In Defense of Villainy

Cross posted from Brave Spirits Theatre


Constantin Stanisklavski’s system of acting and Sigmund Freud’s theories on psychology have had a transformative effect on performances in modern theatre and film. One tenet that has been born out of them is the oft-repeated idea that actors need to be their character’s best advocate. I’ve heard another version of this philosophy – that actors must like their character. But what does it even mean to like your character? Actors interpret this idea in a myriad of ways.

Though there is helpful wisdom at the heart of this idea, I’ve seen actors who cling to it get into trouble when the play requires their character to be the bad guy. I was once in a play where a young character was killed, and though the circumstances were ambiguous, the text made it clear who had committed the murder. Since the murder didn’t occur on stage, the actor playing the murderer argued for a more positive situation. His character couldn’t have possibly killed the child out of malicious intent — “It must have been an accident.” This actor refused to play the bad guy.

I once saw a production of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling in which the actor playing De Flores gave the most earnest performance I’d ever seen in the role, with a strong sense of De Flores being wronged by the world, and merely misunderstood. But De Flores is a villain. He mentally and physically violates a woman and he kills and mutilates a man. He is an extremely smart character who successfully, and constantly, manipulates those around him. To play De Flores as heartfelt and earnest is to unbalance the entire play. It also robs the audience of the perverse joy we feel in these plays when the villain succeeds.

Having to like your character makes sense through our current lens of psychological realism. Human beings are complicated and don’t fall into easy boxes of “good” and “bad.” Within the classical theatre, however, characters often do fall into those boxes. And while psychological realism can absolutely be applied to great success in the plays of the English early modern stage, actors have to be aware of the traditions out of which their characters comes.


BST’s 'Tis Pity in rehearsal; photo by Claire Kimball

The plays of the English early modern theatre were born out of the medieval morality plays and must be understood in the way they deviate and borrow from that earlier theatrical era. Medieval morality plays traded in stock characters with a set of personified virtues and vices seeking to win control over an Everyman character. These characters represent abstract qualities rather than distinct individuals.This convention made its way into early Elizabethan plays, such as The Three Ladies of London, where the names of the title characters are Lucre (greed), Love, and Conscience.

The most famous of the medieval stock characters is, of course, Vice. Morality plays used vice figures in different ways over the period. Some plays had multiple vice characters, with specific names, such as Lust-Liking or The Seven Deadly Sins. Other plays had one overarching vice character, sometimes simply called Vice. The Vice character often spoke directly to the audience in soliloquies. Many vice characters were also entertaining or comic, so audiences would enjoy watching the character scheme and manipulate. You can see the direct descendant of Vice, and the apotheosis of the character type, in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

I spent a lot of time thinking about villainy as I was preparing to direct John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. In fact, my first rehearsal comments to the cast and production team centered around the notion of villainy. In this Carolinian tragedy, though Vasques is arguably the main villain of the piece, the play is filled with them. In contrast with the modern performance advice to like your character, I asked all the actors to embrace villainy.

In John Ford’s gruesome tragedy, siblings Giovanni and Annabella commit what is seen as a universal horror: incest. Even Vasques, Soranzo’s amoral servant, is taken aback when she learns the news: “Her own brother? O horrible!” Though almost all the characters are aghast at the news of Giovanni and Annabella’s sexual relationship, none of them are without blame. Vasques arranges torture and murder; Soranzo seduces and abandons a lover; Hippolita commits adultery and hopes for her husband’s death; Grimaldi and Hippolita each seek to poison Soranzo; and Richardetto’s selfish actions lead to the death of an innocent victim.

Ford fills his play with unrepentant characters, leaving the audience to question who is the true villain of the piece. The Cardinal wraps up the play pointing the finger squarely at Annabella: “Of one so young, so rich in nature’s store, / Who could not say, ‘’Tis pity she’s a whore?’” But Annabella’s sexual activities were consensual and faithful. The Cardinal moralizes, but we’ve already seen him mishandle justice on behalf of a relative and seize the property and goods of Giovanni and Annabella’s family in order to enrichen the church. Like the rest of the characters, the Cardinal has a compromised ability to judge right from wrong.

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore builds on the form of the Jacobean revenge tragedy and includes not one but five revenge plots. As such the body count at the end of the play is high, and the gruesome tragedy of the play becomes all the more delicious and effective for the audience when the actors are willing to be bad.

