39 thoughts on “Coriolanus: general staging”

  1. I’ll be honest with you. I still can’t decide if Coriolanus in the Park is viable or one of those elaborate Lylesian nose-thumbing gestures designed to incense and self-incinerate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

    I can’t believe part of me is viewing this thing like a, for lack of a better word, impresario. I find myself thinking of the young professional urban fleers with their two-seat baby strollers, sitting out in the hot sun with their lunches from Spoons, expecting some kind of happy festival atmosphere that flatters without demanding too much of them. And I want to make a good impression. So that then we can get away with doing Coriolanus in the Park at some future time. It’s as if the first impression needs to be, to my mind, “How delightful! How unexpected! And how fabulous that our little Brindle-Alicia has been exposed to Shakespeare at such an absorbent age. I’m glad we scheduled time for this!” Patronage! We’ve sealed the deal. And if they want to bring their laptops with broadband access and do a little online trading while they watch, why not?

    Might as well mention my inner split as a theatre dabbler. Part of me, the child of Grotowski and Kraken, is concerned with austere events. You start with nothing. You wait for the creature to rise out of the murky depths. You embrace the void, the vacuum filled only by body and voice. The presence of the word implies the invisibility of other things. And that invisibility is part of the event. And so on. The spectacle builds upon a sublime absence.

    The other part of me acknowledges that theatre needs to be outrageous, full of the novel, the surprising, the audacious, the spectacular. A big party with fabulous people doing amazing things with brilliant charm. The prospect of performing in the park is tapping into that side of me more than the other. And Coriolanus seems a piece meant more for the other more refined approach, at this time and in our culture. Things would have been different at the Old Vic when Larry as Coriolanus with throat cut fell backwards off a rampart, feet held by soldiers, and dangled like a slaughtered pig. Audiences would have enjoyed the spectacle and the utter seriousness together without boredom or confusion. But I don’t know if we can cultivate a base right away with this play. Somebody make an opposing argument, please.

  2. Cultivating a base? What are you babbling about? We’re just doing a play, aren’t we? I think our original impulse was to do some Shakespeare without committing to the Big Party idea at all. No costumes. As little set as we can get away with. And no commitment to “building a base” or “further ventures” or “our season” or anything. Here today, gone today. Catch us while you can. In that sense, this fits in with your Grotowski side.

    Part of the experiment–I think–is to work on this play, which certainly could be a Refined Gesture in the setting you described, as a populist bit of entertainment. Make ’em laugh. Make ’em gasp. Make ’em talk about it.

    I have to say that I am astonished at your reservations. They make me laugh. My experience with Pericles and Winter’s Tale has convinced me that any “audience issues” we perceive in Bill’s plays evaporate when you begin working on them. I’m already seeing how Coriolanus can be a real crowd-pleaser.

  3. For those of you new to this site, I’m overcoming my split on another post:

    http://www.lacunagroup.org/blog/?p=138#comments

    And you can witness it as it happens. It’s kind of like watching reality television. Very exciting.

    As for the building a base business. I, unfortunately, have unresolved issues when it comes to making theatre in Newnan. I have to be careful because I don’t want our present efforts to get confused by my own pre-occupation with personal stuff. Since I’m stuck here, there’s an ambivalent desire to be part of the soil, to be an acknowledged presence. I stand naked before you all when I say I’ve occasionally imagined Don Nixon having to leave several messages on my machine. It’s a wish I’m not proud of. Nuff said.

  4. For an example of Marc’s “fabulous people doing amazing things with brilliant charm,” look no further than Sweeney Todd, now playing at the Fox. My God, I have never felt so untalented in my life. What a brilliant thing, both in conception and execution! All I can do is weakly acknowledge that I knew the director John Doyle in college.

  5. The thing that makes me miserable when thinking of the new production of Todd is how you KNOW it was developed through tried and true creative performance methods that most theatre folk worth their salt have undertaken at one time or another. It’s the result of inspired problem solving given the limits imposed through design, concept, etc. But because it takes place with such prestigious material, it has been leaked out to the populace at large who will see it will as startlingly original or unprecedented. And now, earnest theatre folk who have been working this way their whole careers will be accused of stealing from the new Todd should their work get seen by the recently exposed.

