Dreams of Invisible Sycorax

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the witch Sycorax dies several years before the play begins, enduring only as memory. Banished from Algiers and abandoned on the island to fend for herself and the child in her womb, Sycorax represents not just the Northern African subject, but would have also been seen (in Shakespeare’s time) as a stand-in for the variety of indigenous people that Elizabethan England was encountering more and more due to the expansion of their colonial project abroad.

Sycorax is described as inhumanly powerful, with control over the moon and tides. Her fecundity and connection to lunar cycles link her with archetypal female sources of power. But her version of femininity is far from the dainty European femininity embodied in the young Miranda. Described as a hag "bent into a hoop," her gender identity is illegible and monstrous. This illegibility is present in her race as well. A Northern African with “blue eyes,” she is an exile and a mixed subject who ascends to ruler of her own small realm.

The prefix “syco” is related to the Greek word for “fig,” which was slang for vagina. “Ax” relates to the term “axis” or “axial,” invoking a center around which something turns. Before the arrival of Prospero and his daughter, the island of Sycorax and her son did, in fact, revolve around the axis of female power. Prospero, an embodiment of masculine European rationality whose magical powers derive from his books and spells alone, was only able to "prosper" on the isle in the vacuum of her absence.

Yet at the end of the play, Prospero and the rest of the Italians depart, leaving only the monstrous Caliban, the now-freed Ariel, and Sycorax's invisible but enduring presence. Around what axis will the world of the island now turn?

It's true that Sycorax’s invisibility in this play can be read simply as the forceful eviction of the powerful, racially-marked female from the patriarchal narrative. Old story. However, perhaps there is some grace to be found in the negative space of this hoveringly absent character. Both race and gender only hold sway as identification markers in the realm of the visible. What power can they have over an invisible witch?

An aporia upon which the entirety of the play depends, the legacy of Sycorax is handed down from Shakespeare to us to consider and elegize. What can post-colonialist, feminist artists and thinkers do with her legacy? “As long as we are on the trajectory of the visible, we are more or less innocent or guilty,” says theorist Helene Cixous. Perhaps we can consider Sycorax as blessed, rather than cursed, with invisibility. In any case, her spells are still active, drawing us towards her now-vacant island with an inverse sorcery that resists the verdict of either guilt or innocence.

Juliet's Economy

In the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s most famous love story, Juliet confesses to the dark night her love for the man she’s just met. Little does she know, Romeo is there in the bushes, gazing up at her with heart also blazing. In the scene that follows, the surprised Juliet elaborates a theory of love that has been interpreted for centuries as naïve and idealistic. What happens if we take seriously the model of love articulated by this young girl from Verona? What if love is an economy that operates not on scarcity but on abundance?

Blame teenage insecurity, blame the patriarchy, blame his aching heart still reeling from Rosaline’s refusal, in any case, Romeo’s model of love is grounded in a traditional economy of exchange. He wants to receive and give in equal measure, at an agreed-upon time. Love is trade, and the trade must be fair.

When Juliet tries to leave, saying that this is all happening too fast, Romeo stops her, saying like so many men before and after him: “O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”

“What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” asks Juliet

“The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine,” he says.

She laughs at his pedantry: “I gave thee mine before thou didst request it!”

Juliet needed no guarantees before she confessed her love. She required no certainty of exchange. She gave because there was nothing else to do with her overflowing love but give it – to the night sky, to the vision of Romeo she held in her heart, to whoever was listening in the garden.

“And yet I would it were to give again.” She continues.

This worries Romeo: “Wouldst thou withdraw it? for what purpose, love?”

“But to be frank, and give it thee again.” Juliet knows that it isn’t the having or the getting of love that is the most pleasurable, but the giving of it. She wants to give, and give again; reaping repeatedly the pleasure of the gift.

She laughs again (at least in the production in my head): “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.”

There is nothing stopping her from giving her love endlessly. She need not await exchange. She need not play coy with her devotion until she’s received certainty that he will give his back.

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”

In Juliet’s economy, there is no scarcity. Giving love only generates more.

The Tempest: Provocative but incomplete

Provocative but ultimately uninspiring, Julie Taymor's film The Tempest was full of "incomplete gestures."

