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american repertory theater | expanding the boundaries of theater
Posner & Teller Conjuring the Bard
The Beautiful Creatures of
Pilobolus
Shakespeare’s Shipwrecks:
The Tempest and Twelfth Night
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WFT proudly presents the New England premiere of this richly textured adaptation of Grace Lin’s Newbury-honored novel. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon weaves legend and myth with the story of a young girl’s adventures. Inspired by her father’s stories of the Jade Dragon and the Old Man of the Moon, Minli sets off on a quest to change her family’s fortunes. Through the twists and turns of her extraordinary travels, she finds the courage and cleverness to overcome obstacles—and a new understanding of what is truly important in life.
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COVER: : SET DESIGNER DANIEL CONWAY’S RENDERING OF THE TEMPEST SET DESIGN
Contributors Julia Bumke Robert Duffley Marissa L. Friedman Morgan C. Goldstein Alexandra Juckno Fiona Kyle Christian Ronald Sabrina Sadique Brenna Nicely
Friday nights at 7:30; Saturday & Sunday matinees at 3:00 School vacation week matinees at 1:00 (Tue 4/22-Fri 4/25) Relaxed performance: Sat 5/3 at 10am ASL/Audio-description: 5/9, 5/11
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MASTHEAD
WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON
Twelfth Night
My first season as Artistic Director at the A.R.T. in 2009 launched with a festival devoted to new works inspired by Shakespeare. Our season concludes with two Shakespeare productions—The Tempest on the Loeb Mainstage and Twelfth Night in the Loeb Experimental Theater. The creative team of The Tempest is, to quote Shakespeare, “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Adapted and directed by Aaron DIANE PAULUS, Posner and Teller (of the legendary magic duo ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Penn & Teller), this production features original stage magic which will bring Prospero’s world of sorcery to life. Experimental dance company Pilobolus has created movement for the production, and the entire experience will unfold to the songs of the legendary singer Tom Waits, and his wife and collaborator, Kathleen Brennan. We then journey to Illyria for Twelfth Night in the Loeb Experimental Theater. This production features second-year graduate acting students from the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard. Artistic Associate Shira Milikowsky, director of last season’s The Lily’s Revenge, helms this new production of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy. I hope you’ll join us to experience these Shakespearean adventures. Read further into the Guide for information on both of these productions, interviews with the artists, and an article on Shakespeare and magic inspired by a class I co-taught with Harvard University Professor, Marjorie Garber. I hope to see you at the theater!
The Tempest
WELCOME TO THE A.R.T.!
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THE TEMPEST
MAY 10, 2014 - JUNE 15, 2014 | LOEB DRAMA CENTER Adapted and Directed by Aaron Posner and Teller from Shakespeare’s play Magic by Teller | Songs by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan | Movement by Pilobolus Experience Prospero’s wizardry as never before in this startling production. When shipwrecked aristocrats wash up on the shores of Prospero’s strange island, they find themselves immersed in a world of trickery and amazement, where Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s Dust Bowl balladry and Teller’s magic animate the spirits and monsters. The Tempest is produced in association with The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Nevada.
