For the second half of its 2012-2013 the Shakepseare Theater company in Washington, DC is currently putting on performances of Coriolanus, Wallenstein, and The Winter’s Tale. The first two plays are being performed in a pair the company is calling the Hero/Traitor Repertory, but it’s also fascinating to read the two Shakespeare works currently in production, Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale, together. Though the former is a tragedy set in ancient Rome about a war hero who becomes the enemy of his city when he refuses to temper his manner to secure elected office, and the latter is a comedy of mistaken identities set in Sicily and Bohemia, both plays have tremendous roles for older women, Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother in the play that bears his name, and Paulina, advisor to the royal family of Sicily, in The Winter’s Tale. And to a certain extent, both plays are about what happens when women are barred from formal roles in public life, or when their voices are ignored.

In Coriolanus, Volumnia is the model of a Roman mother, a woman who has raised a great war hero. But while Marcius (the name her son bears before he is given the title Coriolanus in recognition of his war service) can do what Volumnia cannot, represent his country on the battlefield and win honor and political power by doing so, Coriolanus lacks his mother’s deft political perception and ability to compromise when necessary. To a certain extent, this is Volumnia’s fault in raising him. She’s the kind of woman who tells her daughter-in-law “If my son were my husband, I / should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he / won honour than in the embracements of his bed where / he would show most love,” and insists that if Marcius were killed in battle “Then his good report should have been my son.” Marcius’ success is a proxy for Volumnia’s own ambitions. When he wins his greatest victory yet and is poised to become a consul, she reflects, “I have lived / To see inherited my very wishes / And the buildings of my fancy.”

But she may actually be more fit to make the compromises necessary to hold that office than her son is. “Pray, be counsell’d,” Volumnia begs her son when he’s furious at having to go through the rituals to make him consul, including hearing himself praised for his accomplishment, and seeking the approval of Rome’s ordinary citizens, who he has nothing but contempt for. “I have a heart as little apt as yours, / But yet a brain that leads my use of anger / To better vantage…You are too absolute; / Though therein you can never be too noble.” The implacable nature that leads Coriolanus to storm entire cities by himself, and to fight his bitter enemy in single combat makes him an incredibly terrible politician. Volumnia may never have been able to kill in battle the way her son does, but it’s a shame she isn’t allowed to stand for office in his place. Coriolanus may be repulsed by the prospect of compromise, but Volumnia understands a politician’s job all too well: “I would dissemble with my nature where / My fortunes and my friends at stake required / I should do so in honour.”
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One of the reasons William Shakespeare’s work is so enduring is that it’s perceived to be timeless. Romeo and Juliet are stand-ins for every teenage couple that perceives themselves to be or actually is pulled apart by family or other societal forces. Hamlet is every son with a dead father and an uncertain sense of himself. Bands of brothers will continue to charge into battle from this day to the ending of the world, and they and we will need to believe they do so for a greater cause to enable them to keep doing it. But while many of Shakespeare’s psychological insights may feel unmoored from time, in the same way Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy could have met, sparred, and found each other in almost any time period, with adjustments along the way, the means by which Shakespeare delivered those insights vary widely in how tightly they’re tied to particular historical circumstnaces and mores, and in how much structres from the past have reinvented themselves for new eras. This poses enormous challenges for the success of a contemporary Shakespeare adaptation: it’s easy to turn the Capulet and Montagues’ relatively amorphous family fued into a gang rivalry or a spat between business empires, but rather harder to come up with a modern equivalent of the Salic Law that will get audiences juiced.

I say all of this as a roundabout way of approaching Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, a play that’s a perfect example of a relatively modern relationship that’s brought together under difficult-to-translate circumstances. Beatrice and Benedick, two wits who have each other as their favorite targets, are brought together in a horribly traumatic moment that’s difficult to imagine today: Beatrice’s cousin has her chastity impugned at the altar on her wedding day, is left at the altar, and her family pretends that she’s died of shame in order to build time to restore her reputation. The process by which Hero’s wedding is ruined is essentially a timeless one—she’s framed for cheating with another man on the night before her marriage to Claudio—but the reaction to this news is not. Claudio isn’t just disgusted by the idea that Hero has cheated on him: the fact that she has sexual experience at all is at the root of Claudio’s complaint to Hero’s father at the altar:

Sweet prince, you learn me noble thankfulness.
There, Leonato, take her back again:
Give not this rotten orange to your friend;
She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour.
Behold how like a maid she blushes here!
O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal!
Comes not that blood as modest evidence
To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,
All you that see her, that she were a maid,
By these exterior shows? But she is none:
She knows the heat of a luxurious bed;
Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

