The Stratford Shakespeare Festival: Classics

André Sills and Krystin Pellerin in Othello. (Photo: David Hou.)

The question up for grabs in any production of Shakespeare’s Othello is why Iago sets out to destroy Othello and those he loves. In the 1995 movie with Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh’s motivation for Iago’s actions was straight off the surface of the text: he was angry at his general for selecting Cassio rather than himself as his lieutenant and devised a revenge that would punish both of them; Othello’s wife Desdemona, whom he convinced the Moor had been cheating on him with Cassio, is merely collateral damage. It wasn’t an especially interesting choice but Branagh was still the best thing in the picture. When Frank Finlay played it in the famous National Theatre production opposite Laurence Olivier (with Maggie Smith as Desdemona), which was filmed in 1965, his hatred of the Moor derived unmistakably from the fact of Othello’s race. But the best Iago I’ve ever seen was Andre Braugher in a splendid 1991 production at the Shakespeare Theater in D.C.. His Iago caught Othello, Desdemona and Cassio in his web – to quote the character’s own metaphor – for amusement; he was a sociopath. Braugher was the first Black Iago in my experience, and there were also clear nods to the men’s race: you sensed his shock that Othello would prefer a white guy to a brother. That element was prominent in Iobal Khan’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015, which contained a number of Black characters, some African, some Caribbean, one Indian, and depicted a complicated hierarchy where culture determined class in ways that weren’t immediately apparent. Nicholas Hytner’s version at the National Theatre in 2013 was also about class – Rory Kinnear played Iago as distinctly working-class, and his racial discomfort with the Moor was mixed up with his perception that privileged men, one Black and one white, were looking down on him.

New from Criterion: Stanley Donen's Charade

Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade. (Photo: Universal/Criterion Collection.)

In a career devoted to giving audiences pleasure, Stanley Donen was never closer to the mark than in his 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain (Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s hilarious burlesque of Hollywood’s conversion from the silent era to the talkies) and the 1963 Charade. These are two of the most blissful entertainments in American movie history. Charade is a witty, elegant and ingenious thriller written by Peter Stone, from a story he devised with Marc Behm, that is a romantic comedy at its heart. Donen and Stone didn’t invent this hybrid; Hitchcock did, in 1935 in The 39 Steps, and he returned to it twice, in To Catch a Thief in 1955 and North by Northwest in 1959. Both these later vehicles star Cary Grant – as a retired jewel thief on the French Riviera who has to find out who is emulating his illicit style in the first and as an innocent bystander mistaken for a government agent in the second. His leading ladies are Grace Kelly (27 to Grant’s 51) and Eva Marie Saint (35 to Grant’s 55). In Charade Grant is 59 and his acting partner, Audrey Hepburn as Reggie Lampert, is 35. I don’t provide these statistics in order to invoke an unconvincing platitude about aging male stars and young female ones: no one who watches him parry and trade quips with these three stunning, sexy women should make the mistake of thinking that Cary Grant can be reduced to a man of a certain age with a taste for younger partners. With each of them, as with Katharine Hepburn in the thirties and forties, his is the art of erotic understatement, and he’s always the one who gets seduced.

Split Screen: Ogunquit's City of Angels

Tony Yazbeck and Ben Jacoby in City of Angels. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

The 1989 City of Angels is one of the wittiest and most original musicals ever written. Its brilliant book by Larry Gelbart, one of America’s premier comic voices throughout a storied career, is simultaneously a musical parody of a film noir and a delectably cynical treatment of Hollywood, set in the golden era of noirs, the late 1940s. The frame story is about a successful detective novelist named Stine who lands a contract to turn one of his books into a movie, and learns the tough lessons that all the literary successes who fell for Hollywood’s tin promises had to swallow in the big-studio era, about ego, betrayal, manipulation and the bottom line. Stine considers himself too wised-up to be fooled, yet he falls for the phony geniality of the producer-director, Buddy Fidler, who softens him up with praise and then rewrites page after page of his screenplay. Buddy is a megalomaniac with a will of solid steel. And Stine is ripe for seduction – by the money, by the notion of seeing his private-eye hero, Stone, on the screen, and by the sex that hangs in the Hollywood air. His sharp-eyed editor wife Gabby opts to stay behind in New York, though she knows that her husband is historically susceptible to the appeal of available young women, and when he takes Buddy’s secretary Donna to bed Gabby sees through his attempts to cover his tracks. One of the best songs in the sensational Cy Coleman-David Zippel score, “It Needs Work,” musicalizes the moment when she tosses it in his face. The other half of the show is a series of scenes from the movie Stine is writing and Fidler is shooting, so Stine and Stone divide the leading man role, and most of the supporting players are double cast. The musical’s winning visual trick is that the Stine story is designed in color while the film-within-the-play scenes are in glistening black and white.

Louisa May Alcott: The Heroine Builder

Portrait of Louisa May Alcott by Lance Austin Olsen.

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship. Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.”

