The Magical Qualities of Music

We spent a good deal of class discussing the role music plays in a staged production. I didn't see The Winter's Tale this weekend, so I can't say whether that particular production used music well. I can, however, cite an example of music NOT being used well.

I once saw a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. They decided to modernize it, which is fine. I think they were going for a Leo Dicaprio/ Claire Danes kind of vibe, and it didn't quite get there. I mean, everyone on stage was like sixteen and had no idea what they were saying. They used music pretty extensively throughout the show, which, in theory, is fine. Unfortunately, they only used one song.

This was the ONLY song they used. Literally the only one. Capulet's Party? Crawling. Marriage scene? Crawling. Mercutio got killed? Crawling. They also played it over their horribly long scene changes, and it was almost never appropriate for what was happening.

I love ambient music for a stage play, and I think it can add a lot. Unfortunately, it can also be terribly, terribly distracting if not done well.

Will It Last?

My question for today is: Will Perdita and Florizel's relationship last beyond the play? When the play closes, they're happy and married and everyone is alive and everything is wonderful, but can it stay that way?

 OR 

I tend to think...probably not. Firstly, their entire courtship was based on a lie. Florizel spent the whole time pretending to be someone he wasn't. Regardless of how much he purported to care for her, Florizel still spent their entire relationship lying to Perdita about who he was. How legitimate a relationship can it be if one party doesn't feel the need to be truthful with the other? How long until they realize they don't trust each other?

Secondly, how is Perdita going to adjust to life as royalty? As far as she knew, she was just some country girl who had to shear sheep and make butter. Living as a princess probably entails a greater degree of socioeconomic comfort, but there are a huge number of other responsibilities. It's been speculated that that's what ultimately got to Princess Diana - she was a lovely, intelligent girl, but she hadn't been brought up to know how a princess and future Queen of England should act, and she was crushed by the pressure.

Thirdly, how much is their relationship based on physical attraction and idealization of one another's characters? I didn't spend a ton of time looking, but I didn't see anything about how much they enjoy each other's personalities. Florizel spends a decent amont of time calling Perdita "fair" and "queenly," but that doesn't mean that he'll want to hang out with her when she gets old and fat. Which she will. Or she'll get pregnant and have stretch marks and be too tired to want to have sex. Or he'll see her in the morning without her makeup and realize she's not as young as she was. Or she'll move in with him only to find that he leaves his dirty underwear on the floor and wet towels on the bed and he lets himself go because there's no one to impress.

Fun fact: My husband has gained about thirty pounds in the fourteen months we've been married. It happens. He was horribly underweight when we first got together, but still. He walks around in his underwear and flosses his teeth while we're watching TV, and it is kind of off-putting. If I had just married him because I thought he was attractive and I thought he was some fantasy man, we would probably be divorced by now. I know it's a cliche, but my husband really is my best friend. If we weren't married, we'd still hang out all the time. We like being around each other even when we're not at our best.

When you get married, you have to be able to make a life. A life is not a fantasy. Bad things happen. Your spouse, who you love regardless, does gross or annoying things. Work and school and life get stressful, and you are crabby sometimes. Sometimes you don't handle things well. You'll both be sick but have to go to work anyway. You'll have financial problems. Your spouse should be there to pick up the slack and creatively problem-solve and deal with your personal brand of crazy. I don't believe that Perdita and Florizel are prepared for what married life is really like.

Comedy and Kids Will be Kids

I know there's been a lot of upheaval about the genre of The Winter's Tale. I don't necessarily want to get into that right now, except to say that I think it is, at it's heart, basically a comedy. Comedy didn't always mean humorous - it's traditional theatrical meaning was simply "it has a happy ending." Which The Winter's Tale does. So, I'm using it as an excuse to post this video.

This is from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged. I used to own it, but I lent my copy to someone else and he never gave it back.

Now, I want to switch gears briefly and talk about Florizel. One of my group members raised the question "Why didn't he just tell his dad about Perdita? His dad would have been cool with it." I don't know what Shakespeare was thinking, but it seems so obvious to me because I was Florizel.