I wrote on Friday that this is a scenario that’s exceedingly hard to move into the modern era, and I thought the success of Much Ado About Nothing would depend on the ability of the movie to find a contemporary scenario into which this conflict fit without seeming jarringly anachronistic, making it easier to suspend disbelief about the characters’ reactions. While there’s no question that cheating on your wedding night is a big deal in modern society, we’re—fortunately—not a society where it would be a reasonable test of your lover’s affections to ask him to kill his best friend for besmirching your cousin’s sexual reputation. There are options here, of course. I would have been curious to see a slightly larger social context where Hero and her family are Christian, and the film took seriously the idea that her honor is valuable to her because she’s been taught it’s the most important thing about her. And even more interesting could have been a setup where Claudio’s reaction seems to come more from a sense of anxiety about the revelation that his bride has more sexual experience than he does than from the idea that Don Leonato has offended him by pretending to honor him but offering him “this rotten orange” as a sign of that honor.”
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I’m hoping to catch Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing at South By Southwest, though it looks like scheduling may not allow for it. But looking at the trailer, I’ve got two thoughts:

First, I love me some Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker, but I think it’s going to be hard for me to see them not in the context of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s performances in those roles in from twenty years ago. Acker’s so good at retiring roles that it’s hard for me to really imagine her with a delightfully poisonous tongue.

And second, I’m curious as to how the adaptation is going to handle Hero and Claudio, played respectively by Jillian Morgese and Fran Kranz. Their story, in which Hero’s chastity is called into question, the wedding between the young lovers is called off, and Claudio is made to feel guilty by being told that Hero’s literally died of grief is a much harder thing to bring into the moder era than a clash of wits between a much more contemporary couple like Beatrice and Benedick. There’s very interesting stuff to be done with Hero and Claudio about anxiety about relative sexual experience, slut-shaming, and the anxiety of marriage. But getting there and doing it right in this setting probably means jettisoning the set-up in which Claudio believes that Hero is dead. I’m curious to see how Whedon will work it all out. Giving us modern screwball with Beatrice and Benedick is awfully fun, but it’s the easy lift here. Transforming Hero and Claudio and doing it well will be the much more impressive feat.

It’s incredibly striking to watch, Ralph Fiennes’ excellent new cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play about a Roman general turned exile and traitor to his people and himself, Coriolanus, in the midst of a race for the Republican nomination for president, and in the winter of the Occupy movement. To say that it’s a merely 99 percent movement movie would diminish it—and ignore Shakespeare’s intentions to the point of ridiculousness. There’s far too much going on—Roman mothers (and what a Roman mother: Vanessa Redgrave is spectacular as Volumnia), blood feuds (this one, between Martius and Gerard Butler, surprisingly good as Tullus Aufidius), citizens who are easily manipulated and men who think they’re too good to need to earn the public trust.

But Coriolanus is a striking illustration of Shakespeare’s ability to fill whatever space his words are set in. It’s hard to imagine another author who could write a scene of a Roman mother shaming her son into refraining from sacking his home city in an act of poisonous vengeance that would play as well in modern winter coats as it does in togas. And it’s striking to see one of his plays come alive, so vividly transposed to our own time, precisely at the moment that we seem to need it.

In the opening scene of the movie, a group of conspirators come together in a dingy apartment in a bad neighborhood. The First Citizen asks the others, in preparation for a march on grain stores held by the government, “You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?” They could be the General Assembly at an Occupy encampment (the movement could use their graphic design skills, to be sure). The First Citizen’s declaration of Rome’s elite that “They ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us,” is as perfect an articulation of the pains of rising income inequality today as it was when Shakespeare wrote it, and in the time that he imagined those words spoken.

The contempt the citizens meet with when they confront Caius Martius—the Roman general who, like many Republicans today appears to believe that the military are the only people who deserve a social safety net—is awfully familiar as well. “What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues / That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, / Make yourselves scabs?” Martius spits at them. It’s hard not to imagine that America’s beseiged 1 percenters wish they could summon his eloquence in their disdain, though they might stop short at Martius’s diatrabe against popular government, his complaint that by trying to gain the consent of the citizens “we debase / The nature of our seats, and make the rabble / Call our cares fears; which will in time
Break ope the locks o’ the senate and bring in / The crows to peck the eagles.”

And the movie reminded me of something I think at least modern Shakespeare adaptations have in common that’s quite interesting: they’ve redefined banishment as a retreat to poverty. Banishment’s a hard concept in the modern era—as we’ve filled in the land, it’s harder to imagine what it would be like to be cast out of a city state without easy access to the kind of economic, social, or cultural life you once enjoyed within its walls. And it’s also difficult to imagine getting large numbers of people on board with shunning an individual and casting that curse down the years to disadvantage his children as well.

But I think both Coriolanus and Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Romeo + Juliet did something fascinating in their depictions of exile: they made Martius and Romeo poor. When Romeo leaves Verona and ends up living in an isolated trailer: it’s ultimately a poverty of information that kills him when he rushes back to kill himself at what he believes is Julie’ts grave. After the people turn on him and he’s banished from Rome, Martius goes homeless, sleeping rough, hitching rides, growing out his hair and beard, and ultimately stalking his great enemy, Aufidius, to his war council. When Aufidius accepts Martius’s allegiance, and shaving his head, welcomes him back into citizenship, it’s a moment so charged, it’s almost erotic. The nature of our punishments may change. But Shakespeare’s words still have the heft and magnitude to express what exile, what inequality, what hunger mean to us across the years.

