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]

Site-specific shows

A Brooklyn-based troupe is going to stage The Tempest on the beach and boardwalk at Coney Island.
As the following snip suggests, gimmickry is a trap here. But why not more of such site-specific shows around here? Or even shows that start outside and then conclude inside a theater?

From the New York Times:
Uncommon though it is, there is an international tradition of putting on plays in what are known as site-specific locations, said Elizabeth Bradley, chairwoman of the drama department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She told of a small New York company that performed Orwell’s 1984 in front of surveillance cameras to show people how ubiquitous eavesdropping is.
“People have responded to individual theatrical texts by connecting them to natural and found environments for many, many years,” she said, adding, “The trap of these things is whether it’s simply a gimmick.”



Some of Bobo's most vivid theatrical memories involve site-specific shows: Tamara in the '80s next to the Hollywood Bowl, a long-running show that took place in and around a former VFW hall, with '20s flappers and gangsters running up and down stairwells, hopping into limousines, having shootouts by the pool, then slamming doors in your face so that you had to detour and start following other pairs of characters. A production of Jean Genet's The Balcony at the old Odyssey Theater Ensemble in West L.A. in which, during the fictional revolution that was taking place "outside" the "brothel," the entire effing wall of the theater behind me suddenly collapsed, and soldiers with rifles and a jeep started driving under and around the bleachers we were seated on. Or Derrick Lee Weeden in Tony Taccone's Coriolanus at Ashland, rock-climbing in and out and over the Elizabethan Theater's vine-covered walls, and soldiers in combat fatigues screaming slogans, right behind our seats. (Not quite the same as environmental theater, but you get the point.)

So, readers, any ideas on how we could do the same here? K2 in wintertime at Minnehaha? The Importance of Being Earnest in some South Hill mansion's Victorian parlor and garden? Cubbyholes in the Masonic Center used for some kind of audience-participation murder mystery? I realize that smaller troupes and CenterStage attempted similar concepts -- but what if the Civic, Interplayers, Lake City or CdA Summer lent their organizational prestige to such an attempt? Any ideas out there matching scripts or ideas (we could write the scripts!) to match particular locations or buildings around here? It'd be a gimmick, sure, but one that might revitalize interest from lukewarm theatergoers.

[painting: by the actual Tamara de Lempicka, Polish artist, 1898-1980; from peaceaware.com]

So that's what Will looked like ...

Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells has revealed what he believes to be a 1610 portrait of The Big Shake himself: not the dodo-bird of the Droeshout portrait, but a wise and handsome fella who's quite proud of his elaborate lace collar.
In 1604, for a year or so, Shakespeare rented a room in London from a family of French emigres named Mountjoy. Their family business? Making elaborate lace headdresses for wealthy ladies.
Not only is it a better-looking portrait -- it suggests that Shakespeare had ascended from farm-town boy to wealthy property owner. The disgraced glover's son had gone off to the big city and made good. Too bad he only had six more years to live.

Remains of the 1576 gathering place known simply as The Theatre have also been excavated, according to a BBC report. The Globe wasn't built until 1599, so this is where Shakespeare himself would have acted in the premieres of plays like *Romeo and Juliet.*

For Stanley Wells' smackdown of Mark Rylance, Sir Derek Jacobi and all who think that "Shakespeare didn't really write those plays," go here.

ADDED on April 3, 2009:
Ron Rosenbaum in Slate on why Will's looks aren't relevant to what matters: interpreting his plays and sonnets
Also: Katherine Duncan-Jones says that Stanley Wells is wrong because, well, the portrait is of Sir Thomas Overbury and not Shakespeare at all.

*Othello* at SFCC, March 5-15

Othello at Shakespeare's Globe
Originally uploaded by rosewithoutathorn84

Thursdays-Saturdays, March 5-7 and March 12-14, at 7:30 pm

also on Sunday, March 8, at 2 pm

"I am your own, forever": Look for the Act 3 satanic wedding in which Iago inverts Othello's marriage with Desdemona and twists it into a pledged murder pact with guess who as the victim. (Creepy.)

with Aaron Lee Lewis as Othello and Andrew Parish as Iago

directed by William Marlowe and designed by Renae Meredith

SFCC, Spartan Theatre, Communications Building, Bldg. 5, 3410 W. Fort George Wright Dr.

Tickets: $8; $6, faculty, staff, seniors and students

Get in on Sunday, March 8, at 2 pm with $1 and a non-perishable food item for Second Harvest Food Bank.
Call 533-3592.

photo: *Othello* at London's Globe Theater, July 2007, with Zoe Tapper as Desdemona; from flickr.com

Ian McKellen in *King Lear*

Wednesday, March 25, on PBS

Read more here .

Video highlights at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LAiQ6fZXBE