Broadway World Review of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Spoleto Festival

Excerpt from Holistic Shakespeare (Intellect Books, 2012)

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo12317504.html

Shakespeare and his contemporaries perceived man’s mind, body, spirit, and environment as inextricably interconnected. This holistic mindset, the foundation of scientific and medical thought during the Renaissance era, profoundly influenced art and literature throughout the period and supplied the ideological cornerstone of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. In the modern classroom, recapturing this lost holistic viewpoint offers an invaluable resource for encountering Shakespeare’s plays with greater depth, clarity, and authenticity.

Three intertwined concepts made up the fabric of holistic thought during Shakespeare’s lifetime: Wholeness, Interconnectivity, and Embodiment. Borrowed, adapted, and refined from classical and medieval philosophies, this triad of holistic values comprised one of the most significant theoretical influences on Shakespeare’s stagecraft. Collectively, these core tenets, which Shakespeare absorbed from earliest childhood, indelibly colored his perspective on the world in which he lived, while providing the wellspring for his creation of character and situation, and sustaining the ethical systems that underpin the fictional world of the plays. These seminal values, which are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 1, also support the framework for the holistic curricular approach outlined in the ensuing chapters. In the holistic Shakespeare classroom, application of these foundational concepts opens up a fertile pathway that leads students toward a more intimate understanding of how Shakespeare thought—about himself, his relationships, and his environment.

In holistic education, WHOLENESS (or holism) describes an integrated curricular approach that places value on the complete learner and cultivates every student’s unique potential to become active, thinking, and caring contributors to the larger world. In contrast to conventional curricular approaches, which locate primary focus on the learner’s acquisition of formulaic essential knowledge and skills, the holistic educational approach draws upon the rich resources of intuition, memory, sensation, and imagination as channels for personalized discovery. Of course, time-honored analytical and critical tools are not discarded; instead, within a supportive and exploratory classroom community, students are encouraged to engage in the constant interplay between cognitive polarities. Like Shakespeare’s dramatic language, which fluctuates between restrained, highly patterned rhetorical structures and unpredictable, impassioned syncopation, the holistic Shakespeare classroom stresses the plurality of teaching strategies necessary to convey content and facilitate communication of the expressive meaning of Shakespeare’s multilayered plays; instructional techniques that target students’ analytical reasoning skills are deliberately juxtaposed against those that favor subjective, individualized responses, and experiential activities that motivate freeform creative play are balanced by those that foster introspective contemplation. Students learn to practice wholeness through both inner reflection and collaborative activities that enhance personal and transpersonal awareness. By accentuating the unity of the complete learning organism, the holistic model invites students to become adaptable, fluid, and self-aware learners, who are open to experimentation and not intimidated by the unfamiliar. 

Dramaturgical Program Notes: Oklahoma (Kaitlyn Hopkins, dir.)

Notes on Oklahoma!

Oklahoma!, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein  II, is a musical adaptation of the play Green Grow the Lilacs by dramatist Lynn Riggs.  In his nostalgic play, Riggs, a native Oklahoman of Cherokee descent, pays tribute to the hearty people and close-knit communities that populated the frontier territory of his childhood memories.

Green Grow the Lilacs has been described as a  “poem for the theatre.”  Into his simple storyline about the courtship between Laurey, a farm girl, and her cowboy sweetheart, Curly, Riggs interweaves traditional American ballads and folk songs to conjure a lost world of rustic simplicity, community spirit, and innocence.  For the musical Oklahoma!, librettist Oscar Hammerstein sought to capture the richly evocative language and cadences of Riggs’s source play.  Hammerstein wrote:

I recalled how deeply I had been impressed by Lynn Riggs’ description at the start of his play: “It is a radiant summer morning – the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of earth. . . makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a visible golden emanation that is partly true and partly a trick of imagination, focusing to keep alive a loveliness that may pass away.”

On first reading these words, I had a thought, what a pity to waste them on stage directions. . .  I reread the description and determined to put it into song.

The first collaboration between Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers, Oklahoma! marked the beginning of an innovative creative partnership.  Determined to capture Riggs’s unique voice, the duo labored to interlayer plot, dances, songs, and characters into what is now considered one of the best examples of a “book musical.” Oklahoma! launched the Golden Age of the American musical and was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 1943.  Today, it remains one of American’s most beloved musicals, evoking poignant reminiscences of an era of limitless promise and possibility.

