"Goddess" at Berkeley Rep

Berkeley Rep photo by Kevin Berne and Alessandro Mello

 Berkeley Rep has become known over the last decade or two as a place where musicals get developed or premiered on their way to Broadway. Starting with Passing Strange and American Idiot and Amelie, then more recently Ain't Too Proud and Paradise Square, Berkeley has become a staging and trial ground for new musicals. The latest iteration is a world premiere of a new musical by a team with a pretty solid track record: it was conceived by Shaheem Ali, composer Michael Thurber wrote the music and lyrics, and the book is by Jocelyn Bioh. I suspect they're already making arrangements to transfer the show to Broadway.

The Play

Set in Mombasa, Kenya, the play is the story of Marimba, the goddess of music and beauty, who has had a falling out with her mother and come to the mortal realm to seek true love. Meanwhile, she gets by in the guise of Nadira, a singer at a trendy club called Mota Mota. There she meets Omari, the scion of the Mombasa political dynasty, just returned home from college in New York. Omari is supposed to succeed his father as mayor of Mombasa, and his fiancée, Cheche, has been making preparations for his campaign while he was away. But Omari just wants to play the saxophone at the club, where he is also falling in love with Nadira.

So the folktale sets up the conflicts between Omari and his parents, Omari and Cheche, Nadira/Marimba and her mother, Nadira and Madongo, the owner of the club who has romantic designs on her. All with a backdrop of the club and its excellent band and crew of colorful, dancing patrons. Lots of singing and dancing, lots of light and color.

The Production

Because this is a show with Broadway aspirations, it's a much bigger, fancier production that we would normally get in a regional theater. The set is large and elaborate. The band is large (and excellent), starting with the Afro jazz music while the audience is getting seated and playing nearly all the way through the show. And the cast is pretty much Broadway caliber: big voices, great dancing skills, etc. The production quality is high throughout. This is a top-notch production.

And it definitely appeals to its audience. This was the first truly packed theater I've been in since the pandemic, and the reception was enthusiastic. I suspect the run will be very successful and the show will go on to New York and do well.

Bottom Line

If you're looking for a Broadway-style and -quality musical show, I would say this is probably as good a bet as any of the touring shows currently playing in San Francisco (though I haven't seen them). The show has been extended through October 2nd, so you still have a chance to see it.

However (you knew this was coming, right?), although I found the show enjoyable, I felt like it was mostly flash and not much substance. Like many folk tales, there isn't a lot of depth or subtlety to the story. Once you get the setup, you pretty much know where everything is going. So it's very predictable, which I realize is what a lot of people want in their Broadway musicals. I also didn't find any of the major characters very engaging. Amber Iman (Nadira) is beautiful and sings incredibly, but her character doesn't have much dimension, and her acting doesn't add much to it. Phillip Johnson Richardson (Omari) has some personal appeal, but his character seems pretty set in his entitled ennui, never really convincing me that there's any conflict involved in choosing his preferred life of music over his family obligations. (And for that matter, it's kind of the same story with Marimba/Nadira--she never seems to show any sense that she has any inclination or reason to go back to being a goddess, preferring instead to pursue the path of personal love. Only when the curse placed on her threatens people she cares about does she get motivated at all to resume her goddess job.)

So the moral of the story seems to be "be true to yourself", almost regardless of the consequences to everyone else. It's kind of a bizarre message to be preaching, but it's done with lots of flair and charisma, so that's something.

On the other hand, a full house and an extended run, and an audience full of more young and BIPOC people than I have seen at almost any other show. So Berkeley Rep has another successful cash cow. The question is, will any of these audiences come back for other shows? And how much of the revenue will go to promoting local artists and shows? A big theater like Berkeley Rep can be a tremendous force in the local theater scene, but only if it invests in that local theater scene. Let's hope.

"Man of God" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Ben Krantz

 During the pandemic shutdown, as theaters were experimenting with various flavors of online presentation of plays, my usual reaction was to think that it was better than nothing, but in just about every case I thought the show would be much more effective live on stage. Last night I got my first chance to test that theory, as we went to Shotgun to see Man of God, which had been planned for 2020 and was presented as a Zoom play during the shutdown.

Unsurprisingly, the show is much more effective as a fully-staged production.

