HowlRound: Perhaps the best place to preface a critique of Shakespeare Theatre Company’s all-male Taming of the Shrew is the end: Katherina (Kate) delivers her final speech with unflinching honesty, bemoaning that women “seek for rule, supremacy, and sway/ Whey they are bound to serve, love, and obey.” She implores Bianca and the Widow to join her, creating a silent, encapsulating snapshot: three women prostrate before their husbands, hands extended to be crushed beneath their companions’ feet. Regardless of the corseted actors’ gender identities, Shakespeare Theatre Company leaves audiences with a searing image of female submission to men—about as traditional an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play as one can find.
7 comments:
Without seeing the production, I can not agree or disagree with Maegan Clearwood on if the production was successful, but I see why the production felt offensive. Clearwood seemed to think that Iskandar had good ideas but poor execution. If this was because there were few women in the room, we will never know. I think when Iskandar says, “After all, misogyny is not the problem of the woman, but that of the male world that perpetuates it”, it takes the situation, stories, and circumstances away from the women who have felt the pressure to change or be “tamed”. Though it is true that misogyny is both a problem that men and women have to deal with, you can’t tell the story without the women’s side. Taking away a female voice, hurts everyone’s understanding of the issue and gives an extremely skewed picture. If it were only a “man’s issue”, as Iskandar say, we wouldn’t call it women’s rights.
I believe the challenging aspect of this production is that it is not simply men saying the lines of women, but the fact that the men were in DRAG. Drag can frequently come off as offensive if not done tastefully, so it's unsurprising that there was a bit of uproar over this production. That being said, I struggle to imagine tat this play is as severely lacking irony as the author claims. The mere fact that the men involved are cognizant of the fact that the play would have more scrutiny just by virtue of being an all-male cast means that there is built-in irony, and satire naturally follows. Based on the photographs in this article, I also feel that the designs were more successful than the author makes them out to be, being as gaudy and over-the-top as any Shakespeare adaptation whilst still remaining true to the spirit of the play, regardless of whether or not men are the only people on stage. I do, however, agree with the fact that having the people that do the oppressing represent the oppressed is a vaguely cruel twist of fate, and when a show is as laden with social commentary that is so specific like Taming of the Shrew is, it makes one wonder if this was the best idea, or if it was just meant to shock and confuse.
I'm going to compare this to the Public Theater's all female Taming of the Shrew. In the all-female production, they played with the irony that women were playing characters who oppressed women, while this production deems to have men play women oppressed by men, so in one show we have women in power and in another we have men in submission. So I can't fully speak on the all male show since I didn't see it, but it seems like the author missed the irony. A character doesn't have to be an over-the-top, dragged-out, clown on stage to make the irony evident.
I completely agree with the director that the final monologue is degrading and outdated and "monstrous" when performed by a woman on stage, though, so I understand where the director is coming from but the author points out that the reason its so monstrous is because it's relatable to the when playing the part.
I think if Iskandar wanted to use his casting to defy social gender roles it would’ve worked better if he had either cast male actors to play all the women and female actors to play all the men, or just had some women playing women, some women playing men, some men playing women, and some men playing men. The only reason that makes sense to me for him to have an all male cast is if he wants to make a statement about how it would’ve been cast in Shakespeare’s time, and based on this article, it doesn’t appear that was the statement he was trying to make. Based on this review, it seems like the problems with this show boil down to a lack of complexity. They’ve all been simplified to caricatures, which makes them both less interesting and more likely to promote harmful stereotypes, and even though the production was likely trying to be funny, harmful stereotypes in the name of comedy doesn’t make them less harmful.
While I am hesitant to make any strong claims as to the success of the production as a whole, I will say that when companies decide to perform using all-male or all-female casts they should have a very strong and valid reason for doing so. Based on the pictures provided, I do think that the designs may have helped somewhat to convey the satirical goals of the production, but I also think that a more female-dominated design team could have helped a lot more. When doing a show like this where the oppressors get to represent and speak for both themselves as well as the people they oppress, I think it is extremely important that actual members of the oppressed group are present and able to help guide the production towards a more accurate depiction of what dealing with that oppression is like. I will say that I do think a production like this could be important in bringing to light issues as well as sparking relevant conversations, but I think that this show just wasn't fully developed in terms of reasoning and adequate support. If everyone on the production team had a clear vision and understanding of goals, I think it could have been more successful. Based on the quotations given in the article, the justification seemed a bit vague. The director states that misogyny is also a man's problem, as the oppressor, but the design chose to use almost exclusively female stereotypes as a base, making the female characters less believable and harder to take seriously.
The idea behind this production is what bothers me. All-female casting of traditionally male-centered/ male- dominated shows is revolutionary, because rarely does one get to see that many women on stage at once. When female actors are given the chance to take back the roles that men have historically kept from them, that is revolutionary. There is nothing revolutionary or boundary breaking about an all-male cast, because men are already in the position of power. Putting them in dresses and makeup does not negate the fact that there are already many plays in which men have all of the roles. Even with plays that do include female roles, women often only get a chance to be the submissive love interest. Were they trying to harken back to the time of the original Shakespeare plays, in which all of the parts were played by men because women were literally not allowed (by men!!!) to perform on stage? I agree with the writer of the article that expecting an all-male cast to complexly explore gender identity and sexism is just ridiculous. There is something powerful and reclaiming about traditional male roles being played by women, because they are able to speak through the male figure as someone who is hierarchically lower than them. Men talking about how hard it is to be women while bundled up in corsets and lace is offensive at best. While there are appropriate times and places for the privileged to speak out in honor of the struggles of the oppressed, I really don’t think this is the right way to go about it at all.
"The unintentional misogyny." I am very suspicious of this production. I understand that this director had a concept. I also understand that this was a male director whose concept involved telling a woman's story through men. How unoriginal. For years our (women's) stories have been told by men. Our histories have been written down by men. "Taming of the Shrew" was originally written by a man, for men to tell the story of. I am not convinced that the added misogyny of this misogynistic play was unintentional. I think that our world as reached a common understanding that having an outside perspective (especially a historically superior perspective) tell a story without the help of the group that the story is about is generally unacceptable. I think we have reached a place where having men tell women's stories by default produces misogyny, there is nothing unintentional about it.
I wish that I would have seen the production to be able to have a more well formulated opinion on what actually occurred onstage. The reviewer, however was incredibly eloquent and descriptive, allowing me to feel as though I had seen it. Kudos to that reviewer for sitting through the production and writing about it with such articulation.
Post a Comment