– Charlene V. Smith, BST Producing Artistic Director

Cleopatra and the Male Gaze

Cross-posted from Brave Spirits Theatre's blog

Woolly Mammoth’s recent production of Collective Rage: A Play in Five Boops made waves in the DC theatre community. In the play, as described by the company, “five different women named Betty collide at the intersection of anger, sex, and the ‘thea-tah.’ Award-winning playwright Jen Silverman’s absurdist romantic comedy is at once hysterical, inspired, and boldly uncompromising. When you’re done laughing, you’ll be ready to deliver a knockout blow to a thousand different well-worn tropes about female identity…and dare them all to say ‘Boop.’” This world premiere production was lauded by female critics in the blogosphere. But Peter Marks, arguably the most important DC theatre critic in terms of readership and effect on ticket sales, hated the piece, calling it on Twitter one of the worst plays he had seen in DC.

In a daring response, Woolly Mammoth sent out a marketing email highlighting the discrepancy, saying, “There are seven critics who consider Jen Silverman’s world premiere a form-breaking, revolutionary inquiry into gender identity and expression … On the other hand, there’s one critic who used his review to scold the play for using “dirty” words.” Marks heavily criticized the production, calling the conceit “at all times juvenile, and the sophomoric portraits of the five women … astonishingly patronizing.”

It can be dangerous for a theatre or an artist to take issue with a negative review; after all, critics are just doing their job, even when they don’t like a production. But Woolly Mammoth’s reputation and standing within the theatrical community allows them to take such risks. Indeed, it was this marketing ploy and the social media response to Marks’ review that led me to buy a ticket. I quite enjoyed the production and, judging from the laughter and applause, so did the many women around me in the audience.

Studies show that women make up over 70% of ticket buyers and 60% of audiences. We are the majority of the audience, and yet plays written specifically for a female audience are rare. They are so rare that watching a play about women and for women can feel like a revelation. Collective Rage was a play for women, and it seems remarkable that Marks completely neglected to consider that. The characters were all women; they talked about female body parts; the play dissected female stereotypes; the women existed beyond their relationships to men. As one commentator on the Post review astutely put it, “I find it fascinating that Mr. Marks couldn’t see this play for what it is: an indictment of the strictures society puts on women and how women adopt and sometimes embrace those strictures often to the detriment of their own happiness.”

I found myself thinking about these issues in reference to Brave Spirits’ recent production of Antony and Cleopatra. We received a somewhat mixed review in the Post from Marks’ colleague, Nelson Pressley. But it’s not his criticisms of the production that gives me pause; it’s the coded language used in the review and what that language says about gendered expectations in art. Pressley referred to our Cleopatra, played by Jessica Lefkow, as “unconventional” and the production in general as “non-sexy.” In contrast, female audience members characterized the production as “STEAMY,” “dangerous, creative, sexy, intimate,” and “bewitching.”

The point of this blog post is not, however, to take issue with any opinions expressed by Mr. Marks or Mr. Pressley, but to use these examples as a jumping off point into why more female representation and more female voices are needed, at every level of artistic engagement. That also involves parsing the word “unconventional” and digging into what that word suggests and what it reveals about our industry and our expectations of what female characters behave and look like.

As men are systemically hired as directors at a higher rate than women, Antony and Cleopatra is almost always directed by a man. The Shakespeare in Production edition of this play lists seventy productions in a select chronology from 1759 to 1995; only five of those productions had female directors. As a result, Cleopatra is almost always presented through the male gaze. The “male gaze” is a phrase coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975 and is used for analyzing the way stories and art depict women as solely objects for male pleasure.

Cleopatra’s sexuality is often staged as her primary feature, and her primary weapon, though the text does not necessarily support this interpretation. (For more information, see our production dramaturg’s blog post “Search for ‘Drunken Antony’ and the ‘Cleopatra…i’th’ Posture of a Whore” ). Indeed, the text often de-emphasizes Cleopatra’s status as a sex symbol. This comes through the mouth of Enobabus, the play’s truth-teller. When Agrippa crudely remarks, “She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed. / He ploughed her, and she cropped,” Enobarbus responds, “ I saw her once / Hop forty paces through the public street / And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, / That she did make defect perfection, / And, breathless, pour breath out.” Obviously these lines are open to actor interpretation, but arguably Enobabus is providing an alternative view of Cleopatra, a corrective to what Agrippa has heard about her. Enobarbus also tells us that Antony, upon meeting Cleopatra, “goes to the feast, / And, for his ordinary, pays his heart / for what his eyes eat only.” In other words, Antony falls in love with Cleopatra prior to any sexual or physical contact. Enobarbus tells us that Cleopatra’s appeal is about more than sex.