When I was a teenager, it was a time. I was always having these big dramatic problems and everything was the end of the world. Some things were actually very serious - I struggled with depression for about three years before I told my mother and got help for it. It seems really obvious now for someone to say "Well, why didn't you just tell her? She was cool with it." In my crazy, emotional teenage mind, I thought that there was no way she'd understand what I was going through. I thought she'd be disappointed. I thought she'd be angry. I thought she'd think I was stupid or weak.

It seems likely to me that Florizel had thought his entire life that he was going to marry a princess and be king of the country, which is huge, burdensome responsibility. In some ways, he may have felt that any element of choice about his life had been taken away from him. Then, he meets this girl and she's awesome and he loves her immediately, but she's not a princess. As far as he knows, she's just some girl. By choosing her, he may have felt like he was ruining all the plans. When you're young, everything is heightened, and fear of losing something important drives people to do crazy things all the time. It seems to me that he didn't tell his dad because Florizel didn't want to risk anyone getting in the way and messing it up.

Elements of Production

I was a little torn about what to blog about today. I think I want to focus on aspects of production - what I would do with The Winter's Tale if I were the director. I'll happily admit that The Winter's Tale wouldn't be my first choice, but I like to think that I could be creative. 

I'm aware that this is an image from Spamalot,
but that's more or less where this is going.

The first aspect to consider is, of course, the setting. I don't think The Winter's Tale lends itself to interesting adaptations as much as some of Shakespeare's other plays, but I think I would go with an Arthurian England motif. Not quite on the nose, but not so far removed that things wouldn't make sense. I love the idea of green, rolling hills and thatched cottages. It might be hard to execute, but we're just brainstorming.

The second thing I thought about was costuming. Actually, to be honest, I thought about costumes first because, in my opinion, the costumes are the best thing about any show. For a long time, I dreamed of becoming a professional costume designer for stage and film, so it's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

In an ideal world, I would have sat down and drawn out all of my costume ideas for the major characters, but unfortunately, this isn't my only class. So, instead, for the men's costumes I will point you toward the picture above, and I've found a Butterick pattern that more or less exemplifies what I would do for the ladies. I was originally thinking that I wanted Perdita in kind of a German Oktoberfest kind of dress with tons of cleavage, but I don't know if that fits the setting. But in my mind, shepherdesses are all dressed like they've come from Oktoberfest.

The third thing I considered was the lighting, but that's too boring and technical for me to want to discuss here. In a nutshell, darker lighting when things are going bad, and brighter lighting when things are going good. The first three acts would be pretty dark, and then the lights would come up slowly as Time gives his/her big speech.

I really love Time as a character, even though his/her part is so brief. I think, in my own production, I would try to expand Time's role somewhat and try to make the impression that Time is present for everything that's happening. I don't know how I would do that without it being hokey, but it's something I would try to work out. I think, perhaps, I would cast Time as a woman and have her in the background in as many scenes as I could sneak her into. I don't want her to be overt, I just want her to be there.

Sir, Spare Your Threats

I'm still on a pro-Hermione kick, and, to be honest, probably will continue to be. It's probably partly because she's so easy to sympathize with - she did nothing wrong, but her name is dragged through the mud

I think it's interesting, in contrast to Hamlet, how there's so little ambiguity in the character's motivations. In Hamlet, it was almost impossible to tell who was being sincere and who wasn't at any given time. That's not the case here. It seems like almost everyone is being sincere almost all the time. Leontes sincerely thinks that Hermione cheated on him with Polixenes. Hermione is sincere in her denial and her grief. There's a pureness to the characters that I don't think existed in Hamlet.

It makes for a very interesting dynamic. In Hamlet, everyone was running around deceiving everyone else. You, as the reader or the audience member, knew that you couldn't trust anyone. In The Winter's Tale, you know that people are going to act on their convictions, but their convictions might be crazy.