I still can’t quite believe this thing is real, but I guess it is. And newly-out Sean Maher is talking about the decision Joss Whedon made to cast him as Don John in his Much Ado About Nothing adaptation — and to turn the character into a serious ladies’ man:

It’s so funny because I had talked to Joss about my choice to come out – he was so supportive. He just wanted me for this because he saw me in this role of a villain. A very mean-spirited, mischievous, manipulative villain. What Joss did was write don John’s associate, who is a man in the play, as a woman – and we have some very promiscuous sexually-charged scenes together. So during this whole coming out process, with all the press asking me if I could ever be seen as a heterosexual man on screen again, I so badly wanted to say, “well, Joss Whedon just cast me as the guy in between Riki Lindhome’s legs.” But he asked me to keep it a secret, which I did.

I said, somewhat flippantly yesterday, that Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing remains the gold standard for me, and as much as I love Whedon, I’ll want to see how he approaches the material. And now that we’ve heard about this, I’ll be curious to see what other changes he’s made to the plot — Keanu Reeves didn’t have to have a love interest written into Branagh’s adaptation to evince a strong sense of sexual danger around him.

But all of that aside, it’s nice to see Whedon continuing his commitment not just to writing good, non-stereotypical gay characters, but to making casting decisions that challenge stupid stereotypes about whether good actors can sell good characters no matter who they are in real life. And I hope that his Much Ado About Nothing gets a release wide enough to be seen by people other than the core Whedon fandom, who I think are largely on board with both of the messages I hear about here. One of the reasons I’m sorry to have seen The Playboy Club be so bad and fall apart so fast is because I think it’ll be important not just to see gay actors nailing straight roles, but to see them go back and forth between gay and straight roles. It’d be a good thing for mass audiences to have a chance to see Sean Maher playing a gay political leader and a gay man with an active love life on network television and to see him steam up multiplexes with a woman. And it would be good to see Neil Patrick Harris break up his string of hetero lotharios with a gay character. Bad actors won’t be able to sell much beyond things they’ve experienced themselves. Good ones can inhabit multitudes, no matter who they are or where and what they come from.

In the Recommendations for Alyssa Google Doc (which seriously is so much fun, and I’m percolating a bunch of post ideas in there already, so stop by!), someone asked if we could have a regular open discussion thread. I’ve always meant for this post to serve that function: no matter what I toss in here as grist for the mill, feel free to talk about whatever, leave questions or requests, and I’ll try to make sure I spend at least some time hanging out here during most lunch times.

-This sounds like a great, non-boring journalism movie.

-NPR reveals its reader-selected list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books.

-Woo cultural diplomacy!

-Battleship wants you to know that it’s thought out the concepts involved really seriously!

-A Coriolanus adaptation seems oddly appropriate for a moment of recession and poisonous populist tensions. Also, Jessica Chastain!

On Mondays, progressive leaders from all parts of the movement, from the blogosphere to the Hill, take a break out of their schedules to tell us what they’re watching, reading, and listening to. Suggestions or requests? Email AlyssaObserves (at) gmail (dot) com.

Irin Carmon writes about everything from the Rwandan genocide to the meanings of Cameron Diaz vehicle Bad Teacher for Jezebel, Gawker Media’s blog for women. She’s covered media and luxury industries for Women’s Wear Daily and written a travel column for the Boston Globe. Today, she takes us through her week in culture, from art exhibits and movie screenings at Gawker HQ, to salsa in Prospect Park, to a Father’s Day cruise on Jamaica Bay

Monday

To offset the hyper plugged-in nature of my job (ten hours of blogging, Twitter-while-walking), am reading the classics on my Kindle. Today: The Tempest, in advance of tonight’s performance. Upon arrival, Gawker Media headquarters are hung with employees’ portraits, by Mark Mann, which he shot on a Graflex 1950s camera. “It’s a very tough camera to lie to,” he writes. “I think these pictures show that.” Mine is right by the bathroom.
At a pre-theater dinner, my father implores me to stop writing about “penises and vaginas,” saying ominously, “It will haunt you.” I reply that so far it’s only haunting him.

The production, at Juilliard, is a mishmash of selections from The Tempest and 17th century music on original instruments. We came for Derek Jacobi (my anti-blog/analog plan has me on track for five Shakespeare productions this year so far, counting Measure for Measure next week, and Jacobi in Lear a few weeks ago, the best production of anything I’ve seen, I think) but it doesn’t quite hang together. In the car, we listen to the GOP debate and read the funniest tweets aloud. Later, I watch The Daily Show and Colbert while catching up on the Internet.
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