THE PERFECT STORM
Revisiting Shakespeare’s Tale of Shipwrecks and Sorcery By Morgan C. Goldstein
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The world of The Tempest has always been fantastical. Shakespeare set the play on an island inhabited by spirits and witches and ruled over by the exiled magician Prospero. The A.R.T.’s new production, led by Aaron Posner in partnership with world-famous magician Teller, creates this enchanted world through a fusion of diverse artistic collaborators. With a traveling tent show-inspired set, songs by legendary singer-songwriter Tom Waits and his wife and partner Kathleen Brennan, movement by modern dance company Pilobolus, and magic by Teller, this production of The Tempest is a vibrant take on one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. “We hope to integrate these elements,” Posner explains, “into what feels like a world unlike
anyone has ever seen.” The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, an exiled duke and magician, who, after years of living with his daughter on a magical island, must unexpectedly confront the people who wronged him in the past. This production of The Tempest involves a setting within a setting: though the play itself takes place on an island, Posner and Teller have layered this world with another, equally mysterious one. “The production takes place in a Dust Bowl, traveling tent show, magician world à la carnival circus,” Posner shares. This Dust Bowl setting was especially inspired by Willard the Wizard, a traveling magician from the early-twentieth century who was assisted by his
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young daughter, Frances. And Willard the Wizard’s connection to this production extends beyond the set—The Tempest contains its own father-daughter duo, Prospero and Miranda. Posner says that in addition to the world of early twentieth-century traveling magicians, “the phrase ‘shipwrecked magic show’ has guided us in the design.” With wooden planks, multiple levels, and strings of lights, the set calls to mind both the quick construction of a traveling production and the decay of a ship destroyed by a storm. Performed by a live band, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s songs evoke both the Dust Bowlera and the other worldly island. Their extensive catalogue conjures the weariness of travel, the ethereal nature of the island, and the blues of a father watching his daughter grow up. Posner also points out that there are thematic connections between Waits and Shakespeare: “Tom Waits is able to live on all the planes that Shakespeare lives on: the rough groundlings, the middle class, and the aristocracy. His music cuts across all of those boundaries— from working class, feet-in-the-dirt sensibilities to spectacularly lifted, esoteric poetry.” Movement by Pilobolus brings the island, and specifically the character of Caliban, to life. The child of the witch Sycorax and also a bondsman to Prospero, Caliban has been interpreted as a monster, an animal, and a mistreated and misunderstood man over the past four centuries. Inspired by the tent show setting, this Caliban will be what Posner describes as a pair of “esoterically conjoined twins.” Posner notes that with two actors working as one unit, Caliban suggests “the conjoined twins of the sideshow and the energy of vaudeville duo acts,” while simultaneously capturing the dual nature of this tragic and comic being.
Posner explains that in many productions of The Tempest, “Prospero’s magic is dealt with in purely metaphorical, theatrical ways.” However, the magic in this production is tangible. Teller’s tricks are performed throughout the show, bringing to life not only the illusions mentioned in the text, but also other, unexpected ones. The audience has the opportunity both to witness and to experience the characters’ shock and awe at Prospero’s magic, or, as the character himself puts it, his “art.” Morgan C. Goldstein is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
“We hope to integrate these elements into what feels like a world unlike any anyone has ever seen.”
AARON POSNER
MAGIC AND MOVIES CHECK OUT THE BRATTLE THEATER’S WEBSITE FOR DETAILS ON THEIR FILM SERIES INSPIRED BY OUR PRODUCTION OF THE TEMPEST. BRATTLEFILM.ORG
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IN FRONT OF THE ILLUSIONS
A.R.T. Institute dramaturgy student Morgan C. Goldstein interviews magician Teller
MORGAN C. GOLDSTEIN: When I was researching your work, I came across your production of Macbeth, which was pretty bloody. There are definitely sinister elements in The Tempest as well. Is this going to be a bloody, violent Tempest? TELLER: Not bloody, but thrilling and unnerving. After all, The Tempest is a story about a magician using his power to create nightmares, from the terrifying sea-storm that opens the show to a demonic banquet to phantom hounds. Prospero can’t forget that his brother and co-conspirators ousted him and abandoned him with his infant daughter on the high seas. So he uses his magic to create shows to terrify and punish those who wronged him. MCG: But there is still a possibility that the audience— although they’re not the target of Prospero’s magic—could be frightened. Is that your intention? Do you want to scare them? T: The emotions that interest me most in the theater are fear and laughter. Thrilling and scary and funny are my specialties. So that certainly will be reflected in this production. continued >
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MCG: What about those emotions do you find so appealing?
