For 20 years, Winona has hosted the Great River Shakespeare Festival. Plays are presented in the performing arts center at Winona State University, between late June and late July. In the past, three Shakespeare plays were acted with a modern theater piece rounding out the quartet of performances. Understudies also presented a play by the Bard and the festival included lectures and community events. Largely funded by the people of Winona with some Minnesota Arts grants and State University money, this ambitious venture flourished for a generation – but, on the evidence of shows that I saw on July 8, 2023, the festival had been badly gored by COVID and may be on its last legs. The audiences for the two plays that I saw were conspicuously long-in-the tooth and the current fad to see all art in terms of identity politics has vitiated the persuasiveness of the productions to a significant extent. Straitened budgets, apparently, have limited resources for costumes and stage decoration, amenities not necessary (and, often, distracting) for productions of Shakespeare and the directors of the shows defend their minimalist staging as indicative of greater fidelity to Shakespeare’s words (while making mush of his carefully designed and symmetrical dramatis personae in the name of gender and racial equity). The auditorium at Winona State seats 250, a fairly large hall for an endeavor of this sort, and, on past occasions when I attended, there were usually about sixty or so seats empty. The plays are now presented with the audience almost in the actor’s laps, the thrust stage surrounded on three sides by a bleacher-like array of reasonably comfortable folding ranked on four-level risers. According to the usher, a formidable-looking volunteer matron, the shows are now presented to an audience that would number 160 if every seat were filled. (The tight quarters and the absence of unnecessary trumpery in the stage decorations are all for the good as far as I am concerned.) There is, however, an unavoidable sense of straitened circumstances, perhaps, and impoverishment; this stands in stark contrast to the army of administrators and off-stage personnel listed in programs, including an intimacy consultant that is de rigueur (often intimacy consultants, hedges against sexual harassment litigation, are, also, fight choreographers, a doubling of roles that seems both appropriate and ironic) and, if the actors suffer PTSD or depression, a therapist is appointed to provide counseling to company members – and given a credit in the playbill. I have attended about 8 or 10 plays over the many years of the Festival and, in general, the performances are intelligently directed, effective, and both elegantly well-spoken and acted. The Company consists of three categories of players – there are local actors, seemingly alumni of Winona State and previous productions of the Great River Shakespeare Festival (GRSF) who have gone on to inauspicious but, apparently, sustainable theatrical careers; some of players are very young and inexperienced (and presumably poorly compensated); leading parts are generally acted by professionals who seem fixtures at the various Shakespeare festivals that are mounted throughout the country, often in rural settings in summer resort communities – this latter category of performers are usually very accomplished. Gender and racial equity considerations have resulted in a pool of festival actors that seem to be about half African-American and mostly women. As I observe below, this can lead to baffling casting decisions. It’s my guess that the audience for Shakespeare will die out in a generation or two and that this Festival will probably collapse within ten years. Shakespeare, I’m afraid, will be relegated to an ever-diminishing cadre of scholars and fragmentarily performed as skits at Renaissance Festivals.