But no matter what the text may say, we bring with us ingrained expectations. I was reminded of this when a cast member posted on facebook a picture I had seen before, of a young Helen Mirren as Cleopatra in the 1966 production at the Old Vic.



I think this picture shows Cleopatra as many of us picture her in our head – in low cut, form-fitting costume that reveals a lot of skin. Now, Brave Spirits doesn’t shy away from sex and skin (in fact, in our production three men appeared in the early Egypt scenes bare-chested). I’m also more than willing to admit that Helen Mirren looks incredible. But neither of those changes the fact that this picture epitomizes our industry’s habit of staging Cleopatra for the pleasure of men: her body is on display. This fact did not go unnoted by the (male) critics of the day. Milton Shuman went on about it in a horribly inappropriate manner: “As Cleopatra, Miss Helen Mirren was well equipped physically for the part with a voluptuous, sensuous figure that swayed with such conviction that rehearsals must have made considerable disciplinary demands upon the rest of the company. I can well imagine them being tempted to break out into storms of appreciative whistles.” Not only the character of Cleopatra, but also the actress herself is here reduced to a physical object for the appreciation of others.

Photo by Claire Kimball.

In Brave Spirits Theatre’s production of Antony and Cleopatra, Jessica Lekfow’s performance and Melissa Huggins’ costume design were not about showing her skin. During rehearsal, we never specifically had a conversation about the “male gaze,” but our choices were all in line with each other. After the production closed I spoke with both Jessica and Melissa about these thoughts, and though we hadn’t used the phrase during rehearsal, they both knew exactly what I was talking about. Melissa said that while she hadn’t been specifically thinking about the male gaze, her design for Cleopatra’s costume had been inspired by Coco Chanel, who was a woman designing clothes for women. In fact, Chanel spoke out about the “illogical” design of New Look fashion created by men. Chanel’s aesthetic was known for its practicality and movement: her clothes allowed women to work, ride bicycles, and engage in physical activity. With the rise of Chanel’s fashion, the corseted female silhouette finally became passé.



In our production of Antony and Cleopatra, three women working together (as director, actor, and designer) to create this character gave audiences a new perspective on Cleopatra and presented new possibilities for who this dramatic character might be. Because a conventional Cleopatra is one whose appearance and behavior has been determined by men, our presentation of Cleopatra should be unconventional. The conventional Cleopatra is one of sexual objectification, but Cleopatra, and women everywhere, are more than their sexualities. Both Cleopatra and female audience members can find power in places other than our skin. This is why one of the keystones to Brave Spirits’ work is providing more opportunities to female artists, both onstage and off. We aim to increase women’s representation in the stories we tell and in the gatekeepers who control the ways those stories get told.

— Charlene V. Smith, Artistic Director

Re-gendering Shakespeare’s Verse

Cross posted from Brave Spirits Theatre's blog

Brave Spirits begins every rehearsal period with an exploration of the play’s text and verse. Because of the primacy we give to language and meter, re-gendering a character, or an entire play, is much more complicated than simply switching pronouns. Kevin Finkelstein, the director, and I worked through the script before the cast ever saw it, having many discussions about what words meant and how to make changes while maintaining the verse form. Several changes we were able to make before rehearsals began, such as the easy flips between him and her and he and she. Many gendered moments in the script we marked to go over with the cast and dramaturg during tablework.

Beyond simply re-gendering the characters, we also wanted to re-gender the world. By this we mean that we wanted to remove from the script all generic language that was actually coded as male. In both our world and the world of Henry IV, male pronouns and words are treated as the default. Male is the norm. Our world is one in which we constantly hear male versions of words, even though 51% of the population is female. We wanted our audience to be aware of the shifts in language and to notice that we were presenting a world to them where female was treated as default.

We talked about not just the genders of the characters, but the gendered language that refers to concepts like peace, war, the devil, and the sun. We had a lengthy discussion with the cast about religion and the gender of God. In the bible, God is referred to as both a mother and a father, even though God has come to be referred to in male pronouns exclusively. Our dramaturg notes that Rabbinic tradition is very clear that God has no gender because God is perfect, it is just that Hebrew, as an imperfect language, has no gender neutral pronoun so they defaulted to male ones.The Judeo-Christian basis of the script is inescapable, so we still had to create a world in which religion exists, but through our discussions we decided to think of it as a world in which the birth of Jesus by the Virgin Mary became the dominant event of the religion. As such we kept oaths that referred to “God” or “Jesu” or “by’r lady,” but substituted in any of those in when the script said “By the Lord.”

