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be as difficult to access as sixteenth-century iam-bic pentameter, yet beginning the play with rough street slang instantly transported the audience to the neighborhoods of Oakland. The chorus mem-bers become characters in the play, demonstrating the cast’s rich talent as singers, rappers, dancers, and actors.

Even before the chorus alerted us that the recent murder was the result of some “in-house business,” Sean San José, as an anguished H, spoke the line, “The thumping of a bass” into one of the micro-phones. The line echoed and reverberated through the space, and the insistent bass thumping, thanks to the impressive sound stylings of onstage DJ Tommy Shepherd (L in the production), underscored the action in Hamlet: Blood in the Brain. The thumping increased in intensity at volatile moments of the play, thereby illustrating the connection between the score and H’s internal strife.

Iizuka’s reworking of Hamlet oriented the play through a new lens: H’s conscience. His thought processes, decisions, and deliberations were laid bare as his constant presence onstage ensured that he witnessed every interaction, every intrigue, every conversation between characters. Moscone’s staging worked effectively, for San José was both literally and metaphorically everywhere: hiding in corners, climbing the ladders, and running up the stairs into the audience. H wrestled with difficult and danger-ous dualities: the love for his mother versus the hate for his uncle, his romantic dream to run away with O versus the need to remain home and defend his birthright, his love versus the mistrust of his friend L, who is also one of C’s drug runners. H’s omni-scient presence gave him as much confidence as it does hesitation, and his breaking point occurred at a dance club where H’s freestyle rap expresses his rage and torment. The gunfire that ensues was a foreshadowing of things to come, for by play’s end those closest to H were dead.

The complex natures of the fully realized charac-ters G, O, and the Ghost of H’s stepfather further complicated his decision-making. Margo Hall as G sauntered around the stage in slinky dresses and high heels and comfortably used her weapon of choice: sexual prowess. Hall’s remarkable dance and singing abilities added visceral energy to her attempts to cloud H’s judgment by singing songs of his boyhood, massaging his ego, and even sharing an open-mouth kiss, which brought any incestuous undertones in Shakespeare’s work to full light. O (Ryan Peters), H’s street-smart, tough-talking, and courageous love interest, helped to ignite H’s roman-tic fantasies to leave Oakland. In the end, O’s death pushed H to revengeful action. As the couple sat in H’s Impala, a bright flash of headlights, explosive

gunfire, and a peal of tires ended their discussion. O lay dead in H’s arms, killed by bullets intended for him. The loving and threatening Ghost of H’s stepfather (Ricky Marshall) acted as the father figure H had always known while persistently urging his stepson to seek revenge. H encountered this urging around every corner, for the Ghost continually ap-pears, sometimes assuming different roles, but al-ways seen only by H. Their final meeting was in a funeral home where the Ghost played an employee working where the dead body of O was held. Un-der glaring lighting, surrounded by piles of ash, and with a roaring crematorium heard in the back-ground, the Employee/Ghost advised H to evalu-ate his own existence. With summoned courage, H finally took revenge on both C (Donald E. Lacy, Jr.) and L, and was once again clad in an orange prison jumpsuit with only the ghost of G to visit him.

At certain moments in Hamlet: Blood in the Brain the characters refer to nearby Bay Area cities such as Pinole and Walnut Creek—references that illus-trate how different the world of Oakland is even compared to its geographic neighbors. Oakland has its own rules, its own social hierarchy. Traditional Shakespeare performance today is often set in a particular era or location in order to, among other things, provide access to sixteenth-century language and demonstrate the timelessness of sixteenth-cen-tury themes. In Hamlet: Blood in the Brain, however, Shakespeare helps us access the realm of Oakland. The world Iizuka creates is one of mistrust, secret oaths, loyalties, and lies, never far from Shake-speare’s Hamlet. But perhaps that is the point: to see Hamlet in Oakland and Oakland in Hamlet.

