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Op-Eds :: Bard for the DNC Two Shakespeare plays about soldiers behaving badly are being performed during the Democratic National Convention week in Boston. by Bill Marx
Bard for the DNC Two outdoor Shakespeare productions about soldiers behaving badly are being performed in Boston during the Democratic National Convention week. What political wisdom the delegates are gleaning from the plays is questionable. "Much Ado About Nothing," where the army officers see the error of their ways with the help of the local police, may provide a reassuring vision of America's handling of Iraq. "Troilus & Cressida" looks like an anti-war play, but Shakespeare is never simple: it is an anti-anti-war parable as well. In terms of quality, the delegates have a clear choice. "Much Ado About Nothing," performed for free on the Boston Common, is the far more professional and polished production of the two. Director Steven Maler carries on in the hot-blooded vein of the Kenneth Branagh film version, in which the soldiers descending on Messina have little on their minds but making whoopee with the female population, who is longing for the attention. Perhaps the trauma and exhaustion of battle explains the poor judgment of Claudio and the Prince, who fall for Don John's clumsy setup of Hero. The sloppy construction of the storyline suggests that Shakespeare is bored with it: why doesn't the maid who was part of the scheme blab? "Much Ado About Nothing" jabs so half-heartedly at the hubris of the military it is a safe play to stage now. Aside from the mischief-making of Don John, the officers are more gullible than guileful. Issues of honor and value, good and evil, are accepted rather than argued over, a hallmark of the plays before "Hamlet." The scrappy wooing of Beatrice and Benedick is what makes the play an entertaining battle of the evenly matched sexes. The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC) comes up with an attractive fun couple, Jonno Roberts as Benedick and Georgia Hatzis as Beatrice, who exude hormonal energy and attitude. But they push too hard at times, as does the production. Still, this is a pleasant romance under the stars. The CSC stages a modest play well. The Publick Theatre tackles a grizzly bear in the Shakespearean canon and comes up bloodied and bowed. "Troilus and Cressida" is one of the Bard's most fascinating failures. Centuries of commentators have argued whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy, a satiric history or a weird melodrama. I think it is a remarkable black comedy, a continuation of Shakespeare's subversion of conventional beliefs and radical play with language that began with "Hamlet." This time, the Bard comes perilously close to reducing all questions of worth to a matter of opinion, which may be worn "on both sides, like a leather jerkin." In Shakespeare's dank vision, the Trojan War has been going on for years; Helen is a trollop and Achilles a dirty fighter. Not only are the Greeks and their foes exhausted, they no longer know if what they're fighting for is trivial or significant. "Troilus's" relevance to the war in Iraq is obvious, but it also has much to say about how political discourse manipulates talk about "values," family or otherwise. Though the Publick Theatre production is uneven, it is still worth seeing because the play is so rarely done. As W.H. Auden argues, if we don't understand the Bard's "difficult" plays, such as "Troilus & Cressida," "we won't understand the great tragedies." Tolstoy Is Long Gone The newly released National Endowment of the Arts study, "Reading at Risk," found that over the past 20 years the percentage of Americans who read imaginative literature -- poetry, plays, and novels -- has dropped 10 points, from 56.9 in 1982 to 46.7 in 2002. The decline rate among those aged 18 to 34 was a nose-diving 28 percent. Predictably, the very cultural industries that contributed to this deplorable situation, and made big bucks doing it, responded to the disturbing news with expedient hypocrisy, blaming everyone but themselves. The media's two-faced take on this major study of 17,000 respondents was predictable. In a "Boston Globe" article, NEA chairman Dana Gioia insisted that anyone who cares about cultural literacy will "respond to this report with grave concern." The media emitted facsimiles of shock and fear. "Newsweek" found the study "troubling," fretted about the growing number of books published every year, and vaporously suggested "that the media and educators need to be more aggressive." An editorial in the "Boston Globe" pleaded that "it is essential to help children love reading, but the badly needed heavy lifting is to help adults love reading and become role models for children." This rousing suggestion comes from a newspaper that a few years ago tried to whittle down its book review pages. Of course, the call for "heavy lifting" is anathema in a culture dedicated to easy access and reassurance. Thus the study's warning that "at the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century" had to be undercut. A "New York Times" article quoted a former librarian who suggested that, in an increasingly visual society, nobody would miss reading imaginative literature much. Veteran professor of English at Amherst College William Pritchard told the "Boston Globe" he didn't dispute the findings of the report, but felt panic was not in order: "I was talking to a colleague today, and we both said we didn't perceive in the students we teach any falling-off in what they had read." The Tenured Groves of Academia are unruffled. The study's claim that reading literature for pleasure is going the way of the dodo may be overblown. But the report asserts an embarrassing truth: academia and the mainstream media are failing, dismally, to foster cultural literacy. Over the past 20 years, English and creative writing classes