Italics are mine

Shakespeare's "Henry V"

I'm currently working on a project related to Shakespeare's play "Henry V" (which came as a surprise even to myself, given that I'd been working on something else and had been underwhelmed by the one production of "Henry V" I have seen, at the Folger a few years ago, but I'd been stuck with the other thing and when I started writing up that new idea -- I'm tempted to say it was in Denver a few weeks ago -- I basically couldn't write fast enough, a sure sign I should keep going). I've had a bad week and writing about this makes me feel better... but I have some very good things on the horizon, in the not so distant future in fact, and the best about this new project is that I'm writing again the way I want and not the way I should, so I feel again like my 20-year-old college self back in Paris, happy to type and type and type some more - just me and the computer in a light-filled room.

I'm not giving details for now about the storyline, except to say it's set in the present time, but the Shakespeare play itself is known as a "band of brothers" type of play with a reflection on war, especially its senselessness and futility. Henry V has blood on his hands, and the Chorus at the very end of the play lets the audience know his son (Henry VI) lost hard-won France in a subsequent conflict after Henry V's death at age thirty-five. Of course the director gets to decide how much emphasis he wants to put on those points, and the 1944 movie adaptation led by Sir Laurence Olivier ended up as a patriotic take on the old tale at a difficult time for the British troops fighting the Nazis. But a 1964 production by the Royal Shakespeare Theater was clearly anti-war (the first anti-war production to do so, although it was based in the UK, so I'm not sure how much the Vietnam conflict informed the director's stance. I would love to see a production set in the Vietnam of the 1960s, for instance Chu Lai in 1965 - a battle won by the US troops, although we know how the conflict as a whole ended.)

Nowadays it is not rare to see a production set in modern-day US, either with actors in military gear or in modern clothes, with obvious parallels with conflicts involving the military, but many productions also prefer a timeless look or period costumes. I regret not being able to see "Henry V" in the Prague Shakespeare Theatre production that was shown in Prague and also in Houston. I've heard it was remarkable, and had the added feature to double- and triple-cast most actors in roles from both sides, showing the randomness of war.

Below I've posted short videos of the Crispin Day's speech (where Henry V rallies his troops, and where he uses the famous expression "we band of brothers" that has been so widely used since) in various productions and movie adaptations of the play.

Richard Burton's speech was recorded in 1951 (uploaded on YouTube by stevewasso). While it is only available in audio, I hope you'll agree the monologue is quite remarkable. No wonder Burton was a star.

The best-known movie adaptations of "Henry V" date from 1944 (Laurence Olivier, YouTube video uploaded by Robert Hicks) and 1989 (Kenneth Branagh, YouTube video uploaded by technicalmark). Enjoy those speeches.

There is also a good BBC made-for-TV movie called "Hollow Crown". I have included below the Saint Crispin's Day Speech from that movie (YouTube video uploaded by PBS).

Sometimes I wish that video recordings existed of productions I would have loved to see, but of course theater is not something you should watch on a TV screen. If you don't experience it in a performance hall, is it really theater? The excerpts above, though, help highlight the nuances in each actor's take on the famous speech, and make the case that each production or movie adaptation brings something unique to the large body of Shakespeare plays.

Martha Graham in "Creating Minds"

(Picture credit: Amazon.com) I recently read "Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi" by Howard Gardner. My favorite chapter in this excellent book, besides the conclusion - which summarizes the profile of creative minds, myself included, so compellingly - was the one about dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Each chapter describes the life of a key creative person and analyzes how his or her creativity came about and was sustained (or not) over a lifetime. The book provides the important reminder that creativity comes at a cost: if people spend a lot of time creating dance or music or painting, they may have to neglect other things, such as friendships or perhaps even relationships with one's children. I'm not sure it is a choice creative artists make, because Picasso or Graham most likely didn't feel they had a choice: instead, they felt they had to express themselves. But it is good to be reminded that true creative people, who shape or perhaps revolutionize their field, do not have the life of typical people, with the house and the car and the kids. One-of-a-kind contributions go hand-in-hand with one-of-a-kind lives, and sometimes extraordinary contributions require very staid, structured, inordinately boring private lives that allow them to bring their creative output to the world.

