I mention this because (whether or not one is writing about a performance) there are nights when things don't quite come together. A spark is missing. The magic isn't there. Whether the fault lies with the production, a particular performer, a bad case of jet lag, or the inattentiveness of a bored audience member doesn't really matter.
When a performance lasts nearly four hours, there are bound to be passages in which a lot of narrative exposition can bog down the action. Richard Wagner was able to surmount this obstacle in Wotan's monologue in Die Walkure and Gotterdammerung's prologue (in which three Norns recap the plot of the Nibelungenlied) with his recurrent use of musical leitmotifs. But I recall once attending a performance of Tristan und Isolde starring Pekka Nuotio and Ludmilla Dvořáková during which a third of the audience left the Metropolitan Opera House after each act.
Even an extremely exciting production can have its disappointing moments. In her highly enthusiastic review entitled "Death, Betrayal and Greed in a Gripping ‘Henry VI’" in The New York Times of the National Asian American Theater Company's six-hour-long production of one of Shakespeare's history plays, even Laura Collins-Hughes acknowledged moments when the production started to lag.
After more than a half century of theatregoing, I've come to accept the fact that a certain kind of exhaustion comes with the territory. The fact that a viewer's mind may wander off does not in any way diminish the ambition which launched the project, the hard work all the artists involved in it, or the artistic process required to bring a substantial work of art to fruition. No matter how much a person might want to be "present" for a performance, there are occasions when drowsiness (like the fog in Carl Sandburg's beloved poem) "...comes on little cat feet, sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on." In those moments, instead of counting sheep, I occasionally find myself thinking of Jonathan D. Larson's haunting lyric for "Seasons of Love" from his hit musical, Rent.
This year I attended two productions which are justifiably viewed as cultural landmarks. Each contains some magnificent moments that demonstrate how craft supports and strengthens storytelling. Each also requires a great deal of patience from its audience.
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One of the big draws at the 2018 San Francisco Silent Film Festival was a screening of Mauritz Stiller's 3-1/2 hour epic entitled The Saga of Gösta Berling. Famous as the vehicle that transformed 18-year-old Greta Gustafsson into a major star, Greta Garbo frequently referred to her first major role as her favorite. |
| Greta Garbo as Elizabeth Dohna in a scene from 1924's The Saga of Gösta Berling |
Most of the film's action takes place on the shores of Lake Fryken in the Värmland district of Sweden. The title character (played by Lars Hanson) is a defrocked minister who has been saved by the Mistress of Ekeby from freezing to death. Thanks to her generosity, Berling becomes one of the lucky pensioners living in her manor at Ekeby.
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| Lars Hanson (Gösta Berling) and Greta Garbo (Elizabeth Dohna) in a scene from 1924's The Saga of Gösta Berling |
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| Lars Hanson as the defrocked priest, Gösta Berling, in a scene from 1924's The Saga of Gösta Berling |
In her program essay, Farran Smith Nehme writes:
“Originally released in two parts that ran almost four hours, Gösta Berling was Stiller’s last film as an auteur in control of all aspects of production. But from a distance of almost 100 years, it’s evident that Garbo (only 18 years old and so beautiful it is said her close-ups made audiences gasp) is just one of many impressive things about Gösta Berling. The movie is based on the debut novel by Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. An attempt at comprehensive plot summary could send a person into a Gösta-like spiral, but on screen the sprawling network of characters is as vivid as any in Dickens. The film plays rather like an epic about alcoholism. Alcohol fuels Gösta’s downfall and many other calamities in the script, although other sins (lust, pride, sloth …) get a workout as well. Its major set pieces include a breathtaking chase across the frozen surface of a lake and a fire scene to rival Gone With the Wind’s burning of Atlanta.”
“The true female lead of Gösta Berling is Margarethe, a.k.a. “the Major’s wife,” played by distinguished stage actress Gerda Lundequist (often described as either the Sarah Bernhardt or the Helen Hayes of Sweden) who commands the screen, capable both of subtlety of expression and the kind of big gestural acting that the more sensational moments require. Margarethe inspires love from her first appearance, in which she is seen slapping the daylights out of a man who is beating a cart horse. Like Gösta, she has a self-destructive streak as well as a dark secret about how she inherited Ekeby in the first place. Margarethe will eventually be forced out of her home but, one night, returns to burn the place to the ground in an astonishing scene of what Garbo biographer Barry Paris calls ‘pyromaniacal glee.’ The burning involves obviously real flames engulfing very large sets, and actors and stunt people dashing around in evident peril.”
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| Gerda Lundequist as the Major's wife (Margaretha Samzelius) in a scene from 1924's The Saga of Gösta Berling |
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| Gerda Lundequist as the Major's wife (Margaretha Samzelius) in a scene from 1924's The Saga of Gösta Berling |
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| Gerda Lundequist as the Major's wife (Margaretha Samzelius) in a scene from 1924's The Saga of Gösta Berling |
For devoted Garbo fans, the screening at the Castro Theatre had many rewards which could easily have eluded those unfamiliar with the nuances of Garbo's acting. However, there was no denying her beauty, the film's artistry, or some of its exquisite (and occasionally comical) costume work.
