review of *Equivocation*

Equivocation by Bill Cain
at OSF; in its final week



Bill Cain’s Equivocation — about Will Shakespeare being pressured by the Jacobean government to write a propaganda piece glorifying the prevention of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, and how Will found a way instead to incorporate chunks of what he discovered into the play we know as Macbeth — is an extraordinary play, on the same level as another re-envisioning and bending of a Shakespearean tragedy, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Cain’s play is also gaining productions elsewhere, and with just six actors and a plain, neutral set, there are practical and artistic justifications for doing it extensively.
I learned more from Cain’s play about the Big Shake, life among the King’s Men, James I and Robert Cecil, Shake’s daughter Judith, the Elizabethan/Jacobean police state, and Abu Ghraib than I did in all the books I studied in grad school.
Yes, Abu Ghraib — because weapons of mass destruction, going into war based on a lie, “justifications” for torture, terrorism, and destroying democracy in order to save democracy are all over this play.
It’s like Stoppard in another way: You gotta do your homework. In Cain’s play, Sir Robert Cecil wows Shakespeare by saying that his plays will live on “for another 50 years.” And the issue of how long a play will run, of posterity, crops up a lot. Well, Ros & Guil is one of Sir Tom’s most popular; Equivocation will have a long highbrow shelf life -- not enduringly popular in the mainstream, but with real legs for those who are willing to research the politics of England from 1533 to 1606. (August:Osage County gives us, today, ourselves; Equivocation is about people in the history books.)



For such a cerebral play, it has calls to action and even moments that evoke compassion and sentiment: “Shag” cradling the head of a young married, tortured conspirator suddenly morphs into Shakespeare cradling the head of his son Hamnet, who’s been dead these 10 years. The play’s final image -- Shake’s daughter Judith, the disaffected one, the twin who lived, the less-favored daughter, at her father’s graveside, complaining that she never really liked the hokeyness of the final romances, with all their magic and coincidences and obsession of a father for reconnecting with his daughter -- and suddenly, through a lighting trick, director Bill Rauch places them on the Globe’s stage, and Judith becomes Cordelia, and Shag, her father, her dead Lear (or else Marina, Imogen, Perdita, Miranda, all reconciled with their fathers in the late romances).
There are big swaths of Lear and Macbeth in Cain’s play, the latter with James I, resplendent in golden robes, hopping up and down and clapping his hands with excitement, all because this new play by the King’s Men is set in Scotland and has witches! (Plenty of witches. Also plots, betrayal, murder, sadism, regicide, emptiness, curses, death.)
(Bobo’s lucky: This very night, on the same Bowmer stage, he is to see ... the Scottish play itself.)
Anthony Heald (best Iago I’ve ever seen onstage, here a few years back) plays Shag as a man who’s repressed, out to make a profit, wary of his superiors, respectful of actors, always in a rush, not at all astounded by his own talent, deeply concerned about what’s true — in politics, in the spiritual realm.
One of the many, many wonderful things about Equivocation is how it treats Shakespeare with irreverence — flawed, a man of the moment, not held at arm’s length by bardolatry, not sure at all that his plays will live on, living a precarious existence as a crypto-Catholic (?) in an officially Protestant nation.
Jonathan Haugen’s split-second changes from just one of the shareholders in the company, Nate (Nathan Field? -- Richard Burbage and Robert Armin, Shakespeare’s wiser fool of the later comedies, are also in this cast) -- into “Beagle,” the Richard III-like, diminutive and misshapen and morally crippled, always scheming Robert Cecil (real-life son of William, whom Shak. parodied as Polonius) were delightful.
So was this play. I’m buying the script, just to relive the fun.
And more than fun -- in its contemporary relevance, its array of insightful analogies, Equivocation presents a theatrical experience not unlike what it must have been like to sit in 1953 for The Crucible: witch hunts like McCarthy there, the scheming in and around the Gunpowder Plot with echoes of Mr. Cheney’s war here.
History made alive. Drunken porters who tell people to fuck off. The world’s greatest playwright, unable even to treat his own daughter with humanity. Actors forever under pressure to get the next play up.
Shag, for once, livng and breathing in our world. That’s Equivocation: having it both ways, living in worlds that are 400 years and a continent apart.
[photos: Anthony Heald as Shag and Jonathan Haugen as Sir Robert Cecil; the members of the King's Men vote to put on the "official version" of what really happened during the Gunpowder Plot (as penned by King James himself and script-doctored by Shakespeare ... erm, this never actually happened, you know]

