Building Rome: Political intrigue and deception run deep in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, part of American Shakespeare Center’s Roman trio. The characters struggle with their own humanity and morality, as they try to justify power grabs and shady deals. Initially performed in 1599, more than 1,500 years after Caesar died, the historical epic may have been the first play staged at the Globe Theatre.
Ethan McSweeny is fond of automotive idioms. “I’m firing on all cylinders,” he says when asked about his work with the American Shakespeare Center, where he has been the artistic director for close to a year. It’s like “trying to tinker on the engine of your car while you’re driving—this thing never gets up on blocks,” he says, adding that joining the company was like “trying to jump onboard a moving train.”
The schedule of the 2019/2020 season, which starts June 25, is just as daunting as he depicts it. It launches with three summer productions, which together mark the start of McSweeny’s first official season.
McSweeny describes the cycle of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Caesar and Cleopatra as “three plays, two authors”—Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw—“one story.” A fourth production, the world premiere of The Willard Suitcases, will be added in the fall. Written by New York–based composer/lyricist Julianne Wick Davis, the musical is based on the intriguing contents of luggage found in the abandoned Willard Psychiatric Center. The suitcases belonged to the patients, and, McSweeny says, “they didn’t put sensible things, necessarily, in them.”
In his 20-year career, McSweeny has been involved in productions around the world, and he insists that the ASC is “very unique….I can tell you that there are very few places like this.” He cites the company’s unusual adoption of “universal lighting and Shakespearean performance conditions” as one reason why the center stands out, but adds that it’s not a “museum recreation”; rather, “It really combines the intensity of intellect that these plays require with the infectious joy of performing them.”
McSweeny still intends to tinker with the engine, “enhancing what’s already there.” One of his first decisions on the job was to put two of the longest-serving company members on year-round, full-time contracts, giving them the title of Actor Managers, to follow a tradition established by Shakespeare’s own King’s Men.
Rather than institute large-scale changes, McSweeny seems to be most interested in experimentation with the existing model. “It’s such a gift to not have to make the same choices over and over again,” he says. “I’m trying to find ways to do what we do, but even better.”
He’s also committed to getting more people into the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, a town that McSweeny professes to love. “It’s a rich buffet of culture and arts,” he says, encouraging his Charlottesville neighbors to visit. “It’s a four-lane highway. Get used to it.”
Late in the interview, McSweeny compares the appeal of theater to that of a “live sporting event.” It’s a simile that, for a theater geek, seems even further removed than his vehicle imagery—but the new artistic director has made it clear that he’s unconcerned with preserving stereotypes or favoring tradition over innovation. He sums it up by saying, “I’m a profound Shakespeare believer, but also a real agnostic when it comes to ways to do Shakespeare.”
More information at americanshakespearecenter.com
“Comfort thyself, sweet friend; it is not strange / That women will be false and wavering.”—Franklin, Arden of Faversham (Act 1, scene 1)
Maybe the scheduling was merely coincidental, but witnessing the debut performance of the early modern true-crime drama Arden of Faversham on International Women’s Day felt particularly wrong—and perhaps more comical because of it.
The anonymously written 1592 play, which in recent years has gained extra traction by crediting Shakespeare with co-authorship, remains remarkable for the depiction of one of England’s most infamous domestic tragedies, capturing a snapshot of real-world 1551 news. It’s a simple story of a lady desperate to get out of a rut: cheating wife schemes with lover to kill husband. Though the pair enlist a pack of self-interested conspirators and criminals to complete the task, each proves incompetent until near the very end of the play.
Is this straightforward work about ordinary citizens shedding blood a rare artifact about smashing the patriarchy? Did the American Shakespeare Center’s actor-led Renaissance winter season choose the play because of its frighteningly strong female lead character? Sure, the plot-propelling decision to off a husband could be taken as the ultimate expression of self-empowerment, but even the most progressive people would agree there are less severe alternatives for fixing an unsatisfying marriage than stabbing.
Alice Arden, the wife in question, is no role model—and like any great villainess, her evil disposition is what makes the piece exceptional. Played with mischievous conviction by Abbi Hawk, Alice is the sultry femme-fatale mastermind who ultimately sees her darkest wish satisfied. Behind lipstick smiles and on crossed coquettish legs, she flaunts humanity’s worst traits, those which ignorant women-haters have feared and contradictorily ascribed to the fair sex for ages: deceitfulness, capriciousness, emotional weakness, gross lust, and cold cruelty. And though it is her murdered husband Thomas for whom the play is named, her lover Mosby who hatches the last successful plan, and the retaliatory former tenant Greene who employs the hoodlums Black Will and Shakebag, Alice is clearly the one running this bitch.
