Shakespeare Scholar Comments

Irene Dash, author of the brilliant new book, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Indiana University Press, 2010), recently spent a snowbound Manhattan afternoon watching Ariel’s Way. She even watched the DVD twice! Ms. Dash’s background equips her to be an ideal audience for the play, and her response to it is more than just satisfying to me. I hope (as does she) that her endorsement might encourage others to make room in their busy lives for Ariel’s Way.

Dear Jim Henderson,
Thank you so much for sending me the video of Ariel’s Way. I tremendously enjoyed the great variety in your songs and the way they helped define character. Ariel was captivating. Her song, "I’m on my way. . . . My job is done and my dues are paid" was beautiful. Clearly she was eagerly anticipating leaving Prospero, here called Victor.
I liked the way you took her line from late in Shakespeare’s play, about her feeling sorry for Prospero’s victims ("I would, were I human") and used it near the close of Ariel’s Way. It opened up the possibility for Prospero’s changing. Also I liked your decision to translate Caliban into an actual child of Prospero’s, rather than just a metaphor for the evil in all of us. You gave a literal meaning to Shakespeare’s line, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine." It worked well.
Of course one of the astounding things you do is your handling of the storm visually. How exciting and wondrous–all created by Prospero in his studio.
Good luck on this brave new adventure.
Warmly,
Irene Dash

The Tradition that Includes "Ariel's Way"

Three decades of teaching the Shakespeare canon to young adults has given me a chance to revisit major works many times, and a lifetime of theatre going has let me see most of Shakespeare’s dramas on stage. In years past I’ve enjoyed reading the scholarship of Frank Kermode, Stephen Greenblatt, and Marjorie Garber. Chantal Zabus’ Tempests After Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2002) was especially helpful as the concept of Ariel’s Way began to take shape. Most recently I’ve devoted dozens of well-spent hours to James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, and Charles Nicholls’ The Lodger Shakespeare. I recommend all of these books, especially Nicholls’ eminently readable “history mystery.”

As the creator of Ariel’s Way (a musical adaptation of The Tempest), more important and useful to me than all of the fine studies I just mentioned is Irene Dash’s masterful work, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Indiana University Press, 2010). The germ for Ariel’s Way was planted as I worked one winter with middle school students on a production of The Tempest, and the following spring with high school students on West Side Story. Was there a musical version of The Tempest? I wondered. I found several operatic versions, and incidental music by Mendelssohn, Arthur Sullivan, Sibelius and others. But, with the possible exception of the “juke-box musical,” Return to the Forbidden Planet, I found no Tempest musicals, and so I set about creating one. In the process I investigated the same five musicals that Ms. Dash discusses so well: Boys from Syracuse (The Comedy of Errors), Kiss Me, Kate (The Taming of the Shrew), West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet), Your Own Thing (Twelfth Night), and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Ms. Dash carefully and engagingly charts the development of a tradition of American reprisals of Shakespeare plays during the twentieth century. She brilliantly uses primary sources (such as Leonard Bernstein’s annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet, and letters written by Bella Spewack and Cole Porter about their Kiss Me, Kate collaboration) to show how American writers, composers, choreographers, scenic designers, and producers brought their own creativity and social circumstances to bear upon the proven power of Shakespeare’s texts. An inveterate adaptor himself, Shakespeare thrived on re-telling familiar tales to suit his own talents, tastes and times. His twentieth-century American admirers did him exactly the same service, and Irene Dash shows us how, and sometimes even why.

Shakespeare loved spectacle and music, and his collaborations with lutenists Thomas Morley, Robert Johnson, and other leading composers of his day, are well documented. The Tempest, scholars now believe, was likely written to be performed with a score, and its composition parallels the birth of opera in Italy. Had he lived in our time, would Shakespeare have worked on Broadway or in the West End? No doubt he would have sought the widest possible audience for his work, and the most talented collaborators. Wouldn’t that search have taken him to Broadway?

Such speculation is much less interesting, to me, than the sort of careful, empirical analysis that Ms. Dash conducts in the course of her study. She knows the Shakespeare “originals” and their musical adaptations equally well, and as she moves back and forth, between and among them, brilliant social and aesthetic insights emerge from her analysis as petals unfold from flowers. Her range and depth as a scholar are as impressive as her prose is delightful to read.

Shakespeare and the American Musical defines a living tradition in twentieth-century theater. Ariel’s Way finds its center of gravity just there (it is set in the 1970s), even as it continues that tradition into the twenty-first century. Grateful for the intelligence and imagination that Irene Dash focused on her task, I hope that my own creative efforts might swell the sails of that tradition, propelling it in the direction of a brave, newer world.

