One is considered Shakespeare’s most “masculine” play. The other takes place in two largely female domains: feminist academia and the minimum-wage workplace. This weekend, those contradictory worlds clash in two productions on area campuses, both of them staged with all-women casts.
Smith College is presenting Henry V, in which a young king proves his mettle on the battlefields of France. Paradise Street, at Amherst College, is a new play by Constance Congdon, an Amherst-based playwright with a national reputation. The Smith production imagines a group of female students imagining themselves as Shakespeare’s men, while Congdon’s play digs into questions of identity founded on education and class.
Henry V is often seen as a flag-waver of a play. Written in the heady decade after the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, it celebrates British courage and ingenuity in the face of overwhelming odds. (Laurence Olivier’s film version was intended to rally British spirits during World War II.) But it’s also been seen as anti-war, especially in its portrait of common soldiers caught up in the contest between “two mighty monarchies” and its candid depiction of war’s brutality.
But to director Daniel Elihu Kramer, it’s not a simple either/or. “It’s about war. Much more accurate is to say this play says war is one of the parts of human experience, and asks, ‘What is that like?'” That question informs his production, which explores what it’s like for people—men and women alike, these days—”to transform themselves in order to fight, or send people to fight, or are transformed by the act of engaging in war.”
It begins in a costume shop in a college not a million miles from Northampton, where a student picks up a copy of Henry V and begins reading the opening lines, in which the Chorus asks the audience to “let us& on your imaginary forces work.” Where the playwright asks us to imagine castles, troops and horses on “the vasty fields of France,” here the actors, as they don costumes to enact the drama, are asked to take a further leap of imagination, into Shakespeare’s muscular, masculine world, and to take the audience with them.
“We’re not trying to fool anyone,” Kramer is quick to say. There’s no attempt to make the audience believe the actors are men, nor are the characters’ genders changed. “The production tries to acknowledge and in part investigate the question of how this group of women are going to take on this story, and what it’s like to end up in the middle of these circumstances.”
Kramer also points out that “like all Shakespeare’s plays, it was originally written to be done by an all-male acting company. So there’s not all that much work to be done to explain to someone why you could possibly do a Shakespeare play with a cast composed of only one gender. We’ve just got the other one going.”
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Town vs. Gown
While the Smith students are gender-bending lines like “He today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne’er so base,” the Amherst cast is talking about “the hegemonic problematization of gender-based issues” in a now-hilarious, now-wrenching take on the chasm that separates the country’s economic and social classes—in this case, its classes of women.
Paradise Street takes place on the battlefield between America’s mean streets and its comfortable academic enclaves. It starts with a chance encounter between two women: Jane, a rising academic in feminist studies on a campus not a million miles from Amherst, and TJ, an angry, volatile street kid with an eye for the main chance. A impulsive, violent act leaves Jane brain damaged and TJ in possession of Jane’s Lexus and, eventually, of her identity as well.
Through a series of weirdly inevitable circumstances, TJ is thrust bemusedly into a world of fawning students and rarefied symposia and Jane is cast down into the world of dollar stores and low-rent lodgings. In this princess and the pauper turnaround, we see each sphere through the eyes of the Other. Jane’s trusting nature, born of middle-class comfort and safety, makes the crippling attack possible, giving weight to TJ’s credo that “no one should trust anyone. Because the low want to bring the high ones down, and the high want to keep what they got, so they don’t want the low to even touch them with their failure cooties.”
Jane’s trauma-induced aphasia makes her as inarticulate and angry as TJ, and just as frustrated with a world that can’t, or won’t, comprehend or respect her. The scenes in Wal—sorry, “Mega-Mart,” where Jane finds employment in the quota of disabled workers, could have come out of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of her own odyssey in low-wage America. The disgruntled employees, the punitive management, the union-busting mentality are all there. But they’re not second-hand products of the playwright’s research or imagination. Congdon is a child of the working class who has scaled the ivied walls of academe (she’s playwright-in-residence at Amherst College), so she also has a insider’s experience of the academic style of life—and its modes of expression.
Much of the scholarly discourse that baffles and amuses TJ-as-Jane—lines like “the decodification of the hegemony of Western capitalist and cultural memes”—seems like a broad parody of academic-journalese. But director Michael Birtwistle thinks the intention is not “to mock or denigrate the faculty,” any more than TJ’s dialogue, composed mostly of monosyllables and expletives, is meant as a poke at her class. “It’s not so much condemning one class or another, but simply setting them apart from each other, verbally and linguistically.”
Both Paradise Street and Henry V use language to separate their characters by class, Shakespeare by contrasting verse and prose dialogue and Congdon through the women’s respective vocabularies, high-flown and down-to-earth. Both plays, in quite different ways, also make connections across the class divide. But while King Henry muses, “What have kings, that privates have not too, save ceremony?” Congden’s play answers, “Plenty,” as both her lead characters discover. Her title, Paradise Street, is itself an ironic nod to the privileged neighborhood the Janes of the world occupy and the TJs both resent and aspire to.
Paradise Street: April 15-17, Holden Theater, Amherst College, free, reservations at (413) 542-2277.
Henry V: April 15-17, 21-24, Theatre 14, Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts, Smith College, (413) 585-ARTS (2787), www.smith.edu/smitharts.