(Picture credit: Amazon.com) Graham wasn't one of those staid and inordinately boring folks, though. She was an inspiring pioneer whose work continues to shape dance today, and if you are interested in learning more about her I recommend "Martha Graham Dance on Film" in the Criterion Collection. I bought it shortly after reading the chapter on Graham in Gardner's book. For years I'd heard the name of Martha Graham mentioned around me and never cared to look into her life in more details - and when I did I had to ask myself what had taken me so long. Gardner's book briefly touches upon Graham's relationships with composer & pianist Louis Horst and dancer Erick Hawkins (her only husband, although she didn't remain married to him long), but the Criterion movie fleshes out her life with far more details. Gardner is mostly interested in Graham's work and creativity, with the "American" period and the "Greek" period and the conflicts she had with her dancers. Unique among the creative types profiled, Graham also had others to lead while she produced her art through the dance company that bore her name.

Among the many anecdotes about Graham in Gardner's book, I was most fascinated about the account of her aging: her difficulty in accepting it was time for her to stop dancing (she was in her 70s at the time, I believe), her bout of alcoholism and finally her renewal at the helm of her company before her death at 96.

Below is a video of the beginning of Appalachian Spring, which she dances. The music is by Aaron Copland and the setting is by Isamu Noguchi.

"The Painter" by Peter Heller

When the latest Francine Prose book proved so awful (poorly written, trite dialogue, uninteresting characters, a waste of money, and the good reviews only show that the book publishing industry is a very cosy business) that I didn't want to keep reading - didn't even want to bother taking the book back with me in my space-constrained carry-on, in fact - and found myself without a book for the plane rides back east from Southern California, I made my way to the amazing open-air Bart's Books in Ojai and got, in a completely different genre, "The Painter" by Peter Heller. With that book I had a different problem: it was so good I finished it right before I boarded the red-eye from San Francisco to Newark.

The story, in a nutshell, is that the narrator, a painter (the rugged individualist type, not the sensitive soul type) moved to Taos, NM after the death of his teenage daughter - and only child - in a drug deal gone bad and gets in trouble when he punches a poacher he finds beating a little horse on a day he's out flyfishing. Later he runs into the poacher again and kills him, which triggers a manhunt led by the poacher's brother and an acolyte through the Santa Fe and Taos region. (Earlier the man served one year in state prison for shooting at a man who had insinuated he'd do certain things to the man's daughter, when she was still alive, and had apparently escaped jail for similar charges before, so the narrator has a history of violence he can't control when he thinks it's for a good cause.) There's also a romance with the woman who serves as a model for his paintings, and some digressions about the paintings themselves, but really what kept me reading was the storyline about the manhunt.

In fact, what kept me reading is the voice of the narrator telling us about the manhunt, a voice that grabs you and don't let you go until you've reached the end, although I will admit I skipped some of the paragraphs about paintings and other digressions that interrupted the flow of the story. I rarely find a novel that is truly a page-turner, although the expression is overused in the industry, and while Heller unabashedly uses all the tricks to gear his story toward the widest-possible audience (is it a New York Times bestseller yet?) -- combining the art scene of New Mexico with a flyfishing, tough guy, violence (a murder) with sensitiveness (for the daughter and the little horse), a touch of love (for the model) with lots of brotherhood stuff (his helping out his neighbor when the brother of the dead poacher sets fire to the neighbor's barn where the little horse is recovering, he giving a painting to the acolyte for their first meeting and later saving the acolyte's life) -- sometimes you just have to enjoy a good read, even when - don't let yourself be fooled by the Knopf logo - it is determinedly commercial fiction.

