The Fierce Nowness of Urgency
Even classic theater needs to answer the question: why this play? Why now?
Tom McCamus with members of the company in Salesman in China at the Stratford Festival, 2024. Photography by David Hou.
I’ve been away from this space for a bit, and I apologize for my absence. The reason was partly film-related—we’re in the home stretch of post-production, and should have a submittable cut with corrected color, edited sound, etc. within two weeks—but mostly vacation-related. I spent much of the last two weeks of August in Stratford attending the theater festival there, as we do every summer around this time. I was hoping to post some tidbits while there (which is why I didn’t announce my absence in advance), but the whole time went by in a whirl and before I knew it, I was back in Brooklyn, writing retrospectively.
This was overall a good season at Stratford, and a better one than I had anticipated. One reason is that the year’s biggest musical, Something Rotten, vastly exceeded my expectations. I had skipped the original Broadway production because the play sounded stupid, but it turned out to be inspiredly silly instead. That might partly be context; a show that relentlessly quotes both Shakespeare and the American musical theater canon makes particular sense at a festival whose audience is highly literate in both, and Donna Feore’s expert direction can’t have hurt—there’s no one more capable at mounting a musical on Stratford thrust main stage. It’s also a testament though to Mark Uhre’s high-energy yet unfailingly human performance as the resentful and striving Nick Bottom, who is the equivalent of the Stanley Tucci role in the film Big Night, the “business” half of a brotherly creative enterprise who isn’t actually any good at business. The whole cast is wonderful, though, and if you are in Stratford you shouldn’t deny yourself the pleasure of their company.
A bigger reason is that one of the new plays at Stratford this season is a truly towering achievement which I intend to write about at greater length (and to talk up with anyone and everyone I know in New York to try to bring it here). That play is Salesman in China, which is based on the true story of a production of Death of a Salesman performed in China in 1983, in an adaptation by the Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng, who also played Willy Loman, and directed by Arthur Miller himself. The cast, led by Adrian Pang as Ying and Tom McCamus as Miller, is uniformly excellent, effortlessly navigating a text that veers between English and Mandarin sometimes in the middle of a line, and a narrative that jumps from the present back to 1949 or the years of the Cultural Revolution as Ying’s memory dictates, as well as from Loman’s story to Ying’s and Miller’s. I was repeatedly surprised by where the play went, appreciative of the nuanced treatment of the play’s many characters, and most of all impressed by the complexity of its understanding of cultural interchange as a lived, felt thing with a life of its own not reducible to our contemporary platitudes. The whole thing is a tour de force. If you can get up to Stratford, see it there; if not, it will be going to Ottawa next, and likely to Vancouver after that, and hopefully elsewhere from there.
And this was also a good year for Shakespeare at Stratford, but on that score I have to add an asterisk that will take up the latter part of this post.
The most notable thing about Shakespeare at Stratford this year is how traditional it is. Twelfth Night opened the festival, directed by veteran actress Seana McKenna, who has forgotten more about Shakespeare than you ever knew. It stars Jessica B. Hill as Viola, and it’s a perfect marriage of role and performer. Jessica feelingly embodies Viola’s impossible triangular dilemma and her grief without ever losing her fundamental zaniness. She’s surrounded by an absolutely top-notch ensemble (and Twelfth Night really is an ensemble piece), and has affecting chemistry both with her Orsino (Andre Sills) and her Sebastian (Austin Eckert). The kind of consistent comfort with the verse on display in this production is something only a place like Stratford can guarantee. The production is set in 1967, and there are some alterations made both to suit the time and to expand the female cast—Deb Hay is a delightfully querulous Joni Mitchell-esque Feste and Laura Condlln’s affecting closeted lesbian Malvolio reminded me of Grayson Hall’s portrayal of Judith Fellowes in the film of Night of the Iguana. But this isn’t really a “concept” production; they’re mostly just doing the play, on a mostly bare stage, letting the language and the acting tell the story.
Sam White’s production of Romeo and Juliet also takes some small liberties—the prologue is sung (beautifully) by Vanessa Sears’s Juliet, for example, and the sex scene with Romeo is a bit more raw and less sentimentally romantic than I’m used to with this play (though it doesn’t involve nudity)—but overall it’s an exceptionally traditional production, down to the delicious period costumes. The ensemble, which overlaps substantially with Twelfth Night (Sears also plays a luscious Olivia, and Hill plays an appropriately very young Lady Capulet intimidated by her fierce husband, played by Graham Abbey; Scott Wentworth, meanwhile, plays temperamental opposites Friar Lawrence and Sir Toby Belch with equal sincerity) is once again highly capable. I could quibble about this or that choice, but it all seemed to play very well for the student matinee audience on the afternoon we attended; they laughed and oohed and snickered just when they were supposed to. They were in it.