BETH WYNSTRAUniversity of California, Santa Barbara

LIT MOON WORLD SHAKESPEARE FESTI-VAL. Organized by the Lit Moon Theatre Company, John Blondell, Artistic Director, Santa Barbara, CA. 12–22 October 2006.

As Jerzy Limon describes in his book Gentlemen of a Company (1985), in the late sixteenth century, groups of strolling English players began to tour the European continent with productions of plays performed in English. Although the language was usually incomprehensible to the audience, the plays nevertheless delighted the spectators because of the actors’ nonverbal skills. The Lit Moon World Shakespeare Festival in Santa Barbara reminded me of those sixteenth-century spectators in part because the annual international Shakespeare festi-

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val in Poland—produced by the foundation Limon himself heads, Theatrum Gedanense—inspired the California endeavor.

Lit Moon, a small Santa Barbara–based theatre company, specializes in visual and experimental theatre. The company traveled to the Polish Shake-speare Festival in 2004 and 2006 with its productions of Hamlet and King Richard II, and what it saw there so impressed artistic director John Blondell that he decided to produce a similar event. Blondell created a ten-day festival featuring seven companies from five countries: the United States, Canada, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Billed as “the only international Shakespeare festival in the United States,” the event also featured a number of lec-tures, panel discussions, musical performances, and meet-the-artist receptions. This first effort revealed a fascinating glimpse not often seen in this country (outside of New York and Los Angeles) of Eastern European Shakespeare production that radically dif-fers from the Anglo-American tradition.

The production that most made me feel like one of Limon’s sixteenth-century spectators was the de-lightful As You Like It by the State Puppet Theatre of Bourgas, Bulgaria. Despite not understanding Bulgarian and choosing a seat from which the su-pertitles proved unreadable, I could easily follow

the two-person bravura performance by the ac-tor-puppeteers Iroslav Petkov (as Oliver, Orlando, Adam, Duke Frederick, Charles, Corin, and Phebe) and Nedilina Mladenova (as Rosalind, Celia, Duke Senior, Jaques, and Silvius). As I imagine the six-teenth-century English actors would have done, Petkov and Mladenova (who were visible onstage throughout) told the story with an intense physical-ity that made words superfluous. They also skill-fully used tones of voice and those words that the viewers would be able to comprehend (such as the characters’ names) to express various shades of meaning. Most enjoyable was the actors’ ever-changing relationship with the puppets, designed so that they could be operated as marionettes though more often functioning as large, pliable hand pup-pets whose arms and legs were the arms and legs of the puppeteers. With their director, Hristina Ar-senova, Petkov and Mladenova brilliantly utilized the conventions of puppetry to play with the levels of stage reality they created: at one moment Petkov wept profusely at the knockout (perhaps death?) of Charles in the wrestling scene, and at the next Mladenova casually tossed Charles offstage as if to say, “It’s only a puppet, you idiot!” This slapstick As You Like It of necessity played down Shakespeare’s darker, more thoughtful tones in favor of laughs, but in the end revealed more of the human comedy of love: not only romantic love between the couples in the play but also the puppeteers’ love for each other, for their puppets, for the art of performance itself, and even for the audience.

Along with several other productions in the festi-val, As You Like It reinforced the notion that Eastern European theatre is more visual and physical than most Anglo-American theatre. I had previously ascribed this characteristic to the influence of such modern practitioners as Jerzy Grotowski, Josef Svo-boda, and Tadeusz Kantor, but I began to think at this festival that the roots of this visual physicality may in fact go back as far as those sixteenth-cen-tury players and to the plays of Shakespeare, which have been curiously connected to Eastern European theatre’s vitality. Dennis Kennedy, who gave a lec-ture at the festival titled “Shakespeare and Global-ized Performance,” mentioned that productions of Shakespeare in foreign languages are, of necessity, translated into language that is far more easily com-prehended by their audiences than Shakespeare’s English is to twenty-first-century Americans or Britons. What the plays may lose in the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse, therefore, they gain in being more immediately comprehensible and compel-ling for the audience. Paradoxically, they can seem closer to the experience that actual Elizabethans had than present-day productions in Elizabethan language are. In the book Kennedy edited, Foreign

Iroslav Petkov (Corin) and Nedilina Mladenova (Silvius) in As You Like It. Courtesy of the State

Puppet Theatre, Bourgas, Bulgaria.