Arden of Faversham may have originally been a drama—complete with requisite Elizabethan morality dooming the majority of the cast to death for their savagery and willful rebellion against the strict English hierarchy. But centuries of aging have left Arden ripe for a comedic take.
Self-costumed to the nines in threads echoing those 1930s white-gloved escapist movies about dancing urbanite aristocrats, the ASC cast squeezes yucks from the text with exquisite smoothness. Deftly, the actors freak out, fall off stage, howl in shock, and deliver deadpan looks and sly over-the-shoulder glances at the audience with precise comic timing.
As the straight men in this drama-reimagined-as-black-comedy, David Anthony Lewis mops up our pity as helpless Arden, while Rick Blunt, as Arden’s close friend Franklin, is convincingly serious and well- meaning as the voice of reason.
The ne’er-do-wells are equally wonderful. Benjamin Reed as aggravated Mosby brings rage to the role, fluctuating between anger with Alice, their adulterous situation, and the dumb luck that keeps her husband alive. Chris Johnston’s spastic, short-fused, hired henchman Black Will is mined for a fortune of clownish frenetics, and is nearly outdone by John Harrell’s rich Shakebag; pointedly played with a cartoonish wise guy accent, Harrell does genius work as the thuggish yutz. No less riotous, KP Powell in the role of devilish painter Clarke offers up big laughs from his preposterous murder formulas to his side-splitting use of protective glasses.
Despite the historically accurate laxness of being free to kick back with a few beers during the show, there’s still an unspoken reverence framing the ASC experience that was gleefully absent during this latest production. Though the cast and crew always put forth honest efforts to loosen everyone up, the atmosphere in the seats can feel a little like going to church or having been urged into a field trip by an uncomfortably familiar English professor. You notice it most when the jokes, swirled up in iambic poetics and murky 500-year-old slang, prompt the loudest audience members to crow more like they’re showing everyone how smart they are by “getting it” rather than how much of a good time they’re having. Arden is different.
No, the play doesn’t generate any PR for the virtuosity and righteousness of women, but that’s hardly the point. Arden excels thanks to the ASC cast’s inventive way with the words, and they are funnier than hell. I haven’t laughed as hard since the last time I watched Kathleen Turner prank call Mink Stole in John Waters’ Serial Mom. Could be that I just find female killers hysterical, but please don’t let my personal issues deter you from driving over to Staunton for a great time at Blackfriars.
Arden of Faversham is at Blackfriars Playhouse through April 12.
To a lay audience member who hasn’t been involved in a theater production since fifth grade, directors seem as essential to any play’s success as a script. They’re the boss of the show. If the director goes into a coma at the start of the first rehearsal or has a crisis and runs off with the box office manager, what sharp-eyed, astute-eared taskmaster keeps everyone and everything in line?
During the annual Actors’ Renaissance winter season at Staunton’s American Shakespeare Center, it’s completely up to the players to get their proverbial acts together.
It’s no small challenge. Roughly 13 actors are responsible for 79 roles through the course of four plays: darkly hilarious Early Modern true crime bonanza Arden of Faversham; Amy E. Witting’s new piece Anne Page Hates Fun; Shakespeare’s domestic sitcom The Merry Wives of Windsor; and the revered second installment of his historical tetralogy, Henry IV, Part 1.
On the well-lit stage of the enchanting Blackfriars Playhouse last month, the acting company previewed their work on Henry IV, Part 1. The January 24 debut performance revealed completely actor-made choices on staging—down to the costume design, music, props, and the minutiae that would otherwise fall under a director’s purview. And on top of that, the actors had learned their lines in under 10 days.
Why suffer so? According to the ASC, the yearly test aims to empower the players by giving them the “unique blend of scholarship and practice” necessary for undertaking the “deepest dive into the Elizabethan era.” And despite the potential for chaos, it syncs perfectly with the ASC’s respectful and historically guided approach.
The result of leaving the direction of Henry IV, Part 1 to those performing in it is not unlike the best kind of self-released punk rock record: rolling on a steady current of gross humor, powered by blasts of lusty rage, true to the intent of those involved, and peppered with thrilling, unexpected turns. Performances hit the pinnacle of emotive perfection or, in some cases, sail just beyond the well-intentioned grasp of those outsized by their desire to execute.