The Winter’s Tale, a bizarre melodrama that belongs to no known genre, is a challenge to both performers and the audience – the plot is stark with unbearable elements and the radiant conclusion to the play raises far more questions than it resolves. Briefly, King Leontes of Sicily, without any warrant at all, suspects his wife Hermione of adultery. He goes from doting usurious husband to monster in the scope of about a dozen lines. Leontes accuses his brother of “sluicing” his heavily pregnant Queen. This madness results in many deaths: Leontes toddler son dies of a broken heart at seeing his mother traduced; Hermione, the Queen, similarly (seems) to die, and a faithful old retainer sent to dispose of the Queen’s new born infant gets eaten by a bear. (Critics usually forget that the casualties caused by Leontes’ jealousy include an entire shipload of sailors wrecked at sea – he isn’t the direct cause of the tempest, but it is an objective correlative to his rage.) Sixteen years pass, as announced by an allegorical Time, and, now, Hermione’s new-born babe is grown to sprightly, beautiful, and emotionally precocious maiden, Perdita. The play has now radically changed gears with respect to its tone – the story becomes a raucous comedy, complete with country bumpkins and a charismatic con-man, Autolycos. (Autolycos, an attractive and cynical figure, is supposed to show how bad intentions and self-aggrandizement can lead to good things – that is, to cite As You Like It, he sweetens the uses of adversity – but the character, like Falstaff, gets out of control and ends up dominating the second half of the show, assuming an importance far beyond his nominal role in plot; from a plot perspective, he’s just filler to pad out the rather lean matter of the second half of the show.) Of course, all’s well that end’s well, and the play concludes with a scene in which the dead Queen is exhibited as a statue and, then, somehow revived. Perdita marries the son of Polixenes, the King’s brother accused in Act One of having sex, and, somehow, impregnating the Queen with his spawn. So everyone lives happily ever after, except, with Shakespeare, you always have the sense that if the ending is happy it isn’t really the ending. The pivot of the plot, like Janet Leigh’s murder in Psycho, is the scene in which Antigonus, the old retainer dispatched to abandon the new-born infant in a desert place (on the shores of Bohemia) gets eaten by a bear – this is the exact hinge between tragedy and grotesque comedy (Shakespeare’s bumpkins expostulate, at length, on the bear dining on Antigonus) that converts the play from a horrific domestic calamity in a bucolic, pastoral comedy.
GRSF produces this complicated play using only eight actors – except for Leontes, all parts are doubled or, even, tripled. (Before the play begins, the actors who are lounging around in mufti on the thrust stage, explain with the aid of costume accessories – funny hats, crowns, sashes and cummerbunds – how they will appear in their different roles; I had read the play in advance together with Harold Bloom’s commentary in his book Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human and so didn’t need this explication but, I think, it was a good orientation for viewers not as prepared as I. I thought this parsimonious casting worked pretty well and the play was coherently presented. The doomed toddler, Mammilus, appeared as a detailed three-foot tall mannequin or doll, manipulated (and speaking through) an on-stage actor – in my estimation, this was effectively done. When, amidst thunderous lightning claps, Antigonus is pursued by the bear, we glimpse a shaggy man-sized figure roaring loudly. The curtain at the back of the stage is drawn and Antigonus (and the insanely paranoid first half of the play) literally reaches a dead end – there’s just a blank high wall of bricks behind the curtain. An extended trial scene in which Hermione is indicted, and speaks at length, tediously delays the action and is wholly redundant – we’ve already seen enough of the Joe Pesci-style ranting by King Leontes to understand what’s happening here and the Queen’s trial just slows things to a crawl. Here the defect is in Shakespeare and not the company. If cuts are required, they should be made in this protracted scene and not elsewhere – in this production, the speech about the bastardy of certain flowers, the product of grafting high to low, is cut, I think to the detriment of the play’s themes, and the weird speech at the end of the play in which Leontes promises to find a husband for Paulina (her husband was et by a bear) is also deleted. Shakespeare doesn’t want to attenuate the effect of the statue scene with the prior revelation that Perdita, apparently a humble shepherdess, is the lost daughter, “what is lost must be found” as an oracle has said, a necessary development if the marriage of Perdita to Polixene’s son is to be lawful. So he simply describes the unpacking of a certain “fardel” (a casket here) that establishes the girl’s identity – in the script, the two gentlemen come on-stage and simply narrate this important, even, it might be thought, climactic part of the story. The GRSF company produces this scene as a very complex and intricately choreographed dumb-show with the characters speaking out parts of the narrative Shakespeare presented through his two interlocutors – here, the production improves on the Bard’s rather feeble (and indolent) approach to this plot problem. I’ve probably seen A Winter’s Tale three times and, pace Bloom who thinks the ending is always audience pleasing, I don’t think the statue scene ever really works on stage. (In the GRSF show, Hermione stands motionless on a tall pedestal draped in a translucent white sheet – this rhymes visually with an appearance of Hermione as a ghost in the scene with Antigonus, the baby, and the bear; the effect is visually impressive but doesn’t match the dialogue in which the characters obviously can see the figure before it is formally unveiled.)