The Play

Four teenaged, Asian American girls from a church youth group are on a mission trip to Thailand. When one of the girls finds a camera hidden in the bathroom of their hotel room, the four face a lot of growing up, very quickly. First they turn on each other, but as the realization comes that the camera was placed by the pastor who is also their only chaperone, they quickly have to come to grips with their limited options. As denial gives way to anger, the play dramatizes the cinematic-inspired revenge fantasies they concoct. In the end, they have to confront the pastor in person, and reality has to take the place of the fantasies.

Written by Anna Ouyang Moench, the play explores both the reality of how young women learn to live in a world where they are constantly the subject of the male gaze (or worse), and how neither the reality nor the fantasies of how to deal with ongoing problems like this are satisfying in the end.

The Production

[My usual disclaimer here: I'm a member of the board at Shotgun, and my wife and I are season sponsors. I am friends with members of the cast and crew. Opinions here are solely my own.]

This play is so much richer as a fully-staged production than it could be online. For one thing, the interactions of the characters, both verbal and physical, are much clearer and more meaningful in person. It's one thing to tell something from one Zoom window to another, and quite another to physically move toward someone, raising your voice. Also, as the production photo above illustrates, there is much meaning in the contact of these characters, who are constantly ping-ponging between jousting amongst themselves and realizing that they are also their only support system.

Director Michelle Talgarow (with ample assistance from the lighting design of Gabe Rodriguez and Dave Ragaza) manages to move the girls between their reality and their revenge fantasies deftly and with humor, despite the seriousness of the scenario. This is one of the clear ways the live production is able to do things the online version could not possibly touch. And while none of the four actors playing the girls is an actual teenager, they do generally manage to capture enough of the behaviors and interactions of teen girls to enable one to suspend disbelief.

Another thing that is much clearer when seeing the show in person is that the pastor (Chuck Lacson) is not physically present through most of the action--only appearing onstage during the revenge fantasies and then finally at the end. That makes a big difference in the understanding of the play.

Bottom Line

The play works well, and it clearly speaks loudly to a segment of the audience. There is definitely a sense that young girls, and particularly Asian girls, don't feel seen or heard in society, and that their stories aren't told on stage. This production definitely addresses that, both in its content and in its staging. So that's a big step.

I definitely felt after seeing the show on Zoom that the script was a bit too blunt and the message not as universally appealing as I'd generally want to see in a play. Now having seen it in something more like its intended form, I can see that there is much more subtlety to the story-telling than I was able to get online, and the message is much more clearly directed at a broader audience. This is definitely not just a niche play that panders to those who can relate to the primary characters.

So I feel like the play is well worth seeing. It runs through October 2 at the Ashby Stage.

P.S.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Datebook (a.k.a., "the pink section") has an article by Bay Area journalist Joy Diamond (who is Chinese) about this play. I found her insight informative, as her viewpoint is notably different from my own. One small excerpt:

As much as I love theater, it’s a space in which I feel especially like an outsider, where my race feels particularly noticeable in contrast to the average theatergoer. It’s no secret that both artists and audiences of American theater are overwhelmingly white, and it’s not enough to retroactively fit people of color into the existing canon — we need to introduce new works that reflect and prioritize the diverse perspectives of our population.

“Man of God” does exactly that.

I thought the whole piece was well worth reading. 

"Passengers" at ACT

ACT photo by Kevin Berne

 Several things struck me as odd last night when we walked into the theater to see Passengers at ACT. The first was that it was the first theater I've attended that really seems to believe we are in a post-COVID time: no vaccination check, masks optional (a fact reinforced during the recorded pre-show announcement), and the bar is open downstairs.

The second was that they've obviously done some tinkering with the ticketing system. When I bought my tickets a couple of weeks ago, I scored the last two available seats in the center orchestra section. But walking in, I saw that the section was nearly half empty. There seemed to be a pair of empty seats between each pair of patrons (except in the front rows, which appeared full), so, some kind of social distancing? But we were the only patrons in Row H, and the row behind us was entirely empty. On one hand, better sight lines, or at least the ability to shift a seat or two to avoid sitting behind someone. On the other hand, a huge number of empty seats. I guess this is how they justify keeping their ticket prices so high.

And the third thing was a note inserted in the program explaining that they've renamed the Geary Theater to the Toni Rembe Theater, after a huge, anonymous gift to the company. I guess if I'd been paying attention, there were also banners outside that had the new name. Anyway, nice to see an arts organization getting a big infusion of cash (much of which they are going to put into an endowment). The Chronicle had more information about it today.

