Abstract
From a lesbian kiss in As You Like It to a Malcolm X-styled Tybalt, new interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays continue to cause controversy in the USA.
Actors Clay Westman, Bree Ogaldez and Jakeim Hart play Romeo, Juliet and Paris respectively, in a performance of Romeo and Juliet, at the Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania
“The plays were safe in themselves – the subversion would come through performance choices to convey subversive messages,” said Gail Kern Paster, director emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, a scholarly journal devoted to Shakespeare.
“It’s one thing to read about a black moor [Othello] killing his white wife but another thing to see it on stage – it was considered appalling in 19th-century America. The role of Othello couldn’t be performed by a black actor until after World War II. So Paul Robeson could play the role in London, but not in the USA.
“Drama is potentially a dangerous instrument. Shakespeare is telling us about our secret self and that’s what people are afraid of.
“In a way we can step back from the idea of censorship and look at it as social expression and the way the plays challenged us then, now and will do forever. Theatres put ideas out into the world and don’t tell you what to do with them but make you think – which can upset the authorities.”
Sometimes, said Paster, the upset comes from the audience itself. A production of As You Like It at Folger Theatre cast a female actor in the role of Touchstone. In the play, Touchstone falls for Audrey the Goat Girl and they kiss. At an audience question-and-answer session with the cast afterwards, a girl stood up and said the kiss had made her uncomfortable.
“It was really a teaching moment because theatre is not supposed to just comfort you but also to challenge you,” said Paster. “Let’s think about why it’s something you don’t want to see. Who’s allowed to fall in love with whom? Anybody can fall in love with anybody. Yes, some parents and schools and audiences get very upset but that’s the function of Shakespeare’s plays – to make us think as well as to entertain us.”
Dramatic representation can be more than dangerous. It can be potentially deadly, said Paster.
Shakespeare contemporary Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was staged in New York by the Theatre for a New Audience at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in the autumn of 2014 with black actor John Douglas Thompson in the title role. In the play Tamburlaine burns a copy of the Koran on stage.
“Of course, this was considered to be subversive, dangerous and provocative even when it was first performed in London in 1587 and just as much so now,” said Paster.
Actors Paul Robeson and Sam Wanamaker in a Broadway production of Othello in 1943. Robeson was the first African-American to appear with a white supporting cast in a US theatre
Credit: (left-hand page) Ken Ek; (right) ANL/Rex/Shutterstock
“Marlowe was actually writing about atheism, not Islam. We had the scholar advisory council there and I suggested we needed to get out ahead of it and start a dialogue with the local Muslim community, which we did and there were no protests when it was performed. [The play’s run was actually extended.]
“But it is dangerous. We are in a cultural moment where this sort of thing can get you killed. Just because it’s a fictional representation, it doesn’t mean you’re protected – you’ve only got to think of those dead cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo to know that.
“Like Marlowe’s, many of Shakespeare’s plays push our cultural buttons – think of Shylock’s lines – ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ … ‘Do we not revenge?’”
Sherri Young, director of the San Francisco-based African-American Shakespeare Company, understands why the plays can be contentious. “We staged Romeo and Juliet and wanted to attract a younger audience, so we cast 14 and 15 year olds. It was risky because of the sexuality and the reference to teen suicide but we talked about the process with the actors and their parents and it was a wonderful experience.
“It makes the adults nervous but the fact is that teens are being sexualised at a very young age these days, and there is a problem with teen suicide. So, while I can understand why some communities have banned Romeo and Juliet, I think that’s what is dangerous – a lot of kids think they are alone and don’t talk about these things and it’s perhaps better to open the conversation.”
Their productions are also a platform for environmental issues – they set The Tempest on an island of trash, a makeshift stage of garbage and plastic.
Young founded the company in 1994 to give African-American actors the opportunity to be “part of the conversation” about Shakespeare which she felt they been excluded from. Not everyone thought it was such a good idea, with opposition coming from both the black and white communities.
“I got some messages from the African-American community in the beginning, very upset and saying we needed to be doing the work of black, not white, playwrights, but as performers we should be able to do whatever we want to. We had mail from the white community in the Bay Area who were frightened as well – someone actually came up to us and said: ‘You do know that Shakespeare’s not black?’
“Shakespeare is always challenging our attitudes and beliefs – it really makes you think about the nature of the human condition, and you gain new insights all the time – I sometimes root for Richard III now!”
Much of the censoring of Shakespeare and other plays comes from school boards, and in an arena where student actors and young community audiences are the future professional performers and patrons of theatre. This is a concern for many.
Sarah Hoffman, youth free expression manager at the National Coalition Against Censorship, said their tool kit for schools – The Show Must Go On – is one of their most downloaded items.
“We launched it in 2014 to provide students with the resources to navigate tensions in their schools and communities and lead the fight for artistic freedom,” said Hoffman.
Although there are no known cases so far of it being used to fight Shakespeare censorship specifically, students have won other battles.
“At Cherokee Trails High School in Colorado a student-written production, Evolution, about the evolution of love, included a kiss between two students of the same gender and a monologue about transsexuality. An administrator felt the topics were ‘uncomfortable’ and that the community was not ready to confront them. After the students spoke out, the administration changed course and allowed the play to go on,” said Hoffman.
A production of Monty Python-inspired musical Spamalot at South Williamsport Junior-Senior High School in Pennsylvania, was not so lucky. In 2014 the production was cancelled after the principal expressed concerns about homosexual themes. The play was not reinstated.