T: We’re incorporating magic in every place that magic is normally depicted by theatrical convention. For example, the banquet: the T: I think I’m still a fifteen-year-old boy at heart. Part of my objective existing stage directions say the banquet vanishes “with a quaint in Shakespeare is to make sure that if you put a fifteen-year-old device.” That’s been a point of argument among scholars for many high school student in the room with anything that I do, they will centuries: what is this “quaint device”? Our plan for a “quaint think it’s surprising and startling and worthy of respect. device”? A table will be brought out and Ariel will whip So you’ll find that this Tempest is going to be much a tablecloth over it and, Bang! The table will now be “The Tempest funnier than most productions of the play; The Tempest filled with the feast. And each of the dishes is something is a play about that—as the bad guys go to have a nice snack—will turn has a lot of humor in it, but it’s often presented with a a magician dusty, museum-like distance, as though it was funny into something hideous and horrible. So a lovely glass of five hundred years ago. But there’s also a whole level wine will turn into dry red sand. What looks like a nice doing the in this show that isn’t about laughter or fear or pure roast bird will turn into live—well, I don’t want to give all toughest thing amazement. And the thing that I find most appealing of these away, now do I? We’re delivering Shakespeare’s a magician about The Tempest is that it’s a play about a magician content, but with some terrific magic tricks he didn’t have could ever do, doing the toughest thing a magician could ever do, access to. which is to give up magic. which is to give MCG: How do you design an illusion like that? up magic.” MCG: You are, like Prospero, a magician. Besides this shared vocation, do you find that you feel a kinship to T: If you’re asking me how I get ideas, I’ll tell you that character? that they usually happen in conversation. In this case, the conversation is with Aaron Posner, with me, and with our magic T: Prospero controls the world and affects other people by means of consultant, Johnny Thompson. But basically what you do is to sit and shows. The other characters see illusions that affect them deeply, think. There’s no formula—you don’t put it in a meat grinder and it even though they are just visions. That’s pretty much my job comes out done. You sit and you think and you collaborate and you description as a magician… I make illusions that upset the way you come up with good ideas. see the world. Also, Prospero is about my age, and during the course of the story, he does the hardest thing I can contemplate doing: he’s Morgan C. Goldstein is a second-year dramaturgy student at the giving up magic. A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. MCG: But for now, you’re still doing the magic for this production. What will that be like?
PHOTO: JANE KALINOWSKY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES, 2007
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TELLER DEMONSTRATES THE MAGIC TRICK “MISER’S DREAM”
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DUST BOWL BALLADS The Soundtrack of The Tempest By Julia Bumke
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With his growling, gravelly voice and a musical style that evokes jazz, blues, vaudeville, and rock, Tom Waits has inherited the spirit of Americana balladeers like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, infused with a heady dose of theatricality from cabaret composers like Kurt Weill. Waits and his longtime songwriting collaborator, his wife Kathleen Brennan, are both devotees of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski, and they specialize in vivid storytelling. As Jon Pareles described in The New York Times, Waits and Brennan’s songs “can be smart and primal, raucous and meticulous, ethereal and earthy, bleak and comical ... [singing] about drunks, tramps, carnies and killers, spinning tall tales and reeling off free associations that somehow add up.” In recent years, their focus on narrative has led them to explore the theatricality of vaudeville, Vegas nightclub performances, and Weill’s music for dramatist Bertolt Brecht. They have also collaborated with director Robert Wilson on his productions of Woyzeck and Alice, and have now given use of their catalogue for the A.R.T. production of The Tempest. Early in his four-decade career, Waits explained that the goal of the music was to “scoop up a few diamonds of the magic” that Kerouac had “relentlessly chased from one end of this country to the other.” This drive to tell vibrantly evocative American stories has fueled his oeuvre. With album titles like Nighthawks at the Diner, which grins slyly at Edward Hopper’s iconic 1942 painting Nighthawks, Waits and Brennan’s music has captured the loneliness of dusk, giving voice to bygone ghosts of Americana. Their songs’ beautifully rendered images—like “the dark, warm, narcotic American
night” in his 1975 song “Putnam County”—have run the gamut from haunting to uplifting, and the songs consistently stick with audiences long after they are heard. Although Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, his music has defied categorization: “I always imagine you sit at a piano with an open window, and whatever is out there will come in, pass through you and then turn into a song,” he told the Times. This infusion of the outside world in his work with Brennan has kept it fresh and ever-changing. Waits and Brennan also draw inspiration from Mississippi Delta Blues and Dust Bowl ballads of the 1920s and 30s, particularly their evocations of poverty, mortality, and the shiftlessness of Depressionera vagabonds. As Waits explained in the introduction to People Take Warning: Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs, 1913-1938, the Great Depression “was a time when songs were tools for living: a whole community would turn out to mourn the loss of a member, and to sow their songs like seeds.” Waits and Brennan’s interpretations of these Dust Bowl tropes, their theatrical storytelling, and their evocations of vaudeville and cabaret performance infuse their songs with period atmosphere. At the same time, the music is singularly modern: it draws audiences into a world that is equal parts historical, radically new, and theatrically innovative. Julia Bumke is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
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PILOBOLUS: A SYMBIOTIC DANCE COMPANY
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Sometimes inspiration comes from the loftiest of places, and sometimes it grows on cow dung. Pilobolus Dance Theater got its name from a dung-growing fungus known for its extraordinary and unique ability to propel itself with incredible speed, power, and accuracy toward a source of light. For more than forty years, Pilobolus has remained true to its fungal namesake through its dedication to collective creativity and imaginative work, always striving toward innovation. In 1971, a group of dance students at Dartmouth College formed the Pilobolus Dance Theater with the hopes of creating an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to making art. Seven dancers—Martha Clarke, Robby Barnett, Moses Pendleton, Lee Harris, Michael Tracy, Alison Becker Chase, and Jonathan Wolken—experimented with an approach to choreography based on sharing weight between two partners. This highly collaborative technique can still be seen in the evergrowing repertory of over one hundred dances collected by the group over the years. In the true spirit of collaboration, Pilobolus sought from their origins to integrate different art forms, philosophies, and techniques into their work, always using the human body as a medium. Some of the group’s collaborators include graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, the MIT Distributed Robotics Laboratory, the alternative rock band OK Go, and now the American Repertory Theater. Over the years, Pilobolus’s dedication to creating and fostering community has expanded on the artistic philosophy of their touring company by adding branches to their creative team. One of these branches, the Pilobolus Institute, teaches the group’s always-evolving collaborative techniques to performers and non-performers alike. Every year, the dancers and choreographers of Pilobolus add new pieces to their repertoire to perform all over the world. Their innovative style has brought them everywhere from the biggest
concert halls in Europe to “Sesame Street” and the 2007 Academy Awards. For a TED Talk in 2005, two dancers performed “Symbiosis,” a mesmerizing dance piece that highlights Pilobolus’s innovative partnering and gracefully athletic movement style to tell a beautiful story about human relationships and coexistence. Pilobolus’s performance style is known for exaggerating and contorting the human body in innovative ways, often blurring the lines between individual performers. Andrew Boynton of The New Yorker notes, “You forget what you’re looking at; the dancers move so skillfully, so symbiotically, that they cease to resemble people at all.” In the world of The Tempest, the superhuman aesthetic of Pilobolus transforms actors into conjurers, movement into sorcery, and the A.R.T. stage into Prospero’s magical island. Brenna Nicely is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./ Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
PHOTO: JOHN KANE
Twelfth Night
By Brenna Nicely
