My first time seeing All’s Well That Ends Well!  Good night for it – the rain held off, and we got the best seats we’d ever had (in the “tall chair” section, right up against the edge of the VIP section, who all have low chairs).

It’s an amusing little play, kind of all over the map.  They open with a huge funeral scene looking like something straight out of New Orleans the way everybody was costumed.  Bertram has flung himself across the coffin of his father, and is eventually the last to leave the service as people come and remove the chairs around him.  It’s a nice idea, but … at any point in the rest of the play is there any mention of his relationship to his father? At all? Other than “This guy’s dead,” what is the purpose of that extended scene?

Let me see how I do with the plot, for those that don’t know it:  Bertram’s father has just died.  He is taken in as a ward by the King of France.  Bertram’s mother, the Countess, has a ward of her own, Helena, whose father was a famous doctor.  Helena loves Bertram.  (When the Countess says “Think of me like a mother,” thus making Bertram her brother, Helena’s all, “Ewww, no, can’t do that. That’s nasty.” So they have a bit of a go-round on whether she can be a mother-in-law instead.)

Anyway, the King of France is deathly ill, and convinced that nobody can cure him – if only the famous Doctor so-and-so (Helena’s father), was still alive!  Sure enough Helena comes and says, “I have my father’s medicine, I can cure you.”  She offers a deal that if she cures the king, she can marry anyone in his kingdom.  Done and done – she cures him, then promptly picks Bertram.

It’s at this point that we discover that Bertram is a pig. He doesn’t think she’s good enough for him, being just the daughter of a doctor.  I do love a good scene in Shakespeare where somebody pisses off a king, because it never ends well (hello, Cordelia?)  The King at first gently hints to Bertram, “You know what she did for me, yes? She cured me, you know that, right?” and then more sternly, “It is only her title you don’t like – and I can change that.”  But Bertram’s having none of it, and has no interest in marrying Helena.

For the briefest moment here I felt sympathy for Bertram, for one simple reason – if he really has grown up in the same house as this girl, and his mother really does think of her like a daughter, then maybe he sees her as a sister?  In which case, even a king saying “Marry your sister!” would cause you to disagree with the command.

Anyway, Bertram grudgingly agrees to marry Helena, but is then promptly convinced by his cowardly friend Parolles to run away and join the army (an honor that was previously denied him).  And so he does, sending home a note to his mother and “wife” that says, “As long as a wife is in France, there’s nothing for me there.  It’s a big world and I’ll keep as much distance as I can.”  He also writes (paraphrased), “You never got a ring or a baby from me, so until you have those things, we’re not married.”

What comes out of Helena next, surprisingly, is a speech that sounds like something from Les Miserables where she blames herself for all of this, and that if he dies in battle, it will be all her fault.  I liked it, I thought it was very telling about the character, but like many things it seemed to come out of nowhere, and then never any followup.

The plot gets a little twisty here and I can’t say I followed it all entirely.  Helena says that she’s going on a pilgrimage – and somehow rumor circulates that she’s died.  I don’t know where that part came in.  So Bertram either has a wife, or…has a wife who has died? When he starts talking up the ladies of town (Diana in particular) I got lost.  If they know he is married (they do), then yeah, he’s a rat for cheating on his wife.  But if everybody thinks that his wife is dead, is he still a bad guy?

Helena, it turns out, has arrived in town and has spoken to Diana and her mother about her history with Bertram.  Specifically about Bertram’s “ring and baby” thing, which she has taken as a challenge.  They come up with the famous “bed trick” where Bertram thinks he’s going with Diana (to whom he has given his ring), only it is Helena (pretty sure that’s known as “rape” these days).  Badda boom badda bing, everything works out in the end – Helena’s pregnant with Bertram’s child, she managed to get his ring from him, so he says “Ok, fine I’ll marry you.”

I don’t know if it was the production or the source material, but most of the comedy seemed to fall flat.  Poor clown Lavatch got nothing from the audience at all.  Parolles, played by the same guy who did Bottom for Commonwealth a few years ago, felt like he was really trying to force something out of the material that wasn’t there.  The funniest bits came from the Countess, who as the mother character could get an easy laugh of of the slightest eye roll or arched eyebrow, and the King.  The funniest line of the night came in the final scene when it is discovered that Diana is wearing a ring that belonged to Helena, given to her by the king.  He is demanding to know where she got it:

KING

Thou hast spoken all already, unless thou canst say
they are married: but thou art too fine in thy
evidence; therefore stand aside.
This ring, you say, was yours?

