PIPPIN! and MAN OF LA MANCHA: Semi-Full-Frontal Intellectual Theatre (23 June 2013)

       One advantage of academic theatre (my colleagues used "theater" for the building and the British "–re" for play-presenting and their field of work) — one advantage of academic theatre, though a double-edged one, is that practitioners are a little freer than commercial operations to mess around.

       Theatre seasons at universities, however, also have to make a bit of money or at least not lose much, so their summer presentations are often either Shakespearean or lightweight, or both, and usually include a musical. (On Shakespeare: Don't be impressed with the gutsiness of your local theatre troupe if they do a Shakespeare play. Unless it's a very avant-garde production — let's say Macbeth in Gaelic set in Arkansas with midgets — it's probably their moneymaker for the season. Old Will can still put butts into seats.)

       A couple summers, though, Miami University Theatre earned its keep intellectually as well as monetarily by doing sort of back-to-back a romantic, idealistic Man of La Mancha (1965) and a strongly anti-romantic, anti-idealist Pippin (1972).

       Man of La Mancha is inherently ambivalent about romantic idealism since the Man of La Mancha was Don Quixote, and Don Quixote, you know was, as we say in high-power literary criticism, bat-shit crazy. In the play we're told explicitly, sensibly, and very truly, it's good to have dreams, "But if you build your life on dreams / It’s prudent to recall / A man with moonlight in his hands / Has nothing there at all."

       And more than prudence is involved here: The ability to tell world-time from dream-time is intrinsic to sanity.

       Ah, but yet ….

       But yet whatever Cervantes may've intended, many readers have had a justifiable soft spot in our hearts and less justifiable soft spot in our heads for Don Quixote, and his lovable, quixotic form of madness.

       And when I saw and heard Man of La Mancha in Chicago during the riots after Martin Luther King was murdered, I took the play to mean that "To dream the impossible dream" is a pretty good thing. And I'm no sentimentalist: obviously, arguably not even a decent human being; I took the occasion of a horrific assassination and riots to get a hard-to-get theatre ticket.

       As produced at Miami U and in the conception of Bob Fosse, the original director, Pippin is more than unsentimental: it's an attack on sentimentality, romantic theatre, and romantic idealism. Which is a good thing: we too often use "idealist" as an unambiguous compliment. It shouldn't be; literal idealism — in an Inquisitor or fervent Nazi or one of Mao's dream-intoxicated thugs in the Cultural Revolution — literal idealism is dangerous.

       So three cheers for the Miami University Theatre Department and whoever the director was (which I'm not going to look up for reasons that will become clear in a moment).

       Or maybe 2.5 or two cheers.

       The reduction in cheers is because it wasn't enough to do an edgy, controversial play for the summer musical; they needed THAT SOMETHING EXTRA to wow the crowd. So, since a Gaelic Razorback Macbeth, in the nude with midgets, had probably already been done in San Francisco, they did Pippin in body stockings. The time-setting of Pippin is somewhat ambiguous, but the historical Pippin was the son of King Charles the Great, so the earliest it would make sense to set the play is the time of "Charlemagne," about 800 C.E., a long time after the invention of clothing, but a good deal before body stockings. So there was a good chance no one had thought of body stockings before and this production would have not only THAT SOMETHING EXTRA but also SOMETHING DIFFERENT!

       They messed around, and oh, it was different, all right.

       I attended opening night to a packed house: not only summer school Theatre students required to go but families and friends and maybe the standard bussed-in kiddie groups.

       At intermission, the men's room was even more silent than usual. Then one guy at a urinal said to a friend or no one in particular — violating the commandment, "Thou shalt not speak to strangers in the men's room": "Well, would you tell him?"

       Continued silence for a couple or three "beats." Then, "Tough call."

       The "him" here was the star: a sophomore in his first leading role. For whatever reasons, he'd forgotten to put on his "dance belt" under his body stocking. He'd also not worn a jock strap or just his underwear. He'd gone "commando," and from my seat well back in the auditorium I could see that he was, to modify slightly a line from King Lear, "every inch a prince."

       His parents, family, and friends sitting down-front center would get the point made more explicitly.

       I received, by the way, within a few weeks, the answer to The Question at the Urinals: it came from a student of mine who was a professional wardrobe mistress, and it was "Good God, No!" I.e., you don't tell the leading man opening night halfway through his first big performance that he …, well that he failed to do what he failed to do. What she would do is next performance and thereafter lay out the star's costume herself, with the dance belt on top — and she'd tell the other guys in the dressing room to make goddamn sure Pippin wore the belt, whatever his ideas might be on genital comfort.

       I'm sure that after a year or so the star's friends got him drunk and got out their Polaroid shots of him in costume and let him know about his opening-night costume problem; to the best of my knowledge, no one mentioned it to him for the run of the play.

       The point here, beyond a cruelly funny story and the moral, "Don't walk out on stage without having someone you trust check out how you look" is that just about no one in the Theatre or English Departments discussed the insightful juxtaposition of Man of La Mancha and Pippin and the profound issues that contrast raised about romanticism and idealism and the role of the arts generally and theatre in particular in reinforcing potentially dangerous Quixotic idealism on the one hand or emotionally enervating rejection of ideals.