I loved the voice of the narrator, who has for once a voice that doesn't sound like a million other people's voices - he tends to speak in fragments, just like when you speak to someone and correct yourself mid-sentence or talk and talk and talk as if you hadn't spoken to someone in a while. The book is a bit "over the top" at times - Heller clearly wants the book to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster and pre-chewed the scenes for the screenwriters, with very strong visual elements, especially during the shooting at the collector's house and the car chase scenes, which basically scream "make a movie out of me!" 

And frankly, worse things would happen than turning this book into a movie: it is a beautiful story, a little too clean-cut but perfect for Hollywood where the good characters are never too flawed and the bad ones never have too many redeeming qualities. Thankfully, Heller manages to stay on the right side of caricature, and he delivers what should be one of the best and most spellbinding novels of the season. Five stars out of five.

Brooklyn Rider playing Beethoven Op 131 7th mvt

In Ojai, I had the opportunity to discover the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, a group of four young-ish Brooklyn musicians who play mostly modern repertoire (with some incursions in the classics, such as the video below). They emerged on the musical scene in 2008 with Passport - I am the proud new owner of that one and Seven Steps - and are also associated with the amazing chamber orchestra The Knights. Brooklyn Rider was chosen in 2010 to take part in the SXSW festival and in 2011 to record quartets by Philip Glass. Brooklyn Rider is currently accompanying famed banjo artist Bela Fleck in music festivals throughout North America following the release of The Impostor CD. You can hear the full Beethoven quartet Op 131 on Seven Steps. 

Travels

Got back yesterday from Southern California - went to the Ojai Music Festival (will have to write a post about that too) and used the opportunity to also visit Santa Barbara. It was a very good week, very resting and peaceful - by the last day my mind was amazingly calm as if I'd done a really long meditation or silent retreat, which was not the purpose of this trip at all, but nature has that effect on me. Overall, though, I think just about everything is California is overpriced and of course as soon as I got back to B'lem I fell back into my bad habits - I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something, and I know what it is... I left SBA with the strong motivation to go back to southwestern Utah and New Mexico (Santa Fe, and I hope to get up to Taos this time), because the things I liked about the Santa Barbara/Ojai trip were things I had found in those previous travels a few years back. Maybe next summer, or perhaps the spring/summer after that. This coming year I plan to mostly take short weekend trips through New England since I'll be on sabbatical there, so big travels will probably wait until later.

Anyway, I got into some interesting conversations during the trip, and one of them was about gratitude not only for those travels (being able to go on those trips) but for what makes them possible, my current job. And as I near the 10-year mark at the university where I work, which is in an area that is most definitely not a good fit for me, with a lot of people who are not a good fit for me either, I do feel enormous gratitude for picking a job that has made my writing and my travels possible, instead of a job at a place where I would have had to work non-stop at writing papers no one reads or a place that wouldn't pay me enough for me to travel when classes are not in session. I think this is exactly the job I needed after graduate school, because it has made possible, over ten years, (frequent trips to) NYC, DC and Philadelphia, my two books, the two blogs and two month-long trips to Paris, the paintings, in addition to one-time or two-time trips to Santa Fe, Aspen, Seattle, Marlboro (Vermont), St George (Utah), Denver, San Francisco, and perhaps more I forget. Those have been good ten years. So yes as I'm getting ready to move back to Massachusetts for my sabbatical, I am grateful for the job that allowed it all to happen.

High drama at the Comedie-Francaise

Where do I even begin? The administrator of the French state theater company, Comedie-Francaise, is up for reappointment in August after eight years at the helm. The backstabbing and level of political intrigue going on are worthy of a bad novel, which will only be surprising to people who don't know the appeal of power. I spend a fair amount of my time in Washington, DC, so it turns out I have a very good idea of how attractive power can be. I don't have a lot of time to write this post due to other commitments so you'll have to forgive me for not developing all the ideas as much as I'd normally do - it'll be a "stream of consciousness" post a la James Joyce - but I still wanted to share my thoughts about what's going on or at least provide the perspective of a French person reading French newspapers online from the East Coast in the US. 