Debra Charlton

Production Dramaturg

Dramaturgical Program Notes: Austin Shakespeare's Production of Arcadia

ARCADIA and The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason, or Enlightenment, was an intellectual and artistic movement that placed primary value on man’s capacity for rational thought.  Influential throughout Europe during the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, the Enlightenment sparked philosophical contemplation of man’s relationship with his natural environment and his place within the universe, prompted significant advances in scientific achievement and mathematical discovery, and shaped new directions in literature and the arts. 

Two major aesthetic movements, Neoclassicism and Romanticism, flowered during the Age of Reason. Neoclassicism, the earlier of the two movements, dominated between approximately 1765 and 1830.  The movement represented a return to the guiding tenets of the Classical period, especially unity, harmony, simplicity, composition, and restraint. Individual creativity was subsumed to conformity to strict aesthetic rules and the quest for archetypal forms.  Organizations such as the French Academy borrowed methodologies from the sciences to evaluate art based on adherence to pre-set standards of perfection.  

Neoclassical visual art, landscaping, and architecture celebrated the primary of line, (representing intellect) over color (representing emotion).  Careful compositions governed by geometrical forms defined the neoclassical visual aesthetic.  In painting, artists frequently turned to classical literature for subject matter, and focused on themes of duty, self-sacrifice, and patriotism.

One of the most successful painters of the neoclassical era, Jacques Louis David set the standard for visual art in the period.  His works illustrate masterful manipulation of line to relay story, idea, and character. In his painting Oath of the Horatii, David’s employs line to relay contrasting concepts of masculine action and feminine empathy.  Based on a story from classical mythology, the painting’s subject matter depicts preparations for an upcoming battle.  On the left side of the painting, David uses recurrent triangular composition, sharp diagonals, and straight lines to evoke the warriors’ cool reason, firm resolve, and heroism.  In sharp contrast, the curvilinear composition of the female characters suggests emotion that overrides rational thought.

In architecture and landscaping, neoclassicists utilized symmetry and formality to create serene, orderly spaces.   Gardens often featured topiary, severely clipped hedges, and raised, geometrical flowerbeds contained by stone.  Long avenues of trees frequently bordered pathways leading to classical statuary and freestanding architectural elements inspired by the recent archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum.  Pictured below, Gunnebo House, a Swedish country estate built in the early 18^th century, represents a prime example of neoclassical architecture and garden design.

Romanticism displaced neoclassicism as the dominant aesthetic of the 19^th Century.  Its practitioners rejected most of the guiding tenets of the neoclassicists, especially their insistence on archetypical standards of perfection over individual imagination.  The Romantics stressed the duality of human existence and perceived harmony in disunity.  They celebrated man’s unique capacity for genius and valued the wholeness of the human experience, ranging from the sublime to the grotesque. 

In visual art, emphasis was placed on picturesque, untamed natural settings and the creation of mood.   While the neoclassicists celebrated man’s ability to tame his natural environment, the romantics emphasized the awesome power and mystery of the natural world.   Instead of appealing to man’s intellect, romantics appealed to man’s senses and feelings. 

Rusticity, exoticism, and spectacle were pervasive motifs of Romantic landscape design.  Deliberately weathered architectural elements mimicking ancient ruins adorned gardens marked by naturalistic plantings of flowers, trees, and lush foliage. Today, the extensively restored gardens and parklands at Painshill Park in Surrey offer a prime example of Romantic gardening.  The grounds feature a man-man lake powered by steam engine, an amphitheatre, a gothic abbey, and a grotto.

By Debra Charlton

Review of Lucy's Bailey's Production of Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Texas Theatre Journal

Review of Lucy's Bailey's production of Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Company was published in Texas Theatre Journal, July 2010, pages 39-41.

Review of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Directed by Lucy Bailey

The Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

June 23, 2009

Director Lucy Bailey has earned critical acclaim for her startlingly inventive staging of classical plays. Her productions feature a bold visual aesthetic in which innovative use of space, design, and movement take center stage. Following highly theatricalized interpretations of Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens at the Globe Theatre, Bailey makes her directorial debut at the Royal Shakespeare Company with a visually compelling, but flawed interpretation of Julius Caesar.

