Equivocation
1:30 am 43 degrees
Bill Cain is not Marc Norman or Tom Stoppard. He's not Arthur Miller either, and I'm pretty sure the problem with Equivocation is that he wants to be all of them.
The Seattle Rep production of Equivocation is the same one that premiered at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, though apparently with some cuts and rewrites. That's pretty standard these days, but I feel confident in believing that what we saw on stage tonight really is what the author intended us to see, and indeed, presented in its most polished form yet. This forces me to believe that, if we saw what Cain wanted us to see, then Cain didn't know what he wanted to write.
Broadly, the play follows imagined events of late 1605 and 1606, as the final Gunpowder Plot conspirators are being rounded up and executed, when Sir Robert Cecil approaches William Shagspeare (the spelling used in the play, presumably to make shortening it to "Shag" logical and, well, it's the least of the sins) about writing a stage version of the Plot's official account. Mayhem ensues. We go through several attempts as Shag uncovers holes in the "official" story, interviews and becomes emotionally involved with some of the conspirators, and tries to deal with both the separate interests and personalities within his acting company and with his emotionally dead relationship with his daughter Judith, who's in London with him for some reason.
This could have Shakespeare in Love about Macbeth, it could have been The Crucible with the Gunpowder Plot ham-handedly standing in for 9/11 instead of McCarthyism, or it could have been about the relationships among the actors and their families in difficult times, but it wasn't. It tried to be all of these things and succeeded in being none of them.
The play touches on the volatile times, the struggle between incompatible loyalties to religion and the crown, the difficulties of living in a suspicious and authoritarian state, all without really dealing with any of those things or giving them any context. Michael Wood makes an excellent point that one of Shakespeare's great strengths as a writer is his ability to portray right on both sides of an argument. Richard III not withstanding, Shakespeare generally reserved his cartoon villains for his comedies and kept his histories more balanced. Cain does not even attempt this.
I mention The Crucible. I really enjoy that play. I shouldn't, considering how I feel about didactic art, but I do, and I enjoy it because you can watch that show and see a story of abused power and suspicion and damning pride and forgiveness that comes too late, and it's beautifully done. If you happen to know about the period and why Miller wrote it as he did, that only adds to the experience, but you can have the experience without that knowledge. Equivocation lacks that quality.
I enjoyed the performance. I thought the cast was quite good, and the technical execution perfectly fine. (I occasionally had moments of complaint - "Why isn't he lit, dammit?" - but they were few and minor.) J________ and I talked, both during intermission and after the show, and she's pretty firmly of the opinion that the play is written for a very particular audience: one with sufficient play-going savvy to understand and follow the rapid changes of scene and setting with virtually no or minimal changes on stage, one familiar enough with King Lear and Macbeth to make the thematic connections between them and the other relationships on stage, and one either unfamiliar enough with the time period to not understand the writing's historical problems or simply willing to remove historical context from what is ostensibly a historical piece in the interests of making a point. She's right. There's nice bits here and knowing winks that are funny to Shakespeare/theatre people, but we listened to people at intermission who were completely at sea, and that's not good writing.
There's an argument to be made that the play is, as the billing says, about telling the truth in difficult times, about Shag finding a way to tell the truth of things through Macbeth without coming right out and saying it (he equivocates), but frankly, that's not what I saw on stage. What I saw was, over and over again, people saying that "truth" isn't and can't be in "stories", that Shakespeare's other plays lack it and that he wants one that's "true". That's a lie.
What I saw on stage was a show so desperate for the audience to get a particular message that it damn near winked at us. If Cain had been honest, he would have stipulated that Robert Cecil's last speech break the fourth. Any pretense that this is a story and not an essay dies right there. Stories reveal truth to us by putting honestly-drawn human beings up before our eyes (holding the mirror up, something the play mentions more than once and first dismisses and then uses as an argument against art revealing any truth) and letting us take from the story what we need to take. Anyone producing something just to make a point is missing the point.
And really, I think, this is the problem: Cain is trying to make a point. If he'd quit trying to "say" something and just tell us the story, he might have succeeded.