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Shakespeare, several essayists point out that this con-temporaneity has led to Shakespeare productions in Eastern Europe, particularly during the communist period, that have often been used by their directors to comment on their own societies. Although this politicized treatment of the Bard was not noticeable in As You Like It, it was evident in the most striking productions at the festival: Romeo and Juliet by the Bulgarian National Theatre of Sofia and Othello by the Teatr Modjeska of Legnica, Poland.

In one respect, Romeo and Juliet proved quite Eliza-bethan: the cast was all male. However, a Bulgar-ian spin materialized when one of the actors at the outset entered onstage in a frumpy housedress and delivered a hilarious monologue in which he sum-marized the play’s plot as if it were a piece of gossip about two teenagers in today’s Sofia. The six men in the cast then provided a rendering of the play in which the Capulets and Montagues appeared to be rival mafia families fighting for dominance over a tacky Verona that might have been a provincial town in postcommunist Eastern Europe. But director Lilia Abadjieva’s version was far more radically adapted than, say, Baz Luhrmann’s film, which, aside from its setting and music, hewed closely to the text. In this adaptation, scenes from Shakespeare (written in the supertitles in Shakespeare’s English) alter-nated with interpolated scenes (in modern English in the supertitles). Presumably, this alternation of Shakespearean with non-Shakespearean language would not have been evident to a Bulgarian audi-ence, since it would all have been in modern Bul-

garian. However, the Bulgarian audience, like the US one, would definitely have noticed the change in tone from Shakespeare’s play.

Until close to the end, this Romeo and Juliet played as a knockdown farce. Juliet, portrayed by the same actor as the gossipy informant, wore a puffy-sleeved pink party dress, and in despair at her parents’ in-sistence that she marry Paris, attempted suicide, first with a plate, then with a knife, a fork, and a water glass, until she finally expired—from a pollen allergy. As the humor grew more and more black and the actors more and more physically fearless, the play succeeded in piercing through its own ab-surdity. The climax occurred when sheets of rain fell from the flies and the soaked-to-the-skin Romeo and Juliet died a watery death, stumbling, slipping, and finally expiring in a heap of entangled limbs and wet party outfits on the stage floor. Love and death, the production seemed to say, are tawdry, ridiculous, and banal, but still tragic neverthe-less—not only under “Wild East” postcommunist capitalism, but also everywhere humans interact with each other.

Eros and thanatos also appeared in the Polish production of Othello by the Modjeska Theatre from Legnica, a small city in western Poland. Director Jacek Głomb and adapter Krzysztof Kopka, known for their site-specific productions of modern works as well as of Shakespeare, took as inspiration for their creation the journey that Othello and Desde-mona make from Venice to Cyprus between acts 1

Romeo and Juliet die in a watery heap. Vladimir Karamazov (Romeo) and Silvester Silvestrov (Juliet) in Romeo and Juliet. Courtesy of Bulgarian National Theatre “Ivan Vazov.”

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Rafał Cieluch (Iago), Ewa Galusinska (Desdemona), Małgorzata Urbanska (Emilia), and Przemysław Bluszcz (Othello) in Othello. Courtesy of Teatr Modjeska.

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and 2 of Shakespeare’s play. They set their produc-tion entirely aboard a sailing vessel, the Speranza. This made for a visually rich spectacle as the deck and rigging were constructed so that they gave the convincing illusion that the cast was aboard a ship, an illusion aided by the shipboard move-ments staged by Leszek Bzdyl, an acclaimed Polish choreographer. Głomb and Kopka also invented an elaborate subplot involving the ship’s voyage into unknown waters, a storm at sea, the ship’s becalm-ing, and a “Cursed Woman” kept prisoner below decks until she was used as a kind of canary in a coal mine to look for danger. The subplot, which took up approximately the first half of the play, became in effect the backstory of the Othello that we know. For English-speaking viewers this risky choice posed some problems, since the production did not use supertitles and only sparingly employed an English narration, read by a nun from a ship’s log. Although a printed script appeared in the pro-gram, I found myself waiting for the recognizable Othello to start.