First, the lady-administrator. I don't know how things were before her appointment because I didn't follow French theater for many years, but when I returned to Paris in 2012 I was impressed by all the events that try to establish a connection between actors and audience, in particular "Ecole d'acteur" (a monthly program where an actor, in conversation with a radio journalist, shares some key moments in his or her artistic development). All performing arts organizations nowadays talk about audience engagement, but the Comedie-Francaise, with its resident troupe, its three theaters in Paris and its productions just about every day of the week, is in a unique position to bring audience engagement to a whole new level -- especially in conjunction with well-publicized movie projects by some of the actors that may turn them into household names among a large section of the general public. It seems that a few male actors get a lot of "interest" from the 16-to-30-years-old female segment, and perhaps they'd prefer to talk about Moliere rather than receiving tweets from teenage girls with crushes on them, but as social media evolves, this sort of thing may hopefully become less prevalent than, say, live-tweeting by an actor about a role that matters to him or her. So I'll give the administrator credit for starting or continuing this trend of helping build connections between audiences and performers. 

She's also come under fire for her highly publicized marriage in her late forties to a TV personality. Apparently some members of the troupe have resented her for that, which (seen from the US where massive coverage of public figures' personal life is much more common) doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's my solution to that problem: don't read Voici, don't read Gala (the equivalent to People magazine and the like) and you won't know that she appears in their pages with her husband. And the clincher: an anonymous actor reproaches her to want to change her name, engraved in marble alongside that of other administrators, to add her husband's name to her maiden name. Basically, she wants the name in the marble to be her new legal name. This is apparently a terrible, terrible offense. I'm not kidding. The conversation has officially reached the basement level, but the good news is, it can only improve from there. Only based on what has been written in the papers, it sounds like some actors want to tell her how to run her life in the way they find appropriate, and the bottom line is, it's her life not theirs and she gets to run it the way she pleases. Besides, with sharks like that,  I can see how she might have felt she'd never find anyone worth spending her life with before she met the TV personality. She found love late and she's happy about it. Can't people just let her be?

This being said, I'm singularly unimpressed by some of her comments and a lot of the productions created under her watch in recent years (unimpressed is a kind word), especially anything from English-speaking playwrights: Tennessee Williams and A Tramway named Desire, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream, the latter directed by the administrator herself. I haven't seen them, but I've seen pictures, and given all the productions I've seen in the US it doesn't take me long to make a judgment on what this or that new production of an English-speaking playwright will contribute in light of its many predecessors. I can't do that for Moliere or Corneille, but I can do it for Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare without hesitation. Sure, audiences may like those productions (especially if one of the male heartthrobs plays in them), but French audiences won't have seen as many Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare productions, for instance, than their American counterparts. In some cases the only reason they find a recent staging good has to be that they've never seen what good in that case was supposed to look like. I'm thinking in particular about one of the Shakespeare productions, but I will refrain from saying which one.

If I had to hold one thing against the administrator, though, I'd make it her statement that she had asked senior actors (societaires) to direct plays because of budget cuts, although they had directed very few or no plays before. You don't ever want to say something like that. It creates obvious problems of legitimacy and credibility in front of the peers the societaires-directors are supposed to direct. Instead, you want to say something like: "So-and-so has very interesting ideas about this play, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he/she comes up with." If the issue is budget cuts, you make sure the budget cuts are translated into something visible (say, no new costume, and the stage set is one table and one chair in all the scenes) and you also make sure the audiences notice it and you encourage them to complain to elected officials. If the goal is to help societaires gain new skills, which would be a perfectly fine developmental goal, you help them try their hand at directing theater students, for instance - you don't put them in charge of a new production in the national theater. It's just asking for trouble, from directors who spend 100% of their career in the job and don't want newcomers to think it's easy (because it's not), from actors who want to grow and be challenged by veteran directors, from the critics who have a key complaint to make even if they'd have found the play absolutely fine if they hadn't been told. From the administrator of the national troupe, this comes as incredibly naive.

