Shakespeare – Finding My Wings

My visit to ‘Station Eleven’

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) Audiobook – Kirsten Potter, narrator (Random House Audio)
In 40 words or less: A famed actor collapses on stage as a worldwide flu pandemic that destroys civilization begins. Twenty years later, the survivors struggle. Despite desperate conditions, they cherish fragments of life before and seek family and community connections in their new world.
Genre: Post-apocalyptic Science Fiction
Locale: Toronto, Great Lakes region
Time: Near future
Read this if you think post-apocalyptic fiction is not your thing. A beautifully crafted story with compelling characters that will likely surprise you.

I admit it. I steer way clear of classic science fiction and dystopic literature. There are so many books I’ll never have the chance to read in my preferred genres so why bother. Last month we took a road trip to visit family in South Carolina. As usual, we explored out of the way places (good material for another post) and avoided radio roulette by downloading audiobooks. I’d been hearing about Station Eleven for two years and thought it might bridge the differences in our reading tastes. It turned out to be a great decision.

Emily St. John Mandel uses the stage to open Station Eleven. Arthur Leander, a noted actor, is starring in an unusual production of King Lear which includes a few child actors. During the performance, he collapses in full view of the audience and one of the young girls. Despite the best efforts of an EMT in attendance, he dies. The lives of these three characters – Arthur, Kirsten, and Jeevan- are inexorably linked across more than three decades, from the earliest days of Arthur’s film career to twenty years after the earth’s population was virtually destroyed in a flu pandemic.

Jeevan, the EMT, leaves the theater into a Toronto snowstorm and learns of the virulent flu from a doctor watching patients sicken and die in the emergency room. With great descriptive detail, Mandel follows Jeevan as he stockpiles cart after cart of supplies from a closing store and then drags them to his brother’s high-rise apartment where they seal themselves in, hoping to escape unscathed.

Almost twenty years later, Kirsten is traveling the Great Lakes Region with a group of musicians and actors that perform concerts and Shakespeare when they encounter other small groups of survivors. Without electricity or other measures of modernity, daily life requires foraging and scavenging through buildings and cars abandoned as the owners died. Kirsten has blocked out the early years after the pandemic but continues to seek out information about Arthur, who showed her great kindness and gave her a book that’s her constant companion.

Also traveling the region is a young cult leader known as the Prophet, controlling his followers by force and intimidation. The encounters between the groups are classic good vs evil, with some twists. And it all began with Arthur.

Station Eleven is filled with comfortable individuals. Fully-drawn, they are far from perfect beings. Heroic actions come from innate humanity and personal growth, not superpowers. This combination of story and character makes this a genre-busting winner. The audiobook version, narrated by Kirsten Potter, seamlessly shifted from character to character allowing the story to shine brightly.

Anne Tyler reimagines ‘The Taming of the Shrew’

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler (Hogarth Shakespeare, 2016; Random House Audio, Kirsten Potter, reader)
In 40 words or less: A commissioned reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in novel form. Kate is a preschool teacher’s assistant “encouraged” to marry her scientist father’s research assistant before his visa expires.
Genre: Fiction
Locale: Baltimore
Time: Contemporary
Read this if you are interested reading each of the eight titles in the Hogarth modern retelling of Shakespeare’s classics.

Fair warning, I rarely opt to share my opinion on a title I can’t wholeheartedly recommend. I am making an exception having had multiple occasions in the last two weeks to consider different treatments of Shakespeare’s works. My post, ‘The fascination with Shylock’, gives a taste of my Shakespearian interactions.

Modernizing classic literature for contemporary audiences is far from new. West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate have engaged many who otherwise would have been put off by Shakespeare’s language. Film marathons could be devoted to treatments of Romeo and Juliet or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In the spirit of finding new audiences via modern retellings by acclaimed authors, Hogarth Press has created a new series, Hogarth Shakespeare.

A week ago, we saw The Shakespeare Theatre Company‘s all-male version of The Taming of the Shrew, the final production of the 2015-16 season. In brief, while

there were some wonderful acting performances, the shtick of the all-male casting often overtook the production. In another Shakespeare foray, prep for my book groups for next program year has made Howard Jacobson’s My Name is Shylock, his fresh look at The Merchant of Venice, courtesy of Hogarth, a preferred pick.

The third entry in the Hogarth series is Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, released earlier this month. Tyler is renowned for her Baltimore-based novels of quirky family life. In theory, bringing Shakespeare’s tale of two daughters to a classic American city could give the story a different, yet spicy flavor. Anne Tyler ability to share the quirkiness of “regular” families makes her one of America’s beloved authors. In this novel, Tyler doesn’t take full advantage of the opportunity, creating a family most notable for its stultifying routine.

