Shakespeare Bulletin最新文献

{"title":"Macbeth Presented by Seattle Shakespeare Company at Center Theatre, Seattle, WA (review)","authors":"Michael W. Shurgot","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a907996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a907996","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Macbeth Presented by Seattle Shakespeare Company at Center Theatre, Seattle, WA Michael W. Shurgot Macbeth Presented by Seattle Shakespeare Company at Center Theatre, Seattle, WA. 25 October–20 November 2022. Directed by John Langs. Set design by Pete Rush. Lighting design by Bryce Bartl-Geller. Sound design by Dominic CodyKramers. Music by Marchette DuBois. Fight choreography by Geoffrey Alm. Costume design by Jae Hee Kim. With Reginald André Jackson (Macbeth), Alexandra Tavares (Lady Macbeth), Quinlan Corbett (Macduff), Chip Sherman (Malcolm), Charles Leggett (Duncan/Porter/Seyton), Jonelle Jordan (Banquo/Doctor), Amy Thone (Ross), Darius Sakui (Fleance), Koo Park (Murderer 1/Donalbain/Young Siward/Soldier/Servant), Hersh Powers (Fleance), Hattie Jaye (Young Macduff), Lindsay Welliver (Witch 1/Lady Macduff), Esther Okech (Witch 2/Gentlewoman), Jon Stutzman (Siward/Murderer 2/Messenger/Soldier/Servant), and Varinique Davis (Witch 3). For its memorable Macbeth, Seattle Shakespeare Company circled the square. The action occurred on a circular platform set atop the Center Theatre’s rectangular stage, suggesting visually Macbeth’s sense of being “cabined, cribbed, confined” (3.4.22). At the back of the stage hung a large screen that turned bright red during violent scenes. Stage left was an opening that led to Duncan’s chamber, and stage right was a huge door of simulated steel and wood. Above this door were seven protruding spikes, and next to it was a spigot from which Lady Macbeth drew water to wash her and Macbeth’s bloody hands. Hanging from the ceiling were twisted, blood-red sticks, tree branches ripped from Birnam Wood. Though the door stage right suggested a medieval castle, the clothing throughout was modern, implying the timelessness of human violence. Amid fog and pounding drums the witches, their faces marked with red stripes and wearing heavy, ragged coats, slithered from backstage during the initial battle. Throughout the play these shadowy beings lurked in corners of the stage, as if spying on the characters, their identity as uncertain as their influence on the tragedy. From his initial reaction to [End Page 174] the witches—“Stay, you imperfect speakers” (1.3.70)—Reginald André Jackson was magnificent as Macbeth. As he paced rapidly before us during his early soliloquies, his passionate voice drew spectators ineluctably into his tortured psychomachia, as if his own ambition were a prison from which he craved escape. In his aside in 1.3, “Two truths are told,” Jackson directly addressed the audience, asking us to explain how such “horrible imaginings” could even occur to him (1.3.129, 140). After Duncan named Malcolm “The Prince of Cumberland” (1.4.39), Jackson spoke so vehemently that he practically made us accomplices in his murderous plans. Here and in later soliloquies Jackson seemed to deeply feel the horrors of Macbeth’s fecund, powerful imagination, as if unable to tolerate the strains that his murderous intentio","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"King Lear Presented by Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Michael R. Klein Theatre, Washington, DC (review)","authors":"Cecelia Richardson","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a908005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a908005","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: King Lear Presented by Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Michael R. Klein Theatre, Washington, DC Cecelia Richardson King Lear Presented by Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Michael R. Klein Theatre, Washington, DC. 23 February–16 April 2023. Directed by Simon Godwin. Set design by Daniel Soule. Lighting design by Jeanette Yew. Costume design by Emily Rebholz. Sound design by Christopher Shutt. Music composed by Michael Bruce. Choreography by Jonathan Goddard. Fight choreography by Robb Hunter. With Shirine Babb (Kent), Lily Santiago (Cordelia), Rosa Gilmore (Goneril), Matthew J. Harris (Edgar), Stephanie Jean Lane (Regan), Julian Elijah Martinez (Edmund), Patrick Page (King Lear), Craig Wallace (Gloucester), Michael Milligan (Fool), and others. “I don’t know anything about Lear,” the woman next to me confessed as she shifted to let me take my seat, “I just really like Patrick Page in Hadestown.” Shakespeare Theatre Company’s King Lear seemed well aware of the anticipation surrounding its lead actor: the production used its first few minutes to create a sense of expectant celebrity worship that aligned Lear’s onstage court with the audience’s excitement to see Patrick Page in the titular role. Regan (Stephanie Jean Lane) and Goneril (Rosa Gilmore) fussed over their husband’s