The Show

I can't call it a play. It's not a play. It's a multi-disciplinary art performance, combining dance, music, gymnastics, and a lot of circus performances, all written, directed, and choreographed by Shana Carroll. I guess the closest thing I could compare it to might be a Cirque du Soleil show, but on a smaller scale and without the clowns to provide even a modicum of a story line. There is a theme, however. As the name suggests, Passengers is about people on trains, mostly. Among the small amount of verbiage in the show is some talk about how we're all going somewhere, or leaving somewhere. Which I guess is true, but most of us do so without the gymnastics.

The Production

It's really well done. The stars of the show are the circus acts, which are all excellent, as are the gymnastic tumbling bits. The dance is good, but not as polished as the rest. And the sung portions are probably the least-inspired portion, feeling more like a rest period or an excuse to do something else. All the while there are lighting and projection effects that are often distracting, and don't seem to add much to the performance. Ultimately I found that I needed to just focus on the current circus act at any given moment, because the dancing and tumbling and video off to the sides just seemed to be a distraction, and nothing I saw there was as interesting as the current act in the spotlight.

I guess that would be my only complaint, that the show was so busy, it detracted somewhat from the central acts. The choreography and coordination of all these moving parts is impressive, but ultimately not something I can appreciate as much as whatever impossible feat is currently happening on the trapeze, for instance.

Bottom Line

It's a good show, but sort of an odd choice for a theater trying to draw back its audience after the pandemic. It's cool and different and a spectacle, and will likely draw a different audience than your average play. But at the same time, while local theater artists are struggling to get back to work, it would be nice to see the area's largest theater hiring some of them, rather than pulling in a group from outside the area. On the other hand, if this is what puts people in the seats, more power to them.

But this is a theater blog, and I don't feel qualified to really comment on circus, gymnastics, and dance. So I'll just say it's a fun time, worth seeing. It runs through October 9th at the newly-rechristened Toni Rembe Theater.

Ashland, 2022

 After a two-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we were finally able to return to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year. Like all theaters, they are having to come back a bit tentatively, so I have to say the scope of the festival was dramatically less than what we're used to. But it was a treat to be back in lovely Ashland, seeing some of our favorite artists.

So, what's changed?

The two most striking changes in the festival this season were the reduction in the number and scope of the plays offered, and the absence of rotating repertory casting.

The 2022 festival season contained seven total plays, down from the previous eleven. But it wasn't just the number of plays that was reduced. There are fewer performances of each play, and many of the plays are just smaller. For example, one show had a single actor; another had three, and yet another five. This is not a comment on quality--those shows I listed were among the very best we saw. But it reflects both the difficulty of producing a large show when one needs to take precautions to prevent spreading disease and a caution about expending resources on a show when it's uncertain how many people will actually come to see it. The scheduling of the shows was also spread out so that there was no overlap at the middle of the season as there has often been. Some shows ended in July, others didn't begin until August. So it wasn't possible to see all the season's offerings in a single visit. We settled on making two trips, which was fine.

Another victim of the pandemic was repertory casting. Needing to isolate the cast and crew of each show meant that repertory casting was essentially impossible. Overlapping casts and crews would greatly increase the risk of spreading illness across multiple shows, so this seemed a reasonable precaution. It was disappointing to us in the audience, who enjoy seeing actors stretching across a variety of roles. And I imagine it must also have been a blow to the actors who rely on that level of work.

The bottom line here is that there are fewer shows, fewer performances of each, with smaller casts and no chance to be cast across shows. That means a lot fewer opportunities for each artist--a dramatically scaled-down festival.

I should add that another thing that has gone somewhat missing in all this is the festival's eponymous bard: of the seven plays, there were only two Shakespeare works. Although I realize the pandemic necessitated a retreat from the festival's commitment to produce the entire canon of Shakespeare's work in a decade, this pacing suggests that they might be backing away from the canon even more than that, which would be disappointing.

But what about the plays?

Between our two trips, we managed to see all seven of the shows on offer. Of those, I would say two were outstanding, two were very good, and the other three were disappointing on some level.