Hermione, Hermione

Hermione from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is one of my favorite characters in all of literary history. Shakespeare doesn't often create fully fleshed-out female characters, but Hermione is awesome. She's amazingly steadfast and strong. I think it's fascinating when she's contrasted with Leontes. Leontes is her perfect foil: the second a seed of doubt was planted in his head, he turned on his wife.

The question is often raised as to whether Shakespeare was a misogynist. I don't know whether he was or not. It's true that there are few female characters in his work, but we have to consider the fact that women weren't legally allowed to act on stage. The lack of female characters could have been logistical, as much as anything else.

Then, of course, there's the issue of the culture of the time. It's true that England had a female monarch ruling single-handedly, but there was quite a bit of turmoil on that subject. Most people, including most women, still genuinely believed that women were inferior and subordinate to men, and that men were set above women by God. Misogyny is a disgusting and horrible thing, but that was the world at the time. I don't think it was right, but that was the culture Shakespeare lived in.

In general, I think that most writers have trouble writing about their opposite gender. Men can write about men, and women can write about women, but I think that things tend to get dicey when men try to write female characters or women try to write male characters. Shakespeare wasn't a woman. He could only guess what being a woman is actually like. He knew women, and he probably liked some women, but that doesn't mean that he understood why women of his age did the things they did.

On the other hand, there are some amazing women in Shakespeare's writing. Some of them, like Catherine from the Taming of the Shrew, got a bad rap of being un-womanish, but others, like Hermione, were fascinating and complex portraits of life as a woman. Interestingly, Hermione embodies some traditionally "masculine" characteristics - she's brave, she's tough, and she's insanely loyal. I think her characterization adds so much to the play as a whole.



Also, The Winter's Tale has the distinction of having a man eaten by a bear for no discernable reason, so that's exciting.

This is Hamlet We're Talking About Here, Hamlet!

I love Hamlet. I know it's cliche, but I really, really love Hamlet.

As previously mentioned, I tend to look at Shakespeare through an actor's lens. With that in mind, I'm going to share a theory that a friend of mine put forward as her PhD thesis in theatre acting:

Hamlet should never be performed. Hamlet should be bound up and venerated and kept forever, but it should never be performed. The idea is that Hamlet has so much inner turmoil that no actor would be able to adequately perform it without losing his mind. I don't completely agree, but I can certainly see her point. I never got to read her thesis, but I can come up with several arguments that support it.

It was brought up in class today where the character separates from the actor. In my mind, There isn't much of a distinction. The characters we play are parts of us, or we would not be able to play them. The best actors do one of two things: they use who they are to play the character, or they turn the character into who they are.

In the first case, there is almost no one who has enough negative life experience to adequately play Hamlet in the Meisner technique. Most people simply do not have enough to draw on to manufacture the emotions that Hamlet experiences. I mean, let's examine this for a second: His father has been murdered, probably by his uncle. His mother is in an incestuous relationship with said uncle. He is having spectres appear to him, leading him to wonder if he's being led down the right path, whether he's being deceived by a devil, or whether he's losing his mind altogether. His love life is completely messed up, and he makes it worse by accidentally killing his girlfriend's dad. That girlfriend then goes on to kill herself as a direct result of his actions. Also, he's inheriting a country that is at risk of war. He's not sure whether to kill himself, kill his uncle, or whether to kill anyone at all.

And these are only the issues explicitly brought up in the text. Never mind subtext, the actor's life-blood. I mean, what if Hamlet was also in love with his mother? Or Laertes? What if Hamlet knew that his mother's affair with his uncle started before his father was dead? What if Hamlet secretly hated his dad, adding even more confusion to his father's post-mortem cry for vengeance? There is not a person alive who has had a wall of crap like that fall upon him. I'd be pretty surprised if there was anyone who even came close.

Then, of course, there's the issue of whether Hamlet is actually saying what he means. Shakespeare uses verbal irony pretty extensively - there are any number of places where Hamlet could be sarcastic. Here's a passage from act I. What if Hamlet hated his father?

O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? Hold, hold, my heart!
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter. Yes, by Heaven!

