A pair of surgical gloves and a baby buggy got me thinking, recently, about what we can and can’t be expected to believe in when it comes to staging Shakespeare. The occasion was the Classic Stage Company production of A Winter’s Tale, directed by Barry Edelstein. The surgical gloves figured in the scene where Hermione’s gentlewoman Emilia informs Paulina that the jailed queen has given birth to a daughter, the buggy in the scene where Paulina forces her way into King Leontes’ presence with the baby.
It wasn’t just that the actress playing Emilia made a commotion with the gloves, or that the pram, alarmingly, continued to move slowly forward after Paulina had stopped pushing it. There are objects you cannot bring onstage without breaking the illusion that theater exists to create. They are too resonant–either because of reality or because of some art that has gone before. Surgical gloves are inherently farcical. They inspire amusement (or perhaps discomfort). Depending on your frame of reference, baby carriages make us think of Eisenstein, or of Edward Bond’s Saved, or of the movie version of The Untouchables.
There is, of course, a whole style of Shakespeare production that relies on periodically breaking the illusion of the “fourth wall.” But that wasn’t what Edelstein was trying to do with the surgical gloves—far from it. He was trying to engage us on a more visceral level. He wanted to remind us of what’s really involved in childbirth—the pain, the gore, the danger. So he had Emilia rush onstage wearing a seemingly blood-soaked garment and a brow furrowed with medical anxiety, and bark her news with urgent authority, like a recurring character on ER, snapping away at the old polyurethane. It didn’t work. Why?
Edelstein, who recently announced his departure from CSC after five years as artistic director, isn’t the worst sort of director of Shakespeare. But he is the sort of director who seems more interested in his own ideas than in finding a way of realizing a play for us theatrically and dynamically. He has clearly thought a great deal about A Winter’s Tale. He has observed, for instance, that both time and music figure prominently in it. Accordingly, he has hit upon the idea of the metronome as an object that unifies both themes. There’s one ticking away on top of a toy piano as we file into the theater. It isn’t a bad idea.
Nor is it a bad idea to kick things off with a little pantomime prologue: the child Mamillius studiously performing a piece while the king and queen, who have clearly been caught in the middle of dressing for the evening (“Mom, Dad? Listen to this.”), look on indulgently. But the family tableau becomes a bad idea when the director has Leontes exchange a loving glance with the gravid Hermione over the boy’s head, then beam lovingly down at the child, lovingly gaze back up at Hermione, and place a loving hand on her belly. Similarly, the ticking metronome becomes a bad idea after the act break, when Edelstein has every single member of the company come out onstage brandishing one. And when he has every single instance of the word “time” in the Act IV prologue, repeated by a succession of different actors (“…the argument of Time–” “–Time.” “–Time.” “–Time.”), we may be forgiven if we find ourselves thinking, “This is stupid.”
We don’t need Edelstein to drive home the point that Hermione is pregnant: we can see that. We don’t need him to establish that Hermione and Leontes love each other or that Leontes is proud of his son—that’s in the text. We don’t need Edelstein to tell us that childbirth is an urgent and messy business or that jailhouse deliveries are rough. They’re rough on everyone—mother, baby, midwife, the people from Children’s Services. Believe me, we know.
It would be wrong to say that this Winter’s Tale has nothing going for it. It has David Strathairn, an actor who is always welcome, even under the direst circumstances, and who here plays Leontes with a professionalism that is totally out of keeping with the rest of the production. It also has a reasonably unaffected Perdita (Elisabeth Reaser) who clearly has it in her not to seem shallow. But it has a banal, flat Hermione, a Paulina who seems to be reprising a performance from some earlier production of the play, and an Autolycus who’s been encouraged to project a series of offensive black stereotypes. It also has a score (by Michael Torke) that positively reeks of “composition.”
Most of what ails the production is a function of poor taste and judgment. But some of it isn’t. Some of it, like the surgical gloves, is representative of an approach to Shakespeare that we really shouldn’t be seeing any more. It’s an essentially narrative approach that uses “realistic” business in a bid for verisimilitude. It’s probably best typified by the bit player who thinks it’s a good idea to “react” to what is happening onstage, assuming pantomime expressions of shock or concern, seeking eye-contact with other actors onstage, making as if to speak or rush forward at a crucial moment. Actors in sophisticated productions of Shakespeare don’t do that sort of thing. They haven’t for about forty years.