The Tempest According to Taymor

When Jan and I were in Venice this summer (2010), we were surprised to learn that a new feature film version of The Tempest is slated to close the Venice Film Festival in September. Later, I was delighted to discover that the film stars Helen Mirren (as "Prospera") and is directed by Julie Taymor. I can't wait to see it! Disney is releasing it in American theaters in December.

You probably know Julie Taymor as the director of Frida, Across the Universe, and the Broadway version of The Lion King. (Her credits in the opera world are equally impressive.) Isn't it thrilling that an artist of Ms Taymor's stature is tackling this text? I feel taller just having a similar ambition!

No doubt Julie will bring praiseworthy wit and imagination to the play that Shakespeare's literary executors considered "first among equals." (It opens the First Folio.) Shooting the film in Hawaii brings this latest production both closer to and farther away from the America that Shakespeare never saw but invested in with both his imagination and his savings. Would that he were alive today to behold the lives his characters continue to lead--and the productions his plots have spawned!

The Artistic Value of "Ariel's Way"

"Ariel's way": An Educational Experience for an Entire School

Forgiveness

In a previous blog post, I speculated that when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest (for the marriage of King James’s daughter to a German prince) the Bard might have been subtly suggesting to his arrogant, self-righteous and sadistic monarch (and patron) that forgiveness and love offer a more promising path to salvation than violent persecution of evil (in the form of witches or Roman Catholics).

Vengeful Victor (Prospero) and unimpressed Ariel

Nobody has dramatized, better than Shakespeare, the unfortunate consequences of unbridled vengeance. The Tempest starts out as such a revenge tragedy, but the arc of the action bends comic and romantic as Prospero comes to behave in a wiser way and ultimately “drowns” the books that guided his quest for retribution.

People of the twenty-first century have just as much to learn about forgiveness as a seventeenth-century monarch did. We have better tools to work with, though.

An impressive body of research and writing is available today on the subject of “forgiveness.” Institutes at Stanford (Fred Luskin) and at Madison (Bob Enright) have made strong claims for the health benefits of forgiveness and have disseminated methods for applying forgiveness principles. Psychiatrists such as Ned (Edward M.) Hallowell in Cambridge and psychologists such as Jim Dincalci in Chapel Hill have articulated skillful, therapeutic approaches. Religious authors—Jewish (Solomon Schimmel and Charles Klein), Buddhist (Pema Chodron and Jack Kornfield) and Christian (Everett Worthington and Bil and Cher Holton)—have discussed forgiveness in practical and progressive terms.

Victor honors the love between Miranda and Freddy (Ferdinand).

The evidence is clear that learning to “flatten the hook” of resentment and hostility can work miracles in human hearts and minds. If the barbs are extracted, we can be free at last.

Ariel’s Way is musical theater. It is a comedy. It's aim is to entertain people of all ages. It is also a play that illustrates why forgiveness matters, and how it can work its magic in a life.

When you walk away from seeing this play, you’ll not only be humming memorable tunes and recalling great performances. You’ll also be challenged (and, hopefully, inspired) to make your life freer and more fulfilling: by flattening hooks that bind you to others in dysfunctional and unholy ways—just as Victor learns to do, with Ariel’s help, in Act Two.

Why "The Tempest"?

Introducing the professional premiere of Ariel's Way (2010)

As a teacher of Shakespeare for more than thirty years, I’ve had the pleasure of studying and discussing dozens of his plays, many of them multiple times. Among the Bard’s greatest works, The Tempest appealed to me for different reasons at different times in my life.

Playing at my ninth grade prom
(1964)

Before I first read Julius Caesar and Macbeth as a ninth grader (and gleaned a suspicion of unbridled ambition as a worthy motive for living), I was already a musician playing ‘50s and ‘60s pop music at teen house parties and high school dances. When I first read The Tempest a few years later, at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey, it appealed to me primarily for its music. I was intrigued to learn that The Tempest is the most musical of all Shakespeare’s plays. Following up on that fact, I discovered that Pete Seeger wrote a setting of the Bard’s “Full Fathom Five” lyrics—in 5/4 time, no less. I used to perform that song, and smiled watching people try to dance to it. It didn’t groove quite like “I Saw Her Standing There”!

My next encounter with The Tempest came in college. I led a busy extra-curricular life as an undergraduate, and at this time The Tempest initially appealed to me as one of Shakespeare’s shortest works. “Why read more than I have to?” I asked myself as I ran my finger down the shelf of his collected plays in the Gettysburg College library, searching for one to research independently. It wasn’t quite as short as The Comedy of Errors, but it seemed to have a deeper bottom—plus I had already read it! So I chose The Tempest for a seminar presentation.

This time through, Prospero as a scholar with a vengeance—who perversely “drowns” his books in the end—spoke clearly to my condition. I was emerging as a campus activist who urged others to place politics before scholarship (or, at least, to examine the ends of scholarship in a political context). Plotting the downfall of evil, and book drowning, held great appeal for me, in that epoch!