The best

On each of our visits, we saw one outstanding play, clearly better than the others. For what it's worth, both were in the Thomas Theater (the smallest, black-box theater), but both were ambitious new shows.

unseen

This was the show for the first half of the season in the Thomas. Written by Mona Mansour and directed by Evren Odcikin, it was a west coast premiere. The central character, Mia (Helen Sadler) is a conflict photographer who has been documenting the conflict in Syria when something happens. Her memory has holes, and her ex-girlfriend, Derya (Nora el Samahy), and her mother from California (Caroline Shaffer) try to help her piece together what physical and psychological trauma has landed her here.

The acting, design, and direction for unseen were all amazing. It was clearly the best show we saw on our first visit.

Confederates

After unseen closed, Confederates took over the Thomas Theater, and it's another powerhouse production. Another west coast premiere, this one's by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Artistic Director Nataki Garrett. The writing is just brilliant, with more layers than I can fathom, and the production design brilliantly illustrates the parallel challenges navigated by a modern-day black university professor and an enslaved woman during the American Civil War. We know from Sandra (Bianca Jones)'s opening monologue that this is going to be difficult material, and it is. And while Sara (Erika Rose) demonstrates from her first scene that she well knows the difficulty of staying in line with the masters while still trying to remain true to herself and her family, Sandra's similar conundrums only become apparent as the play progresses.

Using the other actors to portray characters who fill remarkably similar roles in the lives of the two women, on a stage that places the professor's office and the slave shack side-by-side (great scenic design by Nina Ball!), we get a visceral appreciation for both how much and how little has changed over the decades between their lives. I can't do justice to this play in this brief summary. It runs through October 29--go see it!

The next level

Two more shows stood out as being good productions, definitely of a caliber I expect from OSF.

How I Learned What I Learned

This is a show I had seen before (but not blogged about; it was in May, 2019, while I was on blog hiatus). Ubuntu Theater Project (now Oakland Theater Project) co-produced this show with Lorraine Hansbury Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. It's a one-actor show by August Wilson, sort of autobiographically describing his life as a black man in America (or more particularly, Pittsburgh, where he grew up). That production starred Steven Anthony Jones, and he again played the role in Ashland.

I had thought the Ubuntu production was good, though Jones had some lapses. I thought he was much better in the Ashland version: both more confident and more personal. And it didn't hurt to have a bigger budget, so better lighting, a fancier set (also by Nina Ball!), etc. It was just a more polished and convincing production. As noted earlier, a solo show is not something I would ordinarily go to Ashland to see, but the quality of the production was definitely up to their standards.

King John

One of the few Shakespeare history plays I had not yet seen in person (though I have seen a filmed version from Stratford), this was a fairly unconventional staging, directed by Rosa Joshi of the upstart crow collective (who co-produced this), with a cast that is all female or non-binary. After a few minutes, the gender thing just stops being an issue, and you just get into the drama. I have to say that they play (though the ending is a bit weak) holds up very well: it's much clearer, more direct, than most Shakespeare histories. And the cast was really solid, with particular props to Jessika D. Williams as the Bastard (she had impressed me several years ago at CalShakes).

This is another show that is still running, through October 29. If you're making the trip to see Confederates, you can see this, too. Worth it!

The other three

I don't have a lot to say about these. I'll just write about them in the order we saw them. Suffice it to say that none of these would justify a trip all the way to Ashland, but it's not a complete waste of your time to see them if you're there.

The Tempest

I hate putting this on the list of inferior productions, but it belongs there. I love the play in general, and a number of my favorite actors are in the cast. The problems I saw here were directorial. As far as I can tell, either director Nicholas C. Avila didn't know what message he was trying to send, or he didn't figure out how to craft that message out of his actors. But when we saw the show in early July, it had been running for a month, and still hadn't found a direction. Maybe it's better now. I hope so, but I don't have a lot of hope. It's still running, through October 15. But mostly it felt like a waste of a lot of talent, and that's not something I've ever encountered at OSF before.

Once on This Island

This show is very well done. Good music, dancing, energy. Unfortunately, there is no real substance to the story. It's pretty much a story about the happy downtrodden Haitians trying to live happily in the shadow of the colonizing French. And the dream of crossing the racial/class barrier that gets thoroughly thwarted. So it was kind of pleasant, but quite unsatisfying. I'm not sure what the point of this was. Also still running, through October 30th.

