At the Folger: Globe players’ Hamlet; Capital Fringe: Duchess of Malfi, Anouilh’s Antigone, Master Harold & Aphra Behn

Lyndsey N Snyder as the Duchess (We Happy Few)

Naeem Hayat as Hamlet (Globe players)

Emily Relva as Anouilh’s Antigone (Wandering Theater)

Dear friends and readers,

This past week I was privileged to see three absorbingly well-acted productions of profound plays, Monday evening as organized by Capital Fringe Festival: inside a black box theater in an art gallery, a 90 minute version of John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, done more or less in modern dress by “We Happy Few” in a small theater where all the seats were sold:

Duchess of Malfi’s cast and commentary;

Friday evening at the Folger Theater (the whole place much loved by me, now a member of the theater side as well as a reader on the scholar side of the building), a 3 hour Hamlet performed by the London Globe players as part of their tour of welcoming places in 2014 (the 27th stop they said):

and late this Saturday afternoon, as organized by Capital Fringe Festival, at the old and once again re-vamped Atlas theater, H Street, NE, a nearly 2 hour version of Jean Anouilh’s 1944 Antigone performed by the Wandering Theater Company who expect to take the production to off-Broadway this coming fall.

Clemmie Evans and Jenna Krasowski as two woman chorus for Antigone

I probably enjoyed The Duchess of Malfi the most. It was acted naturalistically with intense forcefulness and the powerful soliloquies contrasting the natural joy of the Duchess marrying her steward, Antonio, against the fierce opposition of her corrupt, rank-obsessed and incestuous brothers’ ferocious what seems crazed perverse opposition struck strong chords. The focus of the production was the lower class male character, Bosola, endlessly murdering and torturing others in the hopeless hope of promotion and big cash, only to be sneered at when he’s done. (Bob Hoskins did this role decades ago.) So it was accessible. I last saw a production on TV when I was 13 when Channel 13 in NYC was first aired. This production de-emphasized Webster’s exploration of meaningless (“look you the stars shine still” says Bosola to the Duchess at one point) for a mirroring of today’s sexually sick religious hypocrisies, glamorized gangsterism, and antagonistic heterosexuality. I went alone and when I returned home (later at night) sat with a plate of tuna and glass of Shiraz wine watching the latest dire news.

A few years ago now Jim and I saw another Globe production of Hamlet at the Folger, and we did not care for it. The actors were acting Elizabeth players performing Hamlet, and the double turn was too distancing. I believe it was the same actress who performed Gertrude (Miranda Foster) and the difference will epitomize why this production succeeded at least with me. She really played Gertrude directly and with modern virtuoso hysteria and subtlety once we were within the play while at its edges, the singing and dancing and movements as we moved from scene to scene she reverted to an actress-player with her lute interacting with other actors and the audience. I just love the dancing of all the performers together at the end — as magically they all rise from imagined death to brilliant life again. This time the group had a lot more effective stage business during the play, some of which was self-reflexive — the trunks they carried about. At deeply felt tragic moments I felt I was near tears (Keith Barlett as Claudius suddenly confessing that indeed he killed the king and it is killing his soul) and cried at Hamlet’s death, but suddenly we swung round for genuinely comic moments: the world is filled with silly and ignorant and dense (in Shakespeare, Polonius, Laertes) unknowing profound (the gravedigger) presences while others understand the tragic ironies of existence. The mix of comedy and tragedy must indeed have seemed barbaric to the French. The audience did not appreciate the this more modified version of the Globe style, but I gathered more what Shakespeare’s text was meant to convey than I’d done since some of the productions of Papp in Central park years ago. Izzy was not sure how much she liked it. You again had to pay attention to the words which went swiftly. Very strong beyond Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude were Rawiri Paratene as Polonius and gravedigger, Tom Lawrence as Horatio, Laertes, Fortinras, Osric.

The players did get a standing ovation. Not only were all seats taken, but I saw chairs brought in for some known TV (WETA) critic types (Robert Aubrey Davis who seemed to be having a good time). Some of this type of clapping is the result of the place, the price paid, a sort of self-validation. For myself I felt the bitter ironies of the exhibit in the great hall on heraldry: Shakespeare had a hard time gaining the coat of arms for his father. Lord how petty and absurd these competitive mortals be. With my membership I did get a complimentary coffee without having to wait on line.