Thanks to Random House Audio, I had the chance to listen to Kirsten Potter’s reading of Vinegar Girl. To her credit, Potter aptly gave voice to the personality traits Anne Tyler imparted to her characters. Among the funniest characters are those least seen – Kate’s aunt and uncle that each have unique roles to play in the nuptials.

Kate and Bunny Battista are mere shadows of Kate and Bianca Minola. Kate Battista is rather aimless for a 29-year-old daughter of a widowed college professor – she’s dropped out of college and is barely hanging on to her job in a preschool with no real friends. Her off-hours are spent preparing the same one-pot meal to cover dinners for the entire week, doing her family’s laundry and criticizing her beautiful-but-empty-headed high school student sister.

Dr. Battista is in a quandary. He is concerned about continuing funding for transformative research involving rats. He seems on the cusp of a breakthrough but is faced with losing his assistant, Pyotr, whose three-year visa is about to expire. Battista’s solution is to have Kate marry him. Battista intends it be a marriage of convenience, creating pictures on his phone to convince ICE that it is a love match. Dad’s plan would have Pyotr moving into a (separate) bedroom in Battista household and Kate continuing with her domestic roles. Unlike Shakespeare’s Petruchio, Pytor is neither brash nor wealthy. In his somewhat awkward yet genuine way, he undertakes to woo Kate in furtherance of the scheme.

While Kate is hardly a warm, creative and altruistic figure, she is far from the obstinate and feisty character in Shakespeare’s play. The secondary characters at her preschool might make anyone a bit churlish. And Bunny’s high school infatuation with the boy next door hardly qualifies as the string of suitors set to marry Bianca as soon as Kate is married off.

For the modern reader or theatergoer, the treatment of Kate as little more than chattel is at best troublesome. Tyler hasn’t reached sufficiently beyond this in her novel. For its many failings as a modern comedy, the one aspect of the Shakespeare’s play that provides some relief is the comic changing/mistaken identities. While it may be an overused device across the body of Shakespeare’s work, having this twist might have added a comedic lift to Vinegar Girl.

To the good, it is genuine affection between Pyotr and Kate that carries the day in the end, rather than submission. Given such broad license with The Taming of the Shrew, I expected more.

The fascination with Shylock

Whether you are someone who seeks out Shakespeare’s work or is uncomfortable with the language and cadence, Shakespeare’s stories and words permeate our culture. Few of Shakespeare’s characters evoke such strong feeling as Shylock, the titular character in The Merchant of Venice. When first performed over 400 years ago, Shylock was the personification of all the prejudices about Jews – clannish, money-grubbing, dirty, ugly, sanctimonious – the list goes on and on. In different eras and in different cultures, Shylock has at times received more nuanced and sympathetic treatment. Luminaries of stage and screen have taken on the role, each giving it his own take.

This year there are two very different productions with Shylock at the forefront in the Washington area. This past week, a new play based on The Merchant of Venice has been staged at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. District Merchants by Aaron Posner, brings the story to Washington in 1873, a time of great political and economic upheaval immediately following the Civil War. The Folger’s strong reputation and Posner’s skills in rethinking the work of others on the stage encouraged us to see the production. In one word GO!

The massive pillars that filled more than half the set served two purposes: first, a reminder of Washington and the fundamentals that created the US, tested by the Civil War; and two, it effectively brought forward and contracted the size of the stage, increasing the interplay between the actors and audience in what is already an intimate venue. The quintessential issues of justice and prejudice, family and peoplehood, generosity and greed flow naturally through this retelling. Each of the eight cast members lived his/her character. The melding of Posner’s and Shakespeare’s words was completely successful. Whether the Shylock’s story is set in the 16th, 19th or 21st century, its power remains the same.

For traditionalists, in late July Shakespeare’s Globe on Tour will present The Merchant of Venice at the Kennedy Center. The show is advertised as “..this new production of Shakespeare’s play dramatizes competing claims of tolerance and intolerance, religious law and civil society, justice and mercy.” Isn’t it always so?

Were this not enough, there is a new version of Shylock’s tale for those who prefer the armchair view. The Crown Publishing Group’s Hogarth Press has commissioned the retelling of eight of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays by some of the world’s most renowned novelists. British novelist and 2010 Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson was chosen to tackle The Merchant of Venice. His novel Shylock Is My Name was released in February. I’ll go out on a limb and predict at least one of my book groups will tackle it during the 2016-17 season. Watch this space for my assessment.

For the Anne Tyler fans out there, her take on The Taming of the Shrew will be published tomorrow. Vinegar Girl, set in contemporary Baltimore, should be a great mashup, proving again how modern masters can bring the timelessness of Shakespeare to today’s audiences.

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