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| Greta Garbo (Elizabeth Dohna) and Ellen Hartman (Märtha Dohna) in a scene from 1924's The Saga of Gösta Berling |
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| Ellen Hartman (Märtha Dohna) and Torsten Hammarén (Henrik Dohna) in a scene from 1924's The Saga of Gösta Berling |
A 2006 restoration of the film that was released in the United States by Kino International had a run time of approximately three hours. In the years that followed, more footage was discovered by the Swedish Film Institute, which restored the color tinting, recreated intertitles to match the originals, and lengthened the film to about 200 minutes.
In recent years, as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has built a close relationship with the Matti Bye Ensemble, audiences in the Castro Theatre have come to cherish Bye's style of accompaniment. The following video comes from a 1975 restoration by the Swedish Film Institute with English-language intertitles and a soundtrack by the Matti Bye Ensemble.
A 1925 opera by Italian composer Riccardo Zandonai entitled “I cavalieri di Ekebù” (based on the same material as Stiller’s film) had its world premiere on March 7, 1925 at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. In the following video, you can watch a 2004 televised performance of Zandonai's opera at the Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi in Trieste, Italy.
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The summer of 2018 will be remembered by Bay area culture vultures as an intense three months during which the arts did not merely flourish, but overflowed with innovation and grandeur. From the cornucopia of historic treasures screened during the San Francisco Silent Film Festival to three complete cycles of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at the San Francisco Opera; from the challenging programs curated by the 2018 San Francisco DocFest, Frameline, and San Francisco Jewish Film Festivals to Berkeley Rep's outstanding production of Angels in America, this summer boasted an embarrassment of artistic riches.Up in Orinda, the California Shakespeare Theater presented the world premiere of Quixote Nuevo (a new adaptation by Octavio Solis of Don Quixote), the West Coast premiere of Everybody (a new interpretation by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins of the most famous medieval morality play), and will soon revive last year's stunning production of black odyssey (Marcus Gardley's contemporary adaptation of the ancient Greek epic poem written by Homer).
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| Aysan Celik (Margaret of Anjou) and Lance Gardner (Earl of Suffolk) in a scene from The War of the Roses (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Sticking to its New Classics Initiative's mission of exploring "what it means to be a classical theatre in the 21st century by commissioning contemporary playwrights to re-imagine classic Western drama and to introduce works from different cultures and traditions into our canon," artistic director Eric Ting (in collaboration with dramaturg Philippa Kelly and actor Danny Scheie) set his artistic sights on creating a new adaptation of The War of the Roses which would combine Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3 with Richard III while attempting to whittle down a mammoth amount of text to a performance time of four hours.
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| Danny Scheie as King Richard III in a scene from The War of the Roses (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
The challenge for a small regional theatre company to stage The War of the Roses is severely daunting, especially when one considers that, of the 11 Shakespearean plays focused on the history of the British monarchy, Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3 had never been staged by Cal Shakes. Together with Richard III, this new adaptation features 14 actors bringing 65 years of English history to life as they portray more than 30 characters.
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| Jomar Tagatac (Duke of York), Joseph Patrick O'Malley (King Henry VI) and Aldo Billingslea (Earl of Warwick) in a scene from The War of the Roses (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
The ambition and resolve behind this project is heightened by its relevance to the American state of crisis brought on by a peaceful transition from the scandal-free administration of President Barack Obama to the nauseatingly sadistic and corrupt administration of a life-long con artist like Donald Trump (whose spiteful, toxic personality bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Richard III). Some pundits claim that the dangerously volatile, narcissistic, and greedy Trump is engineering a political coup. Eric Ting (who staged this four-hour production) offers the following perspective:
“Shakespeare was forging a new national identity with his chronicle of the end of the Middle Ages, capturing a moment of immense change, fear, and uncertainty while articulating the anxieties of a country unsure about its future. The ideals of Henry abruptly giving way to the ruthlessness of Richard worked both as crucible for the Tudor reign and as cautionary tale: that power corrupts, that good often gives way to bad, and that we will believe what we want to believe until it’s too late and the war has spilled into our homes.”
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| Danny Scheie as King Richard III in a scene from The War of the Roses (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
“The four plays that are the foundation of The War of the Roses are themselves about transgressions. The ‘transgression’ of a King taking a wife with no dowry, of a woman taking up arms against her enemies, of regicide, of fratricide, of witchcraft and prophecy, of the slaughter of children. With each transgression, the next comes easier and the norms that govern civil society erode: a distant war becomes a civil war, rules of engagement are twisted into a mockery of itself. Out of the national trauma, a tyrant rises, spurious, manipulative, volatile, turning the world upside down. Truth becomes lie, honor a thing to mistrust and, haunting us all along the way, is a nagging sense that we were somehow complicit. To steep myself in these plays, in these stories that vibrate with such humanity, and to share them with you offers hope that, in the end, you and I are not so different.”