If memory serves, I borrowed this expression from one of my mentors, Robert Woodruff, years ago. Sometimes in art-making practice, audiences accept aesthetic choices that seem unjustified or erratic if the piece itself experiments with form in such a way that generally ignores or transcends traditional causal relationships. Robert – a director with a truly unique vision and no love of traditionalism in the theatre – encouraged formal innovation in his classroom but would never let us get away with what Homer Simpson describes as "weird for the sake of weird."

A play doesn't necessarily have to have a story, he told us, but it does require the evolution of an idea. The cause and effect relationships within a play need bear no resemblance to those of the outside world, but they do need to work together to build a world with internal logic, stakes and circumstances.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest poses many rich questions about the nature of power. From whence does power flow, and does its earned or unearned derivation affect how it should be used? How should one wield the power one possesses, and under what circumstances should one exert power over another? How does feeling powerful, or powerless, change the shape of your world?

Taymor is clearly drawn to the magnetism of these questions and how they relate to active identity markers in our current era. Casting Helen Mirren, a woman of approximately her own age and popular acclaim, in the role of Prospero (a role often considered the aging Shakespeare’s self-portrait) is an invitation to consider the state of the female artist, scholar, and culture-shaper today. But to what end? Mirren’s performance is strong, but feels shoehorned into an idea of Prospero that Taymor doesn’t relate to the rest of her production.

Her Caliban, played by Djimon Hounsou, is similarly problematic. Clearly West African in appearance, consistently half-naked and sometimes in chains, his character evokes the Atlantic slave trade. Prospero’s castle strongly resembles Elmina Castle, a slave-holding fort in Ghana where dehumanizing conditions were forced upon prisoners before they crossed through the “door of no return” onto slave ships. To what end? How does this idea evolve over the course of the play? Where does Caliban go when he exits the castle dramatically at the play’s end? I just hope he doesn’t end up in the colonies tending tobacco fields.

Slightly more successful but still incomplete is Taymor’s vision of the airy spirit Ariel. Played by a pale-painted Ben Whishaw, Ariel is, in this production, a genderqueer shape-shifter whose pectoral muscles sometimes soften into small breasts. In Ariel’s strongest and most frightening scene, s/he takes the form of a huge harpy, the angriest of female monsters. Are we to read Ariel-as-Harpy as the dangerous familiar of our female Prospero, who stakes a strong claim on traditionally masculine forms of power? Are we being asked to imagine gender as the cloven pine from whence this genderless creature dreams of escape? Once again the connections are almost there, but the internal logic doesn’t hold.

All of these gestures are promising but partial. As the time ticks by and the imperative of plot must be obeyed, the ideas contained in the bodies and costumes of Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel are dropped like unreturned serves on a tennis court. Of course, the film is not required to answer all the questions about race, gender, and sexual expression posed by both Shakespeare’s script and Taymor’s vision. Answers are boring! However, the practice of posing deep questions with rigorous engagement is vital. The incomplete nature of the otherwise interesting gestures disappointed at least this viewer, who hoped for a richer, more internally coherent and productive world.

Juliet, short and muscular

When I was 17, I played Juliet in a community theatre version of Romeo and Juliet. This was nearing the end of the phase in which I considered myself an actress. The year before, I'd played Madge in William Inge's mediocre play Picnic, a young pageant-winner described as "the prettiest girl in town." I was not an unpretty teen, but it was dawning on me that with my broad shoulders and square jaw, I wasn't quite pretty enough to be a professional actress. I felt like a fraud playing Madge, a role that Gwyneth Paltrow had played a few years before, but felt slightly more comfortable in Juliet's skin. Juliet is, after all, a tomboy. The consummate ingenue, she's also a rule-thwarting, death-unfazed badass who really, really wants to get laid.

The reviews were generally complimentary, but I couldn't get over the first few words of one critic's response: "Fairfield's Juliet, short and muscular..." What the reviewer was wrestling with wasn't my height (I'm not that short) or my unjustifiably sculpted deltoids, but the subtle genderqueerness of my teen persona. It was latent over a decade ago, but, like Juliet's lupine sexuality, was ready to pounce given the least provocation.

The lack of variety in gender expression of female actors in mainstream theatre is appalling. Blame for this can be scattered widely (and accurately) on agents, graduate schools, playwrights, heteronorm audiences, wary producers, and more. As a director, I'd like to personally call out directors for their painfully limited creativity when it comes to what versions of womanhood take center stage.

