Love and deception: Romance, comedy, and deceit come to the stage in the form of one of William Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies, Twelfth Night. Directed by Jamie Virostko and featuring a talented ensemble, this intimate spin on the Bard’s twisted love triangle combines gender-fluidity with romantic chaos in a traditional yet pared-down production.
Let’s pretend for a minute. It’s sometime in the not-too-distant future. Charlottesville is a thriving black kingdom, free of the white gaze and white corruption, and comprised of various hamlets, including Vinegar Hill, Starr Hill, and between them, Gospel Hill, the kingdom’s seat and center of spirituality.
Such is the premise of Hambone, an original, Afro-futurist telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by local all-black theater troupe the Charlottesville Players Guild.
You know how Hamlet goes: King Hamlet has died. His son, Prince Hamlet, returns home to mourn, only to find that Queen Gertrude has taken up with the dead king’s brother, Claudius. The king’s ghost visits Hamlet with a message: Claudius killed him, and young Hamlet must avenge his death. In the process, young Hamlet goes mad (or does he?).
And while the play is technically fiction, much of what Hambone delves into in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium is real.
The Charlottesville Players Guild’s desire to rework Hamlet came about during the troupe’s summer 2018 Macbeth adaptation, Black Mac. The cast became particularly interested in familial relationships among those characters, and Hamlet came up as another play rife with family drama.
The troupe decided to make Hamlet into “the ultimate black family drama,” one that showcases “the spectrum of black family,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, CPG’s creative director who adapted the script and also plays Queen Gertrude. Director Shelby Marie Edwards chose to focus the production on grief, specifically “the way grief is looked at from the African continuum.”
“One of the ways we incorporate an African aesthetic is how the characters deal with death, how we frame death within the show,” says Edwards. “I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s not like they die and that’s it,” she says, because in the African diaspora, one’s ancestors are always present. It’s not life and death, Edwards explains, but rather “life, death, and transformation.” Take King Hamlet’s ghost—whose message for his son drives much of the plot—as just one example.
When Hamlet/Hambone (played by David Vaughn Straughn) so famously asks in his soliloquy, “To be, or not to be?,” he contemplates life and death. But in Hambone, it’s less a question of physicality and more one of spirituality: Will he accept grief as a part of life and continue on, not just breathing but actually living? Or will he allow grief to consume his soul and render him essentially lifeless?
What’s in a name?
Why call this adaptation Hambone? Some folks might know “hambone” as an African American style of dance that involves slapping one’s own body to create a rhythm (it’s also called the Juba dance, or, originally, the Pattin’ Juba). But it was also used as a derogatory term for black performers. “So, that’s the perfect name for this [production], because [Hamlet] performs madness for certain people to elicit a response,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, who adapted the script. “It’s also a commentary on code-switching.”
Many of the CPG’s creative choices for Hambone add new and interesting layers. They meld African American vernacular English with Shakespeare’s early modern English. Ivan Orr has composed an original soundtrack —which he describes as hip-hop as it might sound in the future —that helps establish the mood and propel the story forward.
Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend, typically staged as a man, is a woman, and Hamlet is in love with her, despite the fact that he’s betrothed to Ophelia. His friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are also women. That could explain Hamlet/Hambone’s intuition, and why he can communicate with his father’s spirit, says Scott-Jones. And what does all that say about Hamlet/Hambone’s relationship with his mother, Gertrude?
King Hamlet and Claudius are twins (both played by Ray Smith)—which raises new questions (and probably a few eyebrows) about Gertrude’s hasty marriage to Claudius, itself complicated by the fact that in this production, Gertrude is pregnant. And that raises all sorts of questions about heirs and future kings.
The CPG has also added a griot, “an African storyteller who holds wisdom,” explains Edwards, a role played by Brenda Brown-Grooms, a local pastor renowned for her sermons. Brown-Grooms grew up in Charlottesville, and her family attended one of the black churches located on Gospel Hill.