While we're on the topic of naive, nothing beats the societaires sending a letter to the culture minister (basically, their boss's boss) asking her not to reappoint the administrator... and some of them apparently not expecting the letter to be leaked. First, never tell your boss's boss what to do. Present the facts and let him/her reach the conclusion for himself/herself. Second, if you don't want the letter to be leaked, you can bet someone else will (want it to be leaked), and whoever is aware of the letter will know who that is and which side to take to leverage his/her knowledge to maximum effect. That's basic politics. It also makes the societaires look petty and mean-spirited, given the content of the letter that ended up online. (Of course, you also have to keep in mind that some of the journalists may have their opinion of who would be the most deserving candidate, and may reframe what they know to put their favorite candidate under the best light.)

Also, I hope that whoever ends up getting the administrator's job (although for me it'd make sense if it was E.Ruf, since external candidates tend to be more successful in periods of high crisis, the Comedie-Francaise - with excellent attendance records - is definitely not in crisis, and Ruf has proved extremely talented in all the endeavors he's put his mind to over the past 20 years) helps actors find better movie opportunities. Things may change with the mediatization of the YSL movie, in which YSL is played by one of the heartthrobs mentioned above, but in the past I don't think the movie roles offered to Comedie-Francaise stage actors have done their talent justice, and I don't see the point of a stage actor known for his/her amazing leading roles in Chekhov or Racine embarrassing himself or herself on camera for third-rate movies that deserve to be forgotten but, in this age of YouTube and Vimeo, may forever remain, at least in fragments, on the Internet while the actors' best roles on stage are only distant memories in the mind of the lucky few who saw those actors back in the days.

Finally, I think some of the junior actors [pensionnaires] are singularly underused (no one wants to join the Comedie-Francaise to only play the third guard or any role that has no name), and I hope the next administrator will create developmental plans for them outlining what skills they should gain to be promoted to societaires, and committing to giving them the opportunities for them to grow. It occurs to me that being administrator of the Comedie-Francaise is very similar, in a way, to being a professor in a US research university, with doctoral students to mentor and advise while they stretch to reach the next level. You take the heat for your students or actors, you don't let them fall flat on their face if they take more than they can chew or do something stupid, you back them up in public no matter what and you have their best interests at heart so that they can become all that they can be. It's really not that complicated, but it's not for everybody. 

I'd write more but I really don't have time for this at the moment. I wrote too much already.

Reading "The (Stage) Director's Voice", vol 2

I got "The Director's Voice" at the Shakespeare Theatre Company the first time I saw Henry IV Part 1 (because yes, there was a second time, I loved that play too much not to go and see it again) - there was a volume 1 published about 20 years ago, and this volume (volume 2) adds a series of 20 interviews with today's best theater directors in the United States, including Michael Kahn, who directed Henry IV Part 1, and Julie Taymor, who no longer needs to be introduced (an enormously successful The Lion King, aka Hamlet with animals, and a controversial Spider Man on Broadway, more recently an acclaimed Midsummer Night's Dream at the Theater for a New Audience that is now being made into a movie, in addition to movies such as Frida - she was the first woman ever to win a Tony for Best Director of a Musical, and the visuals of her productions are always stunning. The woman doesn't dream small, that's for sure. With all that she still finds the time for sculpture and painting. Can you tell I admire her enormously, controversy and all?) Each interview is preceded by a profile - usually extremely positive - of the director by the book editor to provide context and summarize his or her career.

