 “Embracing Contradictions”
In Conversation with A Midsummer Night's Dream director, Richard E.T. White, with Don Rothman, UCSC Professor and SSC Board member.
Don Rothman: What attracts you to SSC this season?
Richard E.T. White: My enormous affection and respect for Marco Barricelli, first and foremost. A big draw for me is also the opportunity to work once more on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I directed it first in 1982 with high school kids, then again in 1985 with the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival. I’m interested to see what access 24 more years of life experience gives me to the mysteries of the play. I’m also eager to once again direct a professional production of Shakespeare in English. My most recent professional Shakespeare production was in Japanese. I co-directed As You Like It with my wife, Christine Sumption, when we were resident directors at Theatre Company Subaru in Tokyo.
DR: How about your more recent directing?
RETW: My directing career since returning from Japan in 1995 has been almost exclusively on smaller-cast and more recent plays by such playwrights as Ibsen, Mamet, Albee, Frayn, and McDonagh.
DR: What’s it like to direct a Shakespeare play in another language?
RETW: It's complex, of course, because you discover very quickly that it's not just about language, it's about cultural assumptions of behavior. One example – Shakespeare revels in puns and word-play, but you discover very quickly that those levels of meaning do not always translate into another language. Often when presented with multiple meanings, a translator will choose one, not what you may have chosen yourself. I remember giving an actor a long exegesis about the sexual subtext of a bit of byplay in As You Like It (while looking at my English-language text) only to have the translator patiently explain to me that none of that level was present in the Japanese. And you also discover – for instance, when you have to ask "Why is the audience laughing so much at old Adam in this scene?"– that the translator may have snuck in a few jokes of his own that were not in the English text!
DR: What other Shakespeare plays have you directed, and what draws you to his plays?
RETW: As I mentioned, I worked for ten years in the 1980s with the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival (now California Shakespeare Theatre) and directed a wide range of Shakespeare’s plays outdoors, including The Merry Wives of Windsor, Julius Caesar, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Dream. I’ve also directed Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Tempest and Twelfth Night indoors.
I loved exploring that dynamic language, those powerful themes, those vivid characters – particularly in the outdoor setting – so working in Santa Cruz gives me a chance to rediscover that enjoyment, while bringing to it the life experiences and tempering that my artistic sensibilities have gained along the way.
DR: How would you describe your planning process as a director?
RETW: I read the play as much as possible, trying to stay open to the resonant images that stick in my mind. I also investigate the context for the production: Where will it take place? Why do it here, now? I try to make all the initial conversations with designers and other collaborators about ideas. Ask why before asking how. Ask who the audience will be and try to see the play from their perspective. I come into design discussions with lots of ideas, ask questions, and then encourage the designers to have better ideas.
DR: Sounds like a process that resembles writing in some ways. How does this work in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular?
RETW: I try to delve into and explore the oppositions within the play, starting with Athens/forest, parent/child, aristocrats/workingmen, etc. and taking that into as much specificity and detail as I can. Embracing the contradictions. Finding the tension, suspense, and dynamic ambiguities.
DR: Have you always approached plays with this curiosity, and does Shakespeare, in particular, tend to reward this sort of interest?
RETW: Curiosity is an essential aspect of directing. It's really more about identifying the right questions to ask than anything else – of yourself, of the designers, of the cast, and ultimately, of the audience. When I was starting to direct Shakespeare I was influenced by Harry Levin’s The Question of Hamlet. It opened up to me the idea that all Shakespeare's plays pose questions to the audience and are very much about the process of discovery rather than giving comfortable answers. I also try to stay open to serendipity: if I marinate the play long enough inside myself, things come along that teach me what the play means to me.
DR: How has the meaning of MSND changed over the years?
RETW: For me, the meaning of the play always starts with the question "What is the forest?" What is this dreamscape that all the characters must traverse to emerge transformed on the other side? So I think that in 1985, in my 30s, my sense of the forest was influenced by a kind of romantic wilderness in my own life – love was painful and awkward, and my view of the action of the play was intensely personal and somewhat dark.
Now, in my 50s, I still think that those aspects have some truth, but I don’t live inside them so much. A lot of my current emotional energy comes from being the doting uncle of a fabulous two-year-old nephew. That leads me to consider the forest as a place that grows adults back down to the very basic desires, the emotional volatility, the lack of a filter, of children. So maybe there's more innocence available to me.
DR: Where do you start now as a director?
RETW: Music is often a starting point for me. When I was getting ready to direct Gorki’s Philistines at ACT this past spring, I was driving in my car one day and I heard an astonishing young woman, Alina Simone, singing in Russian on NPR. The album was her folk-acoustic arrangements of Russian punk-rock songs by Yanka Dyagileva. It was called Everyone is Crying Out to Me Beware, and as I shared it with actors and designers in rehearsal it became the emotional subtext of the show. With Dream, I have been listening to a lot to musicians from North Africa, specifically a group from Mali called Tinariwen. I‘m trying to find the sound of magic, and their incantatory rhythms suggest a direction for that. Also, the striking appearance and charisma of their leader, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, gave us an initial image for Oberon.
