30 Days of Shakespeare, Day 21

[lareinenoire]

Day #21: An overrated play

I'm probably going to end up burning in Shakespeare Hell for this, but The Tempest really doesn't do anything for me. I can, to an extent, appreciate it -- the language and the imagery are positively gorgeous -- but I don't love it, and I doubt I ever will.

Comments

[halflingmerry]

::laughs:: My two most recent projects are your least favorite! But I agree!

(I actually got great satisfaction from and affection for "Shrew" while playing Katherina, and figured out an acceptable way to do so for my own politics/morality without changing anything in the show itself, including my sketchy estimation of WS's intentions. But can go into that later-maybe even on the appropriate post.)

I'm playing Ariel in "Tempest" right now. And while I'm absolutely loving the experience because we have a great cast and great director, writing-wise, I absolutely agree with you. The structure of the show is seriously defective. How is anyone supposed to pay attention to 13-pages of exposition all front-loaded?! Then the ending just falls in drive and energy like whoa and the audience falls asleep again. I think we've found ways to be entertaining, but most of the text is seriously (and unusually for WS) performance-dependent rather than inherently dynamic.

Did I mention, Trinculo, Caliban and Stephano are the only ones with immediately tangible, character-driven dialogue! (Lucky bastards!) (...Okay, okay, Ferdy and Miranda, but as previously stated, they're a bit... loverlike ;-) ) Everything else can be made character-driven with varying degrees of effort, but... man. I'm pretty good at memorizing lines, and metered Classical more easily than contemporary because it's more like a song; but I had the damndest time with my lines as Ariel because it's all procedural!! We found the character stuff, but... I guess Shakespeare tends to spoil us by handing us so much on a platter without the usual "how do I make this make sense?" part of the acting process. With "Tempest" one really does have to start making stuff up to make the characters come alive.

What I do like about the show is how each character set, and each scene, is smack out of a different one of his plays, in references, subject matter, even pace and tone. I like drifting through scenes and finding myself walking from "Lear" to "As You Like It" to "Midsummer". And yes, the language itself is beautiful. (Though surely that makes it more of a poem than a play...)

Hehe, like some other comments, we have some gender-switching going on: Ariel, Sebastian (Sebastienne), Gonzalo, and Trinculo are wimminz. I absolutely agree: it adds so much to some of the scenes (esp. Sebastienne/Antonio) and sometimes seems like it couldn't possibly have been played any other way (Trinculo/Stephano-"If thou'rt Stephano touch me!" / "Thy lordship shall have it!" / "I swim like a duck I'll be sworn!" "Thou'rt more like a goose!" ::gooses her:: "Ohoho!! Stephano! Hast any more of this?" "The whole butt, man!!" <-Yes, yes, I know they're talking about the liquor, but it just works so well when they're not...)

[lareinenoire]

Oh, I know. Double-entendres all over the place! It was a play that was quite fun to perform, but every time I've tried to read it, it just sort of lies flat.

And I'd have loved to see your take on Katherine!