Get serious about “Shakespeare’s King Phycus”

When attempting to recommend Shakespeare’s King Phycus, the joint venture of The Chamberlain’s Men and the Strange Tree Group, the best way I found to describe the production is as a Shakespeare parody mash-up. Out of the wilds of Idaho, Tom Wilmorth’s metaplay not only makes great fun of popular assumptions about the Shakespeare canon but also our expectations of classical drama. This production is more of an experience than your normal “serious” dramatic performance, operating on a trifecta of staging, script, and performance that gesture to audiences’ self-awareness. This is unlike the typical modern theatre experience in which we sit in a dark hall where our silence is the canvas on which the actors perform and our applause is choreographed into the production itself and expected–our only control is to adjust the volume of our gratitude.

Upon entering the Building Stage performance space, you find yourself immersed in a semi-fabricated world. Lining the walls of the make-shift foyer are convincing faux-historical artifacts of original play scripts and photos of early performances by one Edwin Booth (brother to the notorious John Wilkes Booth). Included are contrasting critical claims as to the authenticity of Phycus as a very early Shakespeare play (whose timing could not be more perfect due to the recent publication and controversy over Double Falsehood). Just beyond the exhibit is tavern-like bar, built from the ground up by The Chamberlain’s Men. The detailed construction, which appears stolen from a Renaissance faire, features Goose Island Green Line Pale Ale donated by Blue Frog Bar and Grill. As an audience member, one is immediately thrust into an explicitly theatrical environment you will be a part of of throughout the performance.

King Phycus asks, “Do you see?” (StrangeTree.org)

Whether or not set designer Jay Neander was aware of early modern theatre practices, the production mirrors original techniques to fun effect. The audience sits on a built stage, with a little dais–crafted of recycled VHS tapes convincingly reconstructed to resemble brick and cobblestone–as the only division between performers and spectators. In fact, the entire set is repurposed with professional prop industry detail: lights made from beer bottles, Juliet’s balcony railing embellished with found objects such high heels, and parts of Starbucks to-go cups adorn the elevated boxes where busts of Queen Elizabeth and Abraham Lincoln spectate. The production company even used “green” advertising strategies, putting up mud stencil ads all over Chicago’s bypasses, bridges and sidewalks to get the word out.

The use of modern garbage to create a sixteenth-century set is only one way in which this production draws our attention to how our conceptions of theatre have changed over that time, sometimes to unreasonable degrees. Wilmorth’s script is as consistent as it is funny, and yet you don’t have to be a Shakespeare scholar to get the jokes. His prologue employs the audience member to use their “thinking caps to crown our kings,” nodding to the necessity of imagination and willful suspension of belief in any performance. Famous Shakespearean moments, such as the Ceasar’s death and the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, are torn to shreds for their grandiose inaccessibility. The childhood rhyme “sticks and stones may brake my bones” is put into iambic pentameter, and irony is taken to the next level when Alanis Morissette is invoked in a reference to Ceasarian architecture:

Isn’t it ionic … don’t you think?

The most clever scene is one in which a servant works to recreate darkness on a lit stage. No matter what question Hamlet (or Romeo, I cannot remember which it was, as the same actor plays both) asks his man, the only responses he receives are “I do not know, as it is very dark out.” This moment is brilliantly clever, mocking the expectations of us to imagine darkest night in such plays as MacBeth, where all but one scene takes place at night. The Globe performances typically took place in the early afternoon to cash in on the sunlight rather than playing for candles, while the more expensive Blackfriars playhouse used candle light but for an extra fee.

Discontented siblings Hamlet and Juliet (StrangeTree.org)

Such moments highlight necessary the expectations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audiences, but do not necessarily translate to the modern stage and it’s audiences. For example, only six actors play dozens of parts–some doing so by simply combing their hair in a different direction to signify change, to great comic effect. Aside from the staging and the script, the casting is particularly spot on, using workhorses from The Strange Tree ensemble, described by TimeOut Chicago as striking “just the right balance, merrily lobbing joke grenades with its trademark faux-earnestness.” One great example is when Goldenberg and Rosensteen arrive on stage as commedia dell’arte sketch comedians polling the audience for a topic on which to perform, earnestly mocking the Chicago theatre community that supports IO and Second City, among others. The ensembles sense of delivery really shapes the tone of the play and makes it worth the ticket price ($25).

Shakespeare parody and humor has been done before and almost ad nauseam at this point. Yet belaboring the issue of recycled costumes and all-to-quick wardrobe changes is funny in such a context. For example, Romeo, Brutus and Extranius all conspire over Caesar’s death by recreating a dance sequence from The Music Man, and hunch-backed Gloucester makes sure to include an expectant pause after every bad joke. The powers of staging, script and delivery combined, Shakespeare’s King Phycus is a clever and self-effacing production.

This production pokes fun at the status and stock invested in Shakespearean classical drama, and the impossible expectation that we might get all the nuances of four-hundred-year-old humor. And yet ticket sales for Shakespeare productions rarely wane. Aside from the post-modern humor, what is so interesting about Phycus is that the production is evidence that our culture is starting to rethink early modern dramatic composition as not what we assume. (At least we might be shifting that way if Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous, which considers the Shakespeare authorship controversy, doesn’t completely unravel these right notions.) In our post-modern, Simpsonesque sense of humor, Phycus is a great way to laugh with others at ourselves and the impossible expectations we have of “serious” entertainment.