Shakespeare’s unique quality is to give voice to audience perceptions that he rejects. At one point, someone says that the sun shines equally on palace and cottage and we, in the audience, applaud this line. But Shakespeare doesn’t believe this utterance for a second and, certainly, thinks this notion is pernicious – the royal show marks of divine majesty and their intercourse with rustics or other low-born personages is as fanatically denied as a decree by the Nazis criminalizing racial “mongrelization.” The scenes in which Pauline defies the insane King, a counter-example to Shakespeare’s apparently deeply held belief that the ruler can never be (successfully) challenged, are, in this context, thrilling. The King, as far as Shakespeare is concerned, is always right except when he’s wrong – but error in a King has apocalyptic consequences.
As You Like It is a much sunnier play, essentially a comedy of manners that ends with four marriages. Everyone ends up coupled with their proper mate preserving in due course social rank and hierarchical requirements. (Shakespeare characteristically suggests that these marriages will not be happy for long, that the husband’s will turn tyrannical and the wives will commit adultery – but, in this play, everything occurs in the present tense; if you are happy right now, what’s the point of anticipating misery? – although Shakespeare, nonetheless, insists that sorrow in marriage is inevitable.) The plot is fantastically complicated but can be summarized in this way: Oliver, an elder brother with rights to rule by primogeniture, oppresses his younger sibling, Orlando. He contrives a wrestling match in which Orlando is supposed to be murdered by a thug, Charles. But Orlando is fit and, even, herculean – he savages Charles who can’t speak after his beating. The noble Rosalind, who is the heroine of the play, admires Orlando’s strength and pluck in the “wrassling” as it is pronounced in this production and falls in love with him. Oliver enraged orders that Orlando be burned alive in his dwelling. Orlando, who has reciprocally fallen in love with the noblewoman, Rosalind, is forced to flee into the wild forest of Arden where Rosalind’s father, the old Duke is also in exile. Rosalind and her cousin, Celia, pursuing Orlando, also elope into the forest. Rosalind there woos Orlando in the guise of an attractive boy, Ganymede – these wooing scene between two characters, one a woman travestied as a man and the other a young man, are the center of the play and its most attractive element, but the perverse highly Mannerist scenes are unmotivated by the plot and contrived by Shakespeare merely to demonstrate his characteristic, gender-bending perversity. In this play, everyone falls in love at first sight. Touchstone, a fool who has loyally accompanied Rosalind and Celia, falls in love with one of Shakespeare’s rustic clowns, Audrey, portrayed as an unappetizing dolt. Oliver, repenting of his cruelty toward his little brother, falls in love with Celia, an affection which she requites. Two other rustics, Silvius and Phebe are in love with one another but don’t know it. Phebe is smitten with a obsessive love for Ganymede, who is, of course, not a man at all but Rosalind in disguise. After various complications, all four couples are married, their nuptials consecrated by the allegorical figure of Hymen, and there’s some dancing and singing to round out the show. Someone sings that it’s “Hymen that has begotten the city,” meaning that humans must procreate to live in societies, the sort of sentiment that has endeared Shakespeare to various neo-Con theorists, including Leo Strauss – one could argue that this conspicuously perverse play, in fact, endorses the conservative idea of the nuclear family as the foundation of civilization. Curiously, Rosalind, who is the signature and iconic character in the play (along with the melancholy Jacques who has no significance in the intricate plot at all) appears as the Epilog. She says that, in the name of the women in the audience, she will kiss each of the love-struck men (known to be in that condition by their “simpering”) in attendance – that is,so long as their beards and bad breath don’t affront her. Rosalind’s speech confirms that, among other things, the play’s principal theme is gender and gender roles – she expressly notes in her closing lines that it’s odd for a female character to appear in a role like the Epilog that overtly breaks the fourth wall and her impudence in this part crowns the play. Since gender roles (and social hierarchy to a lesser extent) are integral to the play, the GRSF’s bizarre casting makes the performance into a confusing mess. I had read the play and Bloom’s embarrassingly rapt encomiums to Rosalind, and thought I was well-prepared. But it would have been far better if I had come without any advance knowledge of Shakespeare’s design and intentions because the play’s miscasting in my view completely destroys the carefully balanced gender roles that the play both endorses and refutes and takes as its principal subject – and the clash between Shakespeare’s architecture and the play’s execution left me baffled.