jackets, straightening ties and military medals, while Edmund (Julian Elijah Martinez) stood at attention and Gloucester (Craig Wallace) awkwardly joked with Kent (Shirine Babb). The court, like the audience, seemed defined by a sense of absence, stuck in a holding pattern until the cinematic entrance of Page’s king. Dramatically backlit by airplane landing lights, Lear emerged as the epitome of a confidently masculine leader, ruggedly handsome in aviator sunglasses and a fur-lined leather jacket. This sense of a world in vacuum, bereft without the force [End Page 165] of Lear’s larger-than-life persona, continued throughout the production as Lear’s point of view was privileged over that of any other character onstage. This privileging of Lear’s “storyline” occasionally came at the expense of nuance in a production that clearly defined the “good” and “bad” guys for the audience, but it also served to create a cutthroat world of patriarchal social hierarchy, strictly enforced expected behaviors, and chillingly efficient cruelty. Click for larger view View full resolution Cordelia (Lily Santiago), Goneril (Rosa Gilmore), and Regan (Stephanie Jean Lane) face off against their father in King Lear, dir. Simon Godwin. Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2023. Photo by DJ Corey Photography, courtesy of Shakespeare Theatre Company. Against set designer Daniel Soule’s backdrop of grey metallic walls, a podium and microphone established Lear’s division of his kingdom as a high-profile publicity stunt. Regan and Goneril proclaimed their love out to the audience rather than towards their father, as if addressing an unseen camera. Emily Rebholz’s costume design worked with the set","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"127 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"La nuit des rois [Twelfth Night] Presented by the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Montreal (review)","authors":"Kim Gauthier","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a908000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a908000","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: La nuit des rois [Twelfth Night] Presented by the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Montreal Kim Gauthier La nuit des rois [Twelfth Night] Presented by the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Montreal, in partnership with the Théâtre Advienne que pourra. 20 September–23 October 2022. Adapted and translated by Rébecca Déraspe and Frédéric Bélanger. Directed by Frédéric Bélanger. Set design by Francis Farley-Lemieux. Costume design by Sarah Balleux. Lighting design by Nicolas Descoteaux. Video conceived by Thomas Payette. Music by Gustafson (Adrien Bletton and Jean-Philippe Perras). Makeup by Amélie Bruneau-Longpré. With Adrien Bletton (Valentin), Guido Del Fabbro (Curio), Thomas Derasp-Verge (Sébastien), Alex Desmarais (Antonio), Kathleen Fortin (Maria), Yves Jacques (Malvolio), Marie-Pier Labrecque (Olivia), Benoît McGinnis (Feste), Jean-Philippe Perras (Orsino), Étienne Pilon (Sir Toby Belch), François-Simon Poirier (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), and Clara Prévost (Viola). “Ce n’est pas mon rôle de vous divulger le vôtre” [“It is not my role to tell you yours”; all translations mine], Feste (Benoît McGinnis) told shipwrecked Viola (Clara Prévost), in the first of a series of metatheatrical references that characterized Rébecca Déraspe and director Frédéric Bélanger’s French-language adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Feste was persuaded to introduce Viola-as-Césario to Orsino’s household and keep her secret in exchange for a story, and while La nuit des rois retained the structure and plot of Shakespeare’s play, Feste’s bookend soliloquies and commentary throughout suggested that this production was his re-telling of that story. From the start, Feste knew more than was possible, including the gap between the play’s generic early modern setting—which required Viola to adopt the persona of Césario for her safety—and the [End Page 143] present day, acknowledged with the convoluted line “à l’époque qui fait que nous sommes à notre époque” [“back then, meaning when we are, now”]. The costumes reinforced the imprecise historical setting, which was early modern in appearance with contemporary details, most notably Malvolio’s (Yves Jacques) infamous yellow stockings—reminiscent of soccer socks—themselves upstaged by hose covered in silver sequins. Modernity was further imposed by the continuous onstage presence of the musical duo Gustafson, made up of Adrien Bletton (Valentin) and Jean-Philippe Perras (Orsino), who performed original music on keyboards and electric guitar, briefly joined by Jacques for the drum solo which punctuated Malvolio’s yellow-stockinged entrance. Click for larger view View full resolution The ensemble of La nuit des rois, dir. Frédéric Bélanger. Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, 2022. Photo by Yves Renaud, courtesy of Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. The visibility of the actor-musicians to the characters appeared variable. Without set changes to indicate shifts from one household to the other, the fictional distance between them occasionally coll","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Night at the Kabuki Presented by Noda Map and Sony Music Entertainment at Sadler’s Wells, London (review)","authors":"Todd Andrew Borlik","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a907995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a907995","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A Night at the Kabuki Presented by Noda Map and Sony Music Entertainment at Sadler’s Wells, London Todd Andrew Borlik A Night at the Kabuki Presented by Noda Map and Sony Music Entertainment at Sadler’s Wells, London. 22–24 September 2022. Written and directed by Hideki Noda. Music by Queen. Set design by Yukio Horio. Lighting design by Motoi Hattori. Costume design by Kodue Hibino. With Takako Matsu (Old Juliet), Suzu Hirose (Young Juliet of Minamoto), Takaya Kamikawa (Old Romeo), Jun Shishon (Young Romeo of Taira), Satoshi Hashimoto (Yoshinaka/Yoritomo/Monk), Naoto Takenaka (Kiyomori/Bontaro), Kazushiga Komatsu (Mercury/Platinum), Hideki Noda (Nurse), and others. Although one would be hard-pressed to guess so from its title, A Night at the Kabuki just might be the most raucous, flamboyant, and insanely zany reimagining of Romeo and Juliet ever to bedazzle a London audience. The brainchild of Japanese actor-playwright-director Hideki Noda, A Night at the Kabuki premiered in Tokyo in 2019 and played at Sadler’s Wells (after a COVID-19-induced delay) for three nights in late September 2022, and was performed by the original cast in Japanese with English surtitles. For readers unfamiliar with the name, Noda has garnered acclaim for his innovative scripts that mingle anachronisms, absurdist wordplay, intercultural hybridity, dark comedy, and brutality with gleeful abandon—all of which were on radiant display in A Night at the Kabuki. The great Yukio Ninagawa once hailed Noda as “the most talented playwright in contemporary Japan,” and this production certainly bolstered his claim to be among the nation’s most fearless Shakespeareans. Early in his career, Noda transplanted Richard III (1990) to a school of Japanese flower arranging, set Much Ado About Nothing (1990) amid a sumo tournament, and reimagined the enchanted woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1992) as an amusement park (haunted by Mephistopheles) at the foot of Mount Fuji. In 2021, Noda staged an original play entitled Fakespeare, in which a Shakespeare-obsessed spirit medium in rural Japan contacts Shakespeare’s ghost (played by Noda himself) and one of his descendants, a rapper named Fakespeare, who manifest themselves in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to warn the world about the pandemic of fake [End Page 133] news. Anti-Stratfordians, please take note. Having read about Fakespeare, I was braced for A Night at the Kabuki to present an unconventional take on Romeo and Juliet. It did not disappoint. How to summarize this outrageously eclectic adaptation by a playwright committed to, in the words of the program, “working energetically beyond genres and borders”? Watching it was like having a front-row seat for the fever dream of a time traveler who splits their days between the Tokyos and Londons of several pasts as well as the present, and has dozed off mid-transit while reading Romeo and Juliet and listening to a Queen album. A Night at the Kabuki was both an adaptation ","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prince Hamlet Presented by Why Not Theatre at The Mondavi Center at the University of California at Davis, CA (review)","authors":"Delanie Harrington Dummit","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a907998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a907998","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Prince Hamlet Presented by Why Not Theatre at The Mondavi Center at the University of California at Davis, CA Delanie Harrington Dummit Prince Hamlet Presented by Why Not Theatre at The Mondavi Center at the University of California at Davis, CA. 21 October 2022. Adapted and directed by Ravi Jain. Set and costume design by Lorenzo Savoini. Lighting and production management by André du Toit. Sound design by Thomas Ryder Payne. Stage management by Neha Ross. Assistant stage management by Kim Moreira. With Dawn Jani Birley (Horatio, American Sign Language adaptation), Miriam Fernandes (Rosencrantz/Grave Digger/Player King), Jeff Ho (Ophelia), Eli Pauley (Hamlet), Barbara Gordon (Polonius), Sturla Alvsvaag (Guildenstern/Player Queen), Andrew Musselman (Claudius), Dante Jemmott (Laertes), and Monice Peter (Gertrude). Miriam Fernandes (Rosencrantz) opened the show with a call to consider “who gets to tell the story” of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but another question I found within the