I mentioned the standing ovation because the Wandering Players were not similarly whooped up, and yet their efforts were as strong and perhaps for the audience more successful. The reviewers have been very hard on this production. It is true that their program notes where they say their play is an allegory of American power and abrogation of civil and other individual rights won’t wash. Creon’s self-justification is that of the Nazi collaborators (Vichy leaders in particular): if they didn’t compromise and collaborate it would have been so much more worse, there was nothing (was there?) to be preferred from the different “sides” and the whole controlled dramaturgy very French despite American costuming. Anouilh in fact like Sophocles keeps to non-specific references and that’s why the play applied at times to events happening in the perversely barbaric acts of this week. When Antigone from her place behind an immured wall talks to the callous jailer (who might himself have been murdered had events gone another way) the suggestiveness evoked the torture of solitary confinement in US prisons today. None of the performers were weak.

I write this blog because all three of these productions will recur elsewhere so my reader can perhaps keep an eye out for them. I feel a bit guilty for not having praised strongly one of earliest of the Capital Fringe Festival productions, Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys, done by the “Rude Mechanicals” at the Goethe Institute. Marcus Salley as Sam was the noble soul. I was deeply moved and stirred, at the same time as I so badly missed Jim I had an episode of what’s called STUG. How I would have enjoyed discussing the stage business and props with him:

I came home in time to go to Noodles and Company and for the first time in my life bring home a hot meal of pasta for myself — spicey tomato and chicken pieces with some kind of scattered cheese, which I washed down with paisano wine.

I did justice to the witty comedy of Miss Emma’s Match-Making Agency for Literary Characters on my Austen reveries blog.

But I never mentioned anywhere a remarkable concoction written by Chris Braak an directed by Cara Blouin: entitled The Empress of the Moon: The Lives of Aphra Behn, the writer and director took numerous passages from Behn’s plays as well as short fiction of Oroonoko and her letters to her lover, Scott, and her begging pleas to Thomas Killigrew as a debtor in prison to present scenes from Behn’s life interpersed with some of her most intelligent moving commentary on her experience of life. It was that complicated an amalgram it should be published so people (me and others) could read the text before showing up. The players were movement artists more than actors and much was covered through mime. Sarah Robinson was Behn. I’d single out Alexandra Blouin as the bully Lord Willoughby and Jennifer Huttenberg as the sword-wielding Mr Scott. They all had studied later 17th century gestures. The production ought to be redone at conferences where people who can appreciate how the underlying material has been brought to life. Alas I cannot find one photo of the production anywhere on line so fall back on a photo of a young Jeremy Irons as a tough Rover from decades ago:

as a way of remembering how badly Behn was treated by Scott, Killigrew and most of the men she ever knew, died young, but left 37 plays, many playable, much vivid iconoclastic poetry, translations from subversive French prose and verse, personal letters, and marvelously eloquent epilogues. Germaine Greer’s essay on her life is probably closest to the truth that she survived through sheer nerve, being kept as well as incessant writing.

Thus I managed to join in on some of the Capital Fringe Festival this summer. Jim would buy across the 3 and 1/2 weeks for us probably at least twice as many tickets and we would have gone to rock and concert shows. We would have gone to the final dancing under the tent near Gallery Place where prizes are given out.

Jim would have bought at least a couple of tickets for concerts and operas at Castleton. It’s a 3 hour trip to mid-Virginia by car. Out of the question for me alone. I would have gone to the Castleton Festival through the Jewish Community Center which organized a bus tour package to go to see Madame Butterfly complete with a lunch and lecture, but it was full up by the time I registered. I wonder now what the atmosphere of the place with Loren Mazaal’s death in the middle of the month-long teach-in for students and budding great opera singers and musicians.

This coming Friday evening will be my one effort at Wolf Trap. My friend, Vivian, who comes to the movies with me, will go with Izzy and I to a Mary Chapin Carpenter concert at the big theater, the Filene next week. With both Vivian there, Izzy, google maps and going when it is still light, I hope to learn how to get there and back without an ordeal of suffered anxiety over getting lost.

I am not writing as much about what play and concert going I do because a central inspiration for my blog is gone. My readers probably do not realize how much this was Jim’s as well as my blog. While I did 99% of the writing, many of my blogs were the result of seeing or hearing something with Jim, talking with him before and afterwards and then writing up the ideas and feelings conjured up. He would then read the blog and we’d talk again.

His life was cut off early; like many cancer victims he was destroyed horrifyingly by a disease with cruel indifference by the choice of the society he lived in. I was helpless to do anything for him, and today find myself sometimes asked to pretend it’s okay, that I too am getting over his absence. I am not nor are others similarly devastated and those who agree to collude to pretend do a disservice to those gone and the countless being thrown away or about to be as I write these words. Izzy and I remembered his quiet fun today as we went into DC. She talked of how she sometimes imagines herself talking to him as she leaves her job at the Pentagon, and I how I wish I could get myself to.

I did enjoy, learn, somehow profit from what I experienced and write to advise others to go see these productions if they should turn up in some form near you. And now I retire to read in bed with my two cats nearby.

Vanessa Bell’s Girl Reading

Ellen