Over at the Tom Patterson Theater, finally, Cymbeline, the third Shakespeare Stratford offered this year, is a play I may have seen enough of; I think I’ve seen more productions of it than I have of R&J, if you can believe it. There are again a handful of innovations—the title character is now a queen for some reason rather than a king, and her consort an evil stepfather rather than stepmother, for example—and the opening scene is turned into a theatrical version of those family trees at the start of Russian novels, which may be helpful to those unfamiliar with the play even if it spoils a bit of its convoluted plot. But the satisfactions of this play ultimately come down to two: first, whether the actress playing Innogen holds us all through her crazy cascade of adventures and reverses, and second, whether the bonkers final act lands both comically and sentimentally. Allison E-Crewe delivered on the former and the ensemble, directed by Esther Jun, delivered on the latter. There are plenty of other joys to be had as well, in design and in performance. Nonetheless, I didn’t come away with any strong sense of why this particular play had been mounted.
And I think that might be a problem more generally. I struggle often around this question. On the one hand, I find shallow stabs at “relevance” to be insulting, and think works of art need to speak for themselves. Let the “discourse” respond to them rather than the other way around. Moreover, when we’re talking about something as central to the canon as Shakespeare, I think there’s a great deal of value in simply doing the plays, in the most straightforward way possible. I might not find anything new there, but each rising generation is like Miranda—’tis new to them. And it won’t be if we don’t perform it for them.
On the other hand, though, I believe the artists involved in making a play need to be engaged in the act of discovery themselves if that feeling is to play for us. If it feels to them like they’re just “doing the play” then it’s going to feel that way to us. That’s true for the actors, but also for the director and designers and, ultimately, for the theater as a whole—everyone needs to feel a sense of urgency about the work, like it needs to be done. That feeling has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is ultimately the answer to the question of why—why you are doing this play.
I felt a full-fledged commitment plenty of times in these shows, usually in an accumulation of small ways, in little moments that actors created with each other and with us. But I’m not sure that, at the furthest remove, I always knew the answer to that why, that I felt an urgency. I think that’s an institutional matter, even a larger cultural matter, more than it is a matter for an individual show. But it affects those individual shows—and, ultimately, the fate of the theater itself.
Many members of the company talked openly about how empty houses are these days, particularly on the festival stage with its 1800 seats. Not for the musicals—those are selling very well—but just about everything else is struggling. That’s not peculiar to Stratford—trust me, every theater in North America is dealing with this problem—but I worry that it creates a kind of negative feedback loop where shows that aren’t expected to perform are starved for funds, making it impossible for them to perform, and artistically necessary risks aren’t taken. I note that this year’s most significant production, Salesman in China—which is overtly about the importance of doing live theater and taking extraordinary risks with it—was a very expensive show to undertake, and one that took eight years to develop as well. I’m thrilled that Stratford took that kind of risk—very few theaters would. I worry, though, about whether it will be able to continue to do so given the strength of the headwinds it faces.
While it isn’t really an answer, the only answer I know how to make to that problem is one of urgency. Not “it is urgent that we save the theater;” that’s just a guilt trip, and its efficacy will fade fast if it hasn’t already. Rather: “it is urgent that we do this play, that we do it now, and that we do it right. If we don’t, then why are we here?” That feeling starts with the artists, but management needs to select for that feeling in the artists it hires, and from them it needs to percolate upward and outward to the tendrils of the marketing department and into the ticket booth.
All of this is actually in Salesman in China. Ying Ruocheng saw that he had to risk his career and maybe even his freedom to put on Death of a Salesman in Beijing in 1983, and put it on right. He didn’t even necessarily know what “right” meant—that’s why he needed Arthur Miller as director. And Miller also didn’t really know what “right” meant—something he learned the hard way by actually directing the thing. It was a process of discovery for him too. It had to be.
It’s a commonplace to say that theater can’t be a museum—but maybe people who say that need to realize that this is a problem that afflicts museums, too. Museums aren’t just static art barns; curators need to feel, and then communicate, the urgency of engaging with ancient works of art now, in ways that aren’t insulting to either the audience or the art itself. They fail all the time, but when they succeed, it’s magnificent. If you’re running a classical theater, that’s the challenge: finding urgent reasons to do Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet and Cymbeline, to do them now and to do them right. You have to find them. And then you have to let us know.
I’m not saying it’s enough. I felt that kind of urgency at Stratford’s excellent production of Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? But my understanding is that show isn’t selling great either, even though the Studio is the festival’s smallest stage. If you build it, they still might not come.
But you have to build it anyway. Otherwise why are we here?