Asides Magazine
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A publication of the Shakespeare Theatre Company ASIDES 2012|2013 SEASON • Issue 5 Shakespeare Theatre Company in association with McCarter Theatre Center presents Rebecca Taichman on Transcendent Transformations page 3 Columbia Professor Jean E. Howard discusses Shakespearean Metatheatre page 7 SHAKESPEARE THEATRE COMPANY 2012|2013 SEASON • Issue 5 A publication of the Shakespeare Theatre Company ASIDES Dear Friend, Thoughts from Director There is something beautiful and 3 Thoughts from Director beguiling about The Winter’s Tale, Rebecca Taichman Rebecca Taichman one of Shakespeare’s late romances. In this story of a woman wronged, a 4 Theatricality, Artifice daughter lost and a king who must and the Mended World …on The Winter´s Tale. learn the error of his ways, the audience may interpret in Shakespeare’s The One of Shakespeare’s late romances, The Winter’s Tale the ending as supernatural or mysterious. Every by Jean E. Howard, Ph.D. director approaches this play in a different way and Winter’s Tale is a study in tonal collision— I know D.C. audiences will love STC Affiliated Artist sliding from tragedy to comedy and back Tales Told 8 Rebecca Taichman’s work on this production. by Jacob Janssen again. We careen through the dangerous, moneyed Sicilian court, into the comic 10 Small Cast, Big Impact Rebecca’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s story turns by Laura Henry Buda an empty theatre canvas into a vibrant playground for Bohemian countryside and back again. The 12 The Winter’s Tale Cast and the imagination. Her collaboration with the talented play contains multiple and ever-shifting Artistic Team design team brings out themes of transformation in webs of meaning. As a director, the visual every sight and sound of this production. The use of and theatrical challenges are... well... 14 Climate Change a nine-member ensemble to portray 16 parts through by Drew Lichtenberg doublings also sheds new light on the relationships absurdly difficult and wonderfully exciting. 16 Weaving the Tapestry between the play’s characters. I am pleased with STC’s You’ve got that famous stage direction: “Exit, by Hannah J. Hessel foray into a small cast Shakespeare production, which pursued by a bear.” You’ve got a statue that grew and evolved thanks to our collaboration with Bringing the Music of needs to come to life. You’ve got two tonally 18 the excellent team at the McCarter Theatre Center. Shakespeare to Life opposite worlds that somehow need to make by Kate Colwell This issue of Asides explores the play’s intriguing illogical logic together. 19 2013–2014 Season dualities, its use of theatricality and time, iconic 20 Performance Calendar and moments in the play’s staging history and insights …on doubling actors and cutting the play. Creative Conversations into our production. You can also learn more about the world-renowned composer for this show’s music, Our production is organized around a Nico Muhly, and the doublings of the characters. central theme in the play: transformation. The Winter’s Tale investigates how the human Lansburgh Theatre 450 7th Street NW spirit can be transformed by jealousy, by love, by forgiveness. Our story is told by a company Washington, DC 20004-2207 We hope you enjoy our final mainstage show of the 2012– of nine actors— much the same, perhaps, to Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men—in 2013 Season and we look forward to seeing you in Sidney Harman Hall which everyone in Sicilia plays everyone in Bohemia. Hopefully at the heart of the endeavor 610 F Street NW our theatres again soon. Washington, DC 20004-2207 you will feel a celebration of the actors’ capacity to contain multitudes. Shakespeare was celebrating our capacity for contradiction and multiplicity, and so too does this production. Box Office Warm regards, 202.547.1122 Administrative Offices …on what the audience should know. 516 8th Street SE In the final scene, Paulina says: “It is required / You do awake your faith.” I read this, in Washington, DC 20003-2834 202.547.3230 Michael Kahn some measure, as an ask on Shakespeare’s part—a hope the audience will open its spirit Artistic Director to the impossible rendered possible, to grace and enchantment, to the stammering power ShakespeareTheatre.org Shakespeare Theatre Company Asides.ShakespeareTheatre.org of forgiveness. I suppose that would be my ask as well—that in watching the play, you attempt to awaken your faith—to the strange, miraculous power of theatre, the actor, Connect with Us! Production Sponsor: Additional Support: transformation itself. Artistic Leadership Fund Article courtesy of McCarter Theatre Center. Share Fund of The Restaurant Community Foundation Partner: for the National Capital Region 3 The Winter’s Tale 2012|2013 SEASON • Issue 5 winter and summer, sorrow and joy, Theatricality, Artifice that structure both human life and old stories like The Winter’s Tale. The play also evokes Christian narratives. and the Mended World Leontes, overcome by evil, commits great wrongs, but after a long period in Shakespeare’s The of penitence, receives the gift of grace: the return of his daughter and the seeming resurrection of his Winter’s Tale wife. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare by Jean E. Howard, Ph.D. writes in the shadow of all these tales to create his own dramatic fiction In a charming domestic scene at the start of about humanity’s appalling capacity act 2 of The Winter’s Tale, Queen Hermione, for destruction and also about the pregnant with her second child, asks her son, possibilities for regeneration through Mamillius, to tell her a story. He says: “Merry time, penitence and the helping or sad shall’t be?” and she replies “As merry hand of art. as you will.” But Mamillius has other ideas: “A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one / Of In making his play, Shakespeare does sprites and goblins” (act 2, scene 1). While not hesitate to let the bones of his Shakespeare’s play has no goblins or sprites, art show. For example, when he has it does, at least for its first three acts, traffic depicted the full horrors of Leontes’ Painting of Persephone in Hades by unknown artist (18th century). in sadness: King Leontes’ irrational sexual destructive jealousy and looks jealousy, the estrangement of the king from toward the time of regeneration, an allegorical figure named Time signals the transition. his wife Hermione, the death of his son and At the beginning of act 4, alone on stage, Time announces that 16 years have passed and the supposed death of his infant daughter that the action has shifted to Bohemia, where Leontes’ daughter, Perdita, banished and and wife. It is an icy and tragic “winter’s believed dead, has grown to young womanhood. Although the stage directions don’t specify tale” indeed. But in this play Shakespeare has how the play was staged during Shakespeare’s life, Time probably wore wings, signaling things two ways. In a miraculous reversal of how rapidly time passes, and carried an hourglass and a scythe, traditional symbols of his expectations, in its last two acts The Winter’s destructive power. Time is not a “realistic” figure; he’s an emblematic one, a device that lets Tale becomes a happier story of regeneration, Shakespeare self-consciously point to the ways he is disregarding the classical unities that resurrection and reunion. As a result, the play insist a play’s action must take place in one day and one place. Time says: is both a sad tale and a merry one, a perfect tragicomedy. Impute it not a crime To me or my swift passage that I slide The conversation between Mamillius and his Costume design for the masque Oberon the Faery Prince O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried by Inigo Jones (17th Century). mother signals to the audience Shakespeare’s Of that wide gap, since it is in my power own preoccupation in his late plays with To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour old tales and moldy stories. In these plays he draws on ancient tales and mythic tropes to To plan and o’erwhelm custom (act 4, scene 1) put in stark relief primal patterns of human experience. The Winter’s Tale’s basic structure recalls the myth of Persephone, a beautiful young girl abducted by Hades, the god of the Time could be speaking for the playwright himself who overthrows the theatrical laws of underworld, from a flowering field where she was playing. Allowed to return six months the unities and modern understandings of realism to tell an old tale the way he sees fit. of every year to the earth’s surface, Persephone’s comings and goings explain the cycle of 4 5 The Winter’s Tale 2012|2013 SEASON • Issue 5 In his late plays Shakespeare often heightens the overt theatricality of his dramas, pointing to the artifice that goes into their construction and making the powers and limitations of art part of the subject matter of these plays. The Winter’s Tale is no exception. In act 4, in the springtime world of Bohemia, there is even a conversation between Polixenes, King of Bohemia and Perdita about the importance and value of art in human life. Perdita is given the skeptic’s part, arguing that art dilutes or perverts nature; Polixenes disagrees, using a gardening metaphor to argue for the value of the gardener’s art whereby he grafts one plant onto another to produce hybrids and new varieties of vegetation. In Polixenes’ view, “This is an art / Which does mend nature—change it rather; but / The art itself is nature” (act 4, scene 4).