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott was not quite the quaint homespun lady who wove utopian fables of blissful childhood dreams that her writings, or at least one segment of her complex literary persona, would have you believe. She was not afraid of storms, true enough, but that was mostly because she was a storm herself, albeit a secret storm. Unlike the writings of either Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters, Alcott was not so very interested in what she defined as domestic fiction, a term she used to categorize, though not necessarily to critique, literary works that focus on family dynamics in contrast to the dynamics of female social perspectives, despite the fact that her most famous work, Little Women (1868), would appear to do just that, at least on the surface anyway. She even defined her own alternative literary position, as distinguished from the other writers mentioned, as having a preference for what she called “sensation stories and novels” as opposed to tales of domestic intrigue or turbulence. Some readers of Little Women, Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), or Jo’s Boys (1886), might be especially surprised to hear her declare, albeit in a quiet voice, “I fancy lurid things.” and to acknowledge a literary debt to Johann Goethe’s turbulent Sorrows of Young Werther and his diabolically beautiful Faust drama. Active during one of the most tumultuous and horrific times in American history, when the nature and even existence of that country was in perilous question, Alcott started writing for The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, and upon the outbreak of the Civil War became an active nurse at the Union Hospital in Georgetown. A fervent anti-slavery activist and advocate of complete equality and freedom in all its forms, she was so supportive of the Union cause that she enthusiastically rushed off to enlist in its army, only to be rebuffed, for what to her was that most inane of reasons: because the military did not accept female soldiers. This enraged her, not only as a devoted patriot but also as a avid supporter of the cause of suffrage and equality for women in every walk of life. To say that she was ahead of her time would be a drastic understatement. She was an unalloyed feminist, during a time when what she wanted, though simple enough to our modern eyes, was incomprehensible to not only the government but also to family and friends in her circle. Her dispatches were featured in the anti-slavery newspaper Commonwealth and her advanced thinking, often belied by the obvious charming quality of her fiction, propelled her to the forefront of a then gestating suffrage movement. This courageous dame had guts galore, not to mention the literary skill to captivate readers with her apparent coming-of-age stories, which cleverly concealed in their charms the author’s suggestions for improving our mutual existence.

Lesley Manville in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: An Actress Becomes a Legend

Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. (Photo: Sarah Lee.)

It’s not likely that many people read Choderlos de Laclos’ spectacular 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses these days, but Christopher Hampton’s dramatic version, first produced in 1985, has become, deservedly, a repertory staple. In the original West End production and again on Broadway, the matched anti-heroes, Madame de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, best of friends and former lovers who manipulate everyone around them for their amusement and to enact private revenge plots, were played by Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman. In the triumphant 1988 Stephen Frears movie, called Dangerous Liaisons, Glenn Close and John Malkovich took over the roles, a case of seeming miscasting that, as it turned out, worked brilliantly. (There have been two other film adaptations, a very amusing updated one from 1959 directed by Roger Vadim, with Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe and an unfortunate one called Valmont, directed by Miloš Forman, with Annette Bening and Colin Firth, released the year after Frears’s. And Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe are featured in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, which sets the story in a Manhattan prep school. It’s trashy but a sexy, funny diversion.)

Recent Plays: The Balusters, Fallen Angels, Top Hat and The Fear of 13

The company of The Balusters. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters, which enjoyed a twelve-week limited run as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club season, focuses on the tensions between neighbors of different races, cultural backgrounds and predilections whose veneer of politesse cracks under the pressure of their pursuit of different agendas. It’s a distinctly twenty-first century version of a social high comedy built around a melting-pot aristocracy that’s assumed to have eliminated the exclusionary class barriers of an earlier time but hasn’t really: the old divisions keep popping up, along with the old resentments. This variation of high comedy has produced some highly entertaining American plays (like Smart People and last season’s Eureka Day) and one masterpiece, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. The Balusters isn’t on the same level.

One of a Kind, Twice in a Row: Legacy and Legend

“Art never saved the world. It cannot do so.”

--Marcel Duchamp

“Everyone is an artist.”

--Joseph Beuys

The 20th century. Oh how I do miss that century these days. It was a virtual dynasty of dissonance and discontinuity, a breathtakingly radical realm of overturned assumptions and collapsing complacent expectations. Almost all the accepted truths, from science and religion to literature, music and visual art, were being overturned practically on a daily basis. And the two artists profiled in two new tomes from Princeton University Press were at the forefront of the mission to alter our perceptions of what art was and what it can be expected to do to and for us. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) pretty much invented what we now call conceptual art. But it didn’t really have a name back when they were blazing a trail through the exotic hinterland of aesthetic exploration. And these valuable books, one a collection of snappy quotations from the cheeky and provocative Duchamp, Duchampisms, edited by Larry Warsh, and the other a deeply revealing study, Joseph Beuys and History by Daniel Spaulding, each shed new light on the dazzling outer range of cultural possibility back in the daring century they so personally embodied.