Conversations with Shakespeare: Three Contemporary Adaptations for the Stage

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Conversations with Shakespeare: Three Contemporary Adaptations for the Stage CONVERSATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE: THREE CONTEMPORARY ADAPTATIONS FOR THE STAGE BY SARA BOLAND-TAYLOR THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Theatre in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Adviser: Assistant Professor Dr. Valleri Hohman ABSTRACT The study of adaptation, the practice of creating and producing literature, performance, music, and art that maintains a sustained engagement with an informing sourcetext or ‘original’ piece of literature, is a way of analyzing cultural, theoretical, and performance trends. This study takes up three distinctive contemporary approaches to Shakespearean adaptation and the way in which they reflect the cultural milieu of contemporary Shakespeare performance. Through first-hand observation, personal and previously published interviews with the artists, as well as performance reviews, this study constructs a literary and dramaturgical analysis of three contemporary adaptations in order to understand how these artists converse with Shakespeare, as well as how they invite audiences to engage with retellings of his plays. In addition to analyzing contemporary audience engagement with Shakespeare, this examination provides an analysis of the artists’ respective methodologies of adaptation. The ways in which the writers and artists discussed here collaborate with and interrogate Shakespeare is of particular interest, as well as how they invite audiences to respond to and engage with the plays. The three plays examined in this study, BOY by Erik Ehn, The Feast: an intimate Tempest by Jessica Thebus and Frank Maugeri, and Sleep No More by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, are thrown into relief with their Shakespearean sourcetexts to explore a question that is threefold: how are these adaptations interacting with Shakespeare? How are the adapters asking audiences to interact with these plays? Finally, if Shakespeare’s works and adaptations are, as Julie Sanders argues, a “cultural barometer for the historically contingent process of adaptation” (21), what can these three distinct styles of adaptation tell us about trends in Shakespearean performance within the context of contemporary American audiences? ii To Casey Thiel iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible if not for the support, kindness, and patience of many individuals. Many thanks to my adviser, Dr. Valleri Hohman, for reading my numerous revisions, offering constructive criticism and thoughtful guidance along the way. Her ongoing support and constructive criticism over the past several months has been invaluable. In addition, thanks to Dr. Esther Kim Lee and Professor Emerita Kathy Perkins for welcoming me to the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois, and constantly challenging me to be better than I ever thought I could be. Thank you to the artists, without whose help this study would not have been possible: Raphael Parry, Erik Ehn, Dr. Jessica Thebus, Frank Maugeri, Benjamin Thys, Jenny Ledel, and Jason Zednick. Your insights into the works discussed here have made this a delightful process. Finally, thank you to Dr. Rick Jones, whose unwavering support has given me the courage to keep the faith. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: “That Which is, Hath Been Before”: ..............................................................1 CHAPTER 1: “We Can Only Do What We’ve Ever Done”: Towards a Shakespearean Architecture in Erik Ehn’s BOY..........................................................12 CHAPTER 2: “You Demi-Puppets”: Redmoon and Chicago Shakespeare Theatre Recontextualize The Tempest.................................44 CHAPTER 3: “I Heard a Voice Cry”: Renegotiating the Boundaries of Performance in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More..........................77 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................113 v INTRODUCTION “That Which is, Hath Been Before” As long as there have been plays by Shakespeare, there have been adaptations of those plays. For almost four hundred years, playwrights have been taking Shakespeare’s works, and remaking them, in an overwhelming variety of ways, for the stage. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present David Fischlin and Mark Fortier As a playwright, actor, and theatrical entrepreneur, Shakespeare understood that there was no final form to any of his creations, and he apparently embraced, rather than resisted, the inherent instability of his medium. There was, as Shakespeare’s distinguished contemporary Ben Jonson grasped, one way at least partially to stabilize playtexts: to use the medium of print to produce definitive, that is, authorially approved, versions of the plays. But though half of his known plays were published in his lifetime, there is no evidence that Shakespeare interested himself directly in this enterprise or that he concerned himself with establishing definitive versions or that he resented alterations or revisions. On the contrary, the multiple states in which several of his plays exist...suggest that Shakespeare and his company felt comfortable making numerous cuts, additions, and other changes perhaps linked to particular performances, playspaces, and time constraints. This comfort-level, registered intimately in the remarkable openness of the plays to reinterpretation and refashioning, has contributed to the startling longevity of Shakespeare’s achievement: the plays lend themselves to continual metamorphosis. “Theatrical Mobility” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto Stephen Greenblatt The study of adaptation, the practice of creating and producing literature, performance, music, and art that maintains a sustained engagement with an informing sourcetext or ‘original’ piece of literature, is a way of analyzing cultural, theoretical, and performance trends. This study takes up three distinctive contemporary approaches to Shakespearean adaptation and the way in which they reflect the cultural milieu of contemporary Shakespeare performance. The three plays examined in this study, BOY by Erik Ehn, The Feast: an intimate Tempest by Jessica Thebus and Frank Maugeri, and Sleep No More by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, are thrown into relief with their Shakespearean sourcetexts to explore a question that is threefold: how are these adaptations interacting with Shakespeare? How are the adapters asking audiences to interact with these plays? Finally, if Shakespeare’s works and adaptations serve as a “cultural barometer for 1 the historically contingent process of adaptation” (Sanders 21), what can these three distinct styles of adaptation tell us about trends in Shakespearean performance within the context of contemporary American audiences? William Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted and appropriated since the Restoration. “From 1660 onwards playwrights such as Nahum Tate and William Davenant changed plotlines, added characters, and set to music Shakespearean scripts for performance” (Sanders 46). John Fletcher’s “sequel” to The Taming of the Shrew and Nahum Tate’s sentimental History of King Lear are among the earliest and most famous re-workings of Shakespeare’s popular plays. Increasingly, prominent seasonal Shakespeare festivals (such as the Utah and Oregon Shakespeare Festivals) and dedicated year-round Shakespeare theatres (Chicago Shakespeare or the American Shakespeare Center) stage adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. During the 2012 season alone, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario is presenting MacHomer, a hybridization of Macbeth and The Simpsons, while the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashford is producing Medea, Macbeth, and Cinderella as well as The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa. The Utah Shakespeare Festival will stage Play Desdemona, a fictionalization of a Restoration actress training to play Desdemona and Beatrice with only men on whom to model her performance. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is producing Tina Packer’s Women of Will and The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C. is producing Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys of Syracuse. The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre produces at least one adaptation a season. Past stagings include Funk it Up About Nothin’, The Bomb-itty of Errors, Kabuki Lady Macbeth, The People Vs. Friar Lawrence, and most recently, The Feast: an intimate Tempest. Despite the large number of adaptations produced, these plays and their adapters, receive little scholarly attention. 2 In her introduction to Shakespeare and Appropriation, Christy Desmet opens with a discussion of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, “probably the best- known and most frequently quoted of all Shakespeare parodies” (1). Julie Sanders briefly touches on the same play in Adaptation and Appropriation, naming it “one of the most influential ‘grafts’ of Shakespearean drama,” which also intertexualizes Waiting for Godot (55- 6). These discussions of Stoppard’s play inevitably transition into a discussion of Shakespeare’s film adapters. Scholarly treatments of postmodern and contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare for the stage often cover Stoppard’s 1966 absurdist existential play, and move quickly in to dueling Zefferelli and Luhrman Romeo and Juliets. Meanwhile, “theatrical adaptation has remained a relatively marginalized and under-theorized activity” (Fischlin 4). Throughout her study, Sanders focuses most of her attention on adaptations making a generic
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