It is an intriguing pairing:  Julius Caesar, one of Shakespeare’s most language-driven and male-centered plays, and Bailey, a female director best-known for her fiercely imaginative visual staging. The production starts with an extra-textual preshow; two feral boys, the wolf-reared twins Romulus and Remus, stalk the stage, growling at one another like territorial dogs. A fight erupts, and Remus is killed, his throat torn open by his brother. With this graphic beginning, Bailey signals that masculine violence, ever-present beneath the civilized facade of Roman society, will be her central focus. Language, the instrument of reason, will take a backseat to brute physicality.

As a sensory experience, the production certainly delivers on expectations. Audiences have learned that Bailey never shies away from sensational or experimental techniques; her Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre attracted sell-out crowds lured by press accounts of the graphic onstage gore and the nightly sideshow of fainting audience members; Timon of Athens featured aerial performers in rappelling harnesses flying down from the rafters like carnivorous birds. Bailey’s Julius Caesar is equally creative, if ultimately less satisfying. She reprises her collaboration with designer William Dudley, her creative partner on the Globe plays. A pioneer in the use of high-tech media for theatre, Dudley has created a virtual environment, complete with digitally-enhanced supporting cast, to represent Caesar’s Rome. Projected still images and computer- generated animation establish shifts in locale, and video sequences supplement the live cast in the mob scenes. Minimalist set pieces dress a largely bare stage.

The interplay between virtual and live action is surprising and often effective, as when soldiers burst through gaps between the overlapping projection screens to join onstage battle scenes. At times, however, the high-tech stagecraft falls a bit flat. Although a clever tactic for enhancing a lean cast of extras, the virtual mob never seems particularly bloodthirsty or chaotic, and its stylized movement, replicated on multiple screens, frequently fails to cohere with the spoken dialogue. Ultimately, Dudley’s visual sleight of hand (including computer-generated animation depicting the explosion of a cartoonish statue of Caesar) intrudes as often as it enhances, pulling focus from the serious ethical questions raised in this tragedy of political assassination and civil war.

In the pivotal role of Brutus, Sam Troughton commits the cardinal sin of live performance: he simply cannot be heard. Having worked extensively in film and television in recent years, Troughton struggles to adjust to the acoustic demands of the Courtyard Theatre. His performance, finely crafted though it might be, is all but lost to the audience. In an early scene between Brutus and Cassius (John Mackay), both actors succumb to poor projection and ultra-subtle Chekhovian acting, making their dialogue extremely difficult to follow. With the world’s best voice and text specialists available to the cast, this is a telling oversight, symptomatic of an over-conceptualized production that places more emphasis on visual novelty than on Shakespeare’s language. 

In the title role, Greg Hicks gives a full-tilt performance at stylistic odds with Troughton’s cinematic Brutus. Despite his slight frame, Hicks captures Caesar’s larger-than-life glamour through expansive gestures and impressive vocal dexterity. His Caesar breathes arrogance. During the harrowing assassination scene, he fights hard to remain upright as his body is riddled with wounds, before finally tumbling to the base of a steep step unit. Only in death is Hicks’s Caesar finally stripped of hubris, his splayed, bare legs a reminder of the human frailty beneath the demi-god mystique.

Darrell D’Silva’s portly Mark Antony is a career soldier gone badly to seed. Whether spewing drink after a night of partying, or casually tossing around a severed head, D’Silva gives his role a darkly humorous turn. Part voluptuary, part master politician, his Antony is a jaded, but self-aware manipulator, still likable despite his flaws.

In this macho Rome, women play minor roles. As Calpurnia, Noma Dumezweni is a gorgeous trophy wife, her resonant voice and regal bearing commanding focus in this small part. Hannah Young portrays Portia, Brutus’s troubled spouse. Her intense emotionalism, in stark contrast to Trouthton’s detached Brutus, makes the eventual news of her ghastly suicide believable.

Despite a brilliant creative team and first-rate actors, this production never quite gels. Lush special effects cannot substitute for clear directorial shaping of story and characterization. One suspects that Bailey serves up pictorial tricks to compensate for a wordy script and relatively static plot. However, the production would be better served if she aimed for greater balance between textual and visual production components, and learned to trust the playwright.

Women in the Arts in the Belle Epoche

My article "Sarah Bernhardt:  Artist and Mythologist" appears on pages 12-27.

http://www.amazon.com/Women-Arts-Belle-Epoque-Influential/dp/078646075X

Why Art Matters

My article "Performing Shakespeare" appears on pages 26-27.

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/MediaManager/File/perfomingartscat(websmall).pdf