Sophisticated productions of Shakespeare are informed by an approach that is nonliteral and nonrealistic, even antirealistic, that refuses to pretend we are not watching a play. Indeed, it goes out of its way to draw attention to the fact that we are. Antirealism knows that bit players who pretend to be the characters they are playing even when they’re not speaking merely look foolish and insult our intelligence. It scorns to stoop to such antics. It says to us: “I am not an asshole, and I refuse to behave like one—and I don’t expect you to either. We are all grownups here.”
From a theatrical standpoint, there’s something almost illiterate about Edelstein’s production. The fact that realistic interstitial acting and staging don’t belong in Shakespeare is probably the single most important thing that post-war British theater had to teach us. They don’t belong because they pull focus without serving any function, they create an undesirable relationship between reality and illusion. There are, in America, a handful of stage directors who know this. (Karin Coonrod, Daniel Fish, Michael Greif, Julie Taymor, Scott Wentworth, and Mary Zimmerman spring to mind.)
Antirealism can take an infinite number of different forms. In general, though, an antirealistic piece of staging will tend to accomplish two or more things simultaneously and to have the effect of momentarily disorienting—disillusioning—us in a way that gets us thinking about the process of theater. It’s a setup, of course. Antirealism tells us it isn’t going to try to fool us, and then proceeds to do exactly that. Why it works when it works, and that it works at all, has something to do with an implicit pact that those moments of “disillusion” seem to offer. They leave us vulnerable in a place we didn’t think needed to be defended any more. We’d stopped expecting to be fooled that way.
Antirealism is partly a way of giving a director control over those moments of disillusion. There’s a lovely example of this in Karin Coonrod’s production of Julius Caesar, which Theatre for a New Audience is presenting at the Lucille Lortel. If you go to see it, you will find that Coonrod has turned the figure of the Soothsayer into an almost continuous nonrealistic presence. Long after he’s played his two little scenes, the Soothsayer remains onstage. Sometimes he seems to be watching events unfold. Sometimes he seems to be eavesdropping on the characters in the play, conspiring against the conspirators. Sometimes he seems like a sort of deity or Prospero-figure, controlling fate. Sometimes he takes on the aspect of a stage manager or a director. At one point, seated in a chair on the far right of the stage, he seems like an extension of the audience. His attention is always riveted on the action of the play, but whenever we notice him, our own attention wavers for an instant before we go back to looking where he is looking.
Except in one crucial aspect, the production—which runs, in a judiciously trimmed version, two hours without an intermission—is totally antirealistic, with non-literal props, actors making no attempt to disguise the fact that they play multiple roles, and monochromatic costumes that evoke an idea of past or present without referring to any particular time or place. Coonrod uses flashes of light to represent battle sequences and stylized speech and movement to deal with the problem of staging Roman crowd scenes in a post-Monty-Python world.
Only the acting is realistic. Coonrod has assembled a company of exceptionally skilled and intelligent actors. Earl Hindman’s Caesar perfectly captures the air of benign menace one finds in extremely powerful men. Thomas M. Hammond’s Brutus is a subtle construct of well-intended, righteous self-delusion. Graham Winton, as Mark Antony, makes a masterful performance look effortless and unassuming, and Daniel Oreskes’ Cassius goes light years beyond the interpretation we’re given in grade school.
Toward the end of the plaly there is a pair of book-ended scenes that are inherently difficult to stage. They show us the assisted suicides of Cassius and Brutus, respectively—and violence is always a tough thing to make us believe in. Coonrod does something ingenious here, presenting them in two entirely different theatrical idioms. It’s not just that Cassius’ death is highly stylized while Brutus’ isn’t. It’s that at a crucial moment in the first scene, a movement of the Soothsayer draws our attention in a way that intensifies our focus on the staging. The effect is to lull us into a double complacency. We’re not curious anymore when it comes time for Brutus’ death. We know how stylized Coonrod’s approach to assisted suicide scenes are because we’ve just seen her stage one. So we’re shocked and unnerved by a series of quiet, naturalistic gestures that Brutus goes through before falling on his sword. He puts his hands on his friend’s shoulders. He repositions the sword. He draws a few deep breaths. It’s agonizing.
The important point here is not that Coonrod makes us believe something we wouldn’t have thought anyone could ask us to believe, and on a level we wouldn’t have thought possible, but how crucial those few seconds of realism turn out to be. Our ability to believe in Brutus’ death utterly—viscerally, in just the way that Edelstein failed to make us believe viscerally in Perdita’s birth—transforms our experience of Anthony’s final eulogy. For once, when we hear those overly familiar words—“This was the noblest Roman of them all”—we actually have some glimmer of what the guy is talking about.