Once I accepted that this was not the usual Othello, the production’s departures from Shakespeare be-came most intriguing. The performance radically downplayed Iago’s villainy: a disgruntled officer rather than a Machiavelli, he didn’t so much cause Desdemona’s death as provide an excuse for Othello to do what he already desired. This choice shifted the blame for the tragedy much more squarely onto Othello’s shoulders: instead of the noble (yet a bit simple) Moor, more sinned against than sinning, this Othello—not, in this case, a Moor at all—was fully responsible for his own actions. His readiness to believe in Desdemona’s infidelity resulted not from an inferiority complex caused by the racism of Venetian society, but rather from the sexism of ship-board society. When Iago told him that all women are whores anyway, Othello seemed all too ready to believe it, since the production had created a crude world where sex was a commodity provided right on deck by the ship’s prostitute. This alternative Othello—performed in an intense, alive, physical, and visual style—graphically showed us the conse-quences of a society in which women are relegated to roles as nuns and ladies-on-a-pedestal, or whores and cursed women. Whether this society was Po-land, where Polish feminists have recently criticized the idealization of the “Mother Pole” stereotype, or the US, where good girl/bad girl stereotypes can be seen every night on television, this message emerged as one modern-day audiences can relate to.

The Lit Moon World Shakespeare Festival dem-onstrated the degree to which Eastern European theatres, even well-established, institutional ones, willingly depart from mere translation of Shake-speare to attempt more radical artistic adaptations

of his works. Anglo-American bardolatry leads us to regard productions such as the Bulgarian Romeo and Juliet or the Polish Othello as “not Shakespeare” because the words are not his. We signal to the audience that we are going to do an adaptation of Shakespeare rather than so-called real Shakespeare usually by giving the production a different title: West Side Story, for example, rather than Romeo and Juliet. Even versions of the plays that retain Shake-speare’s words but have been abbreviated and re-arranged, such as Lit Moon’s own productions of Hamlet, King Richard II, and The Tempest—all seen at the festival—would be beyond the pale for such large, institutional theatres as the Royal Shakespeare Company or Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But the Bulgarian National Theatre, the company that produced Romeo and Juliet—the country’s flagship theatre—is just about as institutional as a theatre can be. While I don’t suggest that this approach is completely without controversy among Eastern European audiences (I’ve heard criticism from Poles that Othello’s language was excessively vulgar, for example), it is refreshing to see Shakespeare treated with the loving lack of reverence that the compa-nies in the Santa Barbara Festival displayed. As dis-turbing as it might be for the Shakespeare industry in England and North America, our own theatres might do worse than to adopt the Eastern European attitude toward the Bard: to become less reverential and more complexly referential.

KATHLEEN CIOFFILaGuardia Community College, CUNY

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Joe Dowling. Guthrie Theatre, Wurtele Thrust Stage, Min-neapolis. 7 April 2007.

In May 2006, the Guthrie fittingly closed the doors of its historic theatre building with Hamlet, founder Tyrone Guthrie’s choice for the company’s inaugural production. Artistic director Joe Dowling made the bold decision to fly in the face of tradi-tion by eschewing a conventional star turn, instead casting a young, relatively inexperienced actor in the title role. While far from a definitive Hamlet, Dowling’s production was marked by a muscular energy that, even as it nodded to the Guthrie’s il-lustrious past, seemed to look to the future as the company prepared to open its new theatre com-plex on the Minneapolis riverfront in August 2006. A prime example of destination entertainment, the imposing, industrial-looking building boasts three performance spaces, restaurants, a gift shop, and killer views of the Mississippi River.