What I like most about the book in general is the fact that the interviews are truly informative, and the answers are not generic or shallow. You can't read an answer and think "so-and-so in that other chapter could have said the exact same thing." What I liked most about the Kahn interview is that Kahn has patched together so many different activities, standing at the helm of multiple theater institutions in different cities at the same time (and doing a good job at it, instead of neglecting one and perhaps all of them), leading the drama school at Juilliard in New York City until 2006 and the Shakespeare Theater Company in DC since 1986. (The book editor states: "When I met him, Kahn had homes in DC and Connecticut as well as an apartment near Lincoln Center; it wasn't unusual for him to teach in New York in the morning and rehearse a play in DC in the evening." In recent years, however, Kahn has solely focused on the Shakespeare Theatre Company, which has thrived under his leadership.) As for Taymor's interview, I loved the parts about Taymor's youth and how her four years in Indonesia have informed her creativity and her stage work through novel forms of storytelling such as stage puppets, among other things. I also enjoyed reading her take about the differences between theater productions and movies, since she is also an accomplished movie-maker, and her use of stage "ideographs" to better convey the core of a play. It comes as no surprise that Taymor received a 1991 MacArthur "genius" fellowship, years before she even premiered The Lion King. I haven't read all the other interviews yet, but the ones by Mark Brokaw and Oskar Eustis were particularly informative.

Below is the video of Taymor's TED talk on "Spider-man, the Lion King and life on the creative edge."

Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 in DC

(Photo credit: washingtonpost.com) I have a new favorite play, and that is Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1. But it is part of theater's nature that what you see on stage is not a play but a production of a play, specific to the director, the actors, the set and costume designers, and many more people who worked together in that production and may never work together again. I'm not sure I'll ever see a production of Henry IV Part 1 as good as the one at the Shakespeare Theater Company in DC, which completes its run this weekend. But I'm glad I did get to see it, even if soon what happened on the stage of the Shakespeare Theatre Company will only be a memory. The play, in its two parts, tells the coming-of-age story of Prince Hal (the future Henry V) who wastes his time with disreputable companions such as an old man, Falstaff, who likes to drink and tell self-aggrandizing lies. Hal's education is made in tavers and in his father's castle before he joins the king in fight at the battle of Shrewsbury, where he kills the leader of the rebels, Hotspur (pictured above with his stage wife).

Part 2 completes the story in leading inexorably to the moment when Hal's father dies and Hal repudiates Falstaff who had come to attend the royal procession: "I know thee not, old man." I saw both parts in one weekend, Part 1 on a Friday evening and Part 2 on a Saturday evening, and while I found Part 1 absolutely phenomenal, the first half of Part 2 was rather boring (through no fault of the production - but Hotspur dies at the end of Part 1 and Hal doesn't appear much in the first half of Part 2). The second half was better, and the procession was sensational. The play in this production ends not with the chorus, but with Falstaff and its companions being led away in handcuffs. Henry V shows up on the balcony, and they exchange a long look with each other before Falstaff disappears backstage. Curtain. 

The production, directed by STC artistic director Michael Kahn, was just spectacular. The sets matched my tastes that lean toward the modern but not the abstract and made great use of the stage with multiple entrances and exit points, the costumes had rich colors that popped out in front of the sets without seeming out of place, the music was perfect and of course the acting was outstanding, both from the leading performers such as Stacy Keach as Falstaff and newcomers such as Matthew Amendt as Hal. I'm not sure if John Keabler as Hotspur counts as a seasoned performer or not, but his Hotspur was also spot-on: charismatic and leader-like, so that it is hard to pick a side to root for when he duels with Hal, who until that point is only an immature boy who likes having a good time but also wants his father's love. 

Michael Kahn says a few words about each play here. I particularly liked his point about Hal having to choose between his two fathers, Henry IV and Falstaff. Part 1 is a great coming-of-age story. Just like The Nutcracker is standard ballet fare for Christmas, Henry IV Part 1 (and an abridged version of Part 2... the full version of Part 2 is just a bit much to bear after Part 1, but that's where Hal lets go of Falstaff) deserves to become a traditional offering around graduation time - which it'll probably never be, since it has been around for about four hundred years by now, and to what effect? Sometimes you have to let go of people who have been around you for a long time but have now turned into deadweight to become who you can be, and not only princes would benefit from that lesson.

More resources from the Shakespeare Theatre Company:

• Prosecast on Henry IV Part 1,
• Lunch break with Michael Kahn.