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MARJORIE GARBER (LEFT) AND DIANE PAULUS (CENTER) VIEW A PRESENTATION ON MAGIC BY STUDENT DENG-TUNG WANG (RIGHT)
THEATER & MAGIC IN THE CLASSROOM A.R.T.-Inspired Coursework at Harvard University The Harvard University Freshman Seminar “Theater and Magic,” taught in the fall 2013 semester, evolved from Professors Marjorie Garber and Diane Paulus’s idea of studying the relationship between theatricality, the power of the magus, and the arts of illusion with a small group of freshmen just embarking on their collegiate orbit. First staged in 1611 at the Palace of Whitehall, Shakespeare’s late romance The Tempest had King James I in the audience. The conceptual and synthetic processes of fitting the text of a play from the era of the English Renaissance into the theatrical mode of the twenty-first century are indeed alchemical. Adaptation, to begin with, is transmutation: etymologically, it is the mechanism of undergoing change to accommodate a new reality, and few characters show the mechanics better than Prospero, The Tempest’s powerful magician and the upstaged Duke of Milan. Master of “secret studies,” playwright, director, actor, and father, Prospero embodies the moving nucleus of two concentric plays. Moving from role to role, he restages and repurposes the story of his loss of dukedom to nested circles of audience. On the inside are his audience of characters whom he traps with a tempest and controls on an island; on the outside of his play looking in is the audience of The Tempest from whom he seeks
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freedom. “Let your indulgence set me free,” is the magician’s ultimate appeal to the spectator. A prime mirror dramatizing the power-dialectic between creator and creature, art and artist, the conjuror and conjured upon, The Tempest was at first the only play in consideration for the intensive study of magic at two notable historical nodes—the English Renaissance and contemporary theater. However, as we parsed literary analogues from the former tradition that also pivoted thematic concerns of the course, the syllabus grew to include works of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Robert Greene, and more Shakespeare. Our roster of magicians expanded from the literary to the historical genre. In the first half of the course, students explored biographies of sixteenth-century magicians while also examining plays, automata, devices, and stage illusions from the era. The second half of the seminar swerved its focus toward nineteenth and twentieth-century magicians as well as magic in and on film. Micah Hoggatt, Reference Librarian for the Houghton Library, came on board and compiled a display of objects from the Harvard Theater Collection (one of the largest performing arts collections in the world) for a mid-semester
PHOTOS: STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HARVARD STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
By Sabrina Sadique, Teaching Assistant for “Theater and Magic”
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class-visit. From Harry Houdini’s handcuffs and personal correspondences, to 1890-1936 playbills and posters featuring many magicians addressed in our course, the exhibit also contained some of the earliest editions of our primary texts. Studying the history and literature of magic alone would not have sufficed for the interdisciplinary approach we had envisioned for the seminar. Our textual analyses required a commensurate grasp of how illusions are crafted, staged, and theatricalized, how magic, which is part simulation, part an exercise of misdirecting an audience, shares its basic repertoire with the core elements of acting. Both require the complicity of viewers in the production of make-belief. The ten freshmen selected for the seminar comprised a trained illusionist from Japan, an engineering student with an interest in robotics from Nikiski, Alaska, a National YoungArts Foundation winner from Brooklyn, New York, Computer Science concentrators from Washington and Los Angeles… magicians, musicians, stage-designers, a published playwright from Martinsville, New Jersey. All were of one eager mind as they investigated how props, sound, costumes, light, and stage-effects move a play from language to a living creature—how technique and technology humanize acts of illusion. We invited contemporary practitioners of magic to share their experiences of the craft and interpret for us the chemistry between doing magic and making a play. Guests included Steve Cuiffo, actor and magician who co-founded the performance group Rainpan 43; Paul Kieve, the author of Hocus Pocus: A Tale of Magnificent Magicians and their Amazing Feats, who created illusions for the musicals The Lord of the Rings, Ghost, and Pippin, and consulted for the Harry Potter film