Just got home from The Rogue Theatre's production of Immortal Longings. The basic overview: 10 of Shakespeare's most famous female characters are living in some ethereal, eternal Mind of the Poet. Juliet decides she is sick of dying at the end of her play and wants to rewrite it. Portia oversees a trial to decide, with the main supporters of Julia being Beatrice and Kate, the main opponents to changing the play Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra; the various women present scenes from their plays as evidence.
Overall, it was a rather good production. Joseph McGrath's writing melded well with Shakespeare's, and he deftly mixed his own original Elizabethan blank verse with modern language. The performers were by and large quite good: Cleopatra was mostly in the background, but was powerful when acting out her death scene; Ophelia was largely a comic commentator, except for a brief but rather insightful moment when she considered her "relationship" with Hamlet. The friendship between Kate and Beatrice worked perfectly, as well; they are from two of my least favorite comedies, but their duo in support of Juliet's free will just felt right. Desdemona was played with a kind of wide-eyed naivete that bordered on delusion (a nice comic touch was added as she repeatedly dropped her handkerchief forgetfully), and her scene getting ready for bed was also very powerful. Rosalind was good, Juliet was excellent, and Lady Macbeth was as well, as the character with the most insight into the nature of drama. Only Viola and Portia were questionable, the former because of the actor's inexperience, the latter because of the odd choice to make her much older than the character was. Portia is certainly not as young as Juliet, but she seemed to be played as though she were in her late 20s or 30s, which just seems odd to me. The actors also doubled as the male and female characters in each other's scenes, and some of them, especially Ophelia and Rosalind, were very adept at switching back and forth.
In writing a meta-theatrical play about Shakespeare, you take a pretty big risk. First off, Will's work is so very meta-theatrical already; but perhaps more importantly, after Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, what is there left to say, really? I mean, as the play about Shakespeare, it is hard to find a more intelligent and insightful analysis. But, McGrath does a good job of finding a new angle by addressing the problematic situation of the women in these plays, where even a happy ending is often less lustrous than it seems. He also handles the challenge of the ending well. I was wondering how they would resolve it -- giving Juliet freedom to write a happy ending would seem too simple-minded and sappy, while saying "You can't change what Shakespeare writes!" would seem like annoying bardolatry. I won't say what happens, but they handled it well, and the play became an insightful look at the nature of narrative and writing in general.
The characters are all heavy hitters in the Shakespeare canon, but the play is clearly written for people who know Shakespeare. Not experts, certainly, but smart people who have read or seen the major works. As a Shakespeare "expert" (ahem), I couldn't help but think nerdy things like, "Oh, I wonder what Perdita would say?" or, "Volumnia wouldn't take that crap!" It was also fun for me because as a (teenage) academic, I have a certain perspective on the plays; I tend to take a more cynical read on many of them (including Romeo & Juliet) but the reading provided by McGrath & Co was a bit more in line with mainstream interpretations. That's fine, though; it works both ways, and certainly if you are writing a play about how these women are understood in the cultural imagination, it makes sense to go with the inherited understanding of R&J as the greatest tragic love story of all time. One exception: there were no scenes acted from Hamlet (yay!) but Ophelia's brief moment reflecting on her "love" was a beautiful puncturing of the whiny, self-centered bastard.
So... go see it, if you can. It's on through April 5 at The Rogue Theatre
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