Because the cast seems to be mostly composed of young women, genders were switched in many instances. (I observed this first in the casting of woman as Autolycos in A Winter’s Tale, an innovation that was serviceable in that play because the character is a fraud in all respects and it doesn’t detract from the part to have him played as a transvestite as well.) Here the Old Duke is played by a buxom, sassy Black woman who affects a sort of Southern drawl, a bit like a Mammy in an old racist movie. This isn’t too bad and worked okay, although the accent made the character’s speech hard to understand. More baffling was a weird transposition of parts in the Touchstone and Audrey love plot – in this production, Touchstone is played as vampish, seductive woman, an interpretation for which there is no warrant at all in Shakespeare, although the performance was interesting and gaudy. Audrey, who is supposed to be a shepherdess, is played by the man who acted the part of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. The role is that of a country bumpkin with somewhat offensive aspects – Shakespeare condescends to the character and portrays his relationship with the acrid Touchstone as somewhat bestial. Touchstone, a woman, falls in love with Audrey, a man in this production, when she espies Audrey’s alluring fanny – an overt bit of sexism that would be unacceptable if the part were played by a woman. There are several other gender transpositions that were equally strange, but less important. The problem with these innovations is that Shakespeare is determinedly “binary” when it comes to sex roles; his language is coded according the gender and his women speak differently (and, often, better) than his men. Therefore, you can’t willy-nilly change gender in most of Shakespeare’s plays, let alone As You Like It, a piece that is largely about gender. A good example is a bravura set of speeches uttered by Touchstone (a male fool in Shakespeare’s conception). Touchstone anatomizes the absurd formal etiquette of dueling and, then, advances the idea that the subjunctive or hypothetical “if” can be used to avoid conflict – that is, “if” you think I said that (an insult), then, I am sorry. These speeches which are completely non sequitur but very funny – and intensely gendered – don’t make any sense when uttered by a vampish femme fatale.
And there are other instances of simply calamitous casting. The young actress who plays Rosalind has a “slushy s” to use the language of speech pathology and was tentative in her line readings. Now, of course, Harold Bloom is enraptured by Rosalind and creates expectations that even the young Katherine Hepburn would have trouble meeting. But Rosalind in GRSF production is giddy, frivolous, shrill and, generally, acts the part with her cousin, Celia, in a way that you might expect in TV sit-com from the eighties or a Tyler Perry movie. The actress is attractive and can be funny but she isn’t capable of projecting the laser-like intelligence with which Shakespeare conceived the role. (And Celia, who is a lesser version, of Rosalind, was equally vapid.) There were other inexplicable casting decisions – the farm girl and bumpkin, Phebe is conceived as plain, even homely. Rosalind brutally tells her that she should sell herself to Silvius “because (you) are not made for all markets.” In the GRSF production, the girl is played by a very beautiful young actress. Make-up can make actors appear in any guise necessary so the fact that girl was very pretty doesn’t mean she has to appear that way on stage. But, in a complete misreading of the text, Phebe is shown to be gorgeous, elegantly dressed, and beautiful in all respects. With most parts miscast, it was a relief that the humorous and melancholy Jaques (whose melancholia, like that depicted graphically, by Duerer is a sort of self-regarding, artistic contrivance) was very well-acted – it is he who remarks upon the spate of weddings in the last scene as being like coupled animals “led to the ark” and his speech that begins “All the world’s a stage...” was thrilling and so powerfully pronounced that for a moment it disrupted the otherwise frivolous tenor of the production.
