Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity

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Production photo for Macbeth
Lady Macbeth (Amy Kim Waschke) has ambitious hopes for her husband, as do the “weird sisters” (Robin Goodrin Nordli, Miriam A. Laube). Photo by Jenny Graham.
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Production photo As You Like It
View Full Image with Credit Duke Frederick (Kevin Kenerly, far right) turns his repressive ire on Oliver de Boys (Shaun Taylor-Corbett). Also pictured: MacGregor Arney and James Ryen. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Production photo As You Like It
Duke Frederick (Kevin Kenerly, far right) turns his repressive ire on Oliver de Boys (Shaun Taylor-Corbett). Also pictured: MacGregor Arney and James Ryen. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Production photo As You Like It
View Full Image with Credit Celia (Kate Hurster) and Rosalind (Jessica Ko) are on high alert in the Forest of Arden. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Production photo As You Like It
Celia (Kate Hurster) and Rosalind (Jessica Ko) are on high alert in the Forest of Arden. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Production photo All's Well That Ends Well
View Full Image with Credit Helen (Royer Bockus) enlists Diana (Brooke Ishibashi) and Diana’s widowed mother (Lauren Modica) in her efforts to win Bertram. Photos by Jenny Graham.
Production photo All's Well That Ends Well
Helen (Royer Bockus) enlists Diana (Brooke Ishibashi) and Diana’s widowed mother (Lauren Modica) in her efforts to win Bertram. Photos by Jenny Graham.

Thematic threads connect the 2019 Shakespeare plays

The current season is one of change for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. OSF has appointed a new artistic director, is piloting a new community-hosted experience, and is offering a re-envisioned season calendar, all while recovering from the profound impact of last summer’s wildfires and at a time of deep political strain. But the more things change, the more they stay the same, and what is unfailing at OSF is a commitment to impactful and relevant Shakespeare. The plays of Shakespeare continue to shed light on our collective humanity, and it seems now is a great time for a reminder from Shakespeare that “sweet are the uses of adversity.” (Duke Senior, As You Like It).

At first glance the 2019 Shakespeare plays may not seem thematically linked: In what ways could the romantic comedy As You Like It, the “problem play” All’s Well That Ends Well, and the wildly popular (if not quite the bloodiest) tragedy Macbeth be connected? In these politically charged worlds, the loss of a parent or child spurs the characters to action; each play makes the personal political, delving into legacy, lineage, power and the patriarchy. And all three plays comment on gender through dynamic and determined female characters.

It is in As You Like It that the exiled Duke Senior speaks directly of adversity as she and her band of followers brave the forest of Arden. Director Rosa Joshi (Henry V, 2018) returns to direct what she says is a play “about a search for our authentic selves.” While sharing many comic motifs with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night—cross-dressing, separation, reunion, unrequited devotion, love (romantic, fraternal, paternal), and the notion that courtly behavior and identity can be cast aside in the natural world—As You Like It stands apart from its fellows. As You Like It juxtaposes courtly manners with rustic behavior. This culture clash, if you will, forces characters to assume a new role, abandon an old one and don a disguise or mask.

One of Shakespeare’s oft-repeated lines, “All the world’s a stage,” is taken from As You Like It, reminding us that the play is exploring the nature of performance. “We lose who we are, but we also discover ourselves through that,” Joshi says.

Rosalind’s transformation, in particular, is what moves Joshi, who describes directing As You Like It as “going into this story about this young woman who feels trapped and is suffocating in the patriarchal world. Someone who’s lost their immediate family— in our version, has lost her mother to exile—who’s torn between loyalties.” Rosalind “takes on a persona of a male, thinking it will give her some power,” Joshi continues. “She becomes a man because she’s seen that give people autonomy and power, and I’m fascinated by that exploration.”

Upon leaving court, Rosalind and Celia rename themselves, with Celia choosing “Aliena,” claiming that it is “something that hath a reference to my state.” Not only will these women be foreign to the Forest of Arden, they will be unknown to themselves; they will be without the entitlements and the restrictions of women at court. This state of being alien seems to align well with Jaques’s notion that “all the people in their time play many parts,” and this state of evolution leaves the door wide open for Joshi’s imagining of Arden.

“It feels like a breath, that you take a breath,” Joshi says. “I don’t think the story is that you go there and suddenly it’s all different. It’s a journey. There’s a development that happens to the characters in Arden. So, it’s not that the place completely transforms them, it’s that the place allows them to find themselves.” Joshi hopes this production “feels both timeless and for our time” as she brings her own unique sense of ensemble and play to Arden.

Director José Luis Valenzuela (Destiny of Desire, 2018) is staging a visceral and dangerous Macbeth that he also describes as “timeless,” believing “we can see ourselves where we are right now” in the play. Valenzuela has a strong point of view about the Macbeths, envisioning them as a couple without surviving offspring, fueling an attempt “to kill all of those children of families who may take over the kingdom—trying to destroy that legacy, so those new generations will not be able to take over the world that he finds himself in.”

