Red Bull finds a handsome gang of plotters and schemers in ‘Arden of Faversham’

In big trouble now: Joshua David Robinson as Lord Mayor of Faversham, Tony Roach as Mosby, Emma Geer as Susan, and Cara Ricketts as Alice, in Red Bull Theater’s production of Arden of Faversham. (Image: Carol Rosegg)

Crime stories, whether true or not, exert a seemingly eternal magnetic pull, maybe because they’re all true in their way. A character in a recent episode of The Last of Us discussed people who have a “violent heart” (he sounded like a preacher in putting it that way because he was one), and though he didn’t say so, that lurks in all of us; we may not feel it or act on it, but we all know it’s there. Medea’s gruesome deeds may once have been the actions of an actual person, as her husband’s certainly have been. Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera is based on Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera, who was probably modeled on a real highwayman. Medea’s doings rise to the level of myth, Mackie’s to song, but sometimes the crimes of the heart (Beth Henley’s phrase) take on a tragicomic tone, part murderous and part ridiculous, as in a Quentin Tarantino film. Exhibit A, for the moment, is the gang of lovers, climbers, and plotters in Arden of Faversham, now being staged by Red Bull Theater in New York, who are nothing if not Tarantino-esque.

The virus is still here, but some of our defenses aren’t

What’s wrong with this picture? Taken in Eataly, Flatiron District, New York, 7/28/22. (Image: John E. Branch Jr.)

In Romeo and Juliet, neither a rapier nor a rapier wit is enough to protect Mercutio when a fight erupts between partisans of the Montagues and the Capulets in the streets of Verona. Fighting in public has been forbidden; nonetheless, in what he just called “these hot days,” Mercutio and Tybalt clash for a moment before being separated, and Mercutio takes a hit.

You’ve probably heard one part of his response: “A plague on both your houses!” You may not remember—I didn’t until I checked—how emphatic he is about it. He keeps trying for wit or stoic acceptance but can’t stick with it and utters that curse three separate times. Mercutio is really burned up about what just happened to him.

Shakespeare’s crazy mix is perfectly clear in TFANA’s ‘Measure for Measure’

Angelo (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Escala (January LaVoy) in Measure for Measure at Theatre for a New Audience. (Photo: Gerry Goodstein)

What manner of beast is this play Measure for Measure? The ruler of a city decides it needs to be cleaned up and straightened out, but instead of doing it himself he gives someone else the job and goes on vacation. The man he appoints, a strict moralist, cracks down on crime as expected, but he also proves to be prone to corruption. (Shades of contemporary crusaders such as former New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer here.) It looks as if either a nun must lose her virginity or her brother must lose his head. But this disaster-in-the-making doesn’t come about, because the play changes course. The duke hasn’t left town after all. He sticks around, disguised as a monk, to see what happens, and he ends up having to fix the fixer, so to speak: he must become the one who guards against the guardian, as Plato might’ve put it, which the duke does through a set of relatively comic maneuvers that often recall Much Ado About Nothing.

More British theater is heading for American cinema screens

Today’s Economist Espresso gives a brief nod to the live streaming of theatrical productions with an announcement that the Almeida Theatre, in London, will transmit a production of Richard III to cinemas in July. You can find the post here, and information from the Almeida here.

Giddy delight: Trevor Nunn works wonders with Pericles at TFANA

Raphael Nash Thompson as the tale-teller Gower in TFANA’s Pericles (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Literally and figuratively, Shakespeare’s Pericles is all over the place. Like a very leisurely travel package, it visits six different Mediterranean locations—Antioch! Pentapolis! Mytilene!—and ranges across more than 16 years of time. It has a tour guide—I mean a narrator—and frequent outbreaks of song, dance, and mime. It features a princess protected by a riddle, an assassin, a shipwreck, fishermen on a beach, a jousting tournament, a storm at sea, pirates, a bordello, a dream sequence, and more than one unexpected reunion. It has reminders of other Shakespearean works going all the way back to The Comedy of Errors and looking ahead to pieces he hadn’t written yet, such as The Winter’s Tale. And parts of it may not have been written by Shakespeare at all.

Briefly noted: On blockchains and Shakespeare

The cover of the October 31, 2015, edition of The Economist

The current edition of The Economist contains both an editorial and a briefing on the subject of the blockchain technology that underlies Bitcoin, which is now being adapted for other uses and proposed for more. The basic idea of a blockchain is a ledger that’s distributed and relatively tamperproof. This means that a record of your ownership of something can’t easily be lost or tampered with, which can be very useful not only in finance but also in things like property records, as the opening example in the briefing illustrates. That doesn’t mean that bitcoins or other blockchain-based objects of value can’t be stolen. If somebody gets hold of my laptop, they can use the software that controls my Bitcoin “wallet” to transfer my money to themselves, just as somebody who gets hold of my real wallet can take out whatever cash it contains. But that’s not directly a problem with the system in either case. If you don’t know how blockchains work, or you do but want to know how they might be used, I suggest you read these two Economist pieces.

Briefly noted: Messing with Shakespeare

Does Shakespeare’s language need fixing? Two discussions of the question, from a New York Times op-ed and a post on The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog.

Where are the leading men? Thoughts on Terrence Rafferty’s recent essay

Who would we cast in a present-day remake of The Godfather? Writing in the current print issue of The Atlantic, Terrence Rafferty addresses the question:

If The Godfather were to be made today, you might see Daniel Day-Lewis as Don Corleone, surrounded by, say, Tom Hiddleston as Michael, Rory Kinnear as Sonny, Ben Whishaw as Fredo, Benedict Cumberbatch as Tom Hagen, Keira Knightley as Connie, and Romola Garai as Kay. What’s worse, it isn’t nearly so easy to dream up a fantasy cast of American actors that would be as strong.

Rafferty uses this to set up a discussion of the state of American acting for TV and film. He finds a couple of curious problems: “good American roles have been going to English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Australian, and Canadian actors,” and while we have a slew of capable women, “the ranks of interesting under-40 American [men] have begun to look dangerously thin.”

Fiasco’s Two Gentlemen: A play for blooming spring

Troupe of strolling players: Zachary Fine, Andy Grotelueschen, Emily Young, Jessie Austrian, Paul L. Coffey, and Noah Brody. (Photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Is The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare’s most bro-y play? Maybe not; it isn’t purely about the guys. Yet they clearly have the upper hand, and it’s easy to see 2GV as a Vince Vaughn–Owen Wilson comedy, in which one of them, leaving his lady love behind in Verona, goes to visit his best bud forever in Milan, where he instantly falls for the woman his pal is also set on. The frolicsome plot involves meddlesome parents, a disguise, some comic servants, a dog, and a band of not-very-fearsome outlaws. This is early Shakespeare, and though it lacks some of the clarity and depth of his later writing, the play is lyrical and mostly lighthearted even in its serious moments—it abounds in the spirit of youth in springtime. In dramatizing a clash of love and friendship, it’s also—no surprise—more daring than anything in Vaughn and Wilson’s scripts.