Worker's Playtime

Over on Return of the Reluctant, Bondgirl has posted a letter she received from Wilton Barnhardt; his comments on the most memorable theater performances are hilarious -- and in the case of the pigeons, just a wee bit disturbing -- and I intend to check out his novels once I've winnowed down my TBR pile a bit.

One of the plays he talks about was a performance of "The Tempest" in a planitarium. While I do not have any stories that quite compare, I have found that I have yet to see a performance of that play that is really -- well, normal. The first time I saw it (sort of) was in 1998, at the Globe Theater in London. I was there, tagging along with a group of kids from Grand Valley University in Grand Rapids; it's a reasonably conservative public university in the heart of West Michigan. My best friend Julie was the TA for the class, so she arranged for me to come with them for a few weeks the summer after I graduated from college. I was a bit excited to see the play, because I had become a fan of Shakespeare's late Romances in college (I wrote a paper on "The Winter's Tale" in my Shakespeare class), and to see it at the Globe, no less! Julie had bought the tickets for the prof, but she hadn't been paying attention to the details. It turned out that it was a performance by a Cuban troupe, and what dialogue there was (and there wasn't a lot) was completely in Spanish. The play itself had been significantly rewritten, and a general outline of the altered plot had to be included in the program. When the play started, we also realized that all the women were going to be performing topless, and the men were a hemp jock-strap away from being completely naked. Well, that last part I didn't have much of a problem with, since these were the sort of guys you (or more to the point, I) don't mind seeing in nothing but a hemp jock-strap. But you get the idea: it was a bit outre. There were tribal masks, weird chanting, interperative dancing, and characters that didn't really correspond to any in Shakespeare's play. I eventually somehow realized that their version was essentially a veiled indictment of Castro's regime, and could be understood metaphorically as a larger history of their homeland; once I understood that, it helped me make sense out of what I was seeing. Most of the kids in the class hated it, and I suspect that Julie did too -- she was laughing about it just the other day. A family from a church group that was vaguely affiliated with our school group left about midway through. I don't think I enjoyed standing for all that time, either, especially without some bear-baiting to warm up the crowd a bit. Once I got past the pendulous breasts and incomprehensible chattering, I actually sort of enjoyed it. It certainly made my trip to the Globe more interesting than if I had seen something more... conventional.

The other performance was at the Stratford Festival, and not nearly so colorful. Not long into the play, the actor playing Prospero broke out of character to tell the audience that he had forgotten a full page of the text, and because it included some dialogue integral to the plot, he was going to start the scene over. The audience, for their part, applauded. His candor was admirable, and I was impressed, but once he did restart, I found it impossible to not think he was simply an actor playing Prospero, rather than Prospero himself, if that makes sense. It seems a bit graceless in retrospect, and I wonder if the audience would have clapped so enthusiastically if it had been a younger actor, or a more modern play. In retrospect, I can remember precious little else of the performance. It was, however, a Preview; the play had yet to officially open yet, so it was significantly cheaper to attend, so I probably shouldn't complain. But still, I sort of preferred the Cuban version.

Song: "Anything Goes" by Ella Fitzgerald.