skygiants | (no subject)

Yesterday over breakfast we were discussing the prevalence of Shakespeare and other early modern plays set in the contemporary era, which of course begs the question: why don't we ever set contemporary plays in Elizabethan times? Our Hamlet, anyone? Cat on a Straw Thatched Roof? Glengarry Glen Ross, Now In The Actual Highlands?

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/332164.html

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From:

agonistes

Because Streetcar, when transposed, mostly becomes Othello?

DESDEMONAAAAAAAAAAAAA?????

From:

skygiants

A HORSE-DRAWN CARRIAGE NAMED DESIRE

Edited Date: 2013-04-06 03:53 pm (UTC)

From:

agonistes

A quick search shows that horrible essays that first-year students use to plagiarize try to argue that Stanley = Iago. HAHAHAHAHA NO. Blanche = Iago, OBVIOUSLY.

From:

skygiants

So this is where I confess I don't actually know Streetcar very well; I've seen Marlon Brando do his thing and all, but that was a long, long time ago. I WILL TAKE YOUR WORD ON THAT, THOUGH.

From:

agonistes

Basically -- in the world in which Streetcar operates, Stanley Kowalski, according to Blanche's Old South paradigm, is the racial other. And also Iago is totes in love with Othello. So it's like gender-flipped and problematic dynamics ensue!

From:

hebethen

You discuss things over breakfast? Good gods! I didn't even know people still ate breakfast!

From:

skygiants

I think technically if you start to discuss things it might actually become brunch automatically, no matter the hour of the day. Everyone loves discussing things over brunch!

From:

adiva_calandia

Wait, wait, I have a serious dramaturgical answer to this! Er, if you want me to unleash the 'turg. >.>

From:

skygiants

Go for it! GIVE US THE FULL BENEFIT OF YOUR WISDOM. :D

From:

adiva_calandia

OKAY SO

Basically the theory my advisor espoused was that in order to be fuck-around-with-able, a play either needs to have a structure like a rock or have been well-established enough that everyone knows it really well. Shakespeare -- I was going to say has both of these things, but YMMV on how well-structured some of his plays are. But well-established they most certainly are! So you can do whatever the fuck you want to Shakespeare, especially his well-known works, secure in the knowledge that your audience will probably have enough familiarity with the original work to keep up with what you're changing. (Not recommended for: Cymbeline, Troilus and Cressida, Two Noble Kinsmen.)

Very few modern plays are both well-known and well-structured enough to stand up to a lot of fucking around. At CMU we attempted to do a gritty reboot of Guys and Dolls, which really would probably be one of your best bets if you wanted to do to a modern play what people regularly do to Shakespeare, but we kind of just ended up with Dick Tracy. But there's a play that I do think you could actually set in an earlier or a later era and make it work. ...With the possible exception of the Havana sequence, but fuck it, if we can make Illyria a high school within a larger city, we can make Havana a dive bar in Eastcheap, right?

The other issue is mainly one of practicality. Elizabethan/Jacobean/anything-written-pre-19th-century plays are regularly modernized because (true or not) generally accepted wisdom is that audiences are already going to have trouble understanding the language and they need a visual short-hand to help them understand roles and relationships quickly. I saw a production of Measure for Measure at OSF that was set in the 1970s, and even being unable to hear some dialogue and knowing only the basics of the storyline, it was easy to spot nuns vs. pimps vs. city officials. If you reverse the direction of that -- set, I don't know, The Music Man in Elizabethan England* -- you're arguably interposing a level of confusion between the text and the audience, forcing them to try and understand the setting while also following the storyline. And adding confusion for the audience is only the goal of annoyingly artsy directors, to my mind.

*OH MY GOD THOUGH I WANT THIS SO MUCH NOW. It would be like the Pied Piper!!! *______*

[/turging]

From:

skygiants

These are all good points! But I think you can also argue that if you have the modern dialogue, and then you transpose the setting, it's not particularly difficult to follow -- especially if you're using established visual tropes like "gangster" (everyone knows gangsters!) or, like, "cowboy" or "Queen Elizabeth." You can still have easily recognizable nuns/pimps/city officials/what have you even if they're not modern versions of whatever, because our cultural memory has versions of these from a bunch of different eras.

ALSO NOW I REALLY WANT ELIZABETHAN MUSIC MAN

From:

adiva_calandia

I think you are correct! (The other main argument I was going to make is that a lot of modern plays are more rooted in their particular time/place setting -- eg, Angels in America, anything by August Wilson -- but given that we take the history plays and transplant them to modern fascist regimes, I'm pretty sure that argument doesn't hold much water.)

I JUST

ALL THE LITTLE KIDS HALTINGLY PICKING OUT BEETHOVEN ON LUTES

HAROLD HILL JUMPING OFF THE BACK OF A HAYCART AT RIVER CITY

From:

skygiants

(Yeah, and, like, I with plays that deal with very contemporary issues there's definitely a too-soon factor -- you would not want to transpose them just because you don't want to dilute the message by putting it long-ago-and-far-away. But at some point in the future it'll probably be okay to do Angels in Arcadia.)

MARIAN THE NUNNERY LIBRARIAN with her proud collection of six illuminated manuscripts

From:

petra

I love this.

Wicked. Dateline: Salem, 1691.

From:

enleve

76 sackbuts lead the big parade....

Seeing as Beethoven was born 167 years after the end of the Elizabethan era, it might have to be Byrd instead, or involve time travel, but yeah! That would be fantastic.

From:

batyatoon

... I would kind of love to see Guys and Dolls in Elizabethan England.

Or ancient Rome! COME ON IT COULD TOTALLY WORK

From:

rachelmanija

I read that as Cow on a Straw Thatched Roof.

THUD.

From:

skygiants

Maybe an apt metaphor for the likely result of a production like this . . . >.>

From:

libitina

Brigadooooon

From:

skygiants

I keep reading this as BRIGADOOM

From:

rymenhild

Now I'm imagining a full Elizabethan staging of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, to bring everything back full circle.

From:

skygiants

Wait, has this not already been done? :O

From:

pedanther

You know Harry Turtledove once wrote a short story about a theatre troupe who get trapped in Elizabethan times by an arbitrary plot device, and decide that the best thing they can do is to go ahead with the production they were about to do, which happens to be "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". And then one day there's a knock on the stage door, and it's William Shakespeare, waving a playbill and wanting to have a word with this Thos. Stoppard person...