Ted van Griethuysen as Old Shepherd and Tom Story as Young Shepherd (Clown) in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of 'The Winter’s Tale,' directed by Rebecca Taichman. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

A Shakespeare play can demand an enormous cast: Henry IV, Part 2 has 67 parts. But, in staging a play, there are many reasons to use fewer actors. In high school, the drama club could be too small for a large production, or there may not be enough boys for all the male roles. Maybe an upstart theatre company doesn’t have the funds to costume 67 actors; maybe they don’t have the funds to pay 67 actors. Perhaps the miniscule black box performance space can’t physically hold more than 67, including audience. But why might a big company choose to limit the size of their cast?

The struggle between art and logistics has been managed by theatre artists since Shakespeare was writing. Academics still wonder: were some of Shakespeare’s dramaturgical choices dictated by his (most likely) thirteen-actor company? Were roles doubled for practicality, or was Shakespeare exploiting the convention for dramatic effect? Modern directors often choose to double- or even triple-cast their actors in multiple roles, sometimes for efficiency but also for specific artistic goals. Forced to be creative with staging, rhythm and narrative, a small group of actors tells a more dynamic story with less. Small casts are a potent artistic tool, an interpretive instrument to tease out new ideas in well-worn plays.

One of the most prominent recent examples of a “small-cast Shakespeare” performed was Fiasco Theater’s 2011 Cymbeline, another of Shakespeare’s late plays. With six actors and a minimalist set, Cymbeline was an ironic success, playing next door to the infamous Broadway behemoth Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Surprisingly, the most common accolade bestowed in reviews was the production’s clarity. With a small cast playing two, three or four parts each, Fiasco managed to make a fantastically complicated fairy tale into a coherent narrative, sorting out the tricky spots of the play with ingenuity. Performers hopped from character to character; crates and a white sheet fashioned the disparate landscapes of the play; an actor clicked billiard balls to provide sound for a game of pool. This was not realism. Instead, the audience was asked to activate their own mental agility. As the New York Times marveled, the sheet alone became “a billowing sea, a virginal bedspread, a mournful shroud and a Roman toga, among other things.” Fiasco’s inspired resourcefulness, in the end, told a more convincing story. A fully-formed production emerged through collective imagination, a creative exercise that can only exist when freed of the clutter of hyper-produced, over-conceptualized Shakespeare.

In addition to demanding ingenuity in staging and story, a small cast can highlight an important theme or element. Shakespeare’s R+J, seen recently at Signature Theatre, told the story of Romeo and Juliet with just four young men. In this rendition, the Shakespeare tale was a play-within-a-play, acted out in secret by four students at a repressive private school. Performing alone in their dorm, the four played all of Shakespeare’s characters—and in the process told their own forbidden love story. This structure highlighted the penetrating, cathartic power of Shakespeare’s play. Conversely, in the New York production of Macbeth directed by John Tiffany (Black Watch, Once), the small cast underlined artistic virtuosity. Playing as many as eight different roles, Alan Cumming delivered a tour-de-force performance as a patient bouncing through multiple personalities in an insane asylum. The premise highlighted Cumming’s arresting physicality and gender-bending, and added a new note of tortured vulnerability to Macbeth’s madness.

The strengths of the small cast aesthetic have also been transferred to contemporary non-Shakespeare—even with productions on a larger scale. Think of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, most recently produced at Arena Stage. Though the Metamorphoses cast was slightly larger at ten actors, each performer played four or five different roles in various stories, creating the impression of a single-minded ensemble conjuring myths from thin air. Similarly, in Gatz, the 13-person ensemble of Elevator Repair Service summoned the world of The Great Gatsby from a shabby office. The New York Times described the birth of Nick Carraway’s world onstage: “This metamorphosis, though, occurs by ingeniously sly degrees, and it seems to be taking place entirely in the reader’s mind… It’s unlikely that these actors… would be cast in these parts in a full-dress, conventional Gatsby. But Nick’s vision magically bestows upon them all the traits they require.” Nick’s vision—and the audience’s vision—transports the actors to the many characters and moods of Fitzgerald’s novel. And again, last fall in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart: five ensemble members played academics and ghosts, demons and debauchers, bringing the ballad from Scotland, to hell and back to the Bier Baron.

