Each Is Me

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For more than a year, as I pursue my daily life, two razor-sharp yet ghostly performances from the American Shakespeare Center’s 2019 season flare in my imagination. When I try to remember an early morning dream, I see, over and over again, the woman who foils a flame-faced predator with nothing but her wit. As I fix my morning tea, I see the girl who shivers at her teacher’s touch. The friend who cozens secrets she will not keep appears as I open my office door or hurry to a meeting. Each of these specters is a character in a play by Shakespeare or Amy E. Witting. Each is me.

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These performances — of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Witting’s Anne Page Hates Fun — were the inaugural offerings in the ASC’s “Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries” initiative, which proposes, over the next twenty years, to debut thirty-eight new (and previously unproduced) plays that engage Shakespeare’s thirty-eight in conversation. In 2018, the company invited playwrights to submit work that might respond to and interrogate The Merry Wives of Windsor. Witting won that year’s competition and its $25,000 prize, and the ASC brought her to Staunton, Virginia in January 2019, when her play was rehearsed in their Blackfriars Playhouse (the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre), and again in mid-February, when Anne Page, in repertory with Merry Wives, kicked off the company’s three-month Renaissance season.

That February, I traveled to Staunton determined to see how Witting might turn a new lens on one of Shakespeare’s less frequently performed plays. I also wanted to gauge how a contemporary playwright would take advantage of the early modern theatre practices that define the Blackfriars and the ASC: universal lighting, double and triple casting (within a relatively small troupe of players), and the inclusion of audience members on the stage, where they become part of the action. My experience exceeded this focus. Together, the plays riveted me not to Shakespeare’s past but my own.

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On February 14, I watched The Merry Wives of Windsor, the play Shakespeare is reputed to have written at the request of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see fat Sir John Falstaff (whom she had enjoyed in Henry IV, Part 1) caught in love’s throes. Merry Wives tracks Falstaff ‘s desperate attempts to seduce two married women in the town of Windsor. The next night, I attended Anne Page Hates Fun, whose action unfolds in Windsor, New Hampshire. Though Witting includes a large-bellied wit-cracker among her townspeople, she does not ascribe to him anything resembling lecherous misconduct. She concentrates, instead, on the hidden life of a woman named Anne Page, who cannot trust any man because she has been molested by her high school English teacher.

Initially, Shakespeare’s rough comedy seemed an odd foil to Witting’s bittersweet play, which is haunted by loss. I realized, however, in the middle of my second night in the playhouse, that both plays explore the power (and threat) of community where sexual aberration is concerned. Shakespeare’s wives, who determine they must publicly humiliate the seamy seducer who would corrupt their bodies and reputations, demonstrate what a community may gain in scourging a predatory male. Witting’s Anne Page, who determines she must hide her victimization from even her closest friends, makes us consider what a predator’s exposure may cost his victim.

As I write the above paragraph, I consider Anne’s silence with the coolness of recollection’s tranquility.

As I sat in the audience that night, I was anything but calm.

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Witting borrows her heroine’s name from one of Merry Wives’s relatively minor characters. Shakespeare’s Anne is the daughter of one of the wives Falstaff endeavors to bed. Though she is modest in speech, she is the object of vociferous debate among three suitors, who compete for her hand in marriage, as well as between her parents, who favor different (and utterly inappropriate) foppish contenders. Witting...