THE NEWSLETTER OF CLASSIC STAGE COMPANY • VOLUME 17, NUMBER 1 • FALL 2O13
Interviews with ROMEO & JULIET ‘ director TEA ALAGIC, illustrator DAVID HEATLEY and CSC Director of Education KATHLEEN DORMAN
CLASSIC
IN THIS ISSUE:
FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR:
Romeo and Juliet are perhaps, along with Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, literature’s most famous couple. And, like Paolo and Francesca, they seem to have become locked into a kind of equally immortal punishment. Not exactly the “hell” of Paolo and Francesca, but rather a theatrical “purgatory” of sorts. It has been argued that since the time of the Romantics, not an evening goes by where Romeo and Juliet’s story is not revived in some form or another across this great globe or ours. There they are: night after night, century after century, re-enacting their love, their death, their transfiguration. Perhaps their situation is actually more torturous than that of Paolo and Francesca, who are just condemned to hell where they must circle one another, forever out of reach. But for poor Romeo and Juliet, they are resurrected over and over to relive their fiery passion and re-experience the naive hope that the stars that have been so terribly crossed in the skies might realign and smile down upon them. It is an intensity of love and hope that few of us experience in a lifetime.
In this way, encountering Romeo and Juliet is a bit like experiencing Nietzsche’s “Curse of the Eternal Return.” In this fiendishly clever teaching parable, an imp arrives at a given moment and asks its interlocutor, “This moment that you are experiencing right now, would you want it to be repeated forever and ever?” If the answer is, “No, I would not,” then the truth is quite simple: “You must,” to quote another German poet/thinker, “change your life!” This, in a certain respect, is what happens to many of us when we encounter
the extraordinary, immediate, all-consuming passion of Romeo and Juliet. There is no question what they said to Nietzsche’s imp, and now they relive their moment for all eternity. But would we? If Romeo and Juliet were to step out and ask us, “Haven’t you felt what we’ve felt?” what would be our answer? And if our answer was, “Not yet,” isn’t the play’s unspoken injunction: “When?” In short, Romeo and Juliet have become something of a challenge to us to live and love to the fullest. This, it would seem, is one of the existential byproducts of being one of Western literature’s collective crushes. Not to mention that the play contains some of Shakespeare’s most stunning poetry. The play is based on an Italian tale translated into English verse as “The Tragedical History of Romeus and Juliet” by Arthur Brook in 1562. It is retold a few years later in prose in William Painter’s “Palace of Pleasure.” Shakespeare reworked these two sources in the early 1590s, around the same time he wrote his comic masterpiece A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. A “poor quarto” of ROMEO & JULIET was published around 1597. The play was revived immediately during the English Restoration but with a revised “happy ending” that became the norm for producing future productions of the play. In these versions, Juliet would wake just in time to stop Romeo from joining her in death. This gave Romeo and Juliet something of a hundred-year reprieve from the ending Shakespeare penned, but by the dawn of the 19th century, this aesthetic “stay of execution” was revoked and their tragic deaths restored.
Generation after generation has subsequently rediscovered Romeo and Juliet and found that their romantic aspirations still rhyme with this now immortal couple. But the ways in which they rhyme seem to have shifted between the 19th and 21st centuries This has to do with both our unfortunate history and the intriguingly bicameral nature of this play. It is Friar Laurence who first alerts us to the dual nature of ROMEO & JULIET in the image of the flower that, like “ Plato’s pharmacy,” has both medicinal and destructive powers. Here there is both “cure” and “poison.” Our play is similarly bifurcated between a positive (eros) and negative (thanatos). Both sleep, waiting for one or the other to be awakened and put to use. One could argue that it is the eros of ROMEO & JULIET that has “carried the day” throughout most 19th- and early 20th-century productions, but as our history continues down its blood-drenched path, it is the theme of thanatos that begins to emerge. It is hard, in the glare of the early 21st century, not to see how the language of thanatos has infected the speech of these two lovers who cannot help but think in violent terms. Look at Juliet’s “gallop apace” soliloquy where she imagines Romeo cut up into a thousand stars. The play is rife with such mixtures of eros giving way to thanatos; love infected with death.
The Friar warns that Romeo’s “violent delights” can have “violent ends” and indeed, in this warrior culture, Romeo and Juliet become warriors of love. When their love is threatened, they defend it with the fearless zealousness of gladiators. A savage abandon runs through this play from the fights in the streets to the way these young lovers face adversity. It has become part of their collective DNA, working its way through the parents and onto their otherwise innocent children—like some species-destroying genetic mutation that, when it reaches the young, seems to herald the end of this world. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler notes, “A world that does not love itself is a world that does not believe in the world: we can believe only when we love.” Such a world, bereft of love, is a world not worth living; a world that will ultimately, carelessly destroy itself. This is Stiegler’s fear of our current condition. Perhaps this is another reason why Romeo and Juliet have once again returned to our collective imagination, like that imp in Nietzsche’s “Curse of the Eternal Return”—only perhaps, in Romeo and Juliet’s case, their story has the potential of actually becoming “The Cure of the Eternal Return.” The cure being nothing more and nothing less than love.
