#folger

An essay I wrote about Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V at the Guthrie Theater was published this week in the Stage Directors and Choreographers Journal.

I assistant directed the plays earlier this year and enjoyed reflecting back on the process with the actors, directors, stage managers, dramaturgs, casting directors, and observers who made the process possible. A huge thank you to my editors at SDC, Stephanie Coen and Lucy Gram, and everyone who gave their time for interviews: Mark Catron, Penelope Geng, Joe Haj, Tyler Michaels King, Jennifer Liestman, Tree O’Halloran, Carla Steen, Will Sturdivant, and Stephen Yoakam.

I wanted to work with Joe Haj since I saw his Pericles at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2015 when I was on the public programs staff. It is still one of the best productions of [anything] that I’ve seen and I’m grateful he invited me to join the directing team3 for this project. I have so many treasured memories like Henry IV bringing an air fryer to rehearsal and making pizza rolls for everyone, Hotspur creating company-specific Connections during tech, or the staggeringly brilliant composer Jack Herrick teaching me to juggle during dinner breaks.

Joe and Yoke were in the Histories at the Guthrie in 1990 and I read Michael Pennington’s book about producing ALL of the history plays with the English Shakespeare Company during rehearsals. We were all struck by how the challenges and rewards of digging deeply into Shakespeare rhyme across the years:

Joe was reminded of an experience he had on a tour of the theatre archives at the Folger Shakespeare Library when he directed Hamlet there in 2010. “I remember [the librarians] taking these prompt books down and looking in the margins, which are filled, filled, filled with scribbles of…artists just like us, trying to wrestle to the ground the hardest material in the world. Trying to find a path into it, trying to make something that may be beautiful for people to come and participate in and watch. I realized this play has been around for centuries…we’re just in the river of the long history of this play.” “We get to go in, splash around a little bit, make our minor contribution to this eons long contemplation of this play. It was so disburdening…I don’t have to make the perfect anything. I don’t have to make the thing nobody’s ever seen. I don’t have to do any of those things. I just have to try to make the thing as beautifully as I know how with these collaborators in this process, that’s my only responsibility.”

“Gerwig also includes a downright Shakespearean soliloquy (impeccably delivered by America Ferrera) that is simultaneously insightful and obvious, rabble-rousing and heavy-handed, momentum-killing and an emotional highlight. It’s complicated and amazing…you know, like Shakespeare.”

Amy Patel, 01.07.2007, Clapham, London

Amy meets a man named Graham through a criminology class they both go to and finds him slightly odd as he is constantly taking notes. On April 7th 2006, she realises they live on the same street, and while they are walking home she falls (or is pushed) onto the street and suffers a concussion. She goes back to Graham’s flat to recover and notices a hypnotic table and bookshelves full of notebooks. When she returns home, she realises she can see into his flat from hers, and takes to watching him. One night, she notices a piece of pipe that looks like “many arms with no hands” slip into his flat. When she calls the police, a man who is Not Graham answers the door, but the police find nothing amiss. It notices her watching and begins to stare directly into her room every night. She moves and never sees Not Graham again. His notebooks were just full of the sentence “Keep watching” written over and over again.

Notes: Amy enjoys people watching in her own time, and seems intent on watching Graham without his knowledge, but based on his notes it seems like he knows she is watching and is scribbling his notes specifically to attract her attention (likely so NotThem won’t get him). The first appearance of the web table. Tim worked on this one alongside Sasha. 

Entities: The Stranger, The Web, The Eye

Names mentioned: 

AMADEUS at the Folger: astounding performances from the three leads, especially Ian Merrill Peakes as Salieri. Peakes’ intensity and candid sincerity (and, at times, venomous insincerity) are such that it’s hard to believe he can deliver such impassioned performances with SO MANY DARN SOLILOQUYS so many times a week without collapsing. The memorably named Samuel Adams as Mozart totally nails the childish, awkward body language of the stunted prodigy. He’s at once painfully lovable and infuriating.