October
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0469 Tuesday, 8 October 2013
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Subject: Another All-Women’s Shakespeare
From The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/riot-grrrls-successfully-serve-up-a-shakespearean-revenge-story/2013/10/07/b396e59c-2f5b-11e3-9ddd-bdd3022f66ee_story.html
Riot Grrrls successfully serve up a Shakespearean revenge story
By Nelson Pressley
Let’s just say it: The Riot Grrrls are taking a fierce bite out of “Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare’s grisly revenge tragedy. The Riot Grrrls are the all-female wing of the Taffety Punk Theatre Company, performing one Shakespearean play a year with nary a man in sight. Currently, they’re injecting heart and horror into one of the Bard’s least-liked plays.
The problem with “Titus” is that it runs on the shock value of revenge that blows hot and blows cold but is always in the wind. Slashed throats and hacked hands are only the top of a menu of carnage. In fact, if you know “Titus” at all, the first thing you think of probably isn’t the title character, a noble but by-the-book general, or his nemesis, Tamora, Queen of the Goths. More likely, it’s the cannibalism.
Director Lise Bruneau doesn’t temper the gore, but she also doesn’t spurt blood up and down the small Capitol Hill Arts Workshop stage just for Tarantino-like kicks. (In fact, the blood effects are decidedly old-school and low-tech.) A good deal of this swaggering yet sensitive production’s terror is funneled through the affecting performance of Rana Kay as Lavinia, Titus’s daughter. When Lavinia is set upon by Tamora’s punkish sons, the struggling, magnetic Kay plays the violence as real.
As that cruelty unfurls, the vein of pity that “Titus” suddenly strikes is rich. It carries the show, even if elsewhere the production is perplexingly dry. That’s particularly the case with Isabelle Anderson’s commanding but largely emotionless turn as Titus. Anderson has real presence, and she is a clear and generally sharp speaker of verse. But her elevated poetics don’t send the character toward the edges of sanity or of heartbreak, even after the torture of his daughter. (“His” is correct, as Anderson plays Titus: The Riot Grrrls don’t upend character genders or pronouns here.)
Tia Shearer’s twitchy, hot-headed version of Saturninus, the Roman emperor who tries to claim Lavinia as a wife but then impetuously weds the prisoner Tamora (shocking!), is aggressive, yet perhaps too mired in schoolyard bluster. Cooler by far is Tiernan Madorno as Aaron, the Moor who stokes the engine of mayhem at every possible turn. Aaron is an Iago, and Madorno lies and manipulates with dastardly calm.
Sara Waisanen, her black gown cut low and her long blond hair looking wild, cuts a mean and witchy figure as Tamora, while Amanda Forstrom and Teresa Spencer effectively fling themselves about like rampaging thugs as Tamora’s vicious sons. Design-wise, these Goths are marked by thin black streaks on their faces, and the dark, slightly spooky environment created by Jessica Moretti and Katie Dill makes brief but stunning use of a black wall where a message gets scrawled in chalk.
But the project is about acting, of course. And as usual, Bruneau and the Riot Grrrls win the argument — is there an argument? — that women can play the range of Shakespearean parts they traditionally don’t get to play.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0468 Monday, 7 October 2013
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Monday, October 7, 2013
Subject: All Women’s Julius Caesar
From The New York Times
http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/theater/gender-bending-julius-caesar-has-all-female-cast.html
October 4, 2013
Once More Into the Breeches
By Alexis Soloski
Is there a classic play more macho than Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”? A tragedy of men’s frustrations, desires and actions, it offers just two small speaking roles for women. The word “men” occurs 54 times in the script, more than in any other Shakespeare play.
The word “women”? Just four mentions.
But that doesn’t trouble the director Phyllida Lloyd. Her version of “Julius Caesar,” which opens on Wednesday at St. Ann’s Warehouse, is set in a women’s prison and features an all-female cast. A rejoinder to frequent all-male productions, like the Shakespeare’s Globe renditions of “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III,” both soon to open on Broadway, it reclaims meaty parts and muscular verse for female actors.
Women taking on men’s roles isn’t exactly a new tradition, on the stage or off it. Many Shakespeare plays include scenes of women disguising themselves as men. When a Viola or a Julia or an Imogen puts on men’s clothing, she gains a kind of freedom and typically a lot more lines.
