`Hie thee hither': Shakespeare's best onstage, not on the page -- April 26, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Poet Ben Jonson wrote in his tribute to William Shakespeare: “He was not of an age but for all time!”

Lucky guess.   

More than 400 years later, we’re still reading, watching and arguing over Shakespeare. Most of us are, anyway.

High school students continue to struggle over the Bard, thanks to the Common Core standards, but most major universities long ago dropped the requirement that English majors take even a single Shakespeare course.

Two years ago, students at the University of Pennsylvania removed a large portrait of Shakespeare from the English Department and replaced it first with a picture of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, feminist and civil rights activist, and later with a collage of 88 writers and filmmakers.

Last June, a production of “Julius Caesar” in New York’s Central Park became a conservative cause célèbre when Caesar was depicted as a Trumpian with blond hair and a red tie, “whose bloody stabbing is seen as offensive and inappropriate to some who have seen it,” The New York Times reported. 

Defenders countered the tragedy shows the consequences of violence and its disastrous effects.

Shakespeare was born in April 1564, so before the month slips away, let’s give him props. Bob Dylan did. 

When the great Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, he asked Patti Smith to deliver his speech at the awards ceremony in Stockholm. Here's an excerpt:

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure.

I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read.

When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?"

His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

Leave it to Dylan to imagine Shakespeare not as highfalutin artiste but a playwright juggling his words and picky details. Dylan has it right, of course. Shakespeare’s plays are meant for the stage, not the page.

I know this after seeing three Shakespeare plays in two weeks. It was the first time, but won’t be the last, I sorta-binge-watched the Bard.

First was “Romeo and Juliet” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, a good warmup for the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, where “Macbeth” played one evening and “The Taming of the Shrew” the next afternoon.

Shakespeare’s themes generally are timeless, though modern sensibilities do prickle occasionally. Juliet’s marrying at age 13 is disturbing, and so is Taming’s last scene when Kate, starved and sleep-deprived into submission, says: “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign . . .”

Despite such quibbles, I enjoyed the plays immensely.

There’s hardly a better place for Shakespeare than the 300-seat Blackfriars Theater at the ASC. Opened in 2001, it’s a recreation of the Jacobean playhouse in London’s Blackfriars neighborhood. Blackfriars was the indoor theater where Shakespeare put on his plays, the Globe his outdoor venue.

The ASC’s repertory company delivers three or four well-staged productions a week. The versatile actors also dance, sing and play instruments in acoustic musical performances before the shows and during intermission.

“We do it with the lights on,” the theater brags, because Shakespeare produced his plays in what’s called universal light. That means the audience and actors not only can see each other but also interact. You don’t need to understand every archaic word to follow and enjoy the plays.

It’s improbable to find a first-class Shakespeare theater in a small town in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, but like Shakespeare’s work, it’s an enchanting experience.

Take a cue from Lady Macbeth and “hie thee hither” to see Shakespeare onstage.

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Cool cats in D.C.? Yes, in a museum -- Feb. 20, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

“You can’t fake true cool,” Bob Dylan said in his Chrysler Super Bowl commercial as a photo of James Dean flashed on the screen.

Dylan, selling cars at 72, and Dean, the “Rebel Without a Cause” actor who died in 1955 at the age of 24, are among 100 certified cool Americans in a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.

The “American Cool” exhibit of mostly black-and-white portraits includes actors Lauren Bacall, Marlon Brando, Benicio Del Toro and Steve McQueen;  musicians Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Jay-Z and Bonnie Raitt; writers James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker; and athletes Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Jack Johnson and Michael Jordan. 

Not one president or elected official made the list, but if the Presidents Day throng of exhibit-goers was an indication, Washington is hungry for cool. It’s also possible, though, that the gray heads who were grooving to cool Marvin Gaye had given up on the long lines upstairs where, for one weekend, visitors could look at David Datuna’s “Portrait of America” through Google glass. There’s cool and then there’s new cool.  

I almost skipped the “American Cool” exhibit, thinking that once cool is enshrined in a museum it can’t be cool anymore. Plus, while I understand that museums need to attract visitors, I hate to see them pander.

The Newseum, for example, has been struggling financially for years despite thoughtful exhibits on such topics as Civil War journalism and JFK. Desperate last fall to recoup losses, it opened a major exhibit of 60 costumes, “hilarious props” and other paraphernalia from the 2004 movie “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” just before a movie sequel was released. Stay classy, Newseum? I think not.

But “American Cool,” through Sept. 7, manages to be entertaining and thought-provoking. The captivating images make us think about the elusive quality of cool. I watched as writer Joan Didion, leaning against the door of her Corvette Stingray in 1970, mesmerized three young women for several minutes.

Fred Astaire is there but not Ginger Rogers. The only entrepreneur is a young Steve Jobs, long-haired and bearded, riding a motorcycle, bareheaded.

My idea of cool runs more to George Catlin than George Carlin – but neither is in the exhibit.  

Fortunately for us, Catlin painted native Americans in the 1830s before their way of  life vanished forever. He gave up a successful business as a portrait painter in Philadelphia and headed west on several trips he paid for himself. Eighteen of his colorful portraits hang on a curved staircase in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art, which adjoins the portrait gallery.

It’s seems odd that Carlin, a comedian famous for his biting social commentary, didn’t make it, although Lenny Bruce did. Carlin won the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor just a few days before he died in 2008.  

And Twain may be the father of modern American literature but he’s absent too – not because he pre-dates cool, a concept born in the jazzy 1940s. Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass made it.

The exhibit is the product of five years’ work by two cultural historians with doctorates in American studies, Joel Dinerstein and Frank Goodyear III.

Dinerstein is director of the American Studies department at Tulane University, where he teaches a class in the history of cool. No, he tells students, he himself is not cool nor can he teach them how to be cool. Goodyear, a former photography curator at the portrait gallery, is co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine.

To make the cool list, someone had to have three elements of these four: originality of artistic vision and of signature style; cultural rebellion in a given historical moment; “iconicity” or high-profile recognition, and a recognized cultural legacy.

And they needed something else: a great photo. Carlin met the other criteria but no suitable photo could be found. He appears on an Alt-100 list of runners up, along with Tony Bennett, Clark Gable, Jerry Garcia, Jack London, Norman Mailer and Janis Joplin.

No worries. When you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be in a museum.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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