production was “Who gets to access it?” This is not a new question in bilingual performance, but Why Not Theatre’s performance of Prince Hamlet featured Dawn Jani Birley’s Deaf Horatio who, contrary to common theatrical standards of accessibility, seemed all-knowing as she narrated, marked, and intervened in scenes of the show. Horatio, as the surviving character of the play, was the one who remained to tell the story, yet also worked to tell it as the events occurred. The most essential context for American Sign Language (ASL) performance of Shakespeare is that it demands conceptual interpretation––ASL is not signed English, nor does English translate exactly into it. Moreover, the ASL in this performance was not simply translation, but a performance of and play with language. This gave both Jani Birley and the character she played significant control over the play’s themes and interpretation of its events. Horatio, truly, got to tell the story. Through its use of name signs (personalized signs that refer to individual persons, used instead of fingerspelling their written names), Hamlet’s aurally inaccessible monologue to Laertes in 5.1, and Horatio’s doubling as interpreter-narrator throughout, the play blurred the distinction between Horatio and the other characters. Horatio became each character and pulled me into their inward narratives. Interpretive language choices made throughout the show made Horatio’s central role clear. The choice in name signs reiterated authority or characteristics of respective characters. For example, Claudius (Andrew Musselman) was named KING, leading me to wonder what name signs he may have used prior to his inauguration, and to suspect that referring [End Page 185] to him by his reign and authority obscured other, more indicative characteristics of his moral stature or personality. Hamlet (Eli Pauley), ever the orator, was named using the familiar pose of holding Yorick’s skull before him. That this was his name sign prior to hi","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Red Velvet Presented by Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Michael R. Klein Theatre, Washington, DC (review)","authors":"Emily MacLeod","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a908003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a908003","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Red Velvet Presented by Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Michael R. Klein Theatre, Washington, DC Emily MacLeod Red Velvet Presented by Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Michael R. Klein Theatre, Washington, DC. 18 June–17 July 2022. Written by Lolita Chakrabarti. Directed by Jade King Carroll. Set design by You-Shin Chen. Costume design by Rodrigo Muñoz. Lighting design by Yuki Nakase Link. Sound and music composition by Karin Graybash. Dramaturgy by Soyica Colbert and Drew Lichtenberg. Voice and text coaching by Lisa Beley and Kim James Bey. Fight and intimacy consulting by Sierra Young and Chelsea Pace. With Samuel Adams (Casimir/Henry Forrester), Jaye Ayres-Brown (Charles Kean), David Bishins (Terence/Bernard Warde), Amari Cheatom (Ira Aldridge), Emily Deforest (Ellen Tree), Shannon Dorsey (Connie), Michael Glenn (Pierre Laporte), and Tro Shaw (Halina/Betty/Margaret). As I entered the Michael R. Klein Theatre for the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet, I saw a red and gold costume displayed in front of the curtain on stage left, waiting to be filled by an actor whose star status matched the opulent robe. It was revealed to be African American actor Ira Aldridge’s costume for the role of King Lear, which he played towards the end of his life. Chakrabarti’s play moves through time and space, between the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden in London in 1833 and a Polish theater in 1867. It also shows two different Aldridges, first the world-weary actor who had been touring the Continent for years playing Shakespeare’s greatest roles, and then the energetic young man on the cusp of stardom. A shadowy presence haunted this production in both settings, however: the absent star Edmund Kean, whose ailments opened the door to Aldridge’s Covent Garden debut as Othello, though the memory of his performance stood in the way of Aldridge’s success. The turntable on the stage swiftly transported the action between these different venues and revealed additional set decoration that underscored the menacing absent presence of white English celebrities like Kean who challenged Aldridge’s appearance on the London stage. While the old Kean never appeared onstage, his portraits filled the walls of the dressing room that Aldridge used, looming over him as he celebrated after his first performance. In act two, when Aldridge read the negative and racist reviews of his performance, he paced in a parlor adorned with paintings of foxhunting, a brutal tradition associated exclusively with the white British upper class, as Connie, the Jamaican maidservant who attended on