Best Use of Barbies Ever: Or "Measure for Measure" by 10-inch dolls

As preparation for the Stonington Opera House production of "Measure for Measure" -- as well as for the library reads in Brooksville, Brooklin, Stonington and Deer Isle -- I'm re-reading the play. But I've also been surfing the internet for more background information on ideas and productions. To me, this is one of the most complicated of Shakespeare's plays, and I confess that I find it problematic -- and not just because scholars consider it one of the Bard's "problem plays" (which is another way of saying the themes don't fit neatly into comedy, nor can the characters be easily categorized as heroes).

We'll dive into the fascinating background and themes of the play later with the help of a few outstanding scholars and directors.

In the meantime, I want to share a clever two-part YouTube version of "Measure for Measure" featuring Barbie dolls (and created as a project for a Shakespeare class). It's corny at first, seeing the dolls, but actually it serves as quite a good synopsis of the play. It strikes me that there are lots of imaginative ways to approach Shakespeare. My own preference is to enter the story through the text. Others, such as director Jeffrey Frace and the actors at the Stonington Opera House, prefer the platform of a stage. And still others like, well, dolls.

And not just Barbie dolls. Last year, when a boy I know saw the Stonington Opera House production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," he went home and re-enacted a segment of the play with an old set of toy horses we keep around the house for kids.

Turns out, Shakespeare has resonance in more than simply our thoughts. We are free to reinterpret his stories as imaginatively as we want -- with dolls, puppets, movies, poems, dances. I encourage you to watch the "Measure for Measure" Part 1 and Part 2 Barbie YouTube videos, and I think you'll also enjoy this 9-year-old boy's interpretation of last year's "Midsummer."

Of course, the next question is: How will you adapt Shakespeare to your own favorite storytelling technique?

Check out more information about the Opera House Arts production of "Measure for Measure" Aug. 19-29 at the Stonington Opera House.

Is February too early to think about Shakespeare in August?

By Alicia Anstead

I've been thinking lately about the way the performing arts, and plays in particular, linger in our thoughts long after the curtain goes down. Plays, after all, are completely ephemeral. They happen, and they're gone. Except they're not. Think of the plays you've been to that have stayed with you -- whether because of the play itself (themes of love or death, for instance) or the circumstances in which you saw the play (the friend you were with or the phase you were going through). The poet T. S. Eliot talks about measuring life in coffee spoons. But some of us measure our lives in plays. I do at least.

But that's about what happens during a play or after a play. What about everything that happens before a play? A few weeks ago, Linda Nelson and Judith Jerome announced that Measure for Measure, directed by longtime friend of OHA Jeffrey Frace, is the play for Shakespeare in Stonington this summer. (Mark the dates: August 19-29, 2010.)

I couldn't be happier, in part because the experience starts now. Or rather, it started for me as soon as I heard the news. Immediately I turned to my handy cell-phone app PlayShakespeare.com and downloaded the text. For three days during a conference in New York City, I breathlessly read the play on my phone while riding the train to and from the event. At one point, I was so engrossed I missed my stop and ended up several stations away from my own. Wow, do I love when that happens, even if I'm late for something else.

On this read through, I was struck by the utter strangeness of Measure for Measure. It's called a problem play, but it's more than a problem play. It's a testy exploration of justice, mercy, personal agency and, once again, marriage. (Remember all the messiness about marriage last summer with A Midsummer Night's Dream?! If not, re-visit the blog posts that explore: I do, I don't, I might, I couldn't possibly "aspects" of marriage.) M4M is set in Old Vienna, but the themes of premarital pregnancy, enforcing the letter of the law, a woman's right to her own body and the shiftiness of politicians are all very relevant in the 21st century. Alas.

Thus begins our journey. Seven months before the show, the art has started to work its magic. I'll be checking in from time to time between now and summer with reports, tips and teasers about the play, the production and other related news. In the meantime, I'll be thinking -- and I hope you will be too -- about this question: When does art begin? When does it end? And what happens in the space between?

A Disco Donkey Dream

Diane Paulus is one of the most exciting theater artists in America today. You may have read about her recently in a New York Times article on women directors. Or you may know her as director of the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of the musical Hair. She is also the artistic director of American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA, where an earlier work of hers The Donkey Show (a collaboration with Randy Weiner) opens in August. Donkey is Paulus' 1999 disco adaptation -- that's right, disco -- of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Like Shakespeare in his own time, Paulus looks back to classic works of theater and opera to make new works for modern audiences. It's a bit like re-mix, but riskier because it's live.

In the case of Donkey, Paulus uses the story of Midsummer, but not the text. It's more Studio 54 than Elizabethan England or Athens. She changes everything to magically tell the same story and a whole new story at the same time. "I am a huge fan of marrying tradition with modern culture," said Paulus earlier this week in a phone conversation. "That’s one of my passions. So to go back to Shakespeare, who in my mind is one of the greatest sources of structure and character and story, and mash that up with some of the elements that we as audience have experienced in not only modern but more specifically in pop culture is a specific interest of mine."

Listen to the podcast of our entire 8-minute chat or read the transcript. Paulus also talks about the themes of Midsummer, the liveliness of theater in Shakespeare's time and her interest in "theater as experience."

