You’ll have to bear with me this week…My daughter just turned 11, and so my focus is, of course, on her!  But in thinking about this blog and my daughter, it occurred to me that I had a few things to say about children and Shakespeare.

Scott wrote a recent post - http://www.enotes.com/blogs/shakespeare/2008-03/kinder-bard-en/ - which discussed an article about exposing children to Shakespeare at the age of 4.  I agree completely with this premise.  Why not get kids interested in these wonderful stories while they’re still young enough to love fairy tales?  Why can’t they understand The Tempest if they can understand “Rapunzel”?  And language experts say that the younger a child, the easier it is for them to learn a new language.  Now, far be it from me to say that Shakespeare is another language!!  But I know it presents difficulties to some people when they are first trying to handle the Elizabethan poetry, and so if it works better for little kids whose brains still have all those wonderful firing synapses, then why not go for it?

I started the Shakespeare Festival at our school because I figured out that getting Shakespeare “off the page and onto the stage” is critical to students’ enjoyment and understanding of these plays.  People scoff when I say that I added Hamlet to our 7th grade reading list.  Of course it’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s nothing they can’t handle, particularly when we get up and starting reading aloud and acting out the story.  Last semester I worked with a group of students who ranged in age from 5 to 15 on a scene from The Tempest.  This exercise that I did came from a great book called Teaching Shakespeare, by Rex Gibson.  In it he suggested using Ariel’s story of the shipwreck and dividing lines amongst all of the kids, except Prospero, who is a single actor/reader.  So I took one of my older girls and gave her Prospero’s lines, and then divided Ariel’s lines among the rest of the kids.  The lines were divided, too, so they were manageable for younger kids.  Our littlest boy had a line with four words, and then we just worked on up to more and longer lines for the oldest kids.  They had so much fun with this - We even added sound effects so that there were ocean/surf crashing noises in the background while Ariel is telling his story, as well as thunder bolts at “Jove’s lighting, the precursors O’th’ dreadful thunderclaps”!  This was a great experience that led several of the kids to ask me, “When can we do more of this?”  In addition, they really wanted to know the entire story of The Tempest, which gave me the opportunity to do more teaching and sharing of Shakespeare.

Another great way to get younger kids involved in the plays is by having them be extras.  Our Much Ado last summer included the masked ball scene in Act II, complete with a choreographed 16th century Italian court dance!  It was SO neat to see these actors (yes, even the teenage boys!) get into this and want to learn these dance steps to bring even more dimension and life to our production.  Altogether we had 20 dancers - five groups of four dancers each - and the majority of them were extras - younger kids without lines in the play but who really wanted to be involved in the production in some capacity.  My daughter was one of these, as well as the Noble Lady who sings at Hero’s tomb in Act V (yes, I just had to mention my cute kid again!)!

So what exactly is the point to this post, other than to talk about my adorable birthday girl?  I want to encourage all teachers out there - elementary and secondary, public and private schools, and homeschoolers - to not be afraid to tackle the Bard and bring him to life with whatever group of kids you get to teach.  It never ceases to amaze me how much kids can do when they’re encouraged and loved through the process!

Before we left for spring break, I told our new cast that they would need to plan on meeting with our costume designer for fittings on Tuesday the 18th during recess (known as “the break” at our school).  “Break?  But that’s our only break?!?!  What about volleyball?!?  What about our hard-earned social time!?!”  After much sighing and gnashing of teeth, I agreed to bring donuts and hot chocolate.  The gnashing stopped immediately.  They know how to play me like a fiddle!

Costumes…What the heck should anyone do about costumes these days?  When you go to see a “Shakespearean” play, you really don’t know what to expect, unless it gives you a hint in the advertising.  It might look Elizabethan…it might not.  It might be historical…it might not.  It might be both - I saw Romeo and Juliet in Ashland last October and their designer did a clever thing to highlight the generation gap between the old fogeys and the young, hip characters.  The older generation wore traditional Elizabethan costumes, and the younger people looked like modern-day, Catholic high-school students.  To be honest, I’m not sure if I would have understood the point of the very different costume styles had I not read about it in the playbill, but that could just be me - perhaps other playgoers figured it out immediately.

