History Plays, Hot Ones, and the Heat Death of the Universe
Plus: Sherman takes a break from burning Atlanta to go to the theater
The History Plays at the Guthrie
An essay I wrote about Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V at the Guthrie Theater was published this week in the Stage Directors and Choreographers Journal.1
I assistant directed the plays earlier this year and enjoyed reflecting back on the process with the actors, directors, stage managers, dramaturgs, casting directors, and observers who made the process possible. A huge thank you to my editors at SDC, Stephanie Coen and Lucy Gram, and everyone who gave their time for interviews: Mark Catron, Penelope Geng, Joe Haj, Tyler Michaels King, Jennifer Liestman, Tree O’Halloran, Carla Steen, Will Sturdivant, and Stephen Yoakam.
I wanted to work with Joe Haj since I saw his Pericles at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 20152 when I was on the public programs staff. It is still one of the best productions of [anything] that I’ve seen and I’m grateful he invited me to join the directing team3 for this project. I have so many treasured memories like Henry IV bringing an air fryer to rehearsal and making pizza rolls for everyone, Hotspur creating company-specific Connections during tech, or the staggeringly brilliant composer Jack Herrick teaching me to juggle during dinner breaks.
Joe and Yoke were in the Histories at the Guthrie in 1990 and I read Michael Pennington’s book about producing ALL of the history plays with the English Shakespeare Company during rehearsals. We were all struck by how the challenges and rewards of digging deeply into Shakespeare rhyme across the years:
Joe was reminded of an experience he had on a tour of the theatre archives at the Folger Shakespeare Library when he directed Hamlet there in 2010.
“I remember [the librarians] taking these prompt books down and looking in the margins, which are filled, filled, filled with scribbles of…artists just like us, trying to wrestle to the ground the hardest material in the world. Trying to find a path into it, trying to make something that may be beautiful for people to come and participate in and watch. I realized this play has been around for centuries…we’re just in the river of the long history of this play.”
“We get to go in, splash around a little bit, make our minor contribution to this eons long contemplation of this play. It was so disburdening…I don’t have to make the perfect anything. I don’t have to make the thing nobody’s ever seen. I don’t have to do any of those things. I just have to try to make the thing as beautifully as I know how with these collaborators in this process, that’s my only responsibility.”
“King Lear By Williams Shakespeare”
Get it together Hudson Yards. 25 billion dollars and no copy editor? C’mon.4
I saw this production in London, it was my first time seeing Branagh live (I missed his Armory-encompassing Macbeth), and tween-me who had a crush on his thin-lipped weirdo of a Henry V was deeply disappointed. However, rumors that his abs were “deliberately contoured with mud to add maximum definition” appeared to be true.
I do like his description of Lear as a play with “fairytale architecture” but “no magic” and watching former-Williamtown-apprentice Mika Brzezinski try to remember if he was in “The Hobbit” or “Harry Potter” is fun.
Shakespeare on Hot Ones
This is not the first time Shakespeare has appeared on the popular Youtube talk show. Subjecting celebrities to the indignity of eating incredibly spicy wings in order to promote themselves feels Shakespearean in the extreme. What will you to do get want you want? At what price glory? I’ve never actually seen anyone tap out with a “we will proceed no further in this business” but I feel it coming.
I have searched the interwebs for the Shakespeare production where Peter Dinklage played the Chorus (R&J or Henry V?) to no avail. If anyone locates, please share!
The idea of this director was to bolt me to a chair on the side of the wall of the theater over the audience. It was a small space and one show I was quite sick but the show must go on. I was saying my lines and throwing up into a basket…
General Sherman is Rude at the Theater, Gets Kicked Out (of an Oyster House)
I wrote my undergrad thesis on Civil War Shakespeare and thought I was maxed out on delightfully odd stories from that era (would you like, “Lady Macbeth Rips Out John Wilkes Booth’s Stitches Onstage” or “Homosexual Panic Denies Grant Opportunity to Play Desdemona?”) but then Jordan Schneider at the always-excellent ChinaTalk sent over this gem from Bruce Catton’s book, Grant Takes Command.
If you missed our conversation about Shakespeare and Joe Biden back in the halcyon days of four months ago, assuage your election anxiety with our dulcet tones and then make a plan to go vote. Featuring Eliot Cohen, Drew Lichtenberg, and Phil Schneider.
Quick Links
When Ken Branagh tells you to “get in the grave” you get in the grave.
“Without command & sway & sexual sizzle / It’s all one dreary democratic drizzle.”
In practical terms, monkeys vs. heat death of the universe ends badly for us all.
What time does the closet scene in Hamlet take place? 3am?
Recurring R&J Roundup: puppies, intimacy, music, a shark onesie, too hard for ninth grade?, “there’s a lot of New Jersey in Romeo + Juliet.”
Reflections on Cal Shakes closure. Good news: the scene shop is being spun off.
Recommendations
Assyriologist Irving Finkel brings his father’s dental skull into the BBC recording studio. (There is also a brief mention of Hamlet 20 mins in.)
An early draft was more of a production history of the plays rather than an analysis of how Joe Haj put them onstage. I went through about a dozen different ways of describing exactly *why* the opening scenes of Richard II are so g*ddamn confusing. The bit below didn’t make it into the final version but I spent far too long calculating the modern value of eight thousand nobles not to include it here.
Two featured characters – the Duchess of Gloucester and Mowbray – deliver important information but are never seen again, the king may be guilty but is accused obliquely and responds equivocally, and the accusations detour from the main issue of Gloucester’s death into the by-path of Mowbray’s alleged embezzlement of 4.5 million dollars of the national defense budget for “lewd employments.”
There were an unusual number (n + 1) of Pericles around that time. In 2016, Trevor Nunn directed a production at TFANA as did Cameron Knight at Notre Dame Shakespeare. I wrote a program note for the latter.
The team also included Lavina Jadhwani and Kajsa Jones-Higgins. Lavina had a cancer recurrence soon after we wrapped, here is her GoFundMe.
I noticed this on TUESDAY and at the time of sending on SUNDAY, it is still up.