Revenge Song: A Vampire Cowboys Creation

I had such high hopes for this one. It's by Qui Nguyen, who wrote Vietgone, which I've seen twice and loved both times. And this promised to be sort of similar, a musical about a queer, swashbuckling woman (Julie d'Aubigny--a real, historical figure), trending toward superhero status. I just feel like the show wasn't ready for prime time. It felt very uneven, maybe unfinished. My expectations of a show at OSF are for something definitely more polished. And it was compounded by the fact that the sound mixing was terrible. Every time actors started to sing with the band, their voices got dropped, making it difficult to hear what they were singing. That's pretty inexcusable.

Again, there's some real talent in the cast and design crew. We even had to postpone seeing this from early July (rain) to September, and it still felt unfinished, and the sound was a problem. That's very disappointing. You, too, can still be disappointed if you go see it before it closes on October 14.

Summing Up

It was awesome to be back in Ashland, both times. The town is much as we remembered it, though a number of businesses did not survive the shutdown, and some of our favorite restaurants have folded. But there aren't a lot of empty storefronts, and new restaurants (some of them excellent) have opened.

That said, we were there for the Independence Day weekend in July, and where Ashland would normally be packed to the gills, there were tables at restaurants, empty seats in the theaters, and parking spaces available. The outdoor theater shows had pretty good crowds, but the indoor theaters felt about half or maybe two-thirds full at best. On a holiday weekend in the peak of their season. When we returned in September (after Labor Day), it was definitely not crowded.

So I have to say I'm concerned about the future of the festival. Fewer shows, lower ticket prices, fewer performances, smaller crowds. All that adds up to a serious drop in revenue. I can only imagine that they must be struggling. And next year's season looks to be much the same: seven shows, including a solo show, only two Shakespeare plays. and so on. I hope by next year people will feel more confident about going out and about, taking trips to see theater and such. Only time will tell.

"This Much I Know" at Aurora Theatre Company

 

Aurora Theatre Company photo, uncredited

Oh, my. Now that I've broken the ice and written a posting, it seems like time to revisit posting about plays.

This world premiere of a play by the creative team that brought us the acclaimed Eureka Day (playwright Jonathan Spector and director Josh Costello) is really terrific, so I felt like I needed to use the vast reach of this blog (yes, that was sarcasm) to try to entice a few more people to see it.

The Play

First off, this is a well-crafted piece of writing. It's clever without being full of itself, and thoughtful but without straining the brain. Inspired in part by the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman (notably Thinking, Fast and Slow), the play explores how (or whether) people make decisions and choices and how they react to events outside their control. So we have three characters: a professor, his wife, and a student, but all of the actors portray a variety of characters as the narrative slips in and out of time.

Ultimately only the professor's character really gets fleshed out--we have many questions left about the wife and student. But that's a detail, really; the overall effect is still quite satisfying.

The Production

The staging is nice and simple, though there is a fairly busy wall that gets projections, talking portraits, and a number of flags popping out of it. The rest is mostly space for the actors, with a few simple items: blocks that serve as chairs, a desk, etc. And we mostly get to focus on the three actors. Lukesh (Rajesh Bose) is a self-assured professor of psychology who analyzes everything. His wife, Natalya (Anna Ishida), has her life upended by an accident. And the student, Harold (Kenny Toll), arrives in Lukesh's office having been ostracized from the English department for his white-nationalist views. As Lukesh struggles to hold together his relationship with Natalya and Harold comes to grips with his relationship with the rest of the world, we're drawn into background stories that take us to Stalinist USSR and modern Russia, the world of online racism, and a number of Lukesh's lectures that increasingly intersect with his personal life.

Through all of this, the players are shifting in and out of their roles. It's quite a deft choreography, and mostly keeps the play pretty seamless. There are two intermissions in the just-over-two-hour play, which seems a bit much, but they are the two logical breaks in the story, and I suspect the actors need a breather.

Bottom Line

It's really refreshing to see solid, new work like this. The script is really interesting without being over the top, and the acting and direction are quite wonderful. The show is probably a little bit longer than it needs to be, but it's well worth it, and never drags. I quite enjoyed it!

The show runs at Aurora through October 2nd. I definitely recommend seeing it.

Revisiting an Old Friend

 I know.

I don't do this anymore. I got tired of the effort it took to produce even a modest-length "review" of the plays I saw, when very few people were even reading the results. I felt bad because I knew a few people, at least, had come to expect my posts, and in truth, I missed writing them.

And then came The Plague, and the Master of the Revels closed all the theaters. In fairness, I had stopped blogging about theater well before COVID-19 was even a twinkle in some Chinese bat's eye. But it soon became clear that not only was my attempt at "Too Much Theater" impossible, but we would all get to experience "Not Nearly Enough Theater" for far too long.