productions; and Aaron Posner, the recipient of multiple Helen Hayes and Barrymore Awards for stage directing, who is presently infusing magic into the A.R.T.’s upcoming production of The Tempest with eminent magician Teller (from Penn & Teller). The climax of the seminar was on November 17, 2013 just two weeks before the end of the course. At 7:30 on a rainy Sunday morning, a bus full of freshmen were Broadway-bound from Boston for the matinee show of Diane Paulus’s production of Pippin. There they encountered the talking head of a Visigoth warrior, levitations of corpses, vanishing acts, and King Charlemagne’s knife-throwing legerdemain. Students reviewed the play and asked Paul Kieve PROFESSORS MARJORIE GARBER AND DIANE PAULUS how headless legs walk on stage. The refrain that AND DIRECTOR AARON POSNER IN THE FRESHMAN echoes and anticipates The Tempest at the A.R.T. is SEMINAR “THEATER AND MAGIC” from the song that opens Pippin. “We’ve got magic to do,” the Leading Player promises, seducing our commitment to the heights and depths of being spellbound by charms: We’ve got magic to do… Just for you We’ve got miracle plays to play We’ve got parts to perform… Hearts to warm Kings and things to take by storm As we go along our way. For their final creative projects, our ten students were asked to execute in a breadth of seven minutes what they had just experienced at Pippin. Select a scene from a play we have read, incorporate illusion where there isn’t any, tell a story from start to finish, energize the relations between theater and magic with light, sound, costumes, and props on loan from the A.R.T. Enkindle the activity of the soul of a canonical play with your imagination. Expect tempests along the way. Transform a text while keeping its fundamental integrity. Students read reviews of Bob Fosse’s production of Pippin; they saw on Broadway how a vital source may be preserved and revitalized in the atmosphere of a changed time. The process is magical in both form and spirit. Two different students performed the opening scenes of The Tempest with their distinct magic-signatures: one built a fire to initiate the storm, the other bewitched Ferdinand into awakening with the power of the song “Bright Morning Stars are Rising.” A freshman “genderswapped” the characters of Stephano and Caliban twice to dramatize its effect on issues of power and authority. Our resident magician, Masahiro Kusunoki, performed Prospero’s final lines in the Epilogue with digital illusions. The power of the magus multiplied visually on a screen until it receded to a single point. He asked our indulgence to set him free. We applauded. Sabrina Sadique is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University, and was the Teaching Assistant for Marjorie Garber and Diane Paulus’s Freshman Seminar, “Theater and Magic.”
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TWELFTH NIGHT MAY 22, 2014 - MAY 30, 2014 | LOEB EXPERIMENTAL THEATER By William Shakespeare | Directed by Shira Milikowsky
Twelfth Night
Featuring members of the A.R.T. Institute Class of 2014 Shipwrecked on strange shores, Viola has lost her name, country, and beloved brother Sebastian. Disguising herself as the page boy Cesario, she finds herself drawn to Count Orsino even as she delivers his love letters to the beautiful Lady Olivia. William Shakespeare’s crossdressing comedy of mistaken identities, Twelfth Night is a tale of carnival and clowns, music and miracles, and of the redemptive power of love that is stronger than the sea. An A.R.T./ Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training production.
SHIPWRECKED
Director Shira Milikowsky and A.R.T. Institute Head of Voice and Speech Nancy Houfek talk with Institute dramaturgy student Alexandra Juckno ALEXANDRA JUCKNO: Shira, what drew you to Twelfth Night? SHIRA MILIKOWSKY: Ever since I first read this play, I was struck by the plethora of engaging characters. I think about why I love Twelfth Night and think of Viola, but then I remember Toby, Maria, and Andrew Aguecheek, and then there’s Malvolio and Feste! The play is so character-driven in a way that feels contemporary, and I’m excited about directing it, especially with a class of actors who are about to finish their graduate studies. It’s really an ensemble piece. AJ: Nancy, what about you? NANCY HOUFEK: There are a number of aspects of Twelfth Night that appeal to me. Just as Shira said, there are many roles of equal importance that give the actors opportunities to do amazing things. The puns and word play are also really wonderful. I particularly love that Viola’s conundrum is so understandable. The language she uses to hide who she is and make the audience complicit in her disguise is absolutely delightful, and one of the reasons audiences love watching her. AJ: Nancy, what would you tell a young actor who is approaching Twelfth Night? NH: Go through the script word by word by word to understand all the double entendres and jokes. We have a fabulous example in contemporary culture of how these puns work: there’s a Seinfeld episode where Jerry is dating a girl whose name rhymes with a female part and the whole conceit of the episode is to come up with names that rhyme. It’s hysterical! And that’s what the Shakespearean audience would understand. There are ways to make