A small cast can be a brilliant tool for storytelling, allowing us to focus on the elements of a production that are most essential. But at its core, the potency fomented by a small cast lies in the effect of actors transforming before our eyes. As performers slide in and out of roles, they implicitly highlight the intense magic of theatricality. And in stories like The Winter’s Tale, where rebirth and renewal are primary, these transformations are a source of immense power.

—–

Laura Henry Buda is STC’s Education Coordinator and served as Artistic Fellow in the 2011-
2012 Season. She holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from the A.R.T./M.X.A.T. Institute at Harvard
University.

Photo of Sara Topham as Titania in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' directed by Ethan McSweeny. Photo by Scott Suchman.

The 2012-2013 Season at STC has been one that may throw even climate change believers for a loop. For our midwinter show, we mounted a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And now, as we approach the midsummer solstice, we are doing The Winter’s Tale. In other words, the weather inside the theatre has been as topsy-turvy as the skies over the Potomac. And yet it feels apt, somehow, to pair these two plays at opposite ends of the year. They form a bookend in the canon, offering two different perspectives on the passing of time.

Midsummer, for all its virtuosity, is a young man’s play. Using the misadventures of a middle summer’s night—and the fecund, startling imagery therein—Shakespeare tells a tale about the fantastic appetites and desires of young love. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the play was written during Shakespeare’s “lyric period,” in the first third of his career, alongside such other romantic and poetic masterpieces as Romeo and Juliet and Richard II.

Like those plays, Midsummer has a surprisingly complex relationship to genre. Its tone is comic, but it’s a comedy unlike any that had appeared before in dramatic literature. Its images of Ovidian metamorphosis have the power to terrify as much as amuse, and the play unspools into surprising reflections on the power of madness and nightmare. Part of the play’s magic lies in its ability to imbue older, sadder couples with the transformative powers of young love—in particular, the ambiguous royal couples of Theseus and Hippolyta, who preside over Athens, and their Fairyland doppelgängers, Oberon and Titania.

The Winter’s Tale, on the other hand, is the work of someone older, who has been shaped by life and its myriad triumphs and disappointments. Instead of young love, the theme is family ties. The play’s characters form a constellation of parents and children, husbands and wives. As the play opens, two men of middle age—Leontes and Polixenes—wax nostalgic over their lost youth. Polixenes yearns to return home to see his infant son Florizel, who “makes a July’s day short as December.” When Leontes talks to his own infant son, Mamillius, he seems unnerved to see his younger self in the boy:

Looking on the lines
Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreeched…
How like, methought, I then was to this kernel,
This squash, this gentleman. (act 1, scene 2)

Todd Bartels as Florizel and Heather Wood as Perdita in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of 'The Winter’s Tale,' directed by Rebecca Taichman. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Leontes and Polixenes regard the innocence of youth from the perspective of those who have lost it, or, as Polixenes, puts it, have “tripped since” into adulthood. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that The Winter’s Tale was written toward the end of Shakespeare’s career, after he had lost his own son, Hamnet, to death at the tender age of 9. It may be scholarly supposition, but the terrible things that befall Mamillius, Florizel and Perdita in the play seem to bespeak a writer who knows the helpless parent’s pain of losing one’s children. And in Leontes’ relationship with his wife Hermione, Shakespeare paints a terrifying portrait of marital intimacy and betrayal.

If A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a complex relationship to genre, then The Winter’s Tale is practically unclassifiable. The play is often grouped with Shakespeare’s final four plays—along with Pericles, Cymbeline and The Tempest—the so-called “romances.” The term comes to us from Coleridge, who coined it in the first bloom of romanticism for those plays which “arise from their fitness to that faculty of our nature, the imagination… which owes no allegiance to time and place.” And indeed, the play contains joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy, improbabilities of plot and perfect dramaturgical parallels in a manner that is distinctively Shakespearean. When we suddenly leave the courtly world of Sicilia for the pastoral universe of Bohemia, it feels as if we are entering a world half-remembered in our dreams, a comic universe blooming, like springtime, in the middle of a winter’s tragedy. And when we return to Sicilia, we see one of the most magical and unexpected transformations in the entire Shakespeare canon.

Mamillius seems to evoke the fairy world of Midsummer when he tells Hermione, “A sad tale’s best for winter, I have one of sprites and goblins” (act 2, scene 1). But he is also explaining, obliquely, the title of his own play. Without resorting to the “sprites and goblins” of his dramatic apprenticeship, Shakespeare tells us a tale about the vast panoramic sweep of the human experience, as Leontes puts it, “this wide gap of time.” Just as it is easy to forget the midsummer’s passions in the cold of winter, the first flowers ofspring always come as an unexpected shock after the winter’s snow.