the actors at Covent Garden, looked on. Staging the only scene in which the [End Page 157] two Black characters in the play converse with this backdrop suggested that in some ways they were like the foxes in the pictures, exhausted by outrunning the oppressive power of whiteness in their lives. These design elements, part of You-Shin Chen’s intricate set","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespearean Resonances in Contemporary British Drama: Political and Adaptational Borders in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and David Greig’s Dunsinane","authors":"Anja Hartl","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a907991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a907991","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Using Wai Chee Dimock’s theory of “resonance,” this article argues that the potential of Shakespeare’s works to reverberate across centuries and across contexts resides not so much in their universality as in their historical specificity and therefore in the ways in which the meaning and significance of the plays have necessarily changed over time. This argument is illustrated through Scottish playwright David Greig’s 2010 play Dunsinane , a sequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Dimock’s concept of resonance helps to identify specific concerns that the two plays share—above all, an interest in nationhood that is expressed through the border. At the same time, it draws attention to Dunsinane ’s considerable dissonances with Macbeth , which are above all evident in Greig’s rewriting of major parts of Shakespeare’s plot. As such, the border is not only a central theme and aesthetic device in both plays, but also an apt metaphor for Greig’s adaptational approach. As an example of a textual borderscape (in Chiara Brambilla’s sense of the term), Dunsinane probes the borders of adaptation—and of adapting Shakespeare—in the current moment.","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"197 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thrive Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA, and: Twelfth Night Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA (review)","authors":"Noel Sloboda","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a907997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a907997","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Thrive Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA, and: Twelfth Night Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA Noel Sloboda Thrive Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA. 8 July–7 August 2022. Written by LM Feldman. Directed by Larissa Lury. With Annie Fang (Jean 4/La Giraudais), Eli Lynn (Jean 3/Prince), Jasmine Eileen Coles (Jean(ne) 5/Aotourou/Jean(ne)-as-Commerson), Jihan Haddad (Jeanne 1), Marcel Mascaro (Commerson/Commersonas-Jean(ne)), and Meg Rodgers (Jeanne 2/Bougainville). Twelfth Night Presented by the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Theater, Staunton, VA. 9 June–6 August 2022. Directed by Jenny Bennett. With Annie Fang (Sebastian/Malvolio), Eli Lynn (Orsino/Toby), Jasmine Eileen Coles (Maria/Antonio/Valentine), Jihan Haddad (Viola/Cesario), Marcel Mascaro (Olivia/Aguecheek/Curio), and Meg Rodgers (Feste/Fabian). [End Page 178] Click for larger view View full resolution Jeanne 1 (Jihan Haddad), Jean 3 (Eli Lynn), and Commerson (Marcel Mascaro) in Thrive, dir. Larissa Lury. American Shakespeare Center (ASC), 2022. Photo by Anna Kariel Photography, courtesy of the ASC. Run in repertory, LM Feldman’s new play Thrive and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night were promoted by the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) as being in conversation with one another. The former script won the 2020 Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries contest, sponsored by the ASC, which has the stated mission of recognizing new dramatic work that relates to Shakespeare. On the surface, Thrive and Twelfth Night do feature several parallels that might invite conversation. Both center upon young women who journey to foreign shores by sea. Along the way, they are compelled to disguise not only their gender but also their thoughts, passions, and accomplishments, all while navigating a variety of threats as strangers in strange lands. Both plays look critically at love conventions, particularly as defined by gender norms. Yet in watching Thrive and Twelfth Night, I found their overlapping threads at best loosely woven together. Far more satisfying to contemplate than any hypothetical exchange between playwrights were the many effective choices made by the artists involved in Thrive and Twelfth Night as they collaborated—sometimes masterfully—to bring these two productions to life, all while displaying a remarkable breadth of individual talent. Thrive centers on Jeanne Baret, an eighteenth-century (1740–1807) French herbalist. She was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe [End Page 