Though women did not appear on the stage in Shakespeare’s day in any attire, they arrived on the boards in the 1660s, playing not only female parts, but also Shylocks, Lears, Romeos and plentiful Hamlets. Such casting didn’t always stem from a feminist impulse — a pair of breeches shows off lots more leg than a long skirt — but it did provide compelling opportunities for actresses who felt limited by the roles available to them. In the 1840s, the celebrated actress Charlotte Cushman played Romeo to her sister’s Juliet and more than a half-century later Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet was the first ever committed to film.
All-female companies, like Takarazuka Revue in Japan and the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, currently staging a single-sex “Hamlet,” have long existed. And admired actresses like Fiona Shaw and Vanessa Redgrave have attempted Richard II and Prospero.
But female-to-male cross-casting remains a comparative rarity. When it does occur, it can trigger audience skepticism and critical discontent. Compare the praise lavished on the Mark Rylance-led Globe shows with some of the reviews greeting Ms. Lloyd’s “Julius Caesar,” which originated at the Donmar Warehouse in London.
One daily paper, The Telegraph, ran three separate negative assessments, appalled that any director would dare assign these parts to actresses. “Shakespeare never, after all, believed that a single word he wrote would ever be uttered upon a stage by a woman,” one critic harrumphed. But if spectators are so ready to accept middle-aged men in women’s roles (a notion Shakespeare also never imagined, as he wrote them for boys), why should such suspicion greet the reverse?
James C. Bulman, a professor of English at Allegheny College who edited a recent essay collection on cross-gender casting in Shakespeare, has some ideas. Speaking by phone, he noted that for many theatergoers, “women typically aren’t associated with that kind of power, that kind of dominance.”
Cush Jumbo, who plays Mark Antony in “Julius Caesar,” agreed. “I guess it’s a little bit scary to see girls running around with so much power,” she said.
If this explains spectator discomfort, it also clarifies why women might long for male roles. Kathryn Hunter, who has appeared as Lear and then as Richard III, will play Puck in the coming “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Theater for a New Audience. Speaking on a break from rehearsal, she said simply that in Shakespeare “the men have more interesting things to do.”
In a recent column for The Guardian, the actress and director Janet Suzman argued that men have more interesting things to think and speak, too. “There is simply no spiritual, intellectual or metaphysical equivalent to Lear, the Richards, the Henrys, nor the twin peaks of Othello and his demonic tempter, Iago,” she wrote.
Ms. Lloyd, who had earlier participated in a brief experiment with an all-female company at Shakespeare’s Globe, said that she conceived this “Julius Caesar” as a way to redress that imbalance. Speaking from London, she said that she wanted a work that would allow women to play something more than “the love interest, the tyrant’s wife, the tyrant’s mistress.” Frances Barber, who plays Caesar, noted that Ms. Lloyd “wanted us to get rid absolutely of any sort of frilly, female, wily, seductressy nonsense.”
Rid of that, the cast members, who call themselves “the Caesar sisters,” could feel more comfortable taking on male roles, male speech, male gestures. Harriet Walter, who plays Brutus, described rehearsal exercises in which the women explored “the way men don’t apologize for their physical presence in a room.” She added: “They spread out, they stand with their feet apart, they sit with their legs apart. They own the space.”
For Ms. Walter, 63, owning the space and owning this role has proved an unexpected privilege at this juncture in her career.
“I’d reached a point where I didn’t think I’d play Shakespeare any longer,” she said. “Once I’d played Cleopatra, I thought, ‘Now what can I do?’ Because any other female role I was offered in the Shakespeare canon was going to be inferior and less demanding. There was a certain logic to then turn to the male repertory.”
Seana McKenna, 57, who recently played Richard III at the Stratford Festival in Canada, echoed this sentiment. “Most major Shakespearean roles for women you play in your 20s and 30s,” she said. “So this was a gift — to lead a company when I actually had the experience to warrant it.”
One could argue that women are unavoidably less credible in these roles. Throughout history, they have involved themselves infrequently in political machinations and assassinations like those depicted in “Julius Caesar.” But Ms. Walter rejects such an objection. “I’ve played Cleopatra,” she said. “I am not any nearer to an Egyptian empress than I am to a Roman general. They are all characters.”
Ms. Lloyd has staged “Caesar” as a play within a play, in which the women are not themselves Roman senators but prisoners putting on a show. Yet she has ambitious goals for this “entirely feminist” production. She wants, she said, “to make young women in the audience feel they are potentially part of not just the romantic and the domestic, but that they could be at the center of the political sphere.” She added, “We’re on a mission to inspire women to find their voices.”
