Wednesday, November 23, 2016
TAME./Shrew: Three women talk about facing the Bard's troubling play head on
DC Theatre Scene: WSC Avant Bard is presenting a world premiere and critics have lavished praise on its playwright.
“Jonelle Walker’s vivid, artfully unnerving TAME. is a retort to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew,” raved Celia Wren in The Washington Post. (The title of the play, by the way, is all caps and ends with a full-stop.) “Trust me that this is a 5 star play,” Kelly McCorkendale concurred on DCTheatreScene.com.
I read with interest a blog-post that Walker wrote for the Avant Bard web page. In it, she spoke about the importance to her that the production team working on her play inspired by Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew be predominately female.
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4 comments:
I think the one of the best points made by these ladies bring up is that Taming of the Shrew is really just fluff. It’s not a very good script, just fluff and wordplay. But we revere it and keep producing it because it’s Shakespeare. But to keep producing such material to a reasonable not sexist audience in 2016, you kind of have to politicize it somewhat. And as one of the women says, it doesn’t stand up well to that, it crumbles. I applaud making new material based on this play that is able to address those big questions, but I wonder how far you can really twist the original text away from its intended purpose? Is there really that many more new and interesting takes of this one play that a theatre and director can use to justify producing it again? I think it could be interesting if the text was broken up, intercut with pieces addressing domestic violence or the male fantasy of women being servile towards them, and developed into something entirely new like the production of Antony and Cleopatra that was produced here last year. However, I think there far too many diverse, interesting and important plays out there to keep producing Shakespeare just for the sake of doing Shakespeare with one half-assed attempts to make it address something topical. At this point, if you want to get a new topical take on Taming of the Shrew, you have to either create something entirely new simply inspired by the original or completely rework and gut it until it is almost unrecognizable.
2016 is really a bad year for Taming of The Shrew. Many theatre companies are trying their hand at deconstructing it to how the inherent issues with the misogynistic nature of the play and blatant objectification of women. In my personal opinion, I think that a more effective way to critique the work would be by creating new, original works that contrast these ideals in a modern fashion, since as long as your show is linked to one from 500 years ago, no matter what people are going to wave their hands and say "of course men were like that 500 years ago". Now, this version does do that to some extent, but at the end of the day, it really is just an examination of the same set of actions through Kate's eyes. Currin, in the article, even states that she thinks Shrew doesn't stand up very well in regards to Shakespeare's lexicon, so it makes me wonder why we are pushing so hard to tear this specific play down instead of tearing down the ideals that are so problematic about the play in the first play. Shakespearean productions are always going to have a level of distance to them, and until we can find a way to honestly and effectively respond without directly lifting from the plays themselves, we can't really have a new discussion.
I thought this article had some great points to make about the strength of the story of "Taming of the Shrew". I agree with the interviewees in that the show was not built to hold all the grand political ideas that people try to stuff in it. I think like many of Shakespeare's works it was a product of the time in terms of themes about women, and was very much a silly comedy about women and men in love. I don't think there's any honor in trying to scrape out some kind of relevant modern meaning in the original play as written, so I think the author of "Learning Curves" was definitely on the right track by using the context of "Shrew" to show a bigger story, one in which having more modern political themes makes sense. I would love to see this kind of analysis done on other Shakespeare plays with similarly fluffy and silly plotlines that don't have any room for the women to carry actual complex ideas.
It's not exactly a novel approach to re-examine The Taming of the Shrew through a feminist approach, but the show in which a woman, Emily, is confronted by the 'tame' Kat is interesting to me, specifically because of the playwright's description of the plot: in which Emily begins to fall in love with a man, and Kat tries to convince her love is good, and Emily has to be a "good feminist" and resist falling in love.
So, as is custom, here goes my near weekly feminist rant.
What is a good feminist! And why does being a good feminist mean not falling in love! I am very tired of the idea that you cannot be a "good feminist" and still feel stereotypically feminine things. A cool examination of The Taming of The Shrew could maybe be dealing with that aspect of it - perhaps Kat is a woman totally opposed to love because she thinks love makes her a "bad" feminist, and she cannot be strong if she succumbs to love! And then maybe, she does succumb to love, and it all works out. Oh wait! This show already exists! And it's starring Heath Ledger and it's called Ten Things I Hate About You, and it's my favorite rom-com. Drat! 90's feminism wins again.
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