Valenzuela sees the loss of the Macbeths’ own child as their primary impetus for action in this play. “I’ll begin with the funeral of Macbeth’s child,” he says, “to understand that he has no legacy, to understand what they have lost. Part of that journey that he’s taking, that they’re both taking, is because of the risks that there is no more legacy there for them.”

Ambition is typically thought to be the primary issue in the play. Given Valenzuela’s approach, it could be argued that Lady Macbeth is the most ambitious, far surpassing her husband and his desires for advancement. What she desires is the ability to behave male, have male power and to not be hindered by the notions of womanhood (political, physical and emotional weakness).

Like Rosalind, Lady Macbeth feels imposed limitations on her as a woman and recognizes the agency that comes with manhood. She rather blatantly acknowledges this with a prayer of invocation: “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe topful / Of direst cruelty!” Through this conjuring of unknown supernatural powers, she disavows her femininity, which she feels has the obligation of not being cruel. This ambition is about more than advancement of rank, title, class, wealth or power. Lady Macbeth seeks a complete redefining of the self, the implication being that by ridding herself of her female sensibility, her masculine self will emerge. This will not only allow her to be complicit in her husband’s exploits, but his equal and, quite possibly, the better man.

Lady Macbeth’s ideas of masculinity are so clear that she challenges Macbeth’s manhood, calling him a coward for shying away from the thing he claims to want most. His reply, “I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none,” is met with her assertion: “When you durst do it, then you were a man / And to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man.”

Lady M “dares do more” and believes that “to be more than what you were,” is the end game. In their partnership, where he submits, she drives on, admonishing him with “Infirm of purpose . . . My hands are of your color but I shame / To wear a heart so white,” not heeding Macbeth’s advice that a man knows his limits and does not cross certain lines even at the height of ambition. Valenzuela notes the delicious challenge this presents for the actors. “I’m asking for lots of emotional insight into the characters. It’s so complex, and emotionally difficult—she comes in, and you love her, she’s your wife, and she takes away your manhood.” And it’s important to Valenzuela that we go on Macbeth’s journey, that we witness him “make the decision to kill—he’s not a killer, he’s a hero, [that] is the antithesis of being a killer.”

As with all Shakespeare comedies, All’s Well That Ends Well concerns itself with the union of lovers in marriage. However, director Tracy Young (A Wrinkle in Time, 2014) warns us that this is a “complicated love story.” Not easily labeled a romantic comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well defies genre and has been categorized as one of Shakespeare’s problem plays. On the surface, Helen is the definitive female character: moral, the picture of feminine virtue and monogamous. This is quite the opposite of Bertram, who is lewd and carnal. However, Helen is not entirely without these urges, often gendered, recognizing in herself the struggle between chastity and lust.

It is not entirely certain if all really is well. Maybe what has been perceived as a “problem” is a strikingly contradictory female character who breaks conventions of gender. Is Helen virtuous or manipulative? Can we even use such distinctions to analyze her? It seems this protagonist is a complex character. Young reminds us that “she tricks him into getting her pregnant . . . How dreadful! Why would anyone do that?”

Young finds the play completely relatable, however. “I think this is a very relatable thing for a lot of people, especially a lot of women, this question of why do we give our power away? Why do we struggle so hard to validate ourselves and our strengths? Why are we so conditioned to put someone else’s merits—to project all this onto somebody else, and give them all of the power to validate who we are?”

In her sexual pursuit, disguising herself to take Bertram as her lover, Helen poses a threat to the social order. Her love for Bertram leads to the “bed trick” that is central to the plot. “That’s really interesting to me,” Young notes, “and it’s painful to witness in the play. It’s not a feel-good situation. And, in fact, I think, as in so much of Shakespeare, but particularly with this play, it’s quite a modern sensibility.”

Helen’s bold pursuit of Bertram reveals that she is not concerned with the fact that her love is unrequited. She possesses a sense of entitlement that is rooted in her ideas of manhood, believing that men are driven by sex and do not discern one woman from another. “But O, strange men, / That can such sweet use make of what they hate, / When saucy trusting of the cozened thoughts / Defiles the pitchy night; so lust doth play / With what it loathes, for that which is away.”

With the audience’s complicity, Helen exploits Bertram’s weakness and wins him. This hardly has to do with romantic love, and even Bertram’s ultimate concession rests on a wager. Near the play’s end, Helen must still prove that she has, in fact, procured the family ring and bears Bertram’s child.

“This play, in its complication, and I would argue, intentional irony contained in that title—this question of, this interrogation of all’s well that ends well,” Young points out, is a perfect rumination for our time.

Young speaks of the play as being “then and now,” and that seems to be the sentiment of both Joshi and Valenzuela as well. All three productions seek to illuminate our own time by using Shakespeare’s words, themes and idiosyncratic characters. Independent of one another, these directors each spoke of patriarchy, of powerful women, of finding, falling in or stoking the flames of love. So while wildly different, these Shakespeare plays, at OSF in 2019, will no doubt be “our Shakespeare.”

 

Find tickets and information at As You Like It, All's Well That Ends Well and Macbeth.