—–

Drew Lichtenberg is the Literary Associate at STC and production dramaturg for The
Winter’s Tale. He holds an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School
of Drama.

Recorded at the Shakespeare Theatre Company by:

Hannah Hessel, Audience Enrichment Manager
Marcy Spiro, Community Engagement Manager
Drew Lichtenberg, Literary Associate

Special guest: Danielle Mohlman, Playwright and STC’s HR Coordinator

Hannah Yelland as Hermione in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of 'The Winter’s Tale,' directed by Rebecca Taichman. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

In a world of storytelling and, more specifically, in the world of Rebecca Taichman’s production of The Winter’s Tale, the characters’ journeys are heightened through the director’s craft of theatrical yarn-spinning, weaving Shakespeare’s story into an intricate tapestry. Her choice to have actors playing multiple parts heightens the already prevalent theme of transformation. Changing seasons, as in the play’s title, provide one thread of transformation. Aging, as our bodies warp over the course of time, provides another. The play’s setting likewise moves from the cold urbane world of Sicilia to the lush rural Bohemia. This duality of place allows the differences to show in stark relief, illuminating the characters’ journeys.

Perhaps the most radical of Taichman’s choices in this production is her decision to have the same performer play both the jealous king Leontes and the conniving rogue Autolycus. This specific doubling is rare, perhaps because doing so is logistically complicated as the actor has to make changes with sometimes rapid speed. At a glance, the characters feel very different, but they are actually opposing sides of a single coin. Where Leontes seeks out the truth but is unable to see it, Autolycus understands the truth but prefers to manipulate others with lies. The two characters reflect off of each other so well, in fact, that one may wonder if Shakespeare intended them to be played in that way. The scenes are structured so that watching Autolycus helps audiences engage differently with Leontes when the action returns to Sicilia. As the action moves forward from one character to another, the emotions shift, allowing the play’s resolution to unfold. As the play reaches its end and the truth is unveiled, we see how both men, the purposeful and mistaken liars, have had their previous states exchanged. Their transformations allow us to share in the profound moment of Leontes’ discovery, and understand that despite his unnecessary villainy there is room for his second chance.

When actors play two roles, the audience is always aware of the duality, which may affect their understanding of the characters. As the younger child of Leontes and Hermione, Perdita (whose name means “lost”) becomes the second chance at resolving the loss of the infant son Mamillius. One child is bound to the painful past, while the other grows up in Bohemia without knowledge of what has come before. Of course, the audience carries the past with them and knows that when those in Sicilia see her face, they will remember too. The transformation from one child to the other is facilitated by Taichman’s choice to cast one performer as both children, in addition to taking on a third linking role, that of Time. Speaking of the passing of 16 years, Time reminds us of the awful couplings of life—birth and death, youth and old age. With time moving forward, tragedy can be replaced by the springtime of youth.

Of the family, it is only the actress playing Hermione who maintains a single character. And yet, her multiple physical manifestations—as human, as ghost, as a work of art—exist only in the perception of others. She is introduced to the audience as maternal and loving and as her husband’s accusations hit she maintains her warm dignity. Yet, in Bohemia, Antigonus reports witnessing Hermione’s sorrowful ghost looking out for her daughter. After the scene returns to Sicilia, Hermione shows the audience that she is at once impervious to and reflective of the passage of time, physically aging while remaining bound to her new frozen form. Upon her reanimation there is little text for her, which mayshow an internal care not to be shared with the audience. It also shows the end of winter, aslow thawing into a renewed spring.

—–

Hannah J. Hessel, STC’s Audience Enrichment Manager, is in her second season at STC and
holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University.

Mosaic of Minverva (1897) by Elihu Vedder within the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building.

From the siege of Troy to Vietnam, war has been a man’s work. Women stayed behind while their husbands, friends and fathers trekked across oceans to fight the good fight, defeat the enemy, protect the homeland. Women had no place in the trenches—soldiers defined themselves as masculine protectors, embracing bravado and violence in defense of an idealized home. On January 24, 2013, however, the definition of a soldier changed with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s announcement that the U.S. military would lift the ban on female members in combat. The policy acknowledged what had already been occurring overseas, recognizing women for the valor and dedication they demonstrate every day alongside their male comrades.