DIANA

Ay, my good lord.

KING

Where did you buy it? or who gave it you?

DIANA

It was not given me, nor I did not buy it.

KING

Who lent it you?

DIANA

It was not lent me neither.

KING

Where did you find it, then?

DIANA

I found it not.

KING

If it were yours by none of all these ways,
How could you give it him?

DIANA

I never gave it him.

LAFEU

This woman’s an easy glove, my lord; she goes off
and on at pleasure.

KING

This ring was mine; I gave it his first wife.

DIANA

It might be yours or hers, for aught I know.

KING

Take her away; I do not like her now;

That last “I do not like her now” was delivered with just the right comic timing, it had me in stitches.

The production, as always, was quite nice.  The costumes were very impressive, from the initial funeral scene to all the hospital attendants to the king (dressed in pure white, top to toe).  All the military men were in uniform.   The stage – with this cool rotating ring in the middle of it – was equally the king’s palace, the countess’s living room, a tent, a battle ground.  A couple times it even seemed to pass as just some generic street corner.

Was it me or does this play in particular have a crazy amount of back and forth in it?  We see the countess – we see the king – we see the countess – we see the king.  You send a letter here, I send a letter back here…  Once upon a time here on the blog we talked about “split screening” a play, and sometimes I wondered if this would make a good candidate.  What were they sending these letters by, rocket ship?  They kept getting where they needed to go awfully quickly.

As always, glad I got to go, and glad I got to add this play to my list of seen-its.  Not one of my favorites.  I can’t really think of anything where I’d point to a particular scene as an example of something.  (Compare The Comedy of Errors, for example, where I’ve at times used Dromio of Syracuse’s description of his fat new wife as one of Shakespeare’s funniest scenes.)  When one play is being performed and I catch myself thinking, “I wonder what they’re going to do next year?”  I guess that’s telling enough. I don’t remember thinking that when I was watching their Othello.

I received my review copy of Stewart Buettner’s The Shakespeare Manuscript when I was in the middle of The Tragedy of Arthur, which made for a very interesting opportunity to compare two different angles on the same topic – the fictional discovery of a new Shakespeare play. I informed Stewart that I was reading Arthur already, to avoid any feeling that my opinions of the one would cloud the other, but he had no problems with my reading them at the same time.  This actually makes the fourth book on this topic that I’ve read – see also Interred With Their Bones and The Book of Air and Shadows.

So, how does Buettner’s novel get things rolling?  April, the agoraphobic daughter of a rare books dealer, receives a package.  Inside, among other papers, she finds Hamlet, King of Denmarke.  Not prince – King. This is not the Hamlet we all know and love.  This appears to be some other Hamlet story, perhaps even the legendary Ur-Hamlet, a previous chapter in the Hamlet story.

The package came from her father, Miles, who is out of the country traveling on business.  After an unfortunate encounter with some muggers, Miles is left with a nasty case of amnesia and cannot remember how and why he even came by the manuscript. Is it even real?

Unable to get in touch with her father (who sits in a hospital bed as an unidentified “John Doe” until he gets his memory back), April, an actress herself, contacts Avery LeMaster, her former director, to be her expert on the authenticity of the play.

Avery immediately declares it legitimate simply by reading it.  He then convinces April to let him have it – the only copy of what could be the rarest manuscript in the world. He races back to his own group of players, announces “We’re performing this,” and then proceeds to lose it.

The majority of the book is not about the play, but the players. They all have history, and I lost track of who had slept with whom (not unlike my own college theatre troupe :)).  Emotions run high, and had there been more trailers, I’m sure that most of the cast would have spent most of their time in them.  But professionals they are indeed, and the author gives us plenty of opportunity to see them act.  What exactly was Hamlet’s relationship to his father, and to Ophelia?  Buettner offers a number of possibilities.  In doing so, he smartly focuses not on some imaginary text that he had to make up for the purposes of his story, but on the interactions between his actors.  How does Ophelia feel about what Hamlet is saying to her? What does that do to her performance?

The play’s authenticity does come up, of course – eventually.  Will the original be recovered? Can it be properly authenticated?  Can Miles, who does recover from his amnesia, take on the detective work of figuring out where and how he got it in the first place?  Who exactly holds rights to the play, and what does that do to the possibility of performing it?

I liked the core idea – imagine a prequel to Shakespeare, and then focus a group of actors on nothing but performing that story.  It would be easy enough to do in real life, of course, if you just went ahead and wrote your own (for instance, something like Updike’s Claudius and Gertrude comes to mind). But what if the play was actually written by Shakespeare, and you were the very first to perform it? Your interpretation would set the stage, literally, for generations to come.  No hypotheticals.  No discussions in blog comments about whether Gertrude was fooling around with Claudius on the side.  Now you’d have to pick an interpretation and sell it on the stage.  That’s cool.

Most of the rest of the story – the intrigue stuff? I could live without.  Everybody’s got skeletons in their closet. Somebody’s on drugs.  Something horrible happened in April’s family that she doesn’t talk about – she’s got one estranged brother and another that we have to assume is dead. She was also the greatest young actress of her generation before “the event” that sent her off the stage and into her self-imposed exile.  Can she make a triumphant comeback?  Miles, meanwhile, doesn’t really have amnesia – he’s hiding something.

I appreciate that the book has to appeal to a broad audience.  Where I see “a book about the discovery of a new Shakespeare play, that happens to be a mystery”, the rest of the world sees “a mystery about the discovery of a new Shakespeare play.”  But there are moments where I think maybe the author spread himself a bit too thin.  April’s agoraphobia comes and goes.  One minute she can’t be near other people, the next minute she’s sleeping with someone.  She’s accused of racism at some point as well when her black co-star does not understand her hesitance, but that goes nowhere.

(I also found Miles’ amnesia oddly amusing, when he claims to forget the plot of Othello. He knows it’s by Shakespeare, he just forgot what it’s about.  I’m reasonably sure that amnesia doesn’t work that way. 🙂 )

In the end, this book is about its people, and for that I’m glad – I’ve often said that this is how I like my Shakespeare. I like to talk about the characters as if they are real, and not just words strung together on a page.  There is not a great deal of academic detail in this one about the painstaking details of authenticating a Shakespeare play (see “Arthur”, above).  Nor are there any shoot-outs, car chases, or grisly murders.  There’s a bunch of actors on retreat out in the middle of nowhere, and their director shows up with a play that might be Shakespeare.  Go.  You know, it even occurs to me as I write that summary that the entire book could have been written like that, from the perspective of one of the actors.  Start with the director showing up with the play. Who cares where he got it, or what’s happening to authenticate it. You’re an actor, you’ve just been handed the biggest challenge of your career, and you’ve got a month to do nothing but live and breathe it.  What would you do?

PETRUCHIO

I swear I’ll cuff you, if you strike again.

KATHARINA

So may you lose your arms:
If you strike me, you are no gentleman;
And if no gentleman, why then no arms.
Because I will BITE THEM OFF!

What if Katharina had a perfectly good reason for being so cranky all of the time? You’d be sore too if all you wanted to do was shed your clothes, change form, and run wild in the woods.

Author Sylvia Shults pitched me her idea of “Taming of the Shrew + Zombies”, although when I heard “werewolf” I suggested that maybe Twilight had more than a little to do with it. 🙂 I thought it sounded like fun.

And it is. A small book – barely 90 pages – I read it at the beach this weekend. Katharina gets a backstory! Haven’t you ever wondered what her deal is? Why she’s such a man hater (no I did not say “man eater”, at least not yet :))? We learn of her doomed affair with Amadeo, a man she would never have been allowed to marry anyway, even if he hadn’t been killed by a werewolf. Katharina (Amadeo was the only man ever allowed to call her “Kate”) survived the attack, but alas she’s now cursed. Literally.

With that little twist in mind, now you may begin to play out the familiar story. Petruchio has come to Padua to wive and thrive, and when he hears about the substantial dowry that Katharina brings, he takes up the challenge. How long will it be until she (pardon the expression) bites his head off? Is he the alpha male she’s been looking for, without ever realizing what she needed?

I want to use this opportunity to bring up a topic of discussion. Many people have retold Shakespeare’s tales in many different ways. Here, despite the fact that a new story element has been added and the whole book being written in modern prose, the actual Shakespearean dialogue is often kept. I find this jarring. If you add dialogue and that dialogue is modern English, why switch back to spoken Shakespearean just to mimic what’s in the original script? Compare West Side Story as an example. While everyone who ever sees that play can plainly tell that it is a direct port of Romeo and Juliet, it manages to also be an entirely unique entity without suffering in the least for it.

What do you think? If somebody wants to take Shakespeare’s story and play with it, would you like to leave in elements of the original, or just go ahead and write the parallel-universe version where you can do what you want?

