Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "pig-iron"
A Tale of Two "Twelfth Nights"
Many months ago announcements appeared of the impending visit by the twin London productions of “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III”. Mark Rylance, one of the greatest British actors in recent years, was to have the lead roles in both plays: King Richard himself, and the Countess Olivia in “Twelfth Night”. The two plays were to be performed in repertory, authentically, as if in Shakespeare’s time: costumes using only fabrics available in the 16th century, musical instruments played at that time, and last but not least: only male actors partaking, as it would have been performed in the Globe Theater in, say, 1601. Both plays received wonderful reviews in London and played to sold out theaters for their entire run. Now that they were coming to New York, it became a virtual “must-see” here for lovers of the theater in general and of Shakespeare in particular; and yet, my first reaction was to give it a pass. There had been an extraordinary number of Shakespeare plays done in New York in recent times: a wonderful production of Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Metropolitan Opera; another one of the play directed by the fabulous Julie Taymor in the new home of the Theater for a New Audience; “King Lear” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; at least two versions of “Macbeth” (not seen by me) on and off Broadway. I felt that, while an all-male production would be certainly interesting, it would be akin to music played on period instruments: a curiosity, as far as I am concerned, for I keep feeling that the composers themselves would have preferred the modern instruments had they been available at the time. So with Shakespeare: the all male casts were imposed by the contemporary mores of the period, a restraint on him, albeit one that produced much fascinating gender bending. But surely, he would have loved casting a girl to play Juliet, or Olivia, for that matter, had it been possible to do so.
The double productions arrived on Broadway and received unanimously rave reviews. This was a master class of Shakespeare playing, nothing less, we were told. Many of my friends saw it, all loved it. Time passed, and suddenly I realized that the run of the plays was coming to an end, that perhaps I had missed my opportunity and I would regret it: now, with only a week to go, there would not be any available tickets. However, I was wrong: there were some, and I managed to see the penultimate performance of “Twelfth Night”.
It was, indeed, fascinating. It was, indeed, a master class in acting. Seeing Mark Rylance’s mincing steps and girlish infatuation was an experience to treasure. The sense of authenticity that permeated the entire evening, of seeing the play as an audience contemporary with Shakespeare might have seen it was overwhelming. And yet I also felt that my initial apprehensions were not entirely misplaced. In 1598 or 1601, that audience had no alternative to the all male cast. We do, and therefore the transvestite aspects of the performance did distract. The emphasis, instead of being on the plot and the emotions of the characters turned into wonderment at how authentically female the various male actors managed to be. Instead of a romantic comedy with farcical elements, it became a farce. Olivia and Viola were as comic as Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who ended up, in comparison, less amusing. I am delighted to have seen it, but I walked out at the end of the performance with an intellectual appreciation of it, not a single emotion engaged.
Within weeks afterward there appeared in New York yet another “Twelfth Night”: a production by a small Philadelphia theater company, Pig Iron, that performed it for a short run in a tiny theater way downtown in the Henry Street Settlement House. The reviewer described a performance so different from what I had just seen – contemporary setting in a vaguely Balkan country, replete with a Balkan Gypsy band, (“The Only Band in Illyria”) -- that I thought it would be fun to see and compare it to the august Globe Theater version. Once more I got lucky and tickets were available for the next-to-last day of the run.
This is very likely a sacrilegious thing to say, but let me say it anyway: I much preferred it. A group of wonderful American actors, most of whom I have not heard of before, put on a show that left the audience walk out on air after the final curtain. The wide smiles of pleasure surrounding me leaving the small, two hundred seat theater reminded me of a long ago “Much Ado About Nothing” in Central Park that transported the play to the turn of the nineteenth century, replete with ragtime music and Keystone Cops; or the “Midsummer Night” directed by Peter Brook in the seventies that took place in a circus amid white-clad clowns. What they, and some other productions over the years had in common with Pig Iron’s “Twelfth Night” is a great inventiveness that transported the audience into another, imagined-but-believable version of a great play. The Globe production did not achieve that; I never got lost in the complicated narrative, I was watching masterful actors acting. An amusing comparison between the august British version and the small off-Broadway one concerned the role of Viola: in the former, the young male actor playing a girl in male disguise was far more of a girl having a difficult time hiding her gender than the actress in the latter, who turned into a very credible boy.
All told, seeing these performances back to back was a remarkable experience: the one, educational, and the other simply more enjoyable. Both, however, demonstrate why one loves the theater.
The double productions arrived on Broadway and received unanimously rave reviews. This was a master class of Shakespeare playing, nothing less, we were told. Many of my friends saw it, all loved it. Time passed, and suddenly I realized that the run of the plays was coming to an end, that perhaps I had missed my opportunity and I would regret it: now, with only a week to go, there would not be any available tickets. However, I was wrong: there were some, and I managed to see the penultimate performance of “Twelfth Night”.
It was, indeed, fascinating. It was, indeed, a master class in acting. Seeing Mark Rylance’s mincing steps and girlish infatuation was an experience to treasure. The sense of authenticity that permeated the entire evening, of seeing the play as an audience contemporary with Shakespeare might have seen it was overwhelming. And yet I also felt that my initial apprehensions were not entirely misplaced. In 1598 or 1601, that audience had no alternative to the all male cast. We do, and therefore the transvestite aspects of the performance did distract. The emphasis, instead of being on the plot and the emotions of the characters turned into wonderment at how authentically female the various male actors managed to be. Instead of a romantic comedy with farcical elements, it became a farce. Olivia and Viola were as comic as Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who ended up, in comparison, less amusing. I am delighted to have seen it, but I walked out at the end of the performance with an intellectual appreciation of it, not a single emotion engaged.
Within weeks afterward there appeared in New York yet another “Twelfth Night”: a production by a small Philadelphia theater company, Pig Iron, that performed it for a short run in a tiny theater way downtown in the Henry Street Settlement House. The reviewer described a performance so different from what I had just seen – contemporary setting in a vaguely Balkan country, replete with a Balkan Gypsy band, (“The Only Band in Illyria”) -- that I thought it would be fun to see and compare it to the august Globe Theater version. Once more I got lucky and tickets were available for the next-to-last day of the run.
This is very likely a sacrilegious thing to say, but let me say it anyway: I much preferred it. A group of wonderful American actors, most of whom I have not heard of before, put on a show that left the audience walk out on air after the final curtain. The wide smiles of pleasure surrounding me leaving the small, two hundred seat theater reminded me of a long ago “Much Ado About Nothing” in Central Park that transported the play to the turn of the nineteenth century, replete with ragtime music and Keystone Cops; or the “Midsummer Night” directed by Peter Brook in the seventies that took place in a circus amid white-clad clowns. What they, and some other productions over the years had in common with Pig Iron’s “Twelfth Night” is a great inventiveness that transported the audience into another, imagined-but-believable version of a great play. The Globe production did not achieve that; I never got lost in the complicated narrative, I was watching masterful actors acting. An amusing comparison between the august British version and the small off-Broadway one concerned the role of Viola: in the former, the young male actor playing a girl in male disguise was far more of a girl having a difficult time hiding her gender than the actress in the latter, who turned into a very credible boy.
All told, seeing these performances back to back was a remarkable experience: the one, educational, and the other simply more enjoyable. Both, however, demonstrate why one loves the theater.
