If you are going to be able to see The
Second Shepherds’ Play at the Folger Library, don’t read
this! Some of this is anticipated in Joel Cohen’s blog, which Ken Tompkins
sent the list, but I’m glad I didn’t read the blog before seeing
the play. If you’re not lucky enough to live within driving distance of
D.C., however, I thought you’d be interested in some more details of the
production than you will see in a review.
Alan B.
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The play was a delight. The acting could have been better, except
for a wonderfully tough, fishwifey but not quite shrewish Gill, but the
singing, the playing, and the production values could hardly have been
improved. There was LOTS of medieval and early Renaissance music to
supplement the couple of instances of singing in the play text, and they
skillfully included the musicians into the play as characters (and sometimes
props—one became the twisted thorn bush where the shepherds meet after
they discover Mak’s theft of the sheep). I don’t think
I’ve heard so many different early instruments played in a single night
(several lutes and citterns, recorders of all sizes, uileann pipes, a zither, a
hurdy-gurdy, an Irish harp, fiddle, viola da gamba, bells, and a
sackbut). The music was well chosen. The shepherds appropriately
sang “
But for me, the most interesting aspects of the production were in the
staging itself. The director has a very keen sense of the theatrical and
used the words of the text as visual cues in creative ways. They had a
neat “wind machine,” a wide-slatted barrel on a spit covered over
with some kind of cloth, so that when they turned the crank, it hissed and
whistled. The wind was represented visually by actors waving long purple
ribbons on a pole, one for the first shepherd’s speech about the cold,
two for the second shepherd, and three for the third. When Coll
complained about wealthy lords, an actor clad in rich clothes and a golden mask
came onstage and posed haughtily in a tableau. When Gib complained about
being henpecked, the speech was punctuated with a mime in which his wife came
on and chased him all around the theater as he hid in various nooks and
crannies (or comically in plain sight with his hands over his face). When
Daw dreamt of Mak in wolf’s clothing stealing their sheep, they acted it
out with a very impressive wolf costume.
The director cleverly solved two major staging problems by the use of
puppets, as Peter Marks mentioned in his Post
review. Since the stage wasn’t big enough to have
multiple acting stations for the shepherds and Mak’s cottage, they
indicated the characters’ travels between the two settings by having a
couple of cast members come onstage with a long jointed bamboo pole that they
shaped into a mountain range while another cast member used puppets dressed
like the actors playing Mak and the shepherds to show them climbing over the
range with lots of comic business. The first time, the Mak puppet was
carrying a smaller version of the puppet they used for the stolen sheep, which
was very cute. Then, when the shepherds decide to punish Mak but tossing
him in a blanket, they tossed the Mak-puppet. Oddly enough, during
intermission I remarked to Louise and Bruce that the actor playing Mak was a
really large guy and I wondered how they would handle his punishment at the
end. In the Tony Harrison version, they dispense with the blanket tossing
altogether and throw wet sponges at Mak. I was glad to see this production
stuck with the text and figured out a way around the problem. I should
have seen the use of the puppet coming a mile away, but somehow I didn’t,
so it came as a nice and very funny surprise.
The sheep puppet was well done, too. They went for some cheap
laughs with its puppeteer baaing at significant points (I laughed,
too—sometimes cheap is good—and I wondered if this was inspired by
the RSC’s use of chicken puppets to tell “The Nun’s
Priest’s Tale” last year), but also the shepherds carried the sheep
with them to Bethlehem, so that one lamb could meet the other, tightening the
parallel, as well as echoing the story of the animals in the stable when the
sheep puppet bowed before the baby doll.
The appearance of the angel was remarkable. Instead of just
having her stand on the balcony above the actors, they gave her a long dress
that extended all the way down to the stage, a drapery in dark blue below and
light, silvery blue above, and she was standing in front of a backdrop with
sun, sky and golden wings painted on it, so that she really did look like she
was floating in the air above the shepherds.
All in all, an intelligent and very entertaining production.