Hoffman said there seemed to be no pattern of which states censored the most: “Attempts at censorship happen everywhere, and over many different topics – sex, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes, offensive language, violence, religious viewpoints. Though we see many challenges from states like North Carolina, Texas and Florida, we can’t assume that the most objections happen there.
“It may just be that they are most frequently reported there. There are even challenges in more liberal states like California, New York and New Jersey”
The sheer amount of censorship, especially in schools, is something that startled Howard Sherman, director of the arts integrity initiative at the drama department at The New School in New York, who became a full-time theatre advocate after being bombarded with calls for advice.
“I wasn’t surprised that there was censorship – but I was surprised at the wide range of why people censor things, where the impulse comes from and the ways in which censorship is threatening,” he said.
“One teacher told me she couldn’t do A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it’s too sexual. Romeo and Juliet has also caused problems but do you shy away from it, or use it as a platform to open up more discussion and contextualise it?
“Of course there is a desire by students to do shows like Rent that may be challenged, but is a play as gentle as Almost Maine being challenged? Is this the slippery slope? One school banned a production of [1950s musical comedy] Once Upon a Mattress – I have no idea why – perhaps the word mattress alluded to bed?
“The question is, whether to fight or not? I feel it’s better to get the work out there and face scrutiny rather than allow it to be silenced or altered just to make it palatable – aside from recognising that teenagers are a lot smarter than many teachers and educators acknowledge. It’s important. If we are only teaching that theatre is bland entertainment and not recognising its value for students, then you are saying we can always alter the world to make it a blander, safer, duller place.
A scene from a production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Troy Dwyer at the Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania
Credit: Ken Ek
“The broader question is that if there is no push back against the censors, the message is that censorship works and that’s very dangerous beyond the world of entertainment.
“I do think the desire to control the conversation in schools and colleges will get worse before it gets better. We are a decade or two away from the schools being run by the young people of today, for whom some of these topics will be less of an issue. Until that day, we have to keep up the fight,” said Sherman.
When the Capulets go to Ferguson
When a Pennsylvania college decided to use Romeo and Juliet to explore attitudes to race and gun violence, audiences reacted in an unexpected way
Romeo the bad boy? Surely that role belongs to the hot-headed Tybalt who slays Romeo’s friend Mercutio and sets in motion a fatal chain of events for the star-crossed lovers?
Not in the production mounted in spring 2015 at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where audiences were distinctly uncomfortable about love-lorn Romeo’s actions.
Troy Dwyer, director and associate professor at Muhlenberg, said: “We had already started (as an ensemble) devising around the Black Lives Matter issue and thought we could amplify our message by moving into Shakespeare terrain.”
“Students were interested in staging a production that would go beyond preaching to the converted in the community. We wanted to penetrate mainstream culture and it worked with Romeo and Juliet. It was a hot ticket and we were able to spark some conversations!”
Dwyer said: “We looked at Tybalt’s character and his relationship with Lady Capulet (our actress was black). She saw something in Tybalt beyond the brash young man. She had a kind of maternal feeling for him, saw the softness in him.”
“We started to bring in how young black men are perceived outside circles of colour and spinning the idea of what if Tybalt was a figure like Michael Brown or Tamir Rice? Both have had multi-characterisations after their deaths in the media – inside and outside the community, through family eyes and so on.”
“The Capulet enclave was not dissimilar to Ferguson or our community of Allentown. The Montagues were the dominant (white) culture. Joshua Harker played Tybalt as a young man who follows the nation of Islam – so we had the image of a Muslim/Malcolm X figure as Tybalt, buttoned up, in a suit.”
“Romeo’s killing of Tybalt is a crime of passion and partly self-defence but in our production he was driven in part by a culture that cast a lot of suspicion on Tybalt’s physical body.”
Audience reactions were somewhat surprising, said Dwyer. “We had good and careful feedback. Not so much from communities of colour in Allentown but primarily white folks who asked about Romeo’s nature because, as Tybalt becomes more sympathetic as a character, Romeo becomes less so. This meant that upon Tybalt’s death, some white audience members recoiled from Romeo’s reaction. They started asking questions about his behaviour but the interesting thing was we didn’t really change anything about Romeo’s portrayal. We came to the conclusion that it was the world we put him in which made the audience feel his reaction was unexpected – he also carried a gun instead of a rapier.”
“We had a heavy police presence on stage (as The Prince’s guard) and cast some actors of colour as police. When Romeo pulled the trigger he was executing a series of actions based on things he saw around him every day.
“We put a ‘pea under the mattress’ and hopefully engaged more people in the conversation. Afterwards people came up and told me it was really thought-provoking.”
Dwyer readily acknowledges that Shakespeare can often slip through the censorship net where other plays might be challenged or even banned.
“I came to Shakespeare because I was interested in political statement through performance – art as protest. Shakespeare is the paragon of the Western dramatic literary canon and I learned quickly that there was a kind of cultural capital in his plays and that members of the community were more likely to turn up for a piece of Shakespeare than to pieces that were overtly political or that smelled of protest.”
Banned Books Week
The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom promotes awareness of challenges to library materials and celebrates freedom of speech during Banned Books Week, which this year runs from 25 September to 1 October. It offers a series of events including virtual read-outs of controversial plays in local libraries and bookshops, which are broadcast on a dedicated YouTube channel. Readers around the world can join in. As part of a previous Banned Books week, the Brooklyn Book Festival did readings of Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and Romeo and Juliet.
Footnotes
The Folger Library’s touring exhibition Shakespeare – Life Of An Icon – travels throughout the US in 2016. The African-American Shakespeare Company will perform Anthony and Cleopatra in May 2016