This is yet another way in which the substance of Hambone is quite real, particularly for Charlottesville’s African American communities. Gospel Hill and Vinegar Hill are physically gone from present-day Charlottesville, majority black neighborhoods razed by the city in the mid-20th century in the name of “urban renewal.” And Starr Hill, another such neighborhood, is starting to disappear, too, thanks to gentrification (and, it can be said, the whiteness that the Charlottesville imagined in Hambone has managed to escape).
While these neighborhoods are physically gone, their presence remains—in people, stories, photographs, in Hambone, and in grief. Black Charlottesvillians still mourn these losses. These neighborhoods lived, they died, and now they are transformed.
“I want to have a real, cathartic moment on stage,” says Edwards, one that can work in service of transformation for actors and audience alike. “I always want the audience to leave a little bit more healed than when they began,” she says. “I want the audience to un-learn any conceptions, consciously or unconsciously, they might have about what people in black bodies can do.”
See Hambone, the Charlottesville Players Guild’s Afro-futurist adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center August 22 through September 1.
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
Seven years after William Shakespeare died in 1616, a collection of his plays was assembled into a single volume for the first time. Only 900 copies were printed—235 survive today. For the first time, one of those First Folios is at the University of Virginia, on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and on display at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library through October 26.
The opportunity for the loan became an excuse for a larger exhibition of UVA’s various Shakespeare-related materials in their collections, according to Dr. Molly Schwartzburg, curator of collections at the library.
“When we found that we had been selected to be a venue for the First Folio, we thought why don’t we select a few of our best items to accompany it,” says Schwartzburg. “And then we realized why would we do that work if we aren’t going to select all of our best items? Why don’t we make a whole exhibition out of it? So, we decided to build a large Shakespeare exhibition that would be up all year and then would adjust to accommodate the First Folio. The Folger project inspired us to go whole hog.”
The library went whole hog, indeed. Visitors to the gallery on the main level are treated to a trip through centuries of Shakespeare’s printed history. Early quarto-sized editions of his plays are on display, with texts that may have been authorized, or, just as likely, cribbed by scribbling bootleggers in his audiences. Piracy of entertainment began long before the Internet.
“UVA’s greatest strength is the history of the book,” says Schwartzburg. “Other institutions may be great in theater history. …We decided to look at the printing of Shakespeare up until the present day.”
Each copy of the First Folio is unique, owing to the fact that the typesetters made corrections to their sheets of paper as they worked, but did not discard the flawed drafts. It was a living document throughout its production, which mirrors the doomed struggle to identify definitive versions of any of Shakespeare’s plays.
“There is no such thing as a text of Shakespeare’s plays that is authorized by Shakespeare,” says Schwartzburg.
The plays likely changed even during the Bard’s own life. Scribes copied his drafts for the actors to use, with errors along the way. Like most playwrights, it’s possible he made changes to scripts based on the reactions of audiences and input from actors.
“A play in Shakespeare’s day was probably a fluid thing,” says Schwartzburg.
A comparison of the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy from various early printings of Hamlet shows wide variation. The first standalone quarto copy of Hamlet from 1603 is about a third shorter than what we are familiar with today, and many alternate lines are substituted. A 1604 edition was close to the First Folio version, but lacked a few key words.
Hamlet is now categorized as a “tragedy,” thanks to the First Folio.
“A key thing that happens with the First Folio is that it starts making claims about the text that don’t exist before,” says Schwartzburg. “It breaks the plays up into categories: tragedies, comedies and histories. …That has a huge impact on how you interpret them and has nothing to do with an intention of the author that you can return to.”
Eighteen of the plays had never been published before the First Folio and might otherwise have been lost. In fact, without the First Folio, Shakespeare might have been forgotten entirely.
The First Folio “tells us a lot about the significance of Shakespeare in the environment of 1622 when the project probably begins,” says Schwartzburg. “It tells of a legacy continuing beyond Shakespeare’s own lifetime, which isn’t the case with a lot of other very popular playwrights of the time whom we’ve never heard of today because they didn’t have someone going out and thinking it’s a good idea to publish and sell an edition of this person’s plays.”