When I think about costumes for my productions of these plays, I don’t consider things like, “How can I get this message across?” or “How can we do something that’s never been done before?”  I’m sure a lot of that comes from the fact that I’m not doing professional theater with professional actors - we’re a brand new school theatre troupe, trying to figure things out in our second year.  But even if I were suddenly sucked into the world of professional theater, I’m not sure if I would think of those issues.  I’m not sure if I would wonder if I could somehow make Petruchio a more sympathetic character by setting Shrew in the 1960s and having him wear bell-bottoms.  Would I consider the fact that a 1950s beehive hairdo on Katharina could potentially make her too shrewish for what I’m trying to get across to the audience?  Probably not.

For me, costumes have always been one of the best things about movies and theater.  Costumes can transport a person back in time (something I’ve always wanted to do, particularly after seeing Somewhere in Time as a very impressionable 7th grader!), and I absolutely adore period pieces with elaborate historical costumes - as long as they’re somewhat accurate (What was that horrendous King Arthur flick with Sean Connery, Richard Gere and Julia Ormond?  Oh my…the costumes…oh my, oh my, oh my…where’s the ibuprofen???)!  Good costumes are like the icing on the cake of a historical film or theater experience, and so when I think of costumes for our plays, I automatically think, “Hmmm…it’s set in Italy, so let’s make it Italian!”

Fortunately, my costume designer (an amazing 17-year-old young woman who I hope will be studying costume design at our local university when she graduates) is in agreement with me about “the look” we want for Shrew.  And funny enough, when asked last year what they wanted to do about costumes, the cast said, “We want it to look like Shakespeare.”  Translation = They wanted it to look like it was set in Shakespeare’s times, rather than a modern setting.  They wanted it to look Italian once they found out that Much Ado is set in Italy.  And God bless ‘em, they want to keep Shrew looking Italian because they know we have no budget for all new stuff this summer!

By the way, the second picture above, taken during the masked ball scene of Much Ado, is of my actors who played Margaret and Claudio last year…and who won the roles of Katharina and Petruchio last week for Shrew!  It was this scene that sold me on their “look” for these roles, as well as the fact that I know I can count on both of them to work as hard as they can to make it a great production.  “Petruchio,” by the way, is the young man who said it would be okay to NOT be Petruchio this year, for the sake of letting a senior have the part.  I had no choice, however - His audition was the strongest, and so he will be playing Petruchio and the senior (whose audition was good, don’t get me wrong!) will make a hilarious Tranio!  I can hardly wait…I know this is going to be an amazing summer!

Oh, yeah…costumes…I do jump around with my thoughts, don’t I?  Ultimately, costumes are up to the director and the costume designer who need to work together - the costume designer can’t create the director’s “vision” if the director can’t communicate his/her vision to the designer.  It can be as simple as, “I need to have this modern because I have a $2.00 budget - Let’s visit Goodwill tomorrow!” to as elaborate as, “I’m picturing the antebellum Old South!”  I also believe the director needs to get input from his/her cast.  He might be pleasantly surprised to discover that everyone is on the same page and yes, let’s set Macbeth in a modern high school!  Perhaps the cast has unrealistic expectations, or no clue that the entire production has a $50 budget.  Whatever is decided, fellow directors, keep your cast and crew in the loop - get their input - listen to their ideas - and make the best decisions you can for everyone involved.

Eugene Ionesco’s Macbett takes Shakespeare’s classic tragedy through the looking glass. The result is about as far from “traditional” Shakespearean tragedy as you could imagine—or is it? A new production of Ionesco’s wacky play is once again questioning long-held understandings of The Bard’s work, particularly with regards to genre. Given Will’s late-career predilection for tragicomedies, are the other plays’ categories absolute? Can we find serious overtones in the comedies? In the case of plays like Macbeth and Macbett, are we saying that the tragedies can be funny?

