Music, Movement, and Word at the American Shakespeare Center

While attending A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VI, Part I, and The Winter’s Tale this season at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, I found myself haunted by words that close another play. In the final act of The Merchant of Venice Lorenzo muses that “soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.” In the moonlit space of Portia’s gardens Lorenzo, reading the star-fretted sky as if it were a score, links the music produced by the turning spheres with that created by human voice and instrument. We cannot hear the singing orbs. We can, however, note their earthly equivalents, whose harmonies transform our very nature. Lorenzo crowns his celebration of the earth’s “concord of sweet sounds” with an imperative that is both immediate and mysterious: “Mark the music.”

Music is a vital part of this company’s offerings, and this year “marking the music” enlivened all three productions. Through the magic of music this company engages their audience’s imagination even before a play begins. From the gallery above the stage the actors present songs before each performance and again at the interval. They play guitars and fiddles, drums and tambourines, saxophone and bass (to say nothing of tabor and pipe). They sing together and alone. Their sets establish mood and movement within the audience: some people dance in the aisles; some raise a familiar chorus; everyone claps to the beat. In course, when the plays call for a catch or a ballad, for satyr dance, funeral dirge, or fairy benediction, the company’s energies keep perfect time. Their energies also confirm the promise informing Lorenzo’s directive. To mark the music is to be open to revelation. At the American Shakespeare Center, in the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare’s death, to mark the music is to realize the importance of hearing Shakespeare.

Early modern Londoners did not talk of going to see a play. Like Hamlet anticipating the performance of “The Mousetrap,” they said they were to “hear a play.” When A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Puck discovers Nick Bottom and his homespun cohort rehearsing “Pyramus and Thisbe” in the fairy forest, he thrills that he will be “an auditor” and, perhaps, “an actor too.” Noting these cues, the American Shakespeare Center emphasizes the primacy of what we hear in the theatre over what we see. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will introduce contemporary translations of certain plays during the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death. The ASC sustains a different conviction: Shakespeare’s language will move its audience.

A beautiful reconstruction of Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse at the Blackfriars, this company’s modern facility is lit by candelabra suspended from its oak ceiling and sconces fixed to its paneled walls. In this setting the ASC re-creates the intimacy of the space where Shakespeare’s company performed during the winter months. Bolstered by universal lighting rather than lighting projected onto the stage, that intimacy permits its actors to engage their audience, and the audience to become part of the play: Peter Quince requires a young woman perched on a gallant stool to consult an almanac (so he may know when the moon shines); Joan of Arc challenges those seated front and center to hiss her curses out of hearing; a shepherd conjuring a tempest directs those “gallants” seated on one side of the stage to toss like waves and those seated opposite to roar. Beginning with each performance’s musical prelude and running to its final speech, the American Shakespeare Center’s players connect with their audiences to release the insistent charge of Shakespeare’s words.

Universal magic was released in Ralph Cohen’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Conjuring the fairy forest from the play’s loveliest language, Cohen countered recent interpretations of its green world as an anarchic wilderness. In 2013 Julie Taymor created at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience a dark wood she compared to the savage island in The Lord of the Flies. In 2015 Nick Bagnall interpreted the wood at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre as...