       People talked, of course, about the poor dumb-schmuck actor and his up-front and center dong.

       Hey, man — body stockings! For that extra pizzazz!

       There is much to be said for academic theatre and experimental theatre messing around and going for the New! Improved!! On the other hand, sometimes something has "never been done that way" because doing it that way is stupid.

Unfriendlies on the Left (Background): Me and the MLA (8 Oct. 2014)

The invitation came as a surprise but a very welcome surprise: an offer to contribute an essay to a publication of The Modern Language Association, the publishers of PMLA, arguably the premiere journal in literary studies.

I was invited to submit an essay for consideration in the MLA volume on Teaching Hamlet, which was somewhat curious since I hadn't inquired about the volume nor asked to be invited — and my dissertation covered what I called "Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies," which meant for me the fours major tragedies after Hamlet and not including Hamlet.
Still, I thought I had something to say about Hamlet and a couple other Shakespeare tragedies and suggested an approach to the plays out of Bertolt Brecht and the structure of an Elizabethan playhouse like the Globe and borrowing from at least one more recent critic (probably Francis Fergusson).

Short form: a public playhouse was mostly a raised platform thrust into an audience, surrounded on three sides and a bit, with the players both definitely separated from, but near the audience. There was little scenery, and the effect was far from "illusionist." So you would know you were watching a play, and the usually pretty rhetorical style of acting — to say nothing of dialog in verse — would reinforce that knowledge.

Still, the audience was physically close, and within the space of a few lines — in the opening Chorus to Henry V, for a defining example — audience members could be alienated from the characters and invited to identify with them. That is, you could watch them objectively as speaking objects moving around the stage, and you could get sucked into their stories and identify with them as if they were real people.

This complex point of view is highly significant in a Romantic tragedy like Romeo and Juliet and still more so in a Romantic/Satiric tragedy like Antony and Cleopatra. At times we identify strongly with the lovers — or do with Romeo and Juliet, unless you're soul-dead; and at other times, or at the same time, we can look at them objectively and know that they're making mistakes that will lead to the tragedy we paid money to see and can never totally forget that we're seeing.

Hamlet is definitely presented from the point of view of Prince Hamlet, and we will him well and hope he succeeds in getting revenge. On the other hand, we know that Hamlet is in the star of a tragedy by  Shakespeare, so we know if he follows the course he wants to follow and we want him to follow because we like him and see things from his point of view — well, we know that if he proceeds as he wishes he'll end up featured among the litter of bodies that will end the play.

Also, Hamlet, viewed objectively — especially if you were a normal theatre-goer and hadn't read the script — Hamlet viewed objectively as the play moves along is a bit of a puritanical putz. He's also an intellectual who isn't thinking well. "To be or not to be" is always the question if Albert Camus is right, and Hamlet answers it every time he gets out of bed in the morning rather than turning his face to the wall, giving up, and dying. Or stabbing himself, or whatever. The Question, Hamlet, is whether or not to kill the king, and ethically it is a damn interesting question and should be on the minds of an audience in a Christian monarchy.

Kill the king, Hamlet, or don't. In either event shut up about it; you're annoying people — except that the poetry is really good. More important than annoying people, Hamlet is also killing people one way or another, and in the case of two of his friends he kills on the basis of partial evidence judged with prejudice. For a 30-year-old advanced student at the prestigious Wittenberg U, Hamlet commits some major intellectual, and ethical, errors.

Well, and so forth. It was a pretty good essay on teaching the play: looking at Hamlet in terms of theatre and ethics and the conditions of physical production — and not as "a long poem with speaking parts," as often done, and definitely not as an object of veneration. It was an approach that could spark class discussion.

And the essay was accepted, and I awaited the volume to come out and get reviewed and pretty much guarantee I'd get promoted.

Then the volume didn't come out as scheduled, and I didn't hear from the editors. And then it still didn't come out and still didn't, and I still heard nothing.

And then I was told very casually that the Teaching Hamlet volume hadn't come out because it would not come out. The MLA radical caucus had won the election at the last convention, and they cancelled the volume of old-fart essays and commissioned a volume more up to date.
Could they publish two volumes, for an interesting debate on a really wide range of approaches to Hamlet and literature more generally? Well, maybe, but it would be expensive, and, more important, the old approaches were imperialist, Eurocentric, sexist, (etc.), and wrong.

My Hamlet essay never did get published, and I soon completed my exit from Shakespeare scholarship and criticism into the brave new field of Science Fiction and Fantasy (and horror and eutopia and dystopia) — with an increasing interest in movies. And eventually I became a full professor, served out my thirty-five years and retired to a decent climate and work "on spec" in the movie industry.


Miami University in Oxford, OH, is fairly conservative — it's in John Boehner's Congressional District — and I was sufficiently unconservative to work with the group trying to organize a union. I would get my due from Miami, and for the most part did get my due,  but with delays. That's how the game is played, and that was okay with me. Having my Hamlet essay cancelled, though, was annoying. I should not take it personally, but I do: as an unfriendly gesture from my colleagues to my Left.