The Shakespeare Party

In recent years, this was said to be an authentic
portrait of Shakespeare.

When I attended Knox College in the 1960s, the English department threw a Shakespeare's Birthday party every April on the weekend nearest the traditional birth date of April 23.  It's also the traditional date of Shakespeare's death, as well as the actual deaths of Cervantes and weirdly, several other literary figures through the ages.

This party featured a series of hastily arranged and improvised scenes from Shakespeare's plays, performed with text in hand by party attendees drafted on the spot.

The only set piece that repeated year to year was the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, in which a blushing but highly pleased Howard Wilson, longtime chair of the department, would read with a woman student especially selected to deepen his blush.  It was one of two annual performances for Wilson, along with a Christmas season reading of A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, held in the Gizmo coffee shop.

William Brady taught the English Department courses in Shakespeare in those days.  I had taken his 16th century course and was signed up for Shakespeare my junior year, when I took ill with mononucleosis while back in PA for Christmas break, and had to delay my return to campus until well into the term. So I dropped that course and converted my course load to mostly independent studies.  I wound up with the highest gpa that trimester I ever had.  I even made the Dean's List for the only time.  But I never did take a Shakespeare course.

So my experience of Shakespeare was nonacademic.  I saw my first ever Shakespeare play on stage at Knox.  I'd watched a TV adaptation of Julius Caesar when I was 11, but when I arrived at Knox I'd seen exactly one stage play, a university production of Oedipus Rex I attended with my high school English class. (Unless you count my high school's productions of Seventeenth Summer and Time Out for Ginger, or any of the skits and plays I wrote that were performed by grade school classmates and my Cub Scout den.)

I was very lucky in what I saw that first time. It was the 1964 Knox production of Hamlet, the first play produced in the new Harbach Theatre in the new Fine Arts Center, directed by Rowland K. "Kim" Chase.  It starred Jim Eichelberger, a truly awesome actor who later achieved stardom first at the Trinity Repertory in Providence, and then with the Ridiculous Theatre Company, off off Broadway in New York, appearing as Ethyl Eichelberger.

I was actually onstage at Knox with Eichelberger once, in satirical skit that the Mortarboard club mounted each year. He played James Bond. (It was a year before the notorious Batman satire--so notorious that the skits disappeared for years afterward. ) Just to watch him pull a chair out from under a table and sit down was remarkable--his grace was astounding.

Kim Chase wrote eloquently about preparing for that Hamlet production in the first issue of our campus magazine, Dialogue.  It was basically a talk he'd given the previous spring, as part of the Last Lecture series, in which faculty members were invited to speak on a topic as if it were the last lecture they would ever give. In this case, it was close to the truth.  Chase soon left Knox, part of the mid-60s exodus.

I saw a few more Shakespeare plays at Knox, including a performance by the touring Royal Shakespeare Company, and acted in one: Macbeth. Ric Newman played the lead, with Valjean McLenighan as Lady Macbeth.  Both became good friends, Valjean for the longer time.

A production of Macbeth I saw
with Christopher Plummer and
Glenda Jackson.  Still a difficult play.

Also in the cast was Richard Hoover, who went on to fame as a production designer for television and film.  I played the pivotal role of the Thane of Ross (actor's joke) combined with a couple of small parts.  I shared the first scene of the play with Richard (after the witches, that is.)  He played King Duncan.  Once I was still in the green room when the play started,  and I had to run upstairs for my entrance, glimpsing Richard frantically pacing the stage, waiting for my arrival from the battlefield to announce Macbeth's victory. That added a little drama, and some verisimilitude, as I was out of breath when I entered.

I saw a lot of Shakespeare on stage and screen over the next half century.  Especially in my recent years writing a theatre column for a weekly newspaper or publicity for a university theatre, I read a lot about the plays (as well as the plays themselves) and about Shakespeare.  I wrote about more than 20 productions of 16 of the plays, including several at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Shakespeare is produced even more these days than back in the 60s, though becoming a brand has its pros and cons.  In about one year I also saw a comedic condensed Shakespeare, a comedy about actors playing Hamlet (I Hate Hamlet) and a drama in which Shakespeare is a character (Equivocations), all of which included excerpts from actual Shakespeare plays.