As You Like It, which I have seen only in Kenneth Branagh’s film version, is a very peculiar play, flat in some ways and inconsequential. It contains oddities such as the wrestling match in the first act, directed here as a pastiche of a professional wrestling match on TV or in a WWF arena, complete with slow-motion interludes, and very funny, as well as the bizarre scene comprised of an account in baroque emblems in which Orlando rescues the sleeping Oliver from a snake about to crawl into his mouth (the creature slithers off “indenting” the grassy sward) and, then, fights a hungry lioness (her “dugs shriveled and without milk”) to save his brutal and oppressive older sibling. (Clearly, this imagery once meant something but a modern audience is baffled.) One of the play’s themes seems to be that everyone inhabits a separate reality and that, even, love doesn’t burst the bubbles in which a;; are confined – time passes differently for the lover or the rich man without gout or the thief being led to the gallows and Jacques says that all men play all roles in life and that, in fact, in his travels he has seen the abundance of human kind, a multitude of different creatures, experience, that is, perhaps, the source of his melanchoy.
If you see As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale back to back, some characteristics of Shakespearian comedy become apparent – after all the former play is all comedy and the latter half is in that genre. The chief engines for Shakespeare’s comedy are three: first, there is buffoonery based on the distinctions between persons of high estate and those of low estate (the shepherd and shepherd’s son in The Winter’s Tale, for instance, comically mimic their betters when they are ennobled as a reward for saving Perdita – we are only recently “as gentlemen born”, they proclaim when, of course, they were born no such thing.) This first species of comedy also relies upon distinctions between country and city, as well as between rural life and the affairs of the Court. Second, Shakespeare’s comedy relies upon innumerable and tasteless jests about cuckoldry – a hard sell for modern audiences, but, apparently, a reliable laugh-getter for Elizabethans. Finally, there is a kind of verbal slapstick involving puns, incredible pedantry, and logic-chopping – this is essentially a parody of legal jargon and argument and, in fact, Rosalind is best imagined as speaking in a kind of hyper-precise lawyerly diction that is intrinsically grotesque – she is in most respects an amiable lady lawyer. (In this regard, I observe that Shakespeare’s women are more plain and well-spoken than most of his men; when Hermione violates this principle in The Winter’s Tale and starts speaking the ripe, florid gibberish native to many of the Bard’s characters, her meanings are misconstrued and she ends up accused of adultery and treaspm) This legalistic tone, integral to Rosalind’s discourse, is taken up by Touchstone in his show-stopping explication the “seventh cause” in dueling etiquette.
Watching two Shakespeare plays in the course of a single day leads to a sort of delirium. Speeches from different plays slosh over into one another. For instance, Leontes says that his Queen and Polixenes have been sighing together like “the mort o’ the deer” – apparently, a mournful riff played on hunting horns when a deer is taken. Jaques and the old Duke speak about the hunting of deer, “poor dappled fools” who are the “burghers of” of the Forest of Arden and decry how their “horned” arrows slaughter them. Which play are we watching? In both The Winter’s Tale and As you like it, women about to contrive a rapturously happy ending must carefully deny that they are engaging in any sort of dark arts or witchcraft. For Shakespeare, snatching happiness out of misery is viewed as akin to some sort of witchcraft that would cause the practitioner to be burned.
After both plays, a train rumbled over a nearby railroad track, rattling and clapping wheel of iron, with the crossing lights blinking and sounding a high-pitched bell (a bit like the ping announcing Leontes’ onset of madness in The Winter’s Tale and the same note sounded on a tuning fork to designate “love at first sight” in As You Like It.) At intermission, I went outside, using a back door to sit in a tiny garden where I wrote notes on the productions. The bench was dedicated to some deceased professor, an expert in Elizabethan theater I hope and, in a fantastical mood, marked with the words LOVE, PEACE, HARMONY.
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