But in the history of war, women have often been relegated to the background. They were not asked when countries declared war, nor invited to join the fight against a common enemy. In Coriolanus and Wallenstein, two generations of women fight masculine battles from a position of weakness.

As Coriolanus battles Volscian soldiers and Roman plebeians, sustaining wounds and insults, all his wife Virgilia can do is wail: “O no, no, no!” and “O heavens!” Her anger boiling over at the treacherous tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, she finally voices her grief, to no avail: “You shall stay too. I wish I had the power / To say so to my husband.” Predictably, the tribunes ignore her, scoffing, “Are you mankind?” The words of womankind have no power over anyone.

And there is her mother-in-law, Volumnia, Shakespeare’s most fearsome matriarch. Though she was once perhaps as voiceless as Virgilia, Volumnia has transformed herself into a force of nature. Unable to actually participate in Roman public life, her power over Coriolanus is nonetheless absolute. When Coriolanus turns against Rome, Volumnia is the only one who has the power to defeat him, unmanning him with a mother’s scolding. By the end of the play, Virgilia realizes what Volumnia has known all along: as women, they wield no power, but as the mothers of sons, they have clout. Abandoning themselves and focusing on their maternal roles, they find the one argument that Coriolanus cannot ignore. Mother and mother land, women and Rome are bound together, an entity that will either destroy or be destroyed.

'Giustiniani Minerva,' a Roman marble of Athena/ Minerva (late 5th or early 4th century B.C).

Amid the battle-scarred landscape of the Thirty Years’ War in Wallenstein, Countess Czerny and Thekla must also rely on feminine prowess to win power. When the young lieutenant Max retrieves Thekla, Wallenstein’s daughter, from her convent in the quiet countryside, he glimpses peace for the first time. Max’s artless love for Thekla gives her power over him and, as a result, potential influence in military schemes. “Thekla, speak up, do something, you foolish girl!” her aunt the Countess exhorts her when Max threatens to abandon Wallenstein. “You have the power…” Instead, Thekla wields her power by willfully renouncing it, escalating her father’s doom. But her action is fruitless. Like Coriolanus, Max cannot deny the demands of masculine honor; like Virgilia, Thekla is ultimately powerless to stop him.

By contrast, Countess Czerny strives to keep step with her brother Wallenstein, attempting to play matchmaker in love while Wallenstein plays matchmaker with nations. In many ways, she is her brother’s twin in her thirst and aptitude for greatness; were she a man, she would rival him in courage and cunning. But as a woman, her gifts are wasted. When all the schemes fail, the only action left to her is a final assertion of strength.

There is only one scene in both of these plays in which a woman seems to triumph. Finally able to play the part of military hero, Volumnia returns to Rome victorious, having sacrificed her son for the good of the republic. But Shakespeare does not allow Volumnia to speak. Her silence is pregnant and uneasy—just as Virgilia’s was at the beginning of the play. She has used the might of motherhood to destroy her son, and whether or not she realizes it, she has killed the source of her pride and power. When Coriolanus loses his life, Volumnia loses her identity. She is doomed to powerlessness, unless she begins the cycle of violence again with Young Martius, once again taking up a son as a surrogate.

The women of Wallenstein and Coriolanus are strong mothers, wives and daughters, and powerful characters—but ultimately, they fight in a world that is not for them. Today we are moving toward a world where gender does not define or limit identity. Women now have the power to create their own path, even to sacrifice themselves in the manner of Max and Coriolanus. Merit and ability, not gender, can determine success. Had Volumnia become consul herself, the history of Rome might have been very different.

—–

Laura Henry Buda is STC’s Education Coordinator and served as Artistic Fellow in the 2011-2012 Season. She holds an MFA in dramaturgy from the A.R.T./M.X.A.T. Institute at Harvard University.

Jefferson and Robespierre, however, sought to bring about this freedom through constitutions and government. Schiller, on the other hand, wrote poetry and plays, along with philosophical tracts and history books. His thinking has a romantic, rather than a revolutionary cast. He is concerned above all with aesthetic freedoms, man’s quest for inner enlightenment. He was terrified of mob rule and the untrammeled potential of democracy.

In Schiller’s case, geography was destiny. Schiller had the misfortune of being born in the Holy Roman Empire. Consisting of 400-plus petty principalities in an area the size of Texas, the Empire was ungovernable, a geopolitical Humpty Dumpty that resisted any attempts to put it together into a unitary whole. (You can fill in your jokes about German reunification and walls here.)