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| Nina Ball's set design forThe War of the Roses (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Because the action covers a wide geographical territory, set designer Nina Ball has built a plexiglass cage above the main stage which can be used to represent a forest of trees, a solitary chamber for an isolated king, or the Tower of London, where political enemies can be imprisoned prior to being dispatched through backstabbing or beheading. Jiyoun Chang's lighting helps to conjure visions of Joan of Arc stirring up trouble in France while Byron Au Young's musical score (mostly performed by Josh Pollock on an electric guitar in conjunction with several effect pedals) provides an eerie and somewhat disturbing soundscape.
Anna R. Oliver's costumes range from modern dress to hints of period costume; from traditional church outfits to military armor. Thus, an actor like Catherine Luedtke has no trouble switching genders to appear as Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester; the widowed Lady Elizabeth Grey, and Queen Elizabeth. Stacy Ross similarly transitions between Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester; young Edward (King Edward IV), and the Duchess of York. Marie Sadd handles the youngest of the characters, appearing as the short-lived Rutland (son of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York) and Prince Edward (son of King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth).
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| Joseph Patrick O'Malley (King Henry VI), Aysan Celik (Margaret of Anjou), and Aldo Billingslea (Earl of Warwick) in a scene from The War of the Roses (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Two of the most popular actors familiar to Bay area audiences take on a variety of male authority figures. Lance Gardner appears as the Earl of Suffolk, Sir James Tyrrel, and Queen Elizabeth's brother, Lord Rivers. Aldo Billingslea lends a sense of military strength to the Earl of Warwick, a father who slays his son, and the Duke of Buckingham.
I was especially moved by Joseph Patrick O'Malley's portrayal of the weak King Henry VI (O'Malley reappears in Richard III as Lord Hastings and the Lord Mayor of London) and Sarita Ocon's portrayals of Joan of Arc, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester; Lady Anne (the widow of Ned, Prince of Wales), and George, Duke of Clarence. In smaller roles, Jomar Tagatac offered intense portrayals of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York; a son who slays his father, France's King Louis XI, and Stanley, Earl of Derby.
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| Aysan Celik (Margaret of Anjou) and Jomar Tagatac in a scene from The War of the Roses (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
The two heavy hitters are, of course, the most ambitious and villainous characters. Aysan Celik dominated the first half of the evening as Henry VI's queen, Margaret of Anjou, with a ferocity that tended to eclipse her weak husband's power as well as many of the men in Henry's court. Bay area veteran Danny Scheie was a mercurial nightmare as the bloodthirsty Richard III (perhaps even more vindictive than Trump's loathsome mentor, Roy Cohn).
As the old saying goes, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" Without question, some of Shakespeare's soliloquies soared into the night air, the beauty of their language and the artistry with which they were delivered reminding the audience of the timeliness of Shakespeare's words. As with many productions in the Bruns Amphitheatre, Ting had his actors running up and down the aisles. Oddly enough, there were some moments when, despite the high quality sound design by Brendan Aanes, I had some trouble figuring out which actor was speaking certain lines.
In the course of compressing so much of Shakespeare's text, sacrifices must be made. The audience got a big laugh out of a passage early in the the evening which felt like a recitation of the "begats" (except that, instead of listing who begat who, it was more focused on who killed who in order to get someone out of the way). Despite the brilliance and commitment of Aysan Celik's acting in Henry VI, there were moments when I felt like I was sitting through a touring musical revue that aims to deliver snippets of 100 songs by Irving Berlin in 70 minutes while trying to tell the audience all about the famous songwriter's life.
The second half of the evening, devoted to the megalomaniacal machinations of Richard III to win and hold onto power at any cost, had a much sharper (albeit sleazier) focus. Men were stabbed, heads rolled, morals were compromised and lots of people lost their dignity while England's peasants and livestock tried to keep calm and carry on. Richard III offered Danny Scheie a solid script to chew on (there was a scarcity of available scenery) while demonstrating that he is capable of more than being a superlative classic clown.
Having always admired Scheie's craft and the sheer strength of his delivery, I was gratified to see him tackle a role that genuinely challenged him and made him stretch. For many, watching an actor who (much like a musician) has matured as an artist and can make incredible use of his instrument was a highlight of the evening. There is no question that Scheie has the dramatic chops to be an arch villain (could Tony Kushner's characterization of Roy Cohn be in the offing?) although some of Scheie's vocal mannerisms didn't seem necessary for this production of The War of the Roses.
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| Danny Scheie (Richard III) and Sarita Ocon (Lady Anne) in a scene from The War of the Roses (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
For those who insist that the arts are a frivolous waste of time and money, let me offer a small challenge. This Cal Shakes production of The War of the Roses has been in the planning stages for at least a year. During that time, the 45th President of the United States has progressed from an inarticulate fool to an aspiring tyrant; from a desperately immature man who always needs to be in the spotlight to someone whose petty vindictiveness has become increasingly distressing to observe as Robert Mueller's noose starts to tighten. Bundle up all of your concerns about Trump's dysfunctional behavior and wrap yourself in them as you watch Danny Scheie's portrayal of Richard III. Then try to explain why the arts are not relevant to the world we live in.
Performances of The War of the Roses continue through September 15 at the California Shakespeare Theater (click here for tickets).
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