179] over the course of many years, though her feat was not widely recognized until late in her life, when she received a pension from France’s Ministère de la Marine. Given the times, Baret had to disguise her sex even to set foot on a ship, posing as a valet—ultimately at tremendous cost. Though she had working-class roots, she rubbed shoulders","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"179 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“I name all my plays after places”: David Greig in conversation with Elisabeth Angel-Perez","authors":"Elisabeth Angel-Perez","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a907990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a907990","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This interview between Elisabeth Angel-Perez and David Greig, which took place on 16 January 2023 over WhatsApp, was conducted specifically for this special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin . The conversation focuses on Greig’s use of Shakespeare as a matrix for contemporary drama. Greig stresses the geographical and linguistic displacements in his play Dunsinane (2010), a sequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth , which allowed him to map out a conflictual contact zone between an imperialistic power and a country that has been colonized. He explains how Dunsinane serves as a political parable—for contemporary Scotland, but also the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine—while at the same time decentering Shakespeare as a cultural hegemonic matrix.","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Contemporary Shakespeare: Dislocations and Disjunctions","authors":"Line Cottegnies, Gordon McMullan, Sabine Schülting","doi":"10.1353/shb.2023.a907987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a907987","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction: Contemporary Shakespeare:Dislocations and Disjunctions Line Cottegnies, Gordon McMullan, and Sabine Schülting I What is “contemporary” Shakespeare? And where might it be found? The most straightforward answer to the first question is a negative. “Contemporary Shakespeare” is not simply Shakespeare performed now: the bringing into the present of Shakespeare does not necessarily make the experience of an audience member contemporary in any strict sense, simply because so much of Shakespeare in the now has been shaped by various readings of the past. A further problem of the contemporary is that it is only recognizably “contemporary” after the event, not in the now: the present moment enables us (whoever, or whenever, “we” are) to look back at past events (in, say, the East Germany that has gone or in a festival experience that is ephemeral even in respect of theater’s intrinsic fleetingness) and see them as contemporary, or rather as having been contemporary. As to the “where” question, the answer—to judge at least by the essays in this special issue—is not straightforwardly “in the theater.” The contemporary is, rather, often to be found beyond the theatrical stage, in performance in the broadest sense of the term, or in an expanded form of theater in the street, on the web, during the festival, in the marginal or decentered nation. [End Page 1] Arguably the best way to think about Shakespeare and the contemporary—though it might seem counterintuitive—is to begin not with a contemporary performance but with an early modern image of a performance. The Peacham drawing reproduced below (Figure 1) is a sketch dated 1595, presumably by an audience member, of what appears to be a staging of Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus. It is the most striking extant image of performance on the Shakespearean stage.1 In the words of Eugene Waith, “the gestures and costumes give us a more vivid impression of the visual impact of Elizabethan acting than we get from any other source” (27). Elizabethan it may (probably) be, but the drawing is in striking ways both contemporary and proleptic, usefully reminding us of the con-temporaneity of Shakespearean theater: the extent to which Shakespeare’s theater puts into dialogue different presents. The Peacham drawing is an image of hybrid temporality, and one that foregrounds elements that we would now associate with the global. The image is of clashing cultures, Goths and Romans, showing actors wearing clothes that are a mishmash of ancient Roman (Titus), medieval (Tamora), and early modern Continental European (the guards). It features a scene of violence shaped according to logics of class, race, gender, and conflict between aggressively colonizing nations, as primarily represented by a dominant male making an authoritative gesture, prisoners awaiting execution, a suppliant woman, and a sexualized Black man. The image can therefore be instructive in an attempt to move beyond a traditional meaning of th","PeriodicalId":304234,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Bulletin","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}