12 September 2007

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart

The collection Shaw on Shakespeare includes a letter he wrote in 1888 to the Pall Mall Gazette suggesting that civilized people should boycott any revival of a brutal play like The Taming of the Shrew. Since he wrote it under a pseudonym I suspect he wasn’t completely serious. (I wonder if the Taming of the Shrew was in the back of his mind when he wrote Pygmalion, another comedy with a somewhat emotionally unsatisfying ending about an outsider woman being changed and toned down by a charismatic but emotionally brutal man.) It certainly gets revived more often than better plays, probably because you can sell it as a rough-house version of what used to be called The Battle of the Sexes, only classy because it’s written by the great Shakespeare. I saw the Cutting Ball’s version a few weeks ago. As usual with this company, the sets and lighting were done beautifully. As is not usual with them, the music was awful. We got blasted with hiphop all evening. Personal taste aside, hiphop (meant to signify the vibrant and contemporary, no matter how tired and conventional the sounds) has become a theatrical cliché that should be avoided. Evening after evening I sit there with the other middle-aged white people who make up most of the audience (along with the middle-class minorities who probably don’t care to be associated with hiphop culture) wondering what lie about ourselves and society we’re supposed to pretend to believe in while the music plays. Hiphop has replaced rock as the music that helps us play act that we’re rebels. Both are actually corporate-controlled manifestations of fake rebellion that help people pretend their lives are not as deeply conformist as they really are.

This production was contemporary but commedia-based. I have mixed feelings about commedia dell’arte. I’m as delighted as the next guy by Callot’s engravings, but a couple of years ago when an Italian troupe came to Berkeley and performed the Servant of Two Masters in traditional style I had to admit that, despite the romantic aesthetic appeal of seeing something that could have been viewed in the eighteenth century, I’m just not that entertained by seeing someone pretend to eat a fly, a commedia trope to which this Shrew paid tribute. (Also, I discovered that stuttering jokes are just as unfunny in Italian as in English.) Like Kabuki, commedia has been strip-mined for so many twentieth-century stagings that the novelty has long gone, but I’m more emotionally attuned to the stylized tragedies of Kabuki. Perhaps commedia is just too life-like for me. When I moved back to this area and worked temp for a while, every office I went to had its stock characters, just as surely as if they’d been named Truffaldino and Smeraldina: there was the snippy gay guy, the nice girl who kept trying to smooth over everyone’s feelings, the muttering schemer who was incompetent anyway, the female executive who thought she had to be tough-acting, the avuncular senior executive. . . . It’s fascinating how eager people are to turn themselves into stereotypes. At one long-ago job I stepped onto the elevator only to find it occupied by a pink-faced youngish man with bright suspenders over his huge gut, arrogantly smoking a comically large cigar (smoking in elevators was, if not exactly illegal then – I can’t remember for sure – certainly considered rude. I don’t really get cigars anyway – why not just carry a sign saying "I have a tiny dick"?). He could have modeled as a fat-cat capitalist caricature for New Masses. Perhaps if I knew these people better they would have broken from type; on the other hand, perhaps they would simply have exchanged one mask for another. If the thought of being reduced to standard characters isn’t depressing enough about commedia, then the antics are: basically, a lot of it comes down to vaudeville shtick – they literally use slapsticks – which I just don’t find that funny. I guess I respond more to verbal humor.

The first Shrew I saw was the famous commedia-style production Bill Ball did for ACT (it was shown on television and released on DVD a few years ago); my high school was taken twice. The first time, Petruchio was the surprisingly-muscular-for-the-1970s Marc Singer (the Beastmaster himself! and giving an excellent performance); the second time there was a different, much less buff guy, I think promoted up from Lucentio, who kept his shirt on, providing me an early lesson in how stagings are adjusted for individual actors. I watched the DVD recently and was pleased to see that the show held up: the pacing is fast and crisp and funny, and the whole cast is excellent. Unfortunately they have Kate give the wink to the audience at The Speech – you know the one I mean. This is wrong, wrong, wrong, because basically it turns Kate into Bianca. In the Cutting Ball production, Kate, played by the very funny Paige Rogers, gives the speech straight, but it sort of fell flat for me. Her Petruchio was David Sinaiko, and I have to say I’ve seen him do his “watch me be crazy” thing once too often. Rather than engaging with Kate he seemed to be forcing her to submit to his antic charms, such as they were. As a result the “taming” seemed a zany (yes, a commedia word) display by him rather than an interaction with Kate, as if Petruchio were one of those strenuously outrageous people who take over the room. That’s a power move, but actually a little more innocuous than the methods Petruchio really uses; those methods – deprivation of food and sleep, arbitrary and irrational orders, physical abuse – are classic brainwashing techniques, of the type currently being inflicted by our beloved government on the disappeared in dark and secret prisons. This is the sort of thing that suggests deeper possibilities in the play. To return to our Petruchio, he with his white hair looked too old (especially by contrast with the generally youthful cast) and not physically imposing. I’m not opposed to casting against type, but the usual Petruchio, with his slightly comic macho braggadocio, makes the connection with Kate physically understandable in a way that wasn’t happening here. I never thought I’d see a Shrew stolen by Grumio (Petruchio’s servant), but Avery Monsen was energetically hilarious. The other servants were mostly good too, particularly Jason Wong and Sam Gibbs. They performed their commedia antics with conviction if not always fluidity and crispness, as did the trio of very cute high school girls who danced hiphop routines between scenes.

Cutting Ball used the Christopher Sly induction, and had a Lady (and her girlfriend) rather than a Lord play the trick on Sly. In the Shrew portion, the Lady played Kate, her girlfriend played Bianca, and Sly played Petruchio, which was thematically suggestive if not logically clear, and nicely framed the ideas of stereotypes, roles, and identity worked out in the rest of the play. That brings us to The Speech, and how it should be handled. I’ve already pointed out that the easy evasion of the wink is false to Kate’s character. So do I think we’re supposed to believe what she says? I think we’re supposed to believe she believes it. Kate is an extremist – from Shrew to Stepford wife, but never in the average middle. She means what she says – she means every word. And that’s why it’s funny. It’s a joke about the “patriarchy” and how power actually works. The demure women, Bianca and Hortensio’s Widow, theoretically believe, and during courtship act according to, everything Kate says. But once they’re settled they think she’s a fool for not holding her own, and so much for allegations of omnipresent male power and how it works in the real world. Years ago in Boston, at some small theater whose name I’ve forgotten, I saw a Shrew that set the play in the world of commedia’s offspring, the vaudeville house. It made some brilliant points about comedy as a way of enforcing social conformity through ridicule of those who are different. At the beginning Kate was a raucous baggy-pants comic with a seltzer bottle, like most of the men. By the end she had been transformed into a gauzy pink soubrette like the other women, and she spoke her final speech in a mincing, ghastly tone while posing suggestively for the male spectators. Her transformation was, seriously, one of the most deeply horrifying and disturbing things I’ve ever seen. And I barely remember her Petruchio – another clown? A master of ceremonies? Just another performer fitting into his assigned slot?

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