And now things are opening up again, and we're seeing shows in person (the less said about the lessons we learned with online performances, the better, though maybe I'll blog about that someday). But that's not what brought me back here. It was rereading a play.

Searching for a Reading

Last summer, when it appeared theaters were going to get to reopen for real, and we were all vaccinated and excited about life again, my wife and I got to be guinea pigs. A few years earlier at the Shotgun Players' annual gala we had bought the rights to host a private, staged reading, and the reading itself was scheduled for late April of 2020. Obviously, that didn't happen. We had planned to use the beautiful set that Nina Ball had designed for Shotgun's production of Henry V that was supposed to open right as COVID shutdowns hit--they were in tech rehearsals, and never got to open. It was terribly sad for the artists, of course, but I also took it personally as I'd been allowed to sit in on quite a number of their rehearsals, and really felt like a small part of the gang. Plus I really wanted to use that set!

My thinking had been that we ought to do a reading that would take advantage of Nina's brilliant little interpretation of Shakespeare's Globe Theater inside the Ashby Stage, and the play that came to mind was Bill Cain's Equivocation. We'd seen its world premiere at Ashland in 2009 and also when it played at Marin Theatre Company the following year. Terrific play, partly taking place in the Globe: Perfect!

But as the pandemic wore on, that play felt less pertinent in the moment, and we ultimately settled on a reading of Lauren Gunderson's wonderful play, The Book of Will. We had seen it twice in Ashland in 2018, and had been looking forward to it playing at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in the summer of 2020 before it got canceled. So it was both a chance to give that play a deserved shot in the Bay Area, and also a celebration of the role theater plays in our hearts during difficult times. It was kind of the ideal show to use to reopen the theater after more than a year away, and it, too, is largely set on the stage of the Globe.

So that's all good, but also not the reason I'm writing this.

Old Play, New Context

When we were planning the reading of Equivocation for 2020, I read through the script for the first time in several years. (I have two copies: the OSF script used for the premiere and also the published version--I really like this play!) The play revolves around the premise that in 1605, while Shakespeare was working on his new play about King Lear, the government tries to hire him to write a new "history" play, but this time about current history, specifically the Gunpowder Plot.

This leaves our playwright in a quandary. The king is, after all, the patron of his theater company, and with theaters having been closed by outbreaks of the plague for several years, a commissioned work would be welcome revenue. But the company is divided over whether to accept the task. The play will have to delicately balance the official government line with portrayals of the conspirators and their views. The playwright struggles both with his company and with the government, all while the story of the Plot is still coming to light. Art, truth, and expediency all seem to conflict. Can he write a play that is true and still get it approved? Are we being manipulated? Is he being manipulated?

A Little History Lesson: A House Divided

The years 1605-6 were busy ones in England, but really, for several centuries the whole country had been in nearly constant upheaval. Must of that period is familiar to theater-goers through Shakespeare's "history plays" that cover the period from the early 1300s to the mid-1500s. Throughout those years, England was wracked by questions of succession, usurpation, and the legitimacy of its kings. Even when the Tudor era put an end to the Wars of the Roses, religion came to the fore, and for several generations the country ping-ponged between Catholicism and the Church of England.

Despite a fair degree of adherence to actual history, Shakespeare's history plays both bend history to fit dramatic needs, and also carefully select themes that will pass the approval of his contemporary censors. Not only does Shakespeare have to craft his plays so his audience will enjoy them, but he also needs to make sure the current monarchs will permit the plays to go on.

With the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 and the succession of James I (brokered by Sir Robert Cecil, the Secretary of State), Protestantism seemed well established in England, though there remained devoted, mostly closeted, Catholics (and indeed, Shakespeare may have been one). Jesuit priests were officially banned from the country, for example. And the Protestant King James was not universally loved, both because he was Scottish and because he was deemed a bit of a lightweight in the ruling department, perhaps more interested in the trappings of the office than the job itself. So in November of 1605, a group of English Catholics conspired to blow up the House of Lords (and the king) during the opening of Parliament, an event known as the Gunpowder Plot. Though the plot failed, the event was used to justify further restrictions on Catholics, and to this day the anniversary is commemorated as Bonfire Night.