Many territories were ruled by despots. In Schiller’s case, he grew up in the prison-like duchy of Württemberg, where Duke Karl Eugen personally oversaw beatings, canings and imprisonments of young students, including Schiller himself. After risking life and limb to escape the Duke’s school, and choosing the outlaw profession of playwriting, Schiller met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1794, in the small Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. They had both been brought there by Duke Karl August, another despot but an enlightened one who wished to foster a German literary culture. Unlike Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, masters of their own eminent domains, Goethe and Schiller were caged birds. Liberty was so remote from their everyday lives that it could exist only as an aesthetic abstraction.

Wallenstein, directed by Goethe at the opening of the Weimar Court Theater in 1799, is Schiller’s attempt to examine the political failings of German culture. Sprawling to an epic length of 11 hours, it is his most pessimistic work. Set during the Thirty Years’ War, a national trauma that left nearly two-thirds of central Europe’s population dead, the play depicts a failed revolution in Germany on the American model. Schiller posits the war’s central figure, the general Albrecht von Wallenstein, as a would-be George Washington. Wallenstein speaks of crossing the Rubicon and betraying the Emperor, much as Washington crossed the Delaware and vanquished George III.

But idealism in this play is thwarted by realpolitik. Wallenstein negotiates with the Swedes in secret, while tricking his loyal generals into signing a drunken proviso that would see the Emperor lop off their heads. General Octavio remains loyal to the Emperor, but he appeals to the vanity and greed of the generals in order to betray Wallenstein. The most heroic figure is Max, Octavio’s son, who chooses the freedom of the grave, a darkly absolutist view of self-determination. The most idealistic character is the Irish general Bailey. The son of a servant, Bailey sees in Wallenstein (and in poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s new translation) something like the Enlightenment dream of liberty:

It seems that this is a great historic moment:
The sons of ancient lines are disappearing,
Cities and castles passing from hand to hand.
New names are rising, they have new coats of arms.

At the end of the play, this complicated tangle of divided self-interests produces a cataclysmic scene of tragedy. It is a libertarian’s nightmare, as self-rule loses out to big government and the industrial war machine marches on. Bailey sets out to give his sword to the Emperor and resign his commission, a free man. I would like to think he emigrates to the new world. There is no democracy to be found in Deutschland.

Click here to download the PDF.

Articles include:

• Thoughts from Director Rebecca Taichman
• Theatricality, Artifice and the Mended World in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, by Jean E. Howard, Ph.D.
• Small Cast, Big Impact, by Laura Henry Buda
• New Faces, Familiar Friends: Get to Know the Cast of The Winter’s Tale
• Bringing the Music of Shakespeare to Life, by Kate Colwell
  

Click here to download the PDF.

Articles include:

• Power Lunches and Roman Columns, by Kenneth Adelman
• Director’s Words, by David Muse and Michael Kahn
• An Unlikely Leader: Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein, by Julie Koser
• “I banish you”: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, by Walter Chernaik
• A Note by Robert Pinsky
• Mother Courage: The Power of Women in War, by Laura Henry Buda

Director David Muse

Coriolanus doesn’t get the credit it deserves. I understand why. It’s ugly. Its language lacks lyricism. Its arguments can be hard to follow. It is very long. It’s difficult to stage—full of characters, full of crowds. It’s a tough read, a play that doesn’t yield up its wonders in the armchair.

But I contend that it’s a neglected gem, a play that is special in large measure because it is such a Shakespearean peculiarity. This is a strange thing to say about a play set in 600 B.C., one of the most ancient settings for any play by Shakespeare, but Coriolanus is strikingly modern.

Some of the things that make the play so unique:

1. It is arguably Shakespeare’s most political play. Shakespeare was a political thinker, so that’s saying a lot. No other of his plays contains close to as much discussion of government, power and class. The play’s primary mode is debate and its primary subject is political power. Characters with a whole range of different political convictions discuss, argue, form and dissolve alliances, and maneuver for power.

2. It is Shakespeare’s most public play. It contains a riot, a large battle, a grand battlefield ceremony, three public celebrations, a street brawl, a public trial and banishment and an execution in the public square. By contrast, there are only two brief snippets of monologue. It’s as if nobody is alone long enough to talk to the audience in this play.