Playing at an anti-nuclear rally (1979)

Furthermore, although I always detested Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban, Shakespeare’s use of magic and wonder in The Tempest also struck a chord for me now. I was also re-reading The Great Gatsby in another college class, and I recall being stirred by the sense of wonder in confronting the New World’s possibilities—a theme in both texts.

Ten years later, as a Ph.D. student in Religion and Culture at Duke University, I retraced this theme in greater depth. I came to grips with The Tempest again, this time as a commentary on colonialism. I learned that Shakespeare himself had been an investor in an all-fated voyage of discovery and “plantation.” He was interested in both the economic and the imaginative potential of the New World—my world.

As I delved further into the history of the play, I learned that The Tempest had been written late in Shakespeare’s career and that it had its inception in connection with festivities surrounding the marriage of King James’s eldest daughter. James I (the king who also commissioned the best known English translation of the Bible) was a patron of Shakespeare’s acting troupe, but he was known to the Bard (and everybody else in England?) as a notorious persecutor of witches—indeed, as a masochist who enjoyed watching the tortured confessions of accused heretics. In the way he structured his Tempest materials, was Shakespeare trying to show his liege a better set of religious principles and practices to live by? I, for one, came to think so.

Pursuing commentaries and interpretations (as graduate students are wont to do in defense of their pet critical notions), I noticed that while The Tempest begins as a revenge tragedy, it ends with reconciliation. No dead bodies litter its stage as the curtain rings down. Marriage is in the air as the play ends. Love triumphs. As The Tempest winds down, comedy is wrought from the stuff of tragedy. I was never satisfied, however, with the most common interpretation given for Prospero’s change of heart; i.e., that it is more “seemly” for a king to pardon than to exact revenge. Shakespeare had more to say than that—or would have had, I like to think, if the leading member of his target audience had not been a degraded, sadistic bastard! "Seemliness" was as far as poor King James could get along the path to wisdom.

Victor (Prospero) and Carib (Caliban) reconcile; Ariel, Sebastian and Toni (Antonio) look on. 

More recently, as I watched the cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution during Ramadan, I wondered again why interpreters of The Tempest have not focused more sophisticated attention on the forgiveness theme. Certainly President Bush would not have been moved by an argument for the “seemliness” of forgiveness. A more compelling case needed to be made for forgiveness, at least in our time. I came to believe that The Tempest provides an excellent foundation for supporting such an argument.

Reviewing sad and tragic circumstances in my own life—and in the lives of my loved ones—led me to value, greatly, the power of forgiveness. Medical doctors and psychologists (such as Edward Hallowell and Gerald Jampolsky), spiritual writers (such as Jack Kornfield), and black journalists (such as Ellis Cose and Patricia Raybon) all have argued, convincingly, for the central importance of forgiveness as a psychological, religious, and political act. My life and teaching has washed me up, again and again, on the shores of Shakespeare’s “New World” text. As I continue examining contemporary American life with critical eyes, I still find forgiveness to be a topic worthy of not just exploration but even devotion.

Thus, understanding the life-affirming process of forgiveness became a central concern of my most recent Tempest research. And dramatizing the power of forgiveness in a compelling way emerged as a major theme of Ariel’s Way.

A Musical for All Generations!

The inception of rock music in the 1950s opened a "generation gap" in artistic tastes that has finally begun to heal. Teenagers of today typically do not completely share their parents' tastes in music, but most of them do include music of The Beatles, The Eagles or James Brown on their iPods. The gap between parents and children is not as impassable as it used to be. Today's 50-year-old is often more youthful and broadminded than his dad was at middle age, while today's 16-year-old may be more accepting of differences and willing to talk with adults than her mom was at the same age.

The times are a-changing, again, and old wounds are starting to heal. Indeed, that is precisely the message of Ariel's Way. While an evening at the theatre too seldom satisfies both parents and children, Ariel's Way aims to do--and succeeds in doing--exactly that. The characters and cast in this show are inter-generational, and the story, songs, and staging can be enjoyed whether you're 5, 15, 50, or 85.

What's more, the plot and themes of Ariel’s Way not only warm the heart (while raising its rate!). They also prompt families to share their lives and differing perspectives in conversations at intermission and after the show. In discussing if and why forgiveness works better than vengeance, and the ways in which compassion trumps control as a way of relating to others, people come to understand their individual, familiar, and even political circumstances with more insight.

At least, that's what this writer and this cast have learned at Carolina Friends School--and through working on this show together. So come see it with your family, and see if you don't agree that art fueled by the power of love is a potent force for good in the world! To what The Beatles once proclaimed ("Love is all you need")Ariel's Way adds its own, "Amen!"

,