    My kids were particularly struck by Todd’s death. I, of course, characterized it as “old school Sixties total theatre” straight out of Grotowski by way of Artaud. To them it was a revelation.

    All of which leads me to think that even though we are indifferent to cultivating an audience base, we should play it in a way equivalent to the unanticipated barbarian savagery of the Volscians. They will not have seen the likes of us before.

  6. Stephanie Shelton and I were talking about the play over lunch the other day, and of course talking about it helped clear up some images. I keep fixating on the physical set, specifically those gates of Corioles that close behind our hero in I.4. If we had two tables that were light enough to play with, yet strong enough to stand on withal, then we have some levels and surfaces. Or we could have table-tops and trestles… Or something.

  8. Table-tops and trestles. Sounds like something with a bubbly tune by Richard Rogers.

    I think there should be some conversation about how large a cast might approach this thing. Do we want an outdoor Roman epic? Unto these Corioles? Or do we want a skeleton crew, the few, the proud? Black turtlenecks, a chair, a piece of billowing cloth, and a handful of pixie dust to bring the magic? What say we? I keep asserting We like the evil empire in Ayn Rand’s Anthem. How annoying of me.

  9. I’m thinking we’re going to need at least ten guys. In the scene I just posted, there are four main characters and seven enumerated citizens, although we don’t have to have seven actual bodies.

    I like the billowing cloth idea. I get off on billowing cloths.

    White t-shirts, not black turtlenecks. I’m starting my crunches now.

  10. I was joking about the billowing cloth, but you know, there could be some emblematic way to represent what Coriolanus “brings” whenever he unleashes his dogs of war. Certainly reports bear witness to it over and over, but some Kabuki-like pulling of a red curtain or long stretch of Christo-like fabric might be fun. So then he unfurls one half-way before Rome and agrees ultimately to roll it back up or pull it down or some such thing.

    Volumnia realizes she has given birth to her own impossible dream of honor and glory, the child of her own obscene fantasies of right and rule and conquest. Her appeal to him at the end is bitter, ultimate manipulation, saving Rome’s ass. I’m not saying it doesn’t take a toll on her; she knows she has to destroy her creation.

    What to others is a self-serving and convenient fiction, a lever of power and manipulation, Maritus lives as his truth. He is the impossible object. The references to bowels and war could evoke the idea that he is everyone’s shit become a noxious glory. As for his desire, I think he wants something impossibly pure from Audfidius. Audfidius plays him like the angry closeted “boy” I suppose he in many ways is. It’s the military seduction in a nutshell.

  11. I keep thinking about the link with the stock comic character of the braggart warrior. Here is an instance of that theatrical excess transmuted in a way into a tragic rhythm with that excess as the unresolvable flaw. And of course in this instance the warrior is not lying. In fact, his downfall is due in part to his inability to dissemble. Everyone around him is dissembling. No, not Poor Coriolanus, how good he is. His is an excess that has been exploited and he has enjoyed the rewards.

    Does in fact Coriolanus have a moment of anagnorisis? In the final scene, his complete breakdown in response to Audfidius’ use of “Boy” is as close as he gets, I think. It’s recognition in the form of unraveling. Quite moving, I think. He doesn’t get to live long enough to articulate anything that reaches back very far in its implications. The actor, I think, will have much to show without the words.

  14. If we were making a movie of this, I’d begin with V.6, Aufidius and the conspirators, perhaps with an overlay: “Now”, cut off at 59, and then fade to “Six months ago” and go back to I.1.

    Could we make that work in the park?

  15. As per Marc’s suggestion, if you are going to be doing this production, you will need to provide yourself with olive green cargo pants and a black t-shirt. As of 7/23/08, BJs has such.

    And to get to either stagings or themes whenever you want, just go to the cloud tag and click on those tags.

  17. BJs also has black t-shirts, bundled with gray ones, cheap for $9.99. I’m thinking we can do either/or, and perhaps two of each, with one for “torn/worn/bloody” or something.

  18. Too bad the black will totally disguise all the blood. Have we considered white?

  21. As upstanding members of the media, when it comes to military operations it’s our duty to hide the blood.

    You know we don’t need blood.

    I’m surprised it wasn’t suggested we add it later with CGI.

