I teach Shakespeare. That means I should enjoy attending and evaluating interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, and that my appreciation should be heightened by what I know. Good news! These things are true.
Last Friday, we brought the girls to a couple plays at Woodland Park, about a mile from our house. First we saw Henry VIII and then, a couple hours later, Taming of the Shrew. Any Shakespeare production is interesting for me, if not fun, because this stuff has been out there so long and so long valued and yet with enough play within the plays (no stage directions; no playwright's Forward!) that people really throw their creativity and brains and compassion into the projects, and different stagings and sensibilities emerge though they richly resonate with what we already know. Plus, every year I learn a little bit more about the plays and their contexts, and so I notice ever-finer details and understand better the deliberateness of decisions. Shakespeare in the Park is another layer of cool because, a) it's free, an inclusiveness and civic mission I always appreciate, and b) stagings have to be loud and energetic and stylized to compete with open space, babies and airplanes, which makes comedies over-the-top fun and tragedies and histories more accessible and energetic.
As a Shakespeare teacher and father of three kids, one would hope that my children also know something about Shakespeare's plays, and maybe even enjoy them. More good news! Somehow, through no fault of my own, they do! When the girls were younger, with groups of amenable people we played a couple theater-in-a-box style productions of King Lear and Merchant of Venice, which come with collapsable daggers and, in the case of King Lear, a plastic eyeball. Maybe that helped. The kids also really got into A Midsummer Night's Dream, I don't remember why. We owned the movie with Stanly Tucci, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline, and for a while, they watched it over and over. Also at some point, while we were visiting our great friends in Vancouver, Rachel and Isabelle and their three kids (probably just two at the time), the adults decided it was time the kids watched one of our plays for a change, and we put on "Pyramus and Thisbe," the wedding play put on by the truckdrivers of Midsummer, and, I have to here assert, we blew their world.
This doesn't mean our kids are happy to watch anything. Sophie brought things to draw, Maisie regretted she didn't, and Amelia's always ready for a live performance but can be disappointed though not glum. Sophie rarely looked up through Henry VIII, though she said she heard everything (and people back in Shakespeare's day didn't go see a play -- they went to go hear one), and afterwards, Sophie had some good historical questions that got into the holes of Shakespeare's Tudor propaganda. But nothing special happened here.
As for me, I liked the Catherine of Aragon character a lot; I liked the message repeated throughout the play, Don't hit someone when he's down; I liked the speeches given by characters at their lowest points; I liked musing about the crafting of this play in Elizabeth's court with Shakespeare's possible Catholic leanings; the acting was excellent; but it isn't a play to introduce people to Shakespeare (sorry, Nathan; glad you could make it).
Using a blanket to stake a claim for a performance was something we had recently rehearsed, and I do want to say something tangentially about this.
Tangent, go: We visited Rachel and Isabelle again the week before and went to Vancouver's Folk Life Festival. The sun beat down at day and the beats spun up at night, and it was a fine tiem. Among other groups at the many stages was Besh o droM, a group we knew from Hungary (thank you for the albums, Barna).
A highlight of the visit was the final meal. Rachel had put the kids to the task of planning and preparing a meal for the adults, something her kids had done before. They spent a day and a half planning. Ben's a giant detail guy, and ended up assigning himself to drinks within which he had multiple giant fruits and hammer-crushed coconut. Maisie and Gabby put themselves in charge of desserts, ice cream sundaes with raspberry sauce, perhaps the most triumphant dish of the night. Sophie's soup, though, was a small broth; and perhaps we should have worried when Ben asked if he really needed to put in 58 cups of water for the amount of pasta Amelia was going to prepare. In the end, the pasta was an astonishing thing. No one knows just how the effect was achieved. But it put the paste back in pasta. And I don't know when I'd seen people laugh so hard.
To work my way back from the tangent, at the Vancouver Folk Life Festival, we used blankets to stake our territory, and now we were doing it again.
By the time Taming of the Shrew opened, shade was mercifully spreading across the field. The actors had been practicing cracking a bullwhip and rolling around on each other and slapping faces. A little man in a green hat was distributing candy coins. The crowd had grown substantially.
I love productions of Taming of the Shrew, because it's so sexist it's a riddle but so quick and funny it's irresistible. People put it on, and then we get to see how they deal with a play that tames its free-thinking woman by depriving her of food, drink and company until she gives a speech at the very end saying, "Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign" and "our lances are but straws, Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare."
A few years ago, Seattle Shakespeare Company handled this problem by casting everyone as a man at a bachelor party, staging the play in a final sexist bacchanal -- until the groom delivers Kate's speech with such irony we see he rejects it. Two years ago, Wooden O set Padua in a trailer park, and we could laugh freely because they were rednecks and Kate was genuinely fiercesome. I actually thought I'd never see a better live production. Franco Zeffirelli, meanwhile, handles the issue so brilliantly in his film with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. We see Taylor's Kate, jealous and hurt, we see her making deliberate quiet choices to build a home for herself in her war with her new husband, and in the final scene, we see her watching children, with longing, before she delivers the speech, and we see that this too is a strategy but also partly sincere.
Greenstage's production, though, didn't try to do anything tricky for its modern audience. They trusted to Shakespeare's own devices. I think it worked, and it was a revelation. At the very beginning of Shakespeare's script, there's a drunk dude named Christopher Sly, and people think it'd be hilarious to put in a fancy bed in a fancy house and tell him he's always been rich and here's a play for you, a I'm in-charge-of-fortunes-and-women fantasy. Greenstage played this up, and it was ferocious, and so funny. Then, in the larger play, Petruchio is given free rein to have full reign, and we reveled in his sly control; meanwhile we sympathized with Katherine's unfair portions in life and felt a rising delight as we saw she would emerge into more happiness than she ever achieved in sour competition with her sister. The production even made the versifying funny, emphasizing the rhyming and laying bare its ridiculousness. The show was thoughtful, boisterous, creative, and Sophie was up and watching the entire time.
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