If Hamlet is saying this sarcastically, it takes on a completely different meaning. Rather than telling his father how he plans to take on the task of vengeance out of love and respect, he is telling his father how much he hates him. He might seek revenge strictly out of sonly obligation (although hating your father and hating your uncle aren't mutually exclusive). I think we all know how much it sucks to do something for a parent that we don't want to do. I think most people are familiar with being guilt-tripped into something. If we look at this passage as sarcastic, the entire play takes on a completely different tone.

Is it really possible that one person is carrying around enough emotional baggage to really do Hamlet justice? If not, acting by experience is probably out.

If the actor were to embody Hamlet, he could end up dead or psychologically broken. One of the best examples of the danger of deep method acting is Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger was, by all accounts, a nice normal guy. He had a kid and friends and a life. In order to play the Joker successfully, he became the unhinged, sadistic, amoral character. He played the character beautifully, but I wonder if anyone thinks it was worth the consequences. In order to become the character, method actors bring upon themselves the traumas of their character's lives. They wear their character's clothes and sleep in their character's beds and speak in the character's voices. Rather than becoming the character, the character becomes them. By all accounts, that takes an enormous psychological toll.

I'm not saying that I agree that Hamlet should never be performed. I think most of us can relate to having a messed-up family or a messed-up love life. I don't think that the character needs to be taken as far as it's written. I can, however, see the potential danger in performing the role of Hamlet.

You could probably make the case that Hamlet is the most conflicted character in literary history. Usually, Shakespeare spreads the issues out among everybody, but it seems like all of the other characters in Hamlet have pretty clear motives and ambitions. They're surprisingly one-dimensional, if we adhere strictly to the text. Polonius is a nosy old man who wants to be actively involved in his children's lives. Ophelia does what she's told until she loses her mind. Gertrude is a slave to her desires. Claudius is a competent king, but an evil and ambitious man. It seems like Shakespeare reserved all the complexity in the play for Hamlet himself, and he may have gone somewhat overboard. It's certainly his magnum opus, but it makes for an extremely difficult performance.

Shakespeare in General

Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare. We meet again.

I have a hard time reading Shakespeare as literature. I think of Shakespeare from an actor's perspective - how his plays are meant to be performed. This is probably largely because most of the experience I've had with Shakespeare has been as an actor.

When I was sixteen, I was accepted into the Southwest Shakespeare Company's summer conservatory. It was the first year they had ever accepted anyone who wasn't college-age. This isn't indicative of my great talent so much as their desperation for bodies, but and it was all Shakespeare, all the time. It was a six-week, twelve credit crash course. Many of the teachers and affiliates referred to it as "Shakespeare Boot Camp," and they weren't exaggerating. We had classes from 8am to 6pm devoted to grammar, diction, movement, and performance, and it was all centered around the Bard.

That same summer, I was given the opportunity to play Helena in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The director chose to set the play in Haiti, and rather than the traditional interpretation, we interpreted the fairies as voodoo loa, and Oberon and Titania as voodoo deities.

The year after that, I was accepted into the New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts summer program. It was somewhat less Shakespeare-intensive, but I did have a class devoted exclusively to Shakespearean diction. We spent the entire summer workshopping monologues until we could perform them with perfect diction.

Later that year, I was cast as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. That was probably my favorite part in any play I've ever been involved in. I especially enjoyed Act V, Scene 1 where they bring in Ophelia's dead body. The man playing Laertes kept protesting that he didn't want to hug "creepy dead Cassie."

One of the fun things about Shakespeare, at least from an acting standpoint, is the complete lack of stage directions. Shakespeare indicates when people enter, when they exit, and when a bear chases them offstage. Other than that, directors and actors are free to move how they see fit. Some people see the lack of stage directions as frustrating or confining, but I find it very liberating. Shakespeare's writing, even his tragedies, are generally pretty whimsical. There is a freedom and an energy of purpose behind everything that he wrote. As such, performances should be vibrant with emotion and intent. Shakespeare shouldn't be stuffy or dry or boring or monotonous, because it wasn't written that way.