We need more dykes onstage. More tomboys and tough girls. More bois and butches and trannyboys and andros and genderfuckers. We need more subtly non-normative girls with square features and strong frames. We need tall women and deep-voiced women and short-haired women. And not just in ensemble-generated dance-theatre pieces in NYC and SF! We need butch Juliets, boyish Cozettes and dyky Blanche DuBois' on stages across the country. And we need brave directors - who trust audiences to welcome nature's spectrum of gender variance - to cast them.

Here's the deal. Under-representation of lesbian characters onstage is a serious matter, but a different one. We definitely need more stories of women loving women (playwrights: get on it, and directors: cross-gender casting, STAT!). But until the classical canon is toppled and filled with queer characters, let's remember that gender expression and sexual object-choice are not inherently linked. You can have a broad-shouldered, genderqueer female-identified ingenue pair beautifully with a leading man of any shape and size without sacrificing chemistry or believability. This short muscular Juliet was certainly in love with her sweet-faced, long-haired Romeo, but that's another story...

The Urge to Act, or Why I Love Actors

This weekend I saw three very different performance events: a student production of All's Well that Ends Well at Stanford University, Ampey! a contemporary dance piece by Adia Whitaker at Counterpulse in San Francisco, and the weekly student work showing at Dell' Arte School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California which focused on masked performance. These three pieces couldn't have been more different in style, substance, and circumstance, yet I left all three evenings with a similar sense of deep appreciation.

I'll confess it now. I love actors. I feel like I should say "performers" rather than actors, in order to fully encompass the musicians, dancers, and mimes that moved before me. But what I saw was people onstage, lending their flesh towards acts of import and difficulty. Acting. More specifically, I love the urge to act. I love the choice to go onstage and say: "Go ahead, look at me! I am willing and prepared to bear, for some time, the weight of your gaze."

The storytelling urge is more direct: "I want to tell you THIS. Listen to THIS." The urge to act, however, is indirect. It's the willingness to be a vehicle between a story and an audience. It's a kind of active passivity, an openness to exposure that could more likely result in shame than glory. The performer lets herself be seen so that something else might be seen through her. It’s not surprising that over centuries of anti-theatrical bias in a misogynistic culture, the male actor has been condescendingly associated with femininity and passivity. In many cultures it is women who are watched, who allow themselves to be watched and who sometimes even derive pleasure from being watched.

Actors get a lot of criticism for being narcissistic, egocentric creatures who shrivel without the heat of the lights and the eyes of the audience. But perhaps actors just have the bravery to face head-on the truths that the rest of us want to deny - that identity is always an illusion, that our personality is always a guise, that selfhood only exists in concert with other selves, and that it's always the light and heat of other bodies that turns our own light on.

Speaking of Shakespeare...

I'm looking forward to seeing Julie Taymor's film version of The Tempest when it hits theaters in December.

(Here's the trailer in case you missed it)

It isn't getting great reviews so far at the festivals, but Shakespeare is notoriously difficult to translate to film, and I respect Taymor for being brave enough to try.

Her film version of Titus was fantastic, and while Across the Universe had some issues, I still admire the strange theatricality of her cinematic vision. And really, how can you NOT be excited about Helen Mirren as Prospero?

Shakespeare, finally.

I became a director during my undergrad years at Harvard, where you can't actually major in theatre but nevertheless approximately 25 shows are put up every semester, most student-directed and student-produced.

This results in a lot of well-meaning, over-educated, under-trained wanna-be directors flailing about beautifully and boldly, taking on absurdly challenging (and sometimes misguided) projects right out of the gate. I know, I was one of them. And I loved it.

Undergrad directors often have limited access to new scripts as well as a fascination with the classics they're studying in their literature classes. This means a lot of productions of Hamlet, Streetcar, and Oedipus directed by 19-year-olds who have never blocked a scene before.

After sitting through one too many evenings of what Joanna Settle calls "punitive Shakespeare" directed by cocky undergrads (whose virtuosic textual grasp of the verse and deep connection with the struggle of the character didn't actually result in something enjoyable to watch), I made a vow.

I decided that I wouldn't direct Shakespeare until I was 30. Surely by age 30 (that then-distant shore!) I would have gained both the directing skills and the psychological maturity to take on the Bard.

Thirty is now fast approaching, and along with it, my first time directing Shakespeare. It's just a scene for class (from All's Well that Ends Well), but I'm happy to be finally breaking my ten-year ban. Perhaps a full production will follow.

Chekhov, however, has to wait til I'm 40.