So, then: a deeply divided nation, tenuous leadership, and a scandalous attempt to overthrow the government. And even in the aftermath, conspiracy theories that agents of the crown might have aided the plot, knowing they could exploit the event for political gain.

The Play, Then and Now

Cain originally wrote Equivocation in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ongoing Iraq War, and the themes of government coercion and propaganda, lies, torture, and conspiracy theories all resonated strongly. Exploiting a national tragedy to unite divisive factions, even if the story doesn't quite ring true, was a big theme of the play.

The parallels with 9/11 were quite clear at the time, with a big, violent event used to pull the nation and the world together, with threats of further terror used to justify curtailing travel, increasing surveillance, and eventually, invading foreign countries. One can easily equate the incidents and the responses to them--that was certainly palpable when I saw the play in 2009-10.

So in late 2019 I re-read the play to make sure it would still feel timely a decade later. And boy, was I surprised to find that it resonated in whole new ways! The play hadn't changed, but the social context for the audience was very different.

In pre-pandemic America, the notion that the government might be trying to rewrite (or even, pre-write) history was all too credible in the land of "alternative facts" and "fake news". An unqualified new head of state, pulling the levers of the Deep State, manipulating stories and perhaps even staging them--all terribly familiar in the Time of Trump. Cain's exploration of the role of Truth is even more fascinating that it had been a decade earlier, and honestly, the ambivalence of the answers are even more poignant in the current environment.

It was truly eye-opening to see how a play that had been so rich and timely when it first came out was in many ways even more on-point in a dramatically different world ten years down the road.

And that was all before January 6, 2021. I mean, how much more pertinent can we get? An actual insurrection attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election is right up there with putting gunpowder in a tunnel under the Parliament. And the spin doctors casting doubt on everything and everyone--motives, actions, words--everything is up for grabs.

All I can say is that I continue to be amazed at how prescient Cain was in his writing. But really what that means is that he wrote something really good: a piece of work so deep and complex and real that it provides a framework for gaining insights into future conditions that change over time.

Nerdy Shakespeare Notes

Aside from the deep issues addressed in Equivocation, there is a whole layer of "inside baseball" material for the Shakespeare enthusiast. On top of his background as a Jesuit, playwright Cain has strong credentials from his work with Shakespeare's plays: founder and artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company, he has also directed Shakespeare plays from coast to coast. So this play is full of playful nuggets that appeal to Shakespeare nerds.

In addition to the delightful digs about Shakespeare's acting ability and his penchant for killing off his characters (and particularly, kings), Cain intertwines history with his own story in at least three different ways. One obvious one is the character of his daughter, Judith. There is no evidence of them having anything like the relationship depicted here. A second is the family rivalry with the Cecils. Although scholars have long linked Robert Cecil's father, William, to the character Polonius in Hamlet, I believe Cain's linkage of the younger Cecil to the Scottish Play is entirely novel. In any case, the snarky digs and clever creations make Equivocation a treasure trove for a Shakespeare nerd.

Why Do We Do This?

I will admit that a few bits of the play seem less timely, or at least less urgent, than they did before. The debate over torture and its use and abuse as a tool of investigation is no longer front-page news, for example. But the bigger dynamics at play--government versus private interests, art as a tool for finding (or obscuring) truth, artistic integrity, fathers and daughters, entrenched dynasties--all still work delightfully.

And ultimately, this is what all literature, all stories, all art should be about--holding up a mirror to our current selves so that we can investigate who we are and what we think, feel, and believe. And that's not a one-time offer. Revisiting a book or a play or an artwork isn't just a way to reinforce something already known or have the same experience again. To paraphrase Heraclitus, you can't step into the same story twice. It's reopening the learning. It might reinforce, but it might replace or adjust or augment what came before. There is always value in revisiting stories.

My first viewing of Equivocation was a milestone for me--both the play and the production were eye-opening, and it's been a touchstone subsequently as I think about plays and the theater. Reading it, and hopefully seeing it again lets me both re-evaluate what I recall I got from it the first time and experience new reactions as well. Even if it's the same story, I'm not the same person, and this is not the same world, and there will be new thoughts to think.

Of course, not every piece of art deserves all this much attention. Part of the ongoing reimagining of theater today deals with pruning some works from the canon and introducing new and different ones. I'm all for new works and new voices, but it's important to remember why some of the classics are genuinely classic, and why some modern works are better than others. Some repay ongoing study with rich rewards, and I'm pleased to find that Equivocation seems to fall in that category.