  22. Since when has Marc been the comic relief?

    And why we do need to disguise “non-buffness?” I’m for just, you know, getting buff, instead. It’s what real actors do, right?

    I’ve already got two gym memberships. Might as well start using them again. Gives me an excuse to get up off my butt and away from the computer.

  23. Yes, Ginny, in her never-ending quest to keep me alive beyond my allotted span, is very excited about my plans for buffitudity. She’s not even offended that it’s for a show and not for her.

  24. We need some kind of disclaimer in the program: The buffness of the performers is the result of an extensive creative process and part of a distinctly critical point-of-view; it in no way represents earnest effort on their part as men to adopt that distinct strain of Fascist masculine puffing up that has begun to ascend lately in our culture.

  25. I’m hoping Jeff can walk off on the AT the torment that my wisecracking seems to produce in him. Do you sleep?

  26. It’s my duty to set you naive creative types straight. Achieving buffness will not somehow change or enhance aspects of your relationship with your woman. The buffness effect really only kicks in when two or more of them are gathered at pool parties and can compete for status AMONG THEMSELVES by evaluating the relative (surprising) buffness of their hubs, who are all cannonballing into the water at that moment.

  27. I make no such claims. And there are one or two decided improvements buffitudity would contribute to one’s current relationship; I’ll discuss them with you later.

  30. I’ve already memorized the first three pages of First Citizen. Tomorrow morning, let’s start figuring out who’s playing whom.

  33. The first law of collaboration is: someone has to have an idea before someone else can have a good idea.

    In that spirit I offers thoughts on lean and mean staging concepts. What if we do everything with just bodies on the stage? No other “elements.”

    Visual statements could come out of the idea of “men in formation.” We could then do very coordinated, aggressive, marshall geometries and group movements. Then we can choose to diverge from those for other kinds of statements. Nice tensions possible between being part of the group, leading the group, separating oneself from the group. Tensions within Coriolanus. I’m talking uni- and multi- dimensional arrangements, mind you. And very few straight lines.

    At times it might seem as if we are “at attention” in these various formations, but then the audience will begin to discern that we are actually watching the action and subtly scrutinizing one another, in that appraising alpha-male way: I can take him; he’s fit; he’s a bitch; he’s not a threat or even worth my time. We link that atmosphere with the more convoluted world of political impressions and alliances. Another world of “male postures.”

    Idea for opening. Percussion. Strong formation work. Ending in a variation of a phalanx or something. A ritualized fight begins between actors playing Coriolanus and Audfidius. Gradually the other players break formation and begin to represent bickering tribunes and senators, using snatches of text, and their behavior begins to obscure the view of the fight until it is lost entirely.

    Now the floor is open for good ideas.

  35. More ideas. I’m currently re-reading the play and I’m wondering about the use of staffs as both weaponry and scenic elements. Thing is, staffs can be uniform. Swords would be diverse (in style and period). Staffs are strong phallic statements as well. Staffs can be held in such a way as to suggest “gates,” etc.

    I’m also noting that there is no actual violence that plays out in a scene as an explicit furtherance to the plot (apart from Coriolanus’ murder–and even there, Coriolanus and Aufidius don’t actually get to “do it”). Violence is always impending or we are exposed to its results. That is an interesting idea to work with. What if we fill our production with a series of strong threats of violence and visions of its aftermath, but nobody actually gets to “do it.”

    I think with our elite cadre of players we could emphasize the ritualistic aspects in the play and how violence is often contained and channelled (as well as repressed) in ritual, in both battle ritual and “political” ritual. In a large number of scenes, including the opening, men are getting ready to fight, and that process can be easily ritualized in certain ways.

    So I’m not saying we shouldn’t do some fun choreography with staffs and bodies and create some jarring kinetic statements, just that it should never be for staging a realistic “fight.” We just don’t have the bodies to do “battle scenes,” anyway. And battle scenes? Seen one, seen ’em all. But we can evoke the threat of violence and make explosive events with a small number.

  37. And, yes, for those of you who actually know the play and wish to call my credibility into doubt, Cor. and Aud. do get to battle at the end of the clash with the Vols. I conceptualized too quickly. But it is not very satisfactory for either party.

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