- Brian Kulick, Artistic Director
DOING YOUR LIFE An interview with ROMEO & JULIET director TEA ALAGIC‘
Can you tell us about your background – how you grew up & came of age in Bosnia? TA: I was nineteen years old when war started in my country. I had just finished high school and wanted to go to acting academy. When war broke out my parents sent me away—thinking I was just going to be away for two weeks or something—because girls at the time, in Bosnia, had been targeted for concentration camps and all sorts of genocide. So I became a refugee very early in my life and ran around Europe trying to survive while my parents stayed during the siege. After a year of living in Germany, I went to Prague and studied in the acting academy where I eventually graduated. War ended and I went to London and different places. I just wanted to see more opportunities in theatre. Do you feel like that experience has in any way framed how you think about this play? Absolutely. When Brian called me a couple of months ago and asked me how I’d approach the play, I said this play is in a way very personal for me. It is very clear after twenty years now since the civil war happened, that actually the war was the war of my parents’ generation, not my generation. So my generation felt lost and it took us years to understand why it happened. In the same way that right now in my country, people who were born during the war inherited whatever happened. That hate and continuation of conflict keeps going. It’s very connected to ROMEO & JULIET. Often productions of ROMEO & JULIET play up the love aspect of the story, often at the expense of the strife and violence. What do you feel is the balance and how are you dealing with that? Yes, it’s important to find balance. One piece of research I brought in is a documentary called Sarajevo Romeo and Juliet. It’s real people on different sides, one Muslim, one Serbian. They were so much in love and together they decide to run during the siege. And they end up both being shot by both sides. Through that
Tea Alagic'
documentary you understand a lot about these people in a really deep way, and for some people love is violence, guns and war and power. During the war, you have to understand, people lived their lives. People who have never been in war may think, “Oh my God people are in war, they’re just sitting there lonely and crying.” You actually do everything—you fall in love, you go to school, you go to work. Even though there is no work, you just pretend and sit in front of a computer and pretend to be doing something. You’re trying to do your life. Can you talk about your process? The way we work is very collaborative, I want the acting company to give me their ideas. I want them to contribute to the process. We work from the text and I use different exercises to get it where it needs to go. My background in theatre is a mixture of many things. I did classical acting, I did contemporary work, and the Lecoq program. I do a combination of things to arrive where I think production needs to be. But it’s very collaborative.
Your work moves between the avantgarde to interpretations of classical plays and then to new plays. How do you navigate those different theatrical zipcodes?
a space in which one can create performance. And performance is coming out of artists on stage. So that’s how I look at it. The costumes are, you could say, modern, but they are also very performative.
I never think of myself as somebody who does one style or the other style. Even when actors come in the room and ask about style, I say “I don’t know what you mean by that.” I’m very text-driven. And then I want to be theatrical, so I keep asking how is it different from TV and film? So we now understand what the text is doing, but now I have to understand why I have to come and see that in a theater. And then I find, with the company, our vocabulary— what that means. So with every production it’s different and unique in a way. It depends on the people working together.
Is there another Shakespeare play that you’re interested in working on and why?
Can you tell me about the design of this production? Did you have an impulse to place it in a more contemporary image world? Many people ask me, “So how do you see it? Period or contemporary?” And I can’t answer that either. I look at it as performance art. I say, it’s a space. It’s architectural. Marsha Ginsberg is an amazing designer. She’s an installation artist, architect, and set designer. So the design came, after a lot of work and meetings, to be
I would love to do all of them! I absolutely love it. There was an era when I was so afraid of it because, you have to understand, I’m forty years old and I started speaking English when I was 28. I did play Shakespeare in my mother tongue, but I was nervous about doing Shakespeare when I first started as a director. I didn’t feel it through my body. A couple of years ago, I’d been working a lot on new plays and I went back to reading classics on my own. I was just like, I want to do them all. They are so good. So good to see. Such good writing. And yes, I always want to make cuts to it, but he gives you so much. I’d love to do OTHELLO, HAMLET, KING LEAR. All of them. They’re just incredible.