Whether or not this “Caesar” inspires audiences, it has certainly inspired the actresses involved. Ms. Jumbo, who said that she had coveted her male classmates’ roles during drama school, now wonders what other parts she might take on: “Playing Mark Antony has suddenly made me think: ‘Hold on a minute. I could play Hamlet!’ ”
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0467 Monday, 7 October 2013
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Monday, October 7, 2013
Subject: Women in Men’s Clothing
From The New York Times
http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/theater/women-as-shakespeares-men.html
October 3, 2013
Not Shrews. Princes and Kings.
By Alexis Soloski
In Shakespeare’s plays, women put on men’s clothes so they can travel where they like, marry whom they like, and speak their minds. Actresses from the 1600s to the present have followed suit — literally — dressing as men in search of better parts and more lines. Here are some of the most famous examples of Shakespearean male drag. Alexis Soloski
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN When this American actress played Romeo opposite her sister Susan’s Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet” at London’s Haymarket in 1845, reviewers swooned. “It is enough to say that the Romeo of Miss Cushman is far superior to any Romeo we have ever had,” wrote The Times of London’s reviewer. Cushman also portrayed Lear, Shylock and Hamlet.
SARAH BERNHARDT This French actress was in her 50s when she played the young prince Hamlet in 1899 at her Paris auditorium, the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt. She commissioned a French adaptation of “Hamlet” because, she said, “No female character has opened up a field so large for the exploration of sensations and human sorrows as that of Hamlet.”
DIANE VENORA The director Joseph Papp encouraged Ms. Venora toward a classical take on Hamlet at the Public Theater in New York in 1982. But Ms. Venora, who began the play in tears, ultimately played Hamlet as a brash teenager, strutting about in a tunic and tight black trousers, choking Ophelia and punching Gertrude.
FIONA SHAW The historical Richard II had a reputation for being effeminate. When Ms. Shaw took on the role at the National Theater in London in 1995, she portrayed that king as an androgynous figure, both comic and ethereal. In Deborah Warner’s production, Ms. Shaw’s casting lent an erotic frisson to the relationship between Richard and his usurper, Bolingbroke.
KATHRYN HUNTER During a brief period in 2003 when Shakespeare’s Globe in London experimented with an all-female company, Ms. Hunter gave an impish, playful shading to Richard III. “Her Richard isn’t a bottled spider or a hunchback toad,” a critic for The Guardian wrote, “more a cheeky monkey with an eye for advancement.” The season also featured an all-female “Taming of the Shrew,” starring a sexy Janet McTeer as a Petruchio.
HELEN MIRREN After seeing a production of “The Tempest” starring Derek Jacobi, Ms. Mirren mused, “A woman could do this and it wouldn’t change a word.” She had her chance in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film, which reinvented the role of Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, as a duchess. She showed a fierce maternal love for Miranda and lent an ardent clarity to the speeches. Vanessa Redgrave and Olympia Dukakis have also played Prospero onstage.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0466 Tuesday, 1 October 2013
From: Jessica Maerz <
Date: September 30, 2013 3:18:18 PM EDT
Subject: CFP: Shakespeare in Popular Culture Area, SWPACA 2014
The following CFP may be of interest to the SHAKSPER-L readership.
CFP: Southwest Popular/American Culture Association
Shakespeare in Popular Culture
Albuquerque, NM
Feb. 19-22, 2014
The Shakespeare in Popular Culture Area is now accepting proposals for the Southwest Popular / American Culture Association’s 35th annual conference, which will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Conference Center in Albuquerque, NM.
This year’s theme is “Popular & American Culture Studies: Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow”; we welcome proposals that engage with the overarching conference theme, as well as those that treat the convergence of Shakespeare, pop culture, and mediatization more broadly.
Potential topics might include: global Shakespeares; inter- and cross-cultural Shakespeares; Shakespearean auteurs; digital Shakespeares; screen Shakespeares; Shakespeare and the digital humanities; and postmodern Shakespeares.
Please submit a CV and 250 word proposal to conference2014.southwestpca.org by November 1, 2013. Inquiries may be directed to Area Chair Jessica Maerz at
Details about the conference, including information about conference travel and graduate student awards, can be found at www.southwestpca.org.
Jessica M. Maerz
Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies
School of Theatre, Film, and Television
University of Arizona