have been cranking out thousands and thousands of students, yet reading as a lifelong habit of intellectual pleasure and stimulation, the cornerstone of a liberal education, has lost ground. English professors are in the business of manufacturing teachers, not dedicated readers. A recent publication commissioned by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, "Writing Without Reading," indicates that expository writing courses are giving short shrift to fiction, the traditional inspiration for student essays, and turning to nonfiction. As for the media, its expressions of regret ring especially hollow. Book review sections in newspapers and magazines continue to shrink. Two decades ago, "Newsweek" and "Time" offered two or more pages of book reviews. Today, their arts sections are stuffed to the gills with what is essentially advertising (masquerading as news or reviews) that pushes popular culture: TV, music, and movies. Literature is marginal, in need of a technological makeover. A week before "Newsweek"'s article on the NEA study, a "Tip Sheet" item in the magazine breathlessly hawked "MP3 Books: Tolstoy To Go." Turns out you can now listen to "Anna Karenina" on an iPod. Why should adults or children choose to pick up hefty literary tomes when those who claim to be its champions let the imagination slip through their fingers? Profitable Nowhere The same year Marlon Brando was born, 1924, Eleonora Duse, one of the greatest and most influential stage actresses who ever lived, died at the age of 65. While reading considerations of Brando's career over the past two weeks, the coincidence jumped to mind because, amid all the predictable encomiums to the actor's many great performances, there was scant mention of his disrespect for the art of acting and how harmful his stance has been for the American theater. The critical blather about Brando ranged from hyperbolic inanity ("the best actor who ever lived") to reasonable evaluations ("he was the finest actor of his generation"). The half-baked Freudian effusions of Method acting mavens, for whom Brando is a poster boy of the epiphanic inarticulate, couldn't fend off perceptive charges that the actor's once revolutionary turns in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "On the Waterfront" have dated. What's more, as early as the 60s Brando displayed the sure fire sign of artistic senility -- self-parody. Admirers insist that the actor's incandescent peaks, especially his emotional breakdown in "Last Tango in Paris," make up for the many miasmic valleys. What isn't nearly as easy to forgive is Brando's lifelong dismissive attitude for the art and craft of acting. He began his career on stage and, by all accounts, was a charismatic powerhouse. But after the success of "Streetcar," Brando quickly exited Broadway for Hollywood, a place he openly disdained, never returning to the theater. Over the decades in Tinsel Town he frittered away his talent and considerable influence by taking up roles in films directed by mediocre directors, occasionally publicly boasting about million-dollar paydays for little work. For every "Godfather," he made three or four bombs. Worse, Brando's journey to a profitable nowhere has become the standard path for many of America's most promising actors, who leave the theater as soon as possible for film. The career of Eleonora Duse suggests what Brando could have accomplished had he honored, rather than patronized, his profession. Duse's life was as chaotic as Brando's, but for all of her grand diva storms and affairs with married men, she was a restless creative spirit who never forgot that with genius and fame comes the responsibility to foster artistic excellence. Weary of performing in melodramas the public loved, Duse tackled the controversial plays of Ibsen. She also egged on dramatists, such as her lover Gabriel D'Annunzio, to write serious scripts for her. Duse starred in a silent film she directed herself, but her loyalty to the stage never wavered. Performing without makeup in simple costumes, discarding stock gestures in the quest for psychological truth, Duse was the first modern actor, the indispensable inspiration for, among others, the makers of the Method, from Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg to Stella Adler, who taught the young Brando. Brando died overweight, his artistic force spent, fodder for the nostalgia of critics and gossip about whether or not he was broke. Ironically, his last screen appearance will be as a voice in an animated cartoon. Duse died of influenza in Pittsburgh on the last leg of a grueling American tour. At the time, her lungs were so weak she needed the use of an oxygen tank when she walked off stage. Still, the actress managed to project into huge theaters without microphones, wowing theatergoers, including Charlie Chaplin, who wrote that "her technique is so marvelously finished and complete that it ceases to be technique." Duse's dedication to her ideals is a reminder that there is more to performing than a paycheck. The Last Banana Peel One of my favorite British playwrights, Peter Barnes, died a week ago from a stroke at the age of 73. He was undervalued in his homeland and grievously neglected here, aside from recognition of his ferocious first play "The Ruling Class," which was made into a 1972 film starring Peter O'Toole. A vaudevillian visionary, Barnes specialized in a post-Holocaust, neo-absurdist comedy that rattled audiences of all types: here was a Jewish playwright who had the chutzpah to set a farce in the death camps of Auschwitz. In an introduction to a volume of his plays, Barnes writes that he was born in Bow, London, but spent most of his childhood in "a downmarket seaside resort on the east coast, where my parents worked in amusement arcades on the pier." His early memories were of "deck chairs, Punch and Judy booth and sand artists who could draw, with a pointed stick, elegant