We also considered the way in which insults were often gendered. Most common is the word “knave.” Though knave originally specifically referred to a male person, we felt our audience today would not read gender into the word and thus we could leave it. Another insult used frequently is that of “whoreson.” Whoreson, or son of a whore, very clearly insults someone by insulting their mother. Our dramaturg, Mara Sherman, discovered the word “byblow” as a replacement. Byblow, much like whoreson or bastard, references an illegitimate child. We liked the word because it removed the female gender, and maybe for some audience members flips the gender insult to the male side, as byblow perhaps conjures up the idea of ejaculate going somewhere it’s not supposed to.

During this entire process, maintaining the verse form was of utmost importance. Of course, in prose sections the number of syllables doesn’t matter in the same way, but we also wanted to make changes consistent across the script regardless of whether the dialogue was in verse or in prose. We got lucky in a couple ways. First of all, Queen is an easy switch for King. Secondly, all the other honorifics became easy to deal with when we realized that almost every instance of a title being used included “of.” So instead of struggling to figure out how to swap in Countess for Earl and Duchess for Duke, we were able to swap in “the Countess Douglass” for “the Earl of Douglass” and maintain the verse form. We had to get creative in a few places, such as changing “uncle” for “good aunt” or “cousin” and “nephew” for “young niece.” We left prince alone because there wasn’t a clean way to insert princess, and the words can conjure up very different images since the second one is often used in a derogatory sense.

And our final bit of creativity involved fudging things a little. Man/woman and gentleman/gentlewoman was the biggest issue when it came to maintaining the verse form. We decided to make these switches but ask the actors to play elision — to treat woman/women as one syllable, i.e., wom’n. We thought we could get away with this for a couple reasons. First, the pronunciation difference in woman and women is mostly in the first syllable, even though it is the second syllable that is spelled differently. Secondly, there is a precedent for eliding words into one syllable that have a -en ending. This often involves removing the middle consonant instead of the vowel. So e’en for even or ta’en for taken. There are examples in early modern playscripts, however, of the e being removed instead, such as sev’n written for seven or heav’n for heaven.

Finally, here are some of my favorite switches that we did. Many of these the cast help create.

HOTSPUR: ‘Zounds, an I were now by this rascal, I could brain him with his lady’s fan.
HOTSPUR: ‘Zounds, an I were now by this rascal, I could brain her with her husband’s slipper.

FALSTAFF: but if I be not Jack Falstaff, then am I a Jack.
FALSTAFF: but if I be not Jill Falstaff, then am I false.

DOLL TEARSHEET: thou art as valorous as Hector of Troy, worth five of Agamemnon…
DICK TEARSHEET: thou art as honorable as Antigone, worth five of Helen…

And since the director wanted to create a world in which matriarchy had always been the dominate mode, we even re-gendered Caesar, so that Falstaff “may justly say, with the hook-nosed woman of Rome, ‘I came, saw, and overcame.’”

Early Modern Theatrical Violence and The Bloody Banquet

 Cross-posted from Brave Spirits Theatre

by Charlene V. Smith
Artistic Director

I’ve long been fascinated by violence on the early modern stage, not just its prevalence, but its variety too. The Dictionary of Stage Directions, a resource recounting stage directions found in English plays from 1580-1642, notes over 380 fights, 180 kills, around 60 beatings, and about the same number of instances of pistols or dags (Dramaturg Claire Kimball discussed firearms in The Bloody Banquet previously). Around 30 plays are listed with a stage direction of stabbing. Several plays also including dragging characters in or out by their hair. It should also be noted that these example all come from extant plays; we’ve lost numerous scripts from the early modern theatre that would no doubt increase these numbers.

The first time I read The Bloody Banquet was while researching whether Titus Andronicus was truly a violent play in comparison to the work of the era, or whether such gruesome works were typical. In terms of body count, Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s bloodiest play; thirteen characters are killed. In many revenge plays, the body count tends to be around 6-8. Titus Andronicus’s acts of violence range from the common, such as stabbing, to the uncommon, such as cannibalism, but none of them is unique.

The early modern theatre contains other, more creative, acts of violence. Braining, for instance, occurs in four plays. In Tamburlaine Part One, Bajazeth “brains himself against the cage” and his wife then “runs against the Cage and brains herself.” In Seven Champions a figure “beats out his own brains.” Most cruelly, in Alphonsus of Germany “he dashes out the Child’s brains.” A personal favorite of mine is the curious ending of The Atheist’s Tragedy, in which D’Amville is preparing to execute Charlemont and Castabella but “as he raises up the ax, strikes out his own brains.”