3. Shakespeare never wrote crowds like this. These are not the faceless mobs of Julius Caesar. They are individualized and full of character. They have different opinions about their polis and discourse intelligently about it. In the very first scene of the play, in the midst of a rioting mob, the most radical of the citizens begins to speak in verse. (“Fore me, this fellow speaks!”) This is not a play in which the prose-speaking simpletons chant lines together. They are individuals, and only under extreme circumstances do they behave like a mob. This is not a play about kings and queens or generals and senators but about an entire polis.

4. The play is unique sounding. This is Shakespeare writing the poetry of politics. It is the language of debate, of political attack, of scheming and manipulation. It is rough, harsh, rhetorical, irregular, non-lyrical verse. It’s a bold departure for Shakespeare: a powerful, complex, unromantic poem written at the height of his linguistic powers.

5. At the play’s center is Shakespeare’s least sympathetic tragic protagonist. He is proud, elitist, anti-democratic and impolite. His injured pride leads him to recruit an enemy army to attack his homeland.

So what makes the play so interesting to me?

It concerns very modern political issues. It’s a play about class and class conflict. The central conflict is not so much within Coriolanus as external to him. It’s the people vs. Coriolanus. The plebeians vs. the patricians. Democracy vs. elitism. These conflicts are central to our political universe, especially in a large representative democracy in which generally aristocratic politician-celebrities govern. We are a society who knows this tug of war: we seek equality but worship celebrity; we venerate the ensemble but really like the star.

And true to form, Shakespeare doesn’t take sides. The people are smart, articulate, engaged, fighting for a voice. They are also cowardly, fickle and reckless. Coriolanus is arrogant, disdainful, elitist. He is also an astute observer, a truth teller, a man devoted to principle.

Some famous productions of the play have taken sides. Brecht liked it for its empowered Roman populace and leftist politics. But 20 years before Brecht, the Nazis liked it too, offering it to their youth as an example of valor and heroism.

This production won’t take sides. It’s not what Shakespeare is up to.

Let me also say that the psychology of the play is fascinating. It’s easy to dismiss Coriolanus as an arrogant ass. A snob. But there is much to admire here: as I said, Coriolanus is a man of principle. He sees through pretense. He speaks the truth. He is unwilling to put on an act, to play a part, to pander, to pretend, to lie. He is in fact a man too principled to get by in the world. Like Menenius says, “his nature is too noble for the world.” The world snuffs him out.

And of course the play contains one of the most extraordinary and fascinating portraits of a mother/son relationship Shakespeare ever wrote. Patrick Page will tell you that Coriolanus is a textbook Phallic Narcissist. That’s a Freudian diagnosis. Or Puer Aeternus. That’s Jungian. Come see the performance to see what he’s talking about.

And in case I’ve scared you by talking about the play’s length and its heady politics, let me also say that Coriolanus is the closest Shakespeare came to writing a political-thriller action movie. And I’m determined to have everyone out of the theatre by 11:00 p.m.

So how are we doing this sprawling, long, epic, crowded play?

I’ve split the world in two. Half of the cast are patricians and half are plebeians. Nobody doubles across class lines. There’s a thematic payoff to this—it emphasizes the class conflict that is central to the play. And there’s a practical payoff—it allows an ensemble of plebeians to play dozens and dozens of roles in a way that feels deliberate.

The idea is that we don’t try to mask all of the ensemble’s changes but that we embrace them. That we don’t attempt full costume changes. That we allow the audience to see some changes happen on stage. And we take this overt theatricality a step further in that we watch the plebeians “labor” to run the production. They move furniture. They operate lights. They make music and noise. This ensemble of plebs are the workers who labor to support the patricians and make the production possible.

Now this won’t be what I call a period-analogy production. We’re going for something modern in feeling but still epic. It’s a “swords and suits” production. I want it to be close enough to us that these politicians feel eerily familiar, but also to be nestled in a world where martial valor and hand-to-hand combat have some meaning.

And the space. I asked Blythe R.D. Quinlan to design a set that controls scale. That can frame a single human being and not swallow him up. That can make this big stage feel crowded. That can shift quickly. That feels solid. And that feels old and new at the same time. We were both drawn to concrete, which features in a lot of modern architecture (particularly the “Brutalist” style, appropriately for this play) but was invented by the Romans. We want to stage it fairly simply, so we’re being fairly restrained about shifts and changes. No big furniture, no laborious changes, no grand living rooms rising from the floor. Strong, bold, theatrical and simple.