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the double entendre come alive. And Feste is constantly joking about who’s a fool and who’s not a fool. Those kinds of things are key. SM: Twelfth Night is one of the funniest comedies, but there is also this river of sadness that is so present and fascinating. There’s a melancholy even in the goofiest parts of it. The play still works because we can connect to it emotionally. I always love comedy that has those two sides to it. I think it gives it a depth and a timelessness. NH: If you look at the other great comedies of Shakespeare, there’s always some heartbeat of loss. It’s so easy to think, “Oh, they’re so happy: they have a beautiful island with sunshine and splashing around at the beach!” But look at the language of death, illness, mourning, madness, excess, cruelty, brutality! Time isn’t just a clock ticking, time is the clock ticking towards death. “Come away death” is one of the highlight “happy” songs, and it’s so interesting that it’s not. Feste’s song at the end of the play doesn’t say it alternates rain and sunshine, it says, “it raineth every day.” Did you see The Tempest that Julie Taymor directed? The island is a wasteland, and the only lushness is created by the magic. To me that’s a closer reading about Illyria in Twelfth Night. It maybe isn’t this joyous magical illusory place but it’s a place of … you know, it’s an insane asylum! SM: The play is set around Twelfth Night, at the end of the Christmas celebration. I’ve been thinking that the glory and the joy of this time of celebration is now fading, so part of the characters’ attachment to these different excessive behaviors may come from trying to hold on to or recapture that joy when it’s already begun to decay.
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The Tempest
NH: That’s a great word. SM: And even the people who are obsessed with revelry are frantically battling that decay, as opposed to Olivia who’s wallowing in her sorrow over her brother’s death. But neither is a balanced response. NH: Viola becomes her brother when she dresses like a boy. She’s mourning by embodying her brother. She becomes Sebastian. To keep him alive.
NH: In surfeit! “O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou/ That, notwithstanding thy capacity/ Receiveth as the sea….” The sea is so vast, so all-encompassing, that anything that drops in turns to nothing. The sea comes up again and again and again. There was a terrific production I saw where the set was all water with a series of platforms. At any time you could fall off into the water. It was really wonderful, a visual metaphor for the language of drowning. SM: The emotion of the sea and the feeling of being overwhelmed are so present in Orsino’s imagery in his speech, “If music be the food of love.” What is this undercurrent of sadness, and how does it play out against the joy that the characters are performing on top of that? NH: There are speeches in Twelfth Night—“If music be the food of love,” or “Make me a willow cabin at your gate”—that function like arias. And all are about excess or madness. There are also many meta-theatrical moments that remind us that these are actors acting.
Twelfth Night
SM: I love that image—that Viola dresses herself like her brother in order to hold on to him. It makes her commitment to that disguise so much more powerful. She’s not healed. She can’t come out because that would admit Sebastian’s death, but of course he’s not really dead—it’s a comedy. All of these characters are drowning in different ways. They’re all struggling for that breath. Duke Orsino says in his opening speech that he’s drowning.
“Twelfth Night is one of the funniest comedies, but there is also this river of sadness that is so present and fascinating. ... I always love comedy that has those two sides to it. I think it gives it a depth and a timelessness.” – Shira Milikowsky
AJ: And then at the end, everyone breaks character. “We’ll strive to please you every day.” Please clap for us! NH: Play’s over! It’s raining.
PHOTO: GRETJENHELENE.COM
Alexandra Juckno is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
TAYLOR MAC AND THE CAST OF A.R.T.’S 2012/13 SEASON PRODUCTION OF THE LILY’S REVENGE, DIRECTED BY SHIRA MILIKOWSKY
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