In The Devil’s Charter, one of the dumb shows has Gismond enter “wounds gaping … holding a dagger fixed in his bleeding bosom.” In Selimus, the title character removes the eyes of Aga, orders his hands cut off, and then “Opens his bosome and puts them in.” When Aga returns blind and mutilated to his king Bajazet, he says “Witnesse the present that he sends to thee, / Open my bosome, there you shall it see.” The stage direction tells us “Mustaffa opens his bosome and takes out his hands.”

One of the most horrifying moments in Titus Andronicus is watching Tamora being fed her own sons baked into a pie. In Antonio’s Revenge by John Marston, Antonio points to a table of sweetmeats, saying:

Fall to, good Duke. O these are worthless cates.
You have no stomach to them. Look, look here:
Here lies a dish to feast thy father’s gorge.
Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lovest.

Antonio then uncovers a dish containing the limbs of Julio, the Duke’s son.

The Bloody Banquet’s scene of cannibalism presents a twist on the theme of parents eating their children unknowingly. Instead the Young Queen must knowingly consume the flesh of her lover as punishment for her adultery. Armatrites, her tyrannical husband, says, “Thou shalt not die as long as this is meat, / Thou killed a buck with thou thyself shall eat.” The Queen confused asks, “Dear sir?” and the Tyrant repeats, “Here’e deer struck dead with thy own hand / Tis venison for thy own tooth.” Tymethes is drawn and quartered, and his body is hung up and displayed. When the usurped King of Lydia returns to the castle he remarks, “What horrid and inhuman spectacle is younger that presents itself to sight?” Fidelio responds “It seems three quarters of a man hung up.” The Bloody Banquet not only stages the act of cannibalism, but the text also suggests the body parts are placed within view of the characters and thus the audience as well.

Jessica Aimone and Darius McCall as the Queen and King of Lydia
photo by Claire Kimball

Perhaps the most horrifying characteristic of the human race is our propensity towards violence. One of the reasons I direct and produce early modern drama is because it confronts this ugliness head on, all the while doing so in a spectacularly theatrical way. When I first read the ending of The Bloody Banquet five years ago I knew it was a play I had to stage. I’m thrilled that our run at the 2015 Capital Fringe Festival was so popular that we are able to remount the production this weekend, August 20 – 22. Until Brave Spirits, the play hadn’t been professionally produced since the Restoration and we couldn’t be more pleased that we get to offer audiences four more chances to see this neglected work. I hope I’ll see you this weekend and at future productions–perhaps of some of the gruesome works mentioned above. 

Director's Notes: The Two Noble Kinsmen

Cross posted from Brave Spirits Theatre's blog.

The world of The Two Noble Kinsmen is one in which women are left without much choice. In the main plot line, two cousins and best friends, Arcite and Palamon, become enemies when they both fall in love with Emilia, Theseus’s sister-in-law. To stop them from fighting, Theseus tells Emilia to pick one to marry. When she refuses, he decrees that whichever of the two can win a contest of strength shall have Emilia as his prize. The fact that Emilia loves neither man doesn’t matter.

Emilia has not been treated kindly by male critics. In 1908, Tucker Brooke agreed with F.J. Furnivall’s unfavorable comparison of her to “a silly lady’s maid or shop girl, not knowing her own mind, up and down like a bucket in a well.” But I think any woman reading the play today recognizes that the problem isn’t that Emilia doesn’t know her own mind, it’s that Theseus doesn’t consider her mind important in solving the issue.

Such a situation is one that women today know all too well. Recently a video about catcalling, produced by Hollaback!, has gone viral, bringing attention to the harassment women face on a daily basis. Everyone I know who posted the video on Facebook had a man write comment after comment explaining to them why women shouldn’t be offended, why women shouldn’t be afraid, why women were overreacting. Multiple women chimed in to explain why such behavior was offensive and how it made them feel unsafe. Despite this, these particular men point-blank refused to reconsider their actions. One man said, “I will continue to say hello to pretty ladies that walk by me on the street.” Another remarked, “I will keep asking you to smile because your sadness will inevitably lead to someone else’s.” Our own minds didn’t matter.

At the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Theseus explains the action of the play by stating “Never Fortune / Did play a subtler game.” For him, the gods have fairly and justly brought about the troubling results of the plot. In this play, as in life, we may find Theseus’s summation unsatisfying.