I prefer the latter in a case like this. This book wants to be a romance novel, but it’s too short and gimmicky (no offense, Sylvia!) to really accomplish that task. It’s closer to young adult (though there’s just enough sexy time for me not to give it to my 9yr old). So instead I say go for it – throw off the shackles of trying to too closely mimic your source material. Take the story of the shrew waiting to be tamed, and retell it however you want. Change the names, change the dialogue, and take as much time as you need to really dig into your backstory. There’s plenty of opportunity to go all “bodice-ripper” here – lust, passion, individuals quite literally succumbing to their animal instincts! – so why not jump in with both feet? Go the West Side Story way, and make Twilight meets Shrew. Could be a winner!

Of course for every West Side Story there is a Shakespeare in Love, or a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, showing that the opposite side of the argument is also true – you can use your Shakespeare foundation and create an amazing story right in the middle of it. In this case, however, I don’t think the source material stands up the same. Shrew doesn’t really stand up to R&J or Hamlet in the modern reader/viewer’s mind.

What do you think?

Imagine, for a moment, an Oberon and Titania who live in modern day San Francisco. Oh, they’re still king and queen of the fairies, still magical creatures. But, just like mortals, they have their flaws. They fight, they make up. After one particular fight, Oberon brings Boy to Titania as a peace offering. This is not new, the fairies often snatch young boys from the surrounding neighborhood and bring them to live “under the hill” for a time. Not as equals, of course. As toys. And, when they’re bored of their toys, they throw them back.
Something is different about this one, though. This one is not a toy. This boy they treat as a son. Titania deeply loves the boy, an emotion that is also deeply foreign to her (and she does not always like or appreciate it). Sometimes she can not live without him, other times she curses Oberon for ever bringing him to her.
Something else is different about Boy — he has leukemia. What happens to Titania and Oberon next is some of the saddest fiction I think I’ve ever read. The author’s descriptions of parents inside a hospital cancer ward as so realistic you feel like you’re right there with them (and it is not a place you want to be for long). This only stands to reason since Chris Adrian, author of The Great Night, is in real life a pediatric oncologist. So he, however unfortunately, knows all too much about this area.
I’m three paragraphs in, and that’s just the premise for the story. I could take a whole novel of that. “Titania and Oberon living in modern day San Francisco. They kidnap a boy, learn what it means to love him and to be parents, and then have to deal with his mortality as leukemia takes him away. Boom. Go.” I would buy that book.

But this book is more than that. This book is Adrian’s retelling of Shakespeare’s entire story, with a few twists. Oberon, after a particularly horrible fight with Titania (who blames him for all of their pain), has left. Titania desperaretly wants him to return and sends her fairy servants out in search of him daily. In this story, though, Puck is not a mischievous sprite – he is an untrustworthy creature who spends his time in chains. Puck is able to convince Titania, in her grief, that he will surely find Oberon if only she unchains him. She does so and we discover what the other fairies already knew – that Puck is a world-eating monster. The rest of the story is spent with the fairies alternately running away, attempting to fight, or basically kissing their fairy behinds goodbye because the end of the world is surely upon them.
Meanwhile, up in the human world, three distraught lovers have become lost in the park. Each has his (or her) own backstory about how love, sex and relationships have gone horribly wrong. It doesn’t take long for these mortals to run into the fairies, and they all flee from Puck together.
But wait, there’s more! What of Bottom and the mechanicals? Here we get a band of homeless people who have become convinced that the Mayor is solving the city’s homeless problem with cannibalism. So, naturally, they decide to stage a musical retelling of Soylent Green, the old science fiction movie about the same topic.
How does it all end? Well, with lots of sex, I’ll say that. I don’t know if that’s a statement that the author’s making about Midsummer or about San Francisco, but he certainly doesn’t need any double entendres or innuendos to make his point.   
The story is not an exact retelling of Midsummer, and doesn’t try to be, as you can see. Ultimately, I found that I liked the Shakespeare bits and didn’t care much one way or another for the rest. Like I said, I would have read an entire story of nothing but the backstory about Titania, Oberon and Boy. Or how Puck had come to be captured, I’m sure that would make a good story as well. It’s just that, when you start adding characters to Shakespeare, you lose me a bit as your audience. I’m in it for the Shakespeare, and coming at it from the angle of what you do with the Shakespeare. When you take some Shakespeare out and add some of your own creation back in? Well, now you’ve basically asked me to put the two side by side … and I’m not sure what modern author would win that battle.
Chris Adrian was named as part of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” and, as mentioned, is currently in his pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at UCSF. This is his third novel.