2 AUG 2010 UPDATE: According to director Ira Amyx, there is considerable interest in sending this production to New York City in the summer of 2011. If you are interested in getting involved or contributing, please contact Ira. When attempting to recommend Shakespeare’s King Phycus, the joint venture of The Chamberlain’s Men and the Strange Tree Group, the best way I found to describe the production is as a Shakespeare parody mash-up. Out of the wilds of Idaho, Tom Wilmorth’s metaplay not only makes great fun of popular assumptions about the Shakespeare canon but also our expectations of classical drama. This production is more of an experience than your typical serious dramatic performance, operating on a trifecta of audience self-awareness. This is unlike the typical modern theatre experience in which we sit in a dark hall where our silence is the canvas on which the actors perform and our applause is choreographed into the production itself and expected–our only control is to adjust the volume of our gratitude.


An email from the playwright (foolsquad.com): “Dear Elizabeth, I enjoyed reading your dissection of Shakespeare’s King Phycus. It’s always refreshing to hear a scholarly voice analyzing Pull-My-Finger jokes. Well done. I’m glad you got to see the production. All best, Tom Willmorth” Thanks so much! I am glad you liked it!

Ham(let)in’ it up

One summer my  father decided it would be a good idea to raise a commercial pig. My mom, being a high school English teacher, named her Ophelia–she thought the pun on Hamlet‘s girlfriend was cute. We called her Ophie for short. She was a lot of fun. I do not tell you this story for any other reason than to say that, as blasphemous as this may be, I am getting sick of Hamlet. There has been sparse review of PBS’ most recent adaptation of this play, which aired about two weeks ago and can still be viewed online.

Of those few substantive reviews, people generally seem to be undecided about former Dr. Who-star David Tennant’s performance. Kenneth Branagh, despite his contributions, has trained us to want something big and gratuitous from the Bard in film–turning Americans into consumers of Shakespeare only if it is about his particular spokesman, Branagh himself. (on a side note, Branagh was recently tapped to be the head director for the upcoming super-hero movie Thor.) While across the board there seems to be appreciation for Patrick Stewart’s shaded and sinister double duty at the Ghost and Claudius, it seems a love-or-hate situation regarding Tennant. There have been several cute quips, including from the LA Times, about this film as a “kind of sci-fi super-summit.” Undoubtedly the PBS production will benefit in DVD sales from their personal brands as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company pedigree.

Hamlet only gets harder and harder to put on film. There seems to be one or two adaptations every decade, and because many of the roles are so coveted, the field is a bit full of titans: Branagh for the purists, the under appreciated historical Mel Gibson rendition produced by Playboy, Olivier set the actors’ bar in the ’40s, and the perennial Derek Jacobi to list a few. Stewart’s performance is convincing but he seems a bit lost in his role. He has moments so sinister it seems like he is squaring off Magneto, and other moments he brings a caring sense of humanity to Claudius unseen before. But these stark dimensions to Claudius were confusing rather than giving him a multifaceted honesty–they just didn’t seem to sync up.

Polonius is really perfect; the most difficult scene is always Ophelia’s first with her father. A potentially very cruel Polonius on the page, that character is sometimes hard to reconcile the with fact that Ophelia’s insanity is triggered by his death, implying some kind of loving relationship between father and daughter. Oliver Ford Davies presents the most truthful and balanced depiction of their relationship I have seen yet. This may be due to the fact that the play as a whole invests less in the past romantic relationship of Ophelia and Hamlet, a direct reversal from the seminal Branagh adaptation.

Tennant is coming in with a lot of fresh baggage, having just finished his successful role as Dr. Who. The infamous “to be or not to” speech has perhaps a little more baggage to manage. I really enjoy the first half of his delivery of it. The lack of zoom camera lenses and under-cutting angles allows the audience to connect with psychological realism that Branagh’s grandiose tends to over shoot. I was surprised that Tennant didn’t do more with the manic element of Hamlet, something he was particularly noted for as Dr. Who. Perhaps due to his near-psychotic blue eyes, Mel Gibson’s depiction of manic madness is the only attempt I have ever fully bought into. Overall, the tone of the work is subtle and tempered, where no theme or issue sings out above the rest.

While I appreciate the emphasis here on a cohesive powerful ensemble performance, the lack of thematic emphasis is a little tragic in and of itself; there is just so much crazy, madness, ghosts, and heartbreak going on. Also, I felt the film suffered from the British stylized flattening effect, which I think was a choice made in an effort to further force performances to stand on their merits. This is film however, and if you are going to build magnificent sets and gesture towards camera play, I do not see the point in undercutting those technical elements. The individual performances do ring out, each very thoughtful and expressing each actors knowledge of their character. This well-pitched cast is especially evident in the ancillary characters of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the Grave Digger. One of the greater benefits of this ensemble is that you really comprehend what each member’s purpose is in the story arch.

Despite all of these merits, the entire time I was plagued by one question: Do we really need another Hamlet? Community and professional theaters keep this one in continuous rotation. Jude Law just finished a run on Broadway as the lead, and has several Tony nominations to show for it. There seems to be a flooded market in the last four decades, and I just feel that this poor playtext needs a little room and time to breathe before attempts to “re-imagine” it for the screen begin again. Shakespeare did write more than thirty plays, some of which I would argue are far more cinematic than the ever-popular Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello. It is slowly coming to the fore that other dramatists were writing in the same period and have texts equally if not better suited for the screen, The Revenger’s Tragedy and Edward II to name a few. In this film I was looking for something different, radical or not, about the prince of Denmark and didn’t get it. Nothing wrong with stellar ensemble performances–something the industry is less and less suited to handle–but I could do with one less predictable Dane.