Bill Cain is not Marc Norman or Tom Stoppard. He's not Arthur Miller either, and I'm pretty sure the problem with Equivocation is that he wants to be all of them.
The Seattle Rep production of Equivocation is the same one that premiered at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, though apparently with some cuts and rewrites. That's pretty standard these days, but I feel confident in believing that what we saw on stage tonight really is what the author intended us to see, and indeed, presented in its most polished form yet. This forces me to believe that, if we saw what Cain wanted us to see, then Cain didn't know what he wanted to write.
Broadly, the play follows imagined events of late 1605 and 1606, as the final Gunpowder Plot conspirators are being rounded up and executed, when Sir Robert Cecil approaches William Shagspeare (the spelling used in the play, presumably to make shortening it to "Shag" logical and, well, it's the least of the sins) about writing a stage version of the Plot's official account. Mayhem ensues. We go through several attempts as Shag uncovers holes in the "official" story, interviews and becomes emotionally involved with some of the conspirators, and tries to deal with both the separate interests and personalities within his acting company and with his emotionally dead relationship with his daughter Judith, who's in London with him for some reason.
This could have Shakespeare in Love about Macbeth, it could have been The Crucible with the Gunpowder Plot ham-handedly standing in for 9/11 instead of McCarthyism, or it could have been about the relationships among the actors and their families in difficult times, but it wasn't. It tried to be all of these things and succeeded in being none of them.
The play touches on the volatile times, the struggle between incompatible loyalties to religion and the crown, the difficulties of living in a suspicious and authoritarian state, all without really dealing with any of those things or giving them any context. Michael Wood makes an excellent point that one of Shakespeare's great strengths as a writer is his ability to portray right on both sides of an argument. Richard III not withstanding, Shakespeare generally reserved his cartoon villains for his comedies and kept his histories more balanced. Cain does not even attempt this.
I mention The Crucible. I really enjoy that play. I shouldn't, considering how I feel about didactic art, but I do, and I enjoy it because you can watch that show and see a story of abused power and suspicion and damning pride and forgiveness that comes too late, and it's beautifully done. If you happen to know about the period and why Miller wrote it as he did, that only adds to the experience, but you can have the experience without that knowledge. Equivocation lacks that quality.
I enjoyed the performance. I thought the cast was quite good, and the technical execution perfectly fine. (I occasionally had moments of complaint - "Why isn't he lit, dammit?" - but they were few and minor.) J________ and I talked, both during intermission and after the show, and she's pretty firmly of the opinion that the play is written for a very particular audience: one with sufficient play-going savvy to understand and follow the rapid changes of scene and setting with virtually no or minimal changes on stage, one familiar enough with King Lear and Macbeth to make the thematic connections between them and the other relationships on stage, and one either unfamiliar enough with the time period to not understand the writing's historical problems or simply willing to remove historical context from what is ostensibly a historical piece in the interests of making a point. She's right. There's nice bits here and knowing winks that are funny to Shakespeare/theatre people, but we listened to people at intermission who were completely at sea, and that's not good writing.
There's an argument to be made that the play is, as the billing says, about telling the truth in difficult times, about Shag finding a way to tell the truth of things through Macbeth without coming right out and saying it (he equivocates), but frankly, that's not what I saw on stage. What I saw was, over and over again, people saying that "truth" isn't and can't be in "stories", that Shakespeare's other plays lack it and that he wants one that's "true". That's a lie.
What I saw on stage was a show so desperate for the audience to get a particular message that it damn near winked at us. If Cain had been honest, he would have stipulated that Robert Cecil's last speech break the fourth. Any pretense that this is a story and not an essay dies right there. Stories reveal truth to us by putting honestly-drawn human beings up before our eyes (holding the mirror up, something the play mentions more than once and first dismisses and then uses as an argument against art revealing any truth) and letting us take from the story what we need to take. Anyone producing something just to make a point is missing the point.
And really, I think, this is the problem: Cain is trying to make a point. If he'd quit trying to "say" something and just tell us the story, he might have succeeded.