We are having a wonderful time on our annual trip to Ashland. I think even Rick is enjoying it — Macbeth was truly terrifying. And he and Will went to Music Man yesterday and both loved it. It was Will’s first full-length play, and it was apparently really entertaining for the kids as well as adults. The mayor, in particular, was a show-stealer. Now I want to see it!
It’s wonderful seeing friends, sharing big Thai and Indian dinners out, keeping the kids up way too late (it’s 9:30 a.m. and Will is still sleeping.) Though Kymberly, who is in the midst of her own Shakespearean adventure, is being totally missed by everyone. We must get her down here next year. And for anyone reading this, go watch her act in “As You Like It” in Oregon’s wine country in the next few weeks. Kymberly asked me to share my thoughts on the plays, so I’m sharing what my head was buzzing with this morning as I relived the play “Equivoation” last night. It’s rough, but I want to get it posted before Will wants up. Note to Kymberly and Brent — you gotta get down here and see it before the season’s out.

Equivocation

This play by Bill Cain is brilliant, a theatrical tour de force, an imagining of the inner life of Shakespeare and the politics, religious and otherwise, of his day. The acting was demanding and superb, with five male actors playing more than 20 roles, sometimes morphing with lightning speed between them, leaving your head spinning. The real Shakespearean actor playing the genial 16th century Shakespearean actor suddenly becomes Sir Robert Cecil, the Richard III-esque heart of evil and King James’ henchman, and suddenly back again. To watch an actor’s face so suddenly bring terror into your heart and then vanishing suddenly is mind-bending and really demonstrates the power of theater.
We sometimes complain that each OSF production we’ve seen has a least a few stellar actors and a few weak links – there were absolutely no weak links here. Anthony Heald was a terrific William Shagspeare (apparently Cain’s favorite spelling of his name); Jonathan Haugan was brilliant as Cecil; John Tufts, whose acting has felt hollow and unconvincing to me at times in the past, was likewise brilliant, one moment a torture victim, the next an actor playing a torture victim, then suddenly a foppish and slightly Translyvaniaesque Scottish King James making you laugh. Richard Elmore, playing the troupe’s head, Gregory Linington and Christine Albright were likewise wonderful. Albright had me crying, then in a flash of meta-theater pointed out how shallow audiences were for believing the action on stage was real, and then got me crying again harder moments later. Brilliant.
As you can tell, I liked this play. And I want to see it again, because I’m now realizing how much I missed. Perhaps this is the mark of great theater, as my Stanford Prof Terry Castle said of great literature.
Anyone with an interest in Shakespeare, his life, his times, our lives, our times, his plays, our plays, will find something here. Like Shakespeare, Cain is writing about real historical events, bending them to his purposes. In a nice doubling, he’s also writing about Shakespeare being asked to write a contemporary historical event, bending the details to please the King. Which is something Shakespeare did, but here Cain explores what that might have meant to him as a human and an artists working within the potentially deadly consequences of displeases the powers that be.
The plot is a plot, the Gunpowder Plot, which was an attempt by Catholic loyalists to kill Protestant King James, his family and blow up the Parliament building in 1605. The perpetrators were caught, horribly tortured and killed. In the (actual) play, King James has written a play about the incident and Robert Cecil wants Shagspeare to write the play. But Shagspeare, reluctant to take on such a dangerous propaganda job, has a hard time finding the plot in the plot. Nothing is blown up in the end, so where’s the play? And where did the tunnelers get all the gunpowder and what did they do with the dirt? So in search of answers, Shagspeare talks to a tortured conspirator as well as an imprisoned Jesuit priest, whose actual treatise on “Equivocation” is at the heart of the play. Shagspeare’s moral universe is shaken, and leads him on an inner search of his role as an artist, and as a failed father, to his daughter, Judith, the only female character in the play. Notably, she is the only one who plays just one enduring role, almost like a one-woman Greek Chorus.
Like Macbeth, which is an actual Shakespeare play written for King James, and in which equivocation is a major theme (think Double Double Toil and Trouble and the Porter’s monolog on equivocation for starters), this play is incredibly dark at times. You witness two executions, as well as the disembowelment part of the euphemistically term “drawn and quartered.” But it also is funny, very funny at times, as well as moving.
It’s also so full of wonderful Shakespearean touches – you get many “plays within plays,” you have a play that notably (funny and horrifying at the same time) fails to catch the conscience of the king, you have Robert Cecil accusing Shagspeare of writing his father as Polonius, then you have Cecil hiding behind arrases, and in a nice twist, being the one to flee the theater looking for light.
There are wonderful references to Richard III, including a scene where Shagspeare is taken in by his own language, made to sympathize with the evil and malformed Cecil when Shagspeare hears Cecil recite famous self-pitying lines from the end Richard III. There is much wonderful riffing on the theater, its power to move, its lack of power sometimes to change people, the meaning of theater then and now, the meaning of the corrupting power of money and power and its abuse – it all has a contemporary ring without being overt.
In a very interesting time-warping speech, in response to Shagspeare’s question of whether Cecil’s use of torture will haunt him, Cecil replies that by the time of his great great grandson’s grandson (apparently Robert Cecils have remained powerful in British politics for 400 years, or that’s the conceit) in the 21st century having a little torture on your resume may not be so bad. It’s the kind of thing that sounds forced here, perhaps, but worked on stage.
Other wonderful touches include the costuming: in Macbeth, Macbeth’s ability to “fill in the clothing of the monarch” gradually falls away until he’s called something like a dwarf in too-big clothes. Well in this play, there is a scene in which Cecil is wearing the King’s huge robe, echoing Macbeth. It’s little things like that – those darn details – that make the play. Like the time the sceptor is brought on stage wrapped in cloth – for a moment you’re not sure if it’s the torture implements used earlier.
There’s funny commentary about Shakespeare’s other plays, about his own anxieties and feelings as a writer (and not-so-good actor); it really is a great imagining of Shakespeare. We cannot know him (and as Cecil threatens him he’ll be the only major writer whose very existence will one day be questioned) but it’s fascinating to see how Cain imagines his life. Judith, in particular, is harsh on her father’s plays and makes you laugh as she dissects them.
I am now extremely excited to see Macbeth Tuesday, and am now disappointed I’m not seeing Henry VIII, because both are so intimate with the themes of this play. Asma, who saw Macbeth last night with Rick and Rehan, said it was amazing seeing Equivocation so soon after because the references were myriad and many. She said even the costumes used in the fake Macbeth play within play echoed those of the Macbeth production.
Finally, it had a wonderful, touching very satisfying ending, which I had been skeptical could be achieved from such a wild mix of funny and dark material. I won’t give it away, but it deals with why Shakespeare’s plays end with the Romances. I was crying despite the actor’s warning to me it was all just a play.