Visual images can also be pivotal in creating the world of the play. I’m a faithful reader of Andrew Sullivan’s political/cultural blog The Daily Dish. There I found an article about the sculptural sound-suits of artist Nick Cave, which inspired a great conversation about fairies between me and B. Modern, the SSC costume designer. B. shared with me a stunning book, (Un)Fashion by Maira Kalman, about vernacular clothing. Out of those diverse sources the world of the fairies started to take shape.
Ultimately, I guess, I try to gather things I love and care about from the world around me and fit them into the ever-evolving embrace of Shakespeare’s words.
DR: That’s beautiful! What about the cast?
RETW: The range of talents, experience and backgrounds of the cast are an enormous resource. For example, we are lucky to have a number of musicians in the company – that gives us access to a greater musical vocabulary. The goal is to facilitate the growth of a cast into a company: to enlist everyone as a powerful collaborator in the collective act of storytelling.
DR: What do you hope to learn, about the play, about yourself, in the process of directing this work?
RETW: When I was working at the Old Globe in San Diego, Jack O’Brien said to me that the important thing about Shakespeare’s plays is that they serve as a litmus test for who you are as a person, at that point in your life. As the chair of a Theater department, I think about responsibility and leadership a lot. So I am drawn to those ideas in Shakespeare’s plays: that’s a throughline in his work, which is only natural since he was writing in an absolute monarchy.
DR: How does this emerge in MSND?
RETW: Well, that means my attention is drawn to Oberon, Theseus, Hippolyta and Peter Quince, and their dilemmas of authority in the play. But also their opposites: the chaos principles embodied by Bottom and Puck. I love the comic anarchy of Chuck Jones cartoons, and I look forward to trying to recreate the timing and madness of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck onstage. No one should be surprised to find some influence in “Pyramus and Thisbe” of "The Rabbit of Seville."
When I started re-reading the play for this production, the first thing that struck me was that this was Shakespeare’s play about climate change. That in Titania’s resonant warning to Oberon about the weather (in Act 2), and indeed in the actions of all the characters, there was a metaphor about personal responsibility and stewardship. But, of course, there is so much more that I look forward to discovering.
DR: This is fascinating. The play may illuminate some of our most profound contemporary concerns?
RETW: Well, Jan Kott beat me to it, but yes, Shakespeare has always been "Our Contemporary." Hasn’t history shown that every generation reviews and renews itself through the lens of his plays?
DR: Is there one thing in particular that you especially love about MSND? Is there one passage that especially appeals to you as a jumping off point in your thinking about the work?
RETW: Titania’s speech to Oberon in Act 2:
The seasons alter…The spring, the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
Titania describes a world where the weather has undergone violent shifts because of the selfishness, jealousies and pettiness of the denizens of the earth. Nature, which has been a nurturing presence, a place of refuge, has become something chaotic and unpredictable. So the human lovers and would-be actors who venture into the forest outside Athens (a symbol of all that is civilized and cultured in human society) enter a world in which contradictions abound and primal emotions and powerful desires are unleashed. They find a world where the transformations wrought by love and art turn men into beasts, both metaphorically and literally.
DR: So this is where mystery and embracing contradictions come in?
RETW: Yes. The play takes its human protagonists, lovers and clowns, on a journey through extremes in a world tipped out of balance by desire, by love so intense and twisted by pride that it becomes like war. Like any dream, the play is full of inexplicable but oddly resonant images, of swirling surges of emotion and revelation, of delight and night terrors.
DR: And yet, it is a comedy, right?
RETW: In the very best sense of the word. One of the truly wonderful things about the play is how everything is restored, brought back into balance at the end. Everyone is brought into accord through the power of theater – through a bumbling, amateurish but deeply committed performance that nonetheless provides one final transformation for all who participate and witness it.
DR: Is the restoration of order a mystery?
RETW: As I said before, Shakespeare is just not interested in the comfortable tying up of plot threads. Balance is not the same thing as order: there are still plenty of questions left (like, you know, Demetrius is still under the influence of that drug…). Life’s too complex for superficial answers, and Shakespeare is holding up the mirror to life, even if in this case, it’s like one of those wavy, distorting, funhouse mirrors at times. He’s after something more primal, mythic.
DR: And what do you do with all this as a director?
RETW: Our job as the artists who must interpret the play is to embrace its contradictions, and render them as vividly as possible. We have to share with the audience a view of the hazards of human excess that is as resonant today as when it was written.
DR: What is fresh about the play? Which elements, if any, are sacred, and which are more available to artistic interpretation, open to creative twists?
RETW: Everything is fresh about this play because it is so well-structured, yet so playful within its formality. The presence of magic, which is hugely subjective, allows multiple and wide interpretations. It is such a playful metaphor for human society and behavior that it can be done in virtually any period or style. It’s a jungle gym of wonders.
The one thing that must be respected is the humanity of the characters. They must be rich and fully endowed with life and personal integrity, and none of them should be condescended to. Not that they can’t be criticized – they all have much to learn, but they must be allowed to take their journey and be different at the end of the play than they are at the beginning.
DR: Theseus tells Hippolyta as much, doesn’t he? Audiences must change, too? What can we expect?
RETW: Laughter, suspense. Playfulness. Lots of music. Stuff happening all around them.
DR: Finally, why theatre at a time of economic crisis?
RETW: Communal joyfulness. A reminder we’re all in it together. A play about transformation to reaffirm that we can transform both ourselves and the world around us.
DR: Wonderful! I can’t wait to see this production in the Redwood Glen.
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