Two of Shakespeare’s friends organized and edited the First Folio, giving it special legitimacy versus some of the standalone copies of his plays (which were never known to have been authorized by Shakespeare or edited by anyone with knowledge of what his intentions were for his work). John Heminges and Henry Condell, both actors in his troupe, the King’s Men, were close enough friends of the Bard to be named in his will.
Without Heminges and Condell, would anyone remember Shakespeare today? What about the thousands of words in the English language that he invented or popularized?
The First Folio led to a Second Folio in 1632 (also on display in the exhibit) with around 1,700 changes from the First Folio. When the Third Folio appeared in 1663, seven more plays were added but only six of those are now accepted as Shakespeare’s work.
Various editions of Shakespeare’s supposed plays blossomed in the centuries since. Editors censored some material and changed lines to fix rhymes that stopped working as accents changed. As generations of publishers have used Shakespeare’s name and work in whatever way that has suited them at a particular moment, the First Folio is the closest thing to a gold standard that actors, directors and fans have.
Contact Jackson Landers at arts@c-ville.com.
The tale of UVA students Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering, who were convicted in the 1985 double murders of Haysom’s parents, has long riveted central Virginia, and a new documentary reveals how the two saw themselves as tragic characters out of Shakespeare and Dickens.
Initially Soering confessed to the murders, he says, to protect his beloved from the electric chair, but he almost immediately recanted, and 30 years later, still maintains his innocence.
Soering’s attorney, Steve Rosenfield, filed a petition for absolute pardon with Governor Terry McAuliffe last week. Earlier this year, German filmmakers Marcus Vetter and Karin Steinberger screened their documentary, The Promise, at the Munich Film Festival. Germany, too, has long been fascinated with the case involving one of its citizens, who has garnered support from the entire Bundestag and Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The real-life film noir, screened for reporters August 24, opens with lonely highways and dark country roads to Loose Chippings, the genteel Bedford home of Derek and Nancy Haysom, and then slams the viewers with gruesome murder scene photos that one investigator described as “like stepping in a slaughterhouse.”
Soering was 18 years old when he met Haysom, two and a half years his senior, in 1984. “I was practically a child,” he says. Both were Echols scholars, and Soering also was a Jefferson Scholar, a rarity even in the world of the University of Virginia’s gifted students.
Soering says he was a virgin when he met Haysom, and the pair’s passionate affair was documented in their love letters in that era before e-mails and texts.
Writes Haysom after their arrests, “Promise me, Jens. Whatever it takes now, promise me you will not let me ruin your life. I’ve seriously fucked up mine. Don’t let me destroy yours. I would kill myself if I discovered you were compromising yourself for me.”
That was a warning Soering did not heed from a woman who also referred to herself as Lady Macbeth.
Haysom’s letters and writings frequently expressed her wish that her parents were dead. She also has suggested that her mother sexually abused her, but denied it when pressed on the witness stand at her trial.
Soering saw the tale as more Romeo and Juliet, he says. When Elizabeth came back from Bedford and said to him, “I’ve killed my parents. I’ve killed my parents. You’ve got to help me,” Soering turned to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, and pictured himself as Sydney Carton, giving up his life to save another, only he believed that as the son of a German diplomat, at worst he’d only be sentenced to a few years in prison in Germany, ultimately to be reunited with Haysom.
“I said it was me,” says Soering in the film. “I thought I was a hero.”
And police were willing to believe that. Even when Haysom told the detectives interrogating her in London, where the couple was arrested in 1986, “I did it myself,” a detective says, “Don’t be silly.” To which Haysom responds, “I got off on it.”
Haysom was an “unconventional beauty,” says Carlos Santos, owner of the Fluvanna Review, who was a Richmond Times-
Dispatch reporter when the trials took place. “She was worldly, smart,” he says, admitting on the witness stand that she used LSD and heroin. “At the same time you could tell that she lied,” says Santos. “She was a beautiful, charming liar.”
“I have brought sorrow to so many,” Soering tells the filmmakers. “I have destroyed my life because I thought it was about love. Retrospectively I realized I never knew this woman.”
Soering, 50, was sentenced to two life sentences in 1990. Haysom, 52, is serving a 90-year sentence.