pictures in the wet sand, usually of a patriotic nature." Barnes's scripts are iconoclastic, ungainly sand castles: epic attempts to fend off the horror of mass graves, intimations of temporality, and the spread of authoritarian mentalities with circus hijinks and low humor, an irreverent marriage of pratfalls and pogroms. In "Red Noses," which won the Olivier Award for Best Drama in 1985, a band of performers find work telling jokes during the Black Death in France, sending sufferers off to oblivion with a punch line. Not only did Barnes dismiss dishwater realism, but he also took no notice of fashionably abstract alienation. The latter may explain why the playwright never caught on, despite his many theater awards and accolades from critics, monologues performed by such performers as Laurence Olivier, and productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Barnes explored what he saw as "the outer limits of farce where everything is pushed to extremes of pain and cruelty, which is the very source of the comic and the tragic." This paradox is rooted in deep love-hate for the world as it is, coupled with a commitment to dramatize the odds for the survival of kindness amid thriving malevolence. In other words, Barnes's entertainments were too slapsticky for the highbrows and too mocking for the lowbrows. On a practical level, Barnes made things difficult by specializing in large-cast historical dramas, overflowing with a rich language whose agglutination of multilayered puns and ornate metaphors fuses the earthy lyricism of Ben Jonson with the nonsensical zest of S.J. Perelman. Barnes's pseudo-Jacobean masterpiece "The Bewitched," revolves around how an idiot, his public image manipulated by advisors, ruled Spain in the 17th century. Aside from a superb production of "Red Noses" at the Trinity Repertory Company, none of Barnes's major plays, to my knowledge, have been produced in New England. I challenge companies here and elsewhere to take a crack at them. It is a risk because audiences like their comedies tame and Barnes, who championed the brutal farces of Jonson over the tender tussles of Shakespeare, always roughhoused. Of American writers, Barnes is closest to novelist Stanley Elkin, whose black humor boasts similar linguistic pyrotechnics, philosophical savagery, and unsentimental concern for history's losers. For Elkin, God gives us pain and death because He never found His audience. It is this radical doubt, even of the saving grace of laughter, which runs through Barnes's best work. Like Elkin's God, Barnes has yet to find an audience who gets his genius. A Heroic Skepticism This Sunday marks the 200th birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a writer whose work has never been neglected. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe or Herman Melville, each rediscovered as the result of a crusade, Hawthorne has never needed to be promoted nor defended. He has always been central to American literature, particularly today, at a time of war. But why?
Many of the familiar reasons for Hawthorne's enduring vitality still apply. For the admiring Henry James, Hawthorne's literary career proves "that an American could be an artist, one of the finest, 'without going outside' about it." Hawthorne is the first American writer whose art dovetailed a complex critique of our indigenous history with an intuition of unruly psychological depths. Unlike James, Hawthorne generated his best novels and tales out of homegrown experience. Yet, their blend of thick inwardness and formal sophistication, allegorical panache and skeptical supernaturalism, anticipate modernism, from Kafka to magic realism. Over the past few decades, Hawthorne's uncanny insights into unconscious desires, rather than his bracingly skeptical perspective on American culture and politics, have dominated and unfairly limited critical evaluations. His celebrated romances, such as "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of Seven Gables," are seen as early blueprints for Freud's sexual mechanics. John Updike, in a review of a recent Hawthorne biography, sums up the consensus when he says that the writer's "enduring resonance" lies in his "instinctive awareness of the incestuous, polymorphous seethe alive in each individual psyche." Certainly Hawthorne's fantastical tales take up the attractions and repulsions of the Id in all of us. But James pointed out that the author's best subject was "in the secret play of the Puritan faith ... [in] the spiritual contortions, the darkened outlook, the ingrained sense of sin, and of responsibility." Hawthorne's acute sense of evil as a universal stain had its uncomfortable political ramifications as well, which he did not hesitate to point out to the detriment of his book sales in the latter part of his life. During the Civil War, Hawthorne didn't accept that the North was all virtue and the South all evil. He wrote an article for "The Atlantic Monthly," after a trip to Washington that included a visit with Abraham Lincoln, in which he critiqued as well as summed up the arguments of both sides. His courageous stance antagonized both Union and Confederate supporters, because it suggested the war was not a simple clash of good versus evil. For Hawthorne, America's darkness could be expressed in social as well as spiritual realms. This was not only a reasoned rebuke to the optimism of Emerson and the Transcendentalists but also a counter to the blinkered chauvinism, automatic patriotism, and arrogant power-mongering of his time (and ours). For writer Robert Penn Warren, Hawthorne remains a "culture hero -- the man discovering and enacting a role involving the deep sensibility by which experience can be newly grasped and values framed." Pitched against a young nation's hunger for conformity, Hawthorne's writings established a tradition of American dissent.
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