I'd been familiar for some years with the granddaddy of this trend, Tom Stoppard's Rosencranz and Gildenstern Are Dead, and finally saw a production five or six years ago. I even at one point contributed to this tendency by writing a prequel to Othello (Young O), although no harm done as it was never produced.

But Shakespeare brand consciousness also led to some unnecessary razzmatazz that too often distorts and deforms the plays. I've seen too many fashionable attempts to change periods, locating the plays in ever stranger times and places. Few succeeded, and some were utter sham.

Ian McKellen's 1990s  film of Richard III located in in a kind of nightmare 1930s was one that did succeed, and a late 1980s or early 90s production of Hamlet at the University of Pittsburgh that mixed periods was very effective.  (It starred Canadian actor Richard MacMillan, who later had a small but juicy part opposite the great Ian Holm in the film The Day After Tomorrow.)  

But All's Well That Ends Well set in a trailer park?  I wish I were kidding.  How about Othello set in the 1980 locker room of the Los Angeles Lakers, retitled Shaqthello?  (Okay, I am kidding about that one.)

In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, such anxiety-ridden transpositions are more often "useless carnivals."  Updating the plays is unnecessary because the audience itself updates them. A production that finds the vitality in the play can't help but to make it relevant to the times, because it will engage an audience living in those times.  Or as Stephen Greenblatt put it:

"We speak of Shakespeare’s works as if they were stable reflections of his original intentions, but they continue to circulate precisely because they are so amenable to metamorphosis. They have left his world, passed into ours, and become part of us. And when we in turn have vanished, they will continue to exist, tinged perhaps in small ways by our own lives and fates, and will become part of others whom he could not have foreseen and whom we can barely imagine."

As for me, all these years of Shakespeare taught me that there's always too much there to get in one viewing; you always miss something, and so you can always go back.  What is always there for me is the music.

So my favorite comedy is As You Like It, my favorite film of a Shakespeare play is the Kenneth Branagh/Emma Thompson Much Ado About Nothing (although the David Tennant/Catherine Tate version is pretty good, too.)

 But my favorite play remains Hamlet, and though I've seen several more productions on stage (including one with Kevin Kline in New York) and especially on screen,  my favorite production remains that first one, at Knox.  It's a theatrical cliche that your first Hamlet is the one you remember,  but I still feel that Kim Chase and Jim Eichelberger gave us the essential Hamlet, a young man in a hostile and hypocritical world not of his making.

As for the Shakespeare's birthday parties, I can recall actual impressions of only one, probably my last, fifty years ago this past weekend.  I remember it as being at least partly in daylight, and mostly outdoors.  April in some ways really was the cruelest month in Galesburg, at least in those years.  The winters were bleak and long, while spring burst suddenly and completely.  Everything was green and flowering almost overnight.  But we barely got a chance to enjoy it before it was time to blinker and fret for final exams and final papers (which included departmental comprehensives senior year.)  Late April and May were soft air and sunlit torture. Spring was as brief as it was luminous--the insufferable Galesburg summer came early and stayed long, too.

I was in a strange head space (as we might have said then) that spring anyway, but that's another story-- possibly several other stories.  I recall realizing even during that party that I was behaving badly.  But I was given a part--I did the Porter's comic speech from, of all plays, Macbeth.  David Axlerod played it in our production the year before, very effectively.  It was a guest star performance--he arrived in enough time to do his makeup, then did his bit, got laughs and lots of applause, and left, while the rest of us careened around in tights for two and a half hours.  (Although my tights seemed to have inspired a few female students in the audience, but that's yet another story, that I am honor-bound not to tell.)

My own Shakespeare performance at the party was very over-the-top, by design.  I recall not sensing the attentiveness or laughter I was going for, however.  But I like to remember that I said the words well.