizens cavorted in costume and reversed the usual master/servant roles and liberties.
The gender-play in Ashland was brilliantly pointed. Catherine Castellanos was striking both as the Capulet father and as Sir Toby Belch. As the figure of firmest familial authority in the former, she also inspired Maria’s spirit of misrule in Twelfth Night. In both roles Castellanos embodied patriarchal swagger and force. Her slugging of the nurse gave poignant motivation for the nurse turning against her beloved Juliet to support her forced marriage to Paris. When her Toby acknowledges the inhumanity in Malvolio’s abuse there is a suggestion of profound change in his apprehension. The feminine conscience so lacking in Capulet briefly gleams in Sir Toby.
Director Nataki Garrett also cast a woman, Erica Sullivan, as the tragedy’s formal ruler. She plays the Prince as a kind of state governor, with an ever-present aid to record and prompt, delivering the final decree as if in a television address. While her image flickers on the screen the families’ homes are callously uprooted, a harsh exposure of the government's pretence to responsibility.
Both colour- and gender-blind casting inspired Donna Simone Johnson’s playing Mercutio and Antonio. In the tragedy, her Mercutio embodies the wispy sprite of the character’s compulsive fantasies. As Sebastian’s faithful friend in the comedy, his nascent femininity adds a potentially erotic inflection to his expressions of love. That hint parallels this production’s Orsino kissing Viola when she is still in Cesario’s garb.
The African American re-contextualizing of Twelfth Night goes well beyond Johnson’s casting. Director Dawn Monique Williams made Feste the aesthetic center by casting the blues singer Arielle Crosby in that role and setting the play in the classical American blues scene. The festive occasion’s liberties are here imaged in the emergence of African American culture.
Underpinning the romantic triangle, Twelfth Night presents three attempts to transcend one’s social station. The two comical dupes are white: the pathetically vain courtier Sir Andrew Aguecheek (David Anthony Lewis) and the Puritanical steward Malvoiio (Al Spinoza). Both are humiliated by their presumption to court Olivia (the African American Eunice Woods). By her wit and mischievous spirit Maria alone in the subplot succeeds in advancing herself, winning and wedding Sir Toby, solidifying her place in Olivia’s family.
While the Ashland comedy celebrates the advent of African American culture, the tragedy is given an equally dramatic shaping by its shift to the society of the homeless. Of course Shakespeare often respected the classic definition of the tragic hero as high-born and powerful. (Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Titus, etc.). But in Romeo and Juliet he opted for tragic heroes who were young and helpless.
Director Garrett went a step further here. Eschewing the warring families’ usual wealth, she has them poor, living under a bridge. The Montagues are of no visible abode. The Capulets live in a seedy trailer, so Paris’s wealth and status loom even larger against Romeo’s love. This setting builds on Arthur Miller’s revolutionary notion that even a Willy Low-man can be a tragic hero. His “Attention must be paid” implicitly echoes through the homelessness the lovers fight through here. In short, Mercutio’s plague needs no literal houses. Humanity should not be a matter of class.
At the end, the director kept Montague’s promise to honour Juliet with a solid gold statue. Its implausibility in this context is all the more poignant. Montague has the proper impulse, a dream of sufficiency, despite lacking the resources to fulfil it. Equally compelling: during the Prince’s public bromides a sterile army dismantles the society’s pathetic homes. The neighbourhood’s banishment is moire sweeping than Romeo’s.
The underclass setting also redefines Friar Lawrence (the African American Tyrone Lawrence). Shakespeare’s friar was already not completely cloistered. He had his horticultural research, which provided Juliet’s useful drug. He also hoped his facilitating the couple’s marriage would unite the warring families. Director Garrett amplifies that worldliness by making the friar a social activist. He runs a church on wheels to provide food as well as services to the downtrodden neighbourhood. In advising Romeo he appears uncertain about what to do, earnest but powerless.
Within the action — he reappears to join the company recital of the summary speech — this friar disappears when he hears the others approaching the Capulet tomb. He abandons Juliet. But Garrett also gives the friar a scene at the very beginning. His van provides the ammo for the initial Montague and Capulet food fight. The friar returns to help clean up the mess. That works as a mime anticipation of his larger role in the drama: nourishing the lovers’ union then trying to clean up the ensuing mess. The device recalls the dumbshow that anticipates Hamlet’s dramatic implication of Claudiius.
In short, here are two contemporary approaches to Shakespeare that — like the bard’s original productions — use familiar fictions to reflect upon current social conditions and issues. Both effect an intense emotional and intellectual connection. In performance as in conception both works prove exemplary. One can only hope that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival survives its current financial and administrative challenges and will soon return to its familiar range of offering, in volume as in quality. Meanwhile, for this relief much thanks.
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