The script follows King Henry Bolingbroke’s mounting tensions with a rebel alliance fueled by hotheaded Hotspur, and tackles the monarch’s estranged relationship with his heir, Hal the Prince of Wales. After Hal grows out of his frivolous London tavern lifestyle—and tomfoolery with his scene-stealing, boozehound buddy Sir John Falstaff—the young noble assumes his rightful place at his father’s side. Together, Hal and King Henry lead an army that puts down the upstarts seeking to overthrow the crown.
While the play is named after the highest rung on the hierarchy, it could easily bear the name of any of the aforementioned key roles, as each has more to say than the titular character. Yet in reenacting this embattled royal, David Anthony Lewis commands the performance with resonant authority and manly poise. Instinctive, unstudied, and wholly convincing, he seems more comfortable with Shakespeare’s words than anyone else in the play. If some of the production’s choices skirt the border of questionable interpretation, there is zero doubt in Lewis’ Henry.
Henry’s problematic princely son is played with a cautious focus by Brandon Carter, who became more at ease as his character grew fully self-aware in the play’s latter half. It’s possible that Carter’s smooth-voiced delivery is marked by tentative restraint since he’s sharing many scenes with the comedic bulldozer and big-bellied bravado of John Harrell’s Falstaff. The latter’s costume choices paint Sir John as a ’90s grunge wash-up, complete with bandana, Nirvana tee, combat boots, and requisite plaid shirt—tucked over a fat-suit paunch. Despite being a bit young and thin in the limbs for the lovable drunk liar, Harrell is appropriately slurry, sloppy, cowardly, and as hysterical as anyone could hope.
Another of the King’s major headaches, rebel leader Hotspur, is set afire with an irrepressible rage by KP Powell. Cocksure and indignant, the charismatic Powell only relents from boiling over when he’s in the lap of coquettish Lady Percy; as played by Abbi Hawk, she charmingly presents Hotspur’s wife as sultry and impossibly headstrong. Powell and Hawk display authentic chemistry during the play’s few romantic moments.
But as Henry IV, Part 1 is built on barroom banter and war, zingers and vengeful aggression frame Prince Hal’s journey from loaf to promising successor; ultimately, the Actors’ Renaissance finds its best staging choices in the slapstick of the tavern and botched vaudevillian thieveries. Putting the full Blackfriar’s space to excellent use, the actors hurdle the seats, scramble up the aisles to escape the stage, and Hal even chugs from a beer bong hanging off of the second-floor balcony. And though the too- careful, slo-mo choreography of the final act’s sword fighting could use tightening up, the group prevailed thanks to its nimble humor, righteous ire, and genuinely poignant performances.
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Henry IV, Part 1
Through April 13
Though Jane Austen originally wrote Emma as a novel, the story feels like it was made for the stage. This famously witty comedy of manners focuses on the title character and her frustrating but hilarious attempts to play matchmaker in her friends’ lives, while romance for the hard-to-love Emma herself shows up in unexpected ways. Zoe Speas stars as the overconfident protagonist in this faithful adaptation of one of Austen’s greatest works.
Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play that centers on a dysfunctional courtship (defined as misogynistic by modern standards), where subordinate female behavior from leading lady Katherina outsmarts psychological torture by her male suitor, Petruchio, all in the name of comedic farce.
The publication of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in 1853 served to revive interest in some long-expired holiday traditions, including caroling and feasts, and generated the iconic tale of personal transformation that’s been replayed in December for more than 150 years. Responsible for imprinting “Merry Christmas,” “Bah, humbug!” and Scrooge on the seasonal lexicon, Dickens also infused a spirit of generosity into the celebration of Christmas. The Wicked Folly Tour stages the story with new twists and surprises in a production filled with music and cheer. $29-59, times vary.
Everyone loves the classic holiday stories, but, let’s be honest, we’ve seen it all—Christmas past, present and future. Instead of choosing one, the creators of Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!) perform every yuletide tale they can muster, flying through costumes and carols, while managing to mix in international holiday traditions and seasonal icons from various eras.
The King of Navarre and his three friends have signed an oath to avoid the company of women for three years in Love’s Labour’s Lost. This should be easy: Who needs women when you have your studies and fasting to focus on, right? That is, until the arrival of the Princess of France and her companions throws a wrench in the plan. Follow along with the dangerous temptations in this untraditional comedy by Shakespeare.
Finding true love is never easy, but in Shakespeare’s world, it can be downright treacherous. Join young lovers Claudio and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing as they attempt to trick Claudio’s cousin into admitting his love for his professed enemy—while the lurking villain Don John attempts to make Claudio and Hero’s wedding end in disaster. The clever comedy moves between the gutting pain of heartbreak and the soaring happiness of love.