The short answer is…..well, duh! The question is not whether or not these tragedies have moments of levity scattered throughout them; rather, the question is whether or not these dark tales can be played successfully as out-and-out comedies. With its witches, ghosts, and spells, Macbeth is precariously close to camp already. Could the play be pushed over the edge into comedy? One danger is that audiences (especially those already familiar with the play) would read such production as spoofs. Yet, is it possible to view it as a dark comedy that has nothing to do with SNL-style in-joking? The porter remains the lone comic interlude in by-the-book Macbeths, drifting onstage just as the darkest of events have unfolded offstage. Maybe he is simply there for comic relief, but perhaps he is the one character who is in on this dark, deadly joke.

The Comedy of Errors occupies a unique position in Shakespeare’s oeuvre…perhaps. Some believe it to be The Bard’s first play (a position for which it usually dukes it out with The Two Gentlemen of Verona). Based on its structure, it is certainly possible. Borrowed heavily from Roman comedies (and The Menaechmi in particular), The Comedy of Errors tells the story of two sets of twins, separated at birth, who wind up in the same city as adults, resulting in multiple mistaken identities. A new production of the play emphasizes slapstick, farcical humor. It also boasts the novelty of having the two sets of twin characters played by just two actors instead of the usual four (the creators do not mention how this is accomplished, but my money is on mirrors a la the finale of A Chorus Line).

The tendency to lean on sight gags reinforces that, as an early play of Shakespeare’s, it is not as fully developed as some of his later, more sophisticated comedies. Despite its seemingly complex plot structure, the setup for the humor in the play is relatively simple. Antipholus and his manservant Dromio do something, often something contrary, that is later ascribed to the other Antipholus and Dromio (they have the same names, conveniently). The result is a lot of no-I-didn’t-yes-you-did humor that feels repetitive after awhile. This production has trimmed the play down to eighty minutes with good reason. It may be Shakespeare’s first play, but at its core, it is really only a comedy of one error.

As a society, we never seem to tire of ranking things. Whether it is the American Film Institute’s list of the one hundred greatest movies or the weekly top video countdown, the need to name something “The Best” is universal. So it is not surprising that someone created a list of the greatest wits of all time. Shakespeare naturally made the cut, as did Oscar Wilde. The real curio, however, is Oasis musician Liam Gallagher. Really? Gallagher aside, the pairing of Shakespeare and Wilde struck me. Do these two writers share anything other than wit?

Wilde’s life and career were notoriously cut short by the famous trial over “the love that dare not speak its name.” Still, in his brief life, Wilde produced some of the sharpest comedies ever written about high society. His most famous of these is the mistaken-identity charmer The Importance of Being Earnest. Yet, how does this work line up against that of Shakespeare? Mistaken identity and double identity (which figure so prominently in Earnest) certainly show up in Shakespeare’s comedies. Twelfth Night and As You Like It feature cross-dressing heroines; The Comedy of Errors boasts not one but two sets of mixed-up twins; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream features a quartet of lovers, just like Earnest. Overall, however, the two writers create more of a contrast than a comparison. Both were witty and clever, but the snidely dry Wilde and the play-to-the-rafters Shakespeare made people laugh for very different reasons.

In a recent post, I bemoaned the trend of writers who update the references in Shakespeare’s comedies to make them more accessible. According to a recent New York Times review, an Off-Broadway production of Twelfth Night falters in its desire to be accessible, but for somewhat different reasons. The reviewer found the production lacking in its execution of the comic moments because it took a more-is-more approach. What this made me wonder is, if a cast has to work this hard to earn laughs, how funny is the play to begin with?

Let me back up. Of course Shakespeare’s comedies are funny…just not in the way that so many productions try to make them funny. His plays have elements of satire, black comedy, wit, silliness and farce, but it’s the latter that often gets the most weight. Despite directors’ and actors’ efforts, plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night are not 1930s screwball comedies, no matter how rat-a-tat-tat the pacing. Similarly, garish Jim Carrey–esque mugging on the actors’ parts does not make them slapstick farces. In short, a little of these kinds of gags goes a very long way (a similar note should be given to artists who like to shtick up Waiting for Godot). In the end, the strenuous efforts on everyone’s behalf feel like strenuous efforts, and the productions wind up less funny rather than more.