Theater Grottesco’s Twelfth Night: A View from Downstairs
In its twenty-fifth year as a group committed to “breathing life into the theatre through the creation of new forms,” Theater Grottesco (TG) and artistic director John Flax take the near sacrilegious position that Shakespeare’s comedies are “dated and silly.” Flax argues that Shakespeare stole characters and conventions “shamelessly” from the Commedia Dell’Arte tradition while ignoring the incisive social commentary that actually thinned out audiences for the Italians. Shakespeare’s comedies are “romantic and light” and focused almost exclusively on the foibles and obsessions of the wealthy and aristocratic. The serving class acts as “foils, comic relief, and purveyors of snippets of wisdom.” The major irony of Commedia Dell’Arte is discovered in its demise: When the wealthy co-opted the form and its populist roots were ignored, the tradition died.
Flax also argues that Shakespeare probably never needed the crude structures of Commedia Dell’Arte with its recurring plot elements of mistaken identities and unrequited love. In a growing age of literacy, Elizabethan playgoers would find Shakespeare’s “elegant texts” a “new technology” and be little concerned with being genuinely moved by the performance. On the other hand, TG is concerned primarily with “what happens behind the artifice of Shakespeare’s scenes and between his magnificent words.”
Grottesco’s Twelfth Night focuses on the working class who attempt to counter their love-drunk masters’ mooning and cooing, which undermines the economic stability of the play’s neglected estates, with sage advice and simple, practical solutions. Downstairs is where the true humanity and wisdom lie.
As with all their major productions, TG combines, extends and re-invents theatrical forms. Twelfth Night will include the menacing, Beckettian clown; dream sequences with puppets; gestural dance to express deep emotion; and Shakespearean scenes done off-stage to better gauge the working class’s response to the central action. Furthermore, TG’s process for engagement with such a classic text will remain the same: John Flax will present the “skeleton of scenes” in rehearsal where the ensemble will “push the characters and dramatic situations” until “bits of texts and ideas for texts emerge.”
Theater Grottesco’s Twelfth Night may not be the definitive production of the play, but it promises to be a can’t miss performance for September 2008, at the Santa Fe Opera’s Stieren Orchestra Hall.