T. R. Knight, Stan Demidoff and Fight Director Casey Robinson in rehearsals for ROMEO & JULIET.
THE ART OF DISTILLATION An interview with illustrator DAVID HEATLEY and CSC Director of Education KATHLEEN DORMAN Many of our CSC patrons are avid readers of these newsletters but may not know about CSC’s other popular publication that is keyed off our YOUNG COMPANY productions of Shakespeare. Along with doing workshops and productions for middle and high school students from all five boroughs, we provide these young audiences with study guides for each play. One of the highlights of these guides is our illustrated retellings of Shakespeare designed by cartoonist and illustrator David Heatley in collaboration with CSC’s Director of Education Kathleen Dorman. We brought the two together to talk about how they use the contemporary language of comics to introduce a new generation to work of Shakespeare. Is it difficult to distill Shakespeare’s plays into a two-page comic? DH: It’s made a lot easier because Kathleen distills it first, so I already have her condensed version. And that’s what comics are—they squeeze narrative into the most economical form possible, the fewest number of words—say it with a picture if you can get away with it. It’s part of the challenge in making comics in general. Do you find that Shakespeare’s work lends itself to being visualized? There’s a lot to draw on. There is a whole bank of images out there already that I can kind of riff off. It is fun because in some ways I get to be the
director and I get to cast my own characters. A lot of the time I’m going for the archetypal version of that character, but you know you can put your own little spin on it, for sure. Do you find yourself fighting or leaning into the iconic images, especially for those plays that have become famous films? I don’t think I’m fighting them, at least not the Zeffirelli version. I’m not as big a fan of Luhrmann’s. When I draw comics I try to distill it down to as simple and iconic a form as I can. I don’t want my personality dripped all over the
Above and top right: excerpts from David Heatley’s comic strip for CSC’s ROMEO & JULIET Study Guide.
whole thing. Enough of me is in there with just the way I draw, I don’t need to make it quirky and put my fingerprints all over it. I want it to be simple and these pictures in comics are symbols, really. You’re not studying them like a painting, so I want them to telegraph very quickly—who that person is and you shouldn’t be thinking too much about it. My style shouldn’t be getting in the way if I do it right. What is the goal of the comic? Is it meant to serve as a preview for what they’re about to see? What’s important to you? It’s really important that I’m speaking to this teenage audience. I want them to be entertained and to get it, to get the story. To get the basics of it. My hope would be for someone to get a little spark off of what I do and they fall in love with Shakespeare. That would be the ideal. That my love of Shakespeare comes through and that it ignites something for them.
What led you to the idea that comics should be integrated into the study guide? KD: I’m a firm believer in the idea of multiple intelligences, and that people learn in different ways. So, you need to work to engage different types of learners. I’m more of a visual learner myself and am more inclined to sit and read something if there are little bursts of information. When I started working at CSC, our study guide was basically a Word document and it wasn’t very visually stimulating. If you hand a student a packet that’s very wordy, it’s likely not going to engage them. Since they’re consuming anime and graphic novels, we just thought, why not do a very condensed version of that with Shakespeare? Wouldn’t that be fun? How do you go about distilling the whole play into two pages? I give David a condensed version of the synopsis with quotes. The synopsis that I create is directly tied in with the curriculum that our teaching artists use. We have an activity—it’s a called a “whoosh” and basically the entire class gets up and acts out the plot in ten minutes or less. It’s all about speed, and when you change scenes the class goes “1, 2, 3—whoosh.” The point is, I spend a long time distilling down what the plot is. I give it to David knowing that he’s not going to use every quote or part of the summary, but he’s influenced by it,
or the imagery in a particular quote, and he can convey that visually. Do you ever fear that you’re dumbing down the content of the plays? How do you find the balance? The whole program is meant to be an entry point. It’s a gateway. And so we never dumb down the content. That said, we’re not afraid to knock Shakespeare off his pedestal, especially if it makes encountering him a little less frightening.
For more information about The Young Company, visit classicstage.org/youngcompany
Anonymous (2) Arete Foundation Axe-Houghton Foundation Barbara Bell Cumming Foundation Barbara S. and Benjamin M. Cardozo Foundation The Bay and Paul Foundations Bohnert Foundation, Inc. The Bouncer Foundation Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation The Chervenak-Nunnallé Foundation The Cody Foundation Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP The Diller - von Furstenberg Family Foundation The Don and Maggie Buchwald Foundation The Dorothy Loudon Foundation The Dorothy Strelsin Foundation Dramatists Guild Fund The Esselen Family Fund of The Saint Paul Foundation The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation The Friars Foundation The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Irene Diamond Fund Ironbound Partners Fund LLC Lucille Lortel Foundation Michael Tuch Foundation MidOcean Partners National Endowment for the Arts New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York State Council on the Arts The Newburgh Institute for the Arts & Ideas The Open Society Foundations The PECO Foundation Pirret Foundation Random House, Inc. Richenthal Foundation Rosenthal Family Foundation The Scherman Foundation Shakespeare for a New Generation The Shubert Foundation Sullivan & Cromwell LLP The Ted and Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund Teeple Family Charitable Fund at the Greater Alliance Foundation Tony Randall Theatrical Fund The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc. TheaterMania.com
2O13/2O14 SEASON FUNDERS
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Special thanks to the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust for supporting Classic Stage Company.
Marc Abrams Paul Blackman Mary Corson Diane Cummings Denise Dickens Steven L. Holley Brian Kulick Debra Mayer Maeve O’Connor Marla Schuster Nissan Thomas A. Teeple
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Matthew J. Harrington Edwin S. Maynard Therese Steiner Rosemarie Tichler
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Lynn Angelson, CHAIR Kenneth Bartels, VICE CHAIR Donald Francis Donovan, CHAIR EMERITUS
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Greg Reiner
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Brian Kulick
EXTENDED! September 28 - November 10, 2013 For tickets, visit classicstage.org or call 866-811-4111 • CSC Subscribers call 212-677-4210 x 11
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