That's what Hair is, too: an experience, or as we might have said back in the '60s, a trip. Actors bound into the audience to deliver the "love in" up close and personal. Similarly, in the NYC production of Donkey, anyone who wanted could dance with the actors to bumpin music such as I Love the Night Life and Car Wash. Paulus' ideas for Donkey and for theater are very much in the ballpark with the Community Reads the Stonington Opera House hosted over the last 10 days: Citizen actors giving voice to Shakespeare's poetry and breathing life into his characters -- and to the rompy love stories and family tangles we all face in the theater of our own lives.

In the end, it's all about the "love juice" (as Oberon calls it) that intoxicates us the minute we walk into a place like the Opera House or a Broadway house. It's the work of directors such as Paulus at American Rep and Julia Whitworth at Stonington Opera House to draw us into the dream.

A Midsummer Night Dream opens tonight, July 2, and runs through July 12 at the Stonington Opera House on Deer Isle in Maine. The Donkey Show runs Aug. 21-Sept. 26 at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA.

Come laugh with MIDSUMMER fools!

Last night's community read was one of those rare and extraordinary experiences of clarity through art-in-numbers. Stonington Public Library hosted an overflow crowd of citizen actors reading the first half of A Midsummer Night's Dream aloud. Some participants didn't want to read (which was fine) and others were shy (also fine). But as the plot unfolded -- with us sometimes stopping to talk about language or scenes -- the readings and readers became funnier and funnier. No kidding: We were laughing out loud. Big laughs, too.

That can mean only one thing: Shakespeare speaks to us.

Last week, when we read the same words at Blue Hill Public Library, the first half of the play felt a little threatening. We were serious and dramatic. And hey, it worked that way, too, because the text is elastic enough to withstand stretching in various directions.

I happen to prefer hilarious.

By the second night of the Blue Hill read, the "actors" took it there, and it was truly funny, especially because one of the readers had a great Brooklyn (NY) accent, and when she read her lines, it brought the play squarely into a U.S. vernacular, and I love, love, love when that happens with Shakespeare.

If last night was a knee-slapper, I can only imagine what tonight will be. The second half of this play is the Three Stooges meet Monty Python. Yuk, yuk, yuk, who knows what'll happen?

Anon: 7 p.m. at the Deer Isle Public Library in the village. Starting at Act 3, scene 2. No need to catch up on the reading if you weren't there last night. Just come. Laugh with us. See what fools these mortals be.

Can't touch this....

Stonington Opera House is on the cutting edge again. Check out Patricia Cohen's NYT article on women directors in NYC, including Diane Paulus, who just won a Tony for her B'way revival of HAIR (and who will be a guest on on our blog later this week).

Now take a minute to count the talented women working in leadership positions for A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at the Opera House: director, artistic director, executive director, composer/music director, lighting designer, costume designer.

Right on, Opera House!

And a shout out, too, to the amazing scenic designer...the man on the team.

Does it matter that women are in these roles? Yes, because women have traditionally been underemployed in authoritative positions in the arts.

So kudos to Stonington. Where the women are rockin' the boat.

Hey you, got a problem?

Rehearsals are SLLLLLLOOOOOOOWWWWWW moving events. Do a scene. Do it again. Now a third time, but change it, and remember it, and make it real, too. Yesterday at the Stonington Opera House, director Julia Whitworth was working on the scene in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM when the four lovers wake up in the wood after all their jumbles have been resolved. The cast, in a sleepy scrum onstage, worked on the scene three times, then Whitworth thought about it and said: "Can we try Option B now?" So they did, and it worked. At least for the moment.

Last night at a party, the Brooklin (Maine) painter Bill Irvine told me he is headed into new territory with his work, new formal problems he wants to explore and solve.

Seems that all art is problem solving. How to get a brush stroke to look like a cloud or a sail boat. How to get an actor from one side of the stage to the other. How to make comedy and tragedy out of meter.

In MIDSUMMER, Theseus, Duke of Athens, puts it this way:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

That is to say: The artist takes that which is "airy nothing" and gives it form. Bill Irvine's paintings. Shakespeare's plays. Actors in character.

"For me, the work of problem solving often is the creation of something beautiful," Whitworth said by phone today. "I'm not a director who plans out in my head how everything will look. I like to trust the process and the people I'm in the room with."

Whitworth's small son was in the background dealing with his own problem solving: how to get Mom off the phone and pay attention to him.

All this meticulous, very hard work takes place so that when we walk in a theater, the plot quickens and the only problems left to solve are our own: Do we believe? Does it take us there? Are we deep in the Athenian woods?

Reminds me of Woody Allen, who said in a recent interview that filmmaking distracts him (and us) "from the uncertainty of life, the inevitability of aging and death and death of loved ones; mass killings and starvation, from holocausts — not just man-made carnage, but the existential position you're in."

Theseus says the same thing: "Is there no play to ease the anguish of the torturing hour?"

But, hee-haw folks, let's not go too deep. Remember, this is a play in which Bottom's head is turned into the head of a donkey -- and he's got no problem at all with it.

We've Got Sound

In "A Midsummer Night's Dream:" get out your guides to Greek mythology, and stay tuned for podcast interviews by Alicia Anstead with noted Shakespeare scholars Stephen Greenblatt and "our own" Richard Brucher of the University of Maine at Orono. Music from Beth Ann Cole.

Click here to listen to the podcast.