Hedda's further adventures

Jeff Whitty wrote *Avenue Q,* the musical with the foul-mouthed puppets.
He's an Oregon native who actually once won a district spelling bee (Coos Bay, 1983).
And he has written "The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler" -- receiving only its second production anywhere at OSF now. (It premiered at South Coast Rep; the design team and the director and a couple of the actors re-appear here.)
It ought to receive many more productions, because it's hilarious and thoughtful -- the kind of comedy that has you laughing at things and then squirming in your seat because you're not sure if you should be laughing at such things. And isn't Whitty perhaps making fun of people ... just like me?
It's about Hedda and Tesman and Lovberg, trapped between performances the play in a world of fictional characters: Medea drops by,
Mammy from *Gone With the Wind* is the Tesmans' servant. You might think no two women could be further apart. But just as Hedda has a hard time imagining being anything other than depressed and suicidal, Mammy has a hard time imagining anything other than being a slave. And the whole thing, hilarious and funny and fast, gets us to asking: Can ANY of us change? Or are we all stuck with our fates? Add in feminism and race (a second black woman who's feeling empowered) and sexuality (two very funny stereotyped gay men from the late '60s, Anthony Heald and Jonathan Haugen, all swishy and drunk, wise-cracking and self-hating) and you've got the makings of a thinking person's comedy (lavishly produced here, but could be not quite so camped up -- and a cast of eight, lots of costumes, a couple of set pieces but affordable, and Bobo was thinking, in a few years, this is the kind of show that could be done in the Civic's downstairs.
Bobo *loved* this show. You need a couple of black women who can sing and dance, and a lot of adept comedians, and a lot of costumes (cameo appearances by the Phantom of the Opera, Annie, Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw, Beast from Beauty and the Beast, "a spunky housewife with three adorable kids" from a TV sit com, and a host of others. But it's all great and thought-provoking fun. The whole thing starts with ornate golden proscenium, red velvet curtains, an enormous portrait of Ibsen with all his side-whiskers. And then, during the shut-off-your-cell-phones curtain speech, you realize that ol' Henrik's lips are moving. A cheap visual trick, but very funny.

The Clay Cart in Ashland

The phrase that kept coming to mind as I watched this ancient East Indian comedy -- Bill Rauch's introduction of non-Western fare to OSF and a kind of sub-continental commedia dell-arte -- was "overproduced children's theater."
That's harsh -- the production has many fine points, a moving last scene, and it's stuck in my head since last night -- but let me explain.
The Clay Cart was written 2,000 years ago. It's full of stock characters. Open playing space, perhaps two dozen in the cast, usually seated on the perimeter, recliningn on pillows, watchign their fellow actors throughout. People jump up, and wham! they're a gambler, they're the king's brother-in-law, they're the guy who guards the door. Playful. Gorgeous set: golden circular playing area ringed by dozens of golden Hindu statues; three dozen exotic lamps hanging from above (and they all swung in unison during the thunderstorms!); three live musicians at the back; a giant foot from some unseen gigantic statue; a blue runway that circled the playing area and was used for "trips" from one location to another. Stock characters, stock situations: commedia-style.
Long and episodic, the structure just felt like one damn thing after another. Very didactic: they hammered home the idea that character matters more than caste, that wealth does not make your virtuous, that selflessness is the highest form of virtue, and so on. Yes, I know. And yes, great literature often boils down to simplicity: Othello: jealousy is bad. But this kept hammering away at it, as if we were a bunch of children. Pretty to look at, mostly well acted. Raspy-voiced Miriam Laube (too giddy-in-love as Rosalind in a Depression-era AYLI here a couple seasons back, was practically born for the central role of the courtesan (accomplished in singing and dance; cf. geishas in Japan).
Plot turns on coincidence: clever, but over-elaborate. Still, the final scene, with one dispensation of justice after another (when it had appeared that the virtuous wouuld be punished and the wicked would get away with it) was surprisingly moving. A final prayer for virtuous leadership, that we should take care of our poor and live honestly in all ways: good reminders. But at 2:45, it was a long sit for platitudes.
Right next door, Dan Donohue was playing Iago. Did I make the wrong choice?
Richard Howard was fantastic as a thief (I saw him as Richard II here in '95, as Gaev in Cherry Orchard here last year -- almost unrecognizable -- and he's in great shape -- there's a lot of skin shown in this play. In an extremely erotic and non-explicit sequence, Laube stripped off her jewels one by one and desposited them one by one into the hands of her eager lover (Cristofer Jean, as the impoverished but virtuous merchant here; a quirky, rebellious Ariel in the Demetra Pittman-as-Prospero Tempest here a few years ago).
So I would have written a mixed review. But for the money, I want more than just stock characters. And all that didacticism -- it felt like we were being talked down to. A lot of stock situations were predictable.
But boy those Hindus are great categorizers: there are 10 types of drama about humans (as opposed to dramas about the gods), and four skills that any actor must possess, and about 27 dialects in the play, and three central gods, and on and on ....

U.S. History Cycle at OSF

Bill Rauch really is shaking things up.
The word's been that the first-year A.D. at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been making his mark by putting a non-Western play, The Clay Cart, for a long run on the indoor Bowmer stage and actually producing a non-Shakespearean work (well, Our Town, but still) on the outdoor Elizabethan Stage.
Two weeks ago, he announced that OSF — sort of on the model of Shakespeare's two interlocking tetralogies on medieval British history — has commissioned 37 plays over 10 years, to be called "American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle."
And some heavy hitters are involved.
Tony Taccone (A.D. at Berkeley Rep, and a truly exciting stage director (Bobo saw his Othello, Coriolanus and Pentecost in Ashland a dozen years ago) and Jonathan Moscone (A.D. at Cal Shakes) will collaborate on a play set in San Francisco in the '70s ... a play about the murder of the then mayor of S.F., George Moscone (Jonathan's father).

They plan 15 full productions at OSF (2010-19); the rest will be done as readings and workshops. Colorado Shakespeare Festival and Shakespeare & Co. in Mass. are also in on the project.
Playwrights include Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel, Crumbs from the Table of Joy), David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, Golden Child, Flower Drum Song,Aida, Tarzan), Naomi Wallace (One Flea Spare), Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle), Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog, 365 Plays/365 Days, In the Blood; co-wrote screenplay for The Great Debaters; will direct Fences on Broadway next year), and Culture Clash, the site-specific Latino performance troupe (Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza).