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Much ado about Shakespeare

Shakespeare in America

Kogod, CAS team to offer new degree

Much ado about Shakespeare

BY SALLY ACHARYA
Photos by jeff watTs

Hamlet, Feb. 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 17, 20, 22, 24

RELATED LINKS > Katzen Arts Center > Get Tickets online RELATED STORY > Shakespeare in America

When Shakespeare observed that “all the world’s a stage,” he wasn’t, of course, talking about a literal stage. But this year, much of Washington has indeed become a stage for Shakespeare.

The bard is everywhere in Washington during the six-month Shakespeare in Washington festival: the Kennedy Center, the Folger, the Washington Ballet, the Smithsonian.

And, of course, AU.

The university has been exploring the work and impact of Shakespeare with a series of performances titled Shakespeare at AU, most of them based around what is arguably the most canonical play of English literature’s most canonical writer: Hamlet.

“It’s one of the most famous in Shakespeare’s canon, one of most often quoted, and also one of the hardest,” notes Professor Caleen Sinnette Jennings, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). “Hamlet is mysterious. It’s a play that opens with the line, ‘Who’s there?’ It calls into question what’s real and what appears to be real. It’s a study of the mind, and how we know what we know.”

And it’s not just Hamlet that raises questions. The act of performing Shakespeare in the twenty-first century also raises questions for the directors, the actors, and ultimately the audience.

Is it possible to hear Shakespeare afresh when his plots and quotes are so deeply ingrained in the culture? With so many layers of meaning, and so many possible interpretations, what should a director emphasize? And how can work from a time when someone might actually say “get thee to a nunnery” be presented in a way that reaches a contemporary audience, yet doesn’t compromise the richness of the text?

Those were some of the challenges that faced AU’s Department of Performing Arts when it embarked on a season of performing Shakespeare, reflecting on Shakespeare, and exploring the implications of words written some 400 years ago with ink and quill.

Hamlet

First, the women groan.

That’s a frequent reaction among actors when they learn that a company is going to perform Shakespeare, says Jennings. All actors on the Elizabethan stage were male, and there aren’t many strong parts for women—or many parts for women at all—in Shakespeare’s plays.

 Yet famous actresses, including Sarah Bernhardt, have sometimes taken on such plum roles as Hamlet. So when Karl Kippola, CAS, first thought of directing Hamlet, and guessed a particular actress might end up auditioning well for the role of the prince of Denmark, it didn’t seem like a groundbreaking idea.

He thought, in fact, that he might do gender-blind casting, simply assigning the strongest actor to each role. “But as I tried to visualize the story, I became attracted to the idea of what would happen if we reversed everything,” Kippola says. “I thought it could lead to an interesting direction as far as what it would communicate about gender.”

He had another goal, as well. Directors of Hamlet often place the tragedy in unexpected settings to bring a fresh perspective on the complexities, and help a contemporary audience gain insights into the play’s many facets.

“That was one of my primary goals,” Kippola says. “I didn’t go into this trying to make an enormous statement about the nature of gender. I was hoping those choices would prompt discussion.”

The fresh interpretation did, indeed, spark conversation about the nature of gender choices. But it also cast a spotlight on the play itself, and drew attention to lines that might otherwise be overlooked either through their archaic wording, or through their very familiarity.

“It strips away a lot of what our expectations are, and allows us to hear the play with fresh ears,” Kippola says. “We’re forced to hear it anew.”

Elsewhere in Elsinore

Hamlet may have lamented that “frailty, thy name is woman”—but women, in fact, are largely invisible in Hamlet. And the actual women of Elsinore Castle would have been anything but frail, since they must have included the unseen maids and washerwomen as well as noblewomen engaged in a complex game of status and power.

Playwright and director Jennings’s new play, Elsewhere in Elsinore, explores the world of the women in Hamlet. It will premiere at AU this week.

“In Hamlet, you see a community of men—the dead king, his advisor, Hamlet, Horatio, even the grave diggers. I wanted to create a community of women,” says Jennings, who as a young actress visited the actual setting of Hamlet Kronborg Castle near Elsinore, Denmark, and concluded that “certainly, men did not run this castle alone.”

Caleen Sinette Jennings, left, wrote and directed Elsewhere in Elsinore, which has been in preparation for its performances this week.

Even as it opens the door to the back rooms and kitchens of Elsinore, the play becomes a study of class, and what it means to have power in a male-dominated context. There is no man on stage in the play—itself a novel experience, since many plays exist for all-male or mainly male casts, but almost none for all women.

“It will have the audience thinking about the last time they were in a theatre and 16 women were on stage,” Jennings says wryly. “That really doesn’t happen.”

I Hate Hamlet

To be Hamlet, or not to be Hamlet? Whether ’tis nobler in the actor’s résumé to suffer through outrageous Shakespearean lines, or . . . just go back to Hollywood?

That’s the question that troubles a floundering TV star who accepts the role of Hamlet in a Central Park production and then finds guidance, like Hamlet himself, from a ghost—in this case, the ghost of stage legend John Barrymore.

The fast-paced comedy was performed on the same set as Hamlet, and alternated with it in performance. “It was fun to see both pieces played out on the same stage,”says director Carl Menninger.

The breezy 90-minute comedy made an engaging balance to the serious, even dark offerings that have marked the 2006–2007 season and gave students an opportunity to work in a different genre. It was light and contemporary; yet there was a message in the comic madness.

“It’s about romance—the romantic notions of being an artist, creating art, giving yourself over to process and role—in contrast to that real world,” Menninger says. “Hamlet truly is done only for the sake of art. You’re not doing Hamlet to make millions of dollars. So it’s also about the challenges of art and commerce. Do you stay and work at art, or go where money is?”

Shakespeare in Song

Shakespeare’s characters often break into song, or are thought to have been accompanied on the stage by a background of music. His lines, too, are musical in themselves. Lilting and lyrical, written in iambic pentameter, they have enticed composers over the centuries to set them to music.

Choral music is a particularly appealing form for presenting Shakespeare, since the words themselves can become the focus. “Composers have always been drawn to setting the words of any great poet or author to music, and obviously, Shakespeare is among the best of the best,” says Dan Abraham, who is directing the AU Chamber Singers in its upcoming April performance, “Shakespeare in Song: Choral Settings of the Bard.”

While Hamlet has been the particular focus of Shakespeare at AU, a variety of works will be featured in “Shakespeare in Song.” There will be lines from As You Like It, A Winter’s Tale, his sonnets—and, not surprisingly, Hamlet is represented in the mix. The music is largely contemporary, though some of it has a madrigal sound that harks back to the sound and general feel of the Renaissance, Abraham says.

“The settings are very contemporary in terms of sound and layering and rhythm,” he says, and serve to amplify the words of the bard. The program also includes music from the Chamber Singers’ upcoming Kennedy Center concert, including work from Shakespeare’s own time.

 . . . Enter the Students, Just for Fun

It is, of course, a pretty good sign that a playwright has made it when, some 400 years after his death, his work is still performed in the capital of a country he never imagined. Not bad, Will.

But here’s another feather for his Renaissance cap: a group of college students have formed a club to perform his work. Not for credit. Just for fun.

The Rude Mechanicals aren’t performing Shakespeare as part of Shakespeare in Washington, or even, officially, as part of Shakespeare at AU. They’re performing it because that’s what they do for entertainment, every few months.

Last year, they performed four shows, including King Lear. This year has already included The Merchant of Venice and a variety show on the theme of revenge in Shakespeare. In April, they’re performing Twelfth Night and, in keeping with the general Hamlet focus, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which puts an absurdist focus on two minor and rather befuddled characters in the play.

“Shakespeare is so universal. He’s got love and lust and murder and revenge and passion,” says Lauren Barredo ’07, an environmental science and history major who is president of the Rude Mechanicals. “There’s something for everyone.”