Pericles + Oliver < Fagin + Thenardier

When I was eight I played Oliver Twist in the Lakeside Players summer production of Oliver Twist. I was cast in the role of the boy to whom things happen, who stumbles into a world of rich character, and through fortune of birth and the sacrifices of the Artful Dodger, Nancy and Fagin, I undo their world of romantic villainy and am awarded for my inaction with a life of comfort to which I’m entitled because of my utterly saccharine goodness.

It’s a testament to the anti-magnitude of the role that my only memory of it is the scene where I ate a hot dog that the Artful Dodger shared with me and I bit off more than I could chew and had to hold up my finger indicating that she (Dodger was played by a girl) should wait for a second so I didn’t choke before I said my line. That moment is a pretty decent microcosm of my entire acting career.

Oliver is such a boring character. In the way that Cosette diminishes in the tragedy of Eponine’s unrequited love in Les Miserables, he vanishes in the shadow of personages of theatrical merit. Executors of large, emotional lives, tragic inner lives, and impossible wants.

This might seem an odd parallel to draw with Pericles, who is a hero, a man of consequence and valor. But for all his activity, he’s not a complex character… or even much of a character at all. He’s smart and brave and he goes on adventures that demonstrate how smart and brave he is. He solves riddles, runs from an incestuous king who wants to kill him, gets shipwrecked, wins a tournament of knights and marries a princess, gets separated from his wife and daughter, thinks they’re dead, finds them again and lives happily ever after as king.

            He sums himself up in the first scene when he is presented with a riddle that he must solve or die:

 

Like a bold champion I assume the lists,

Nor ask advice of any other thought

But faithfulness and courage. (1:1)

 

            My Riverside Shakespeare says that “lists” means “tournament grounds.” Pericles is a guy who needs only these two tools to tackle all of the problems he faces: faithfulness and courage.

            There’s something to be said for a nice, simple, heroic story about a man being brave in the face of hardship. I like a simple story on occasion. There’s that movie The Rock, where Nicolas Cage plays an FBI chemist who has to help Sean Connery and Michael Beihn break into Alcatraz and stop Ed Harris from launching chemical weapons at San Francisco. Nicolas Cage has to be brave in the face of hardship and save the day and his pregnant fiancé. It's simple AND it kicks ass.

            Pericles is the Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer Shakespearean play. But it is only partially Shakespeare’s. It’s thought that he outlined it, and gave it to George Wilkins to write. Unhappy with the product, Shakes re-wrote the final three acts.

            Of course it’s in these final three acts that we see some awesome verbal acrobatics as Pericles’s daughter, Marina, somersaults her way out of being raped by the Thénardier-like: Bawd, Boult and Pander who buy her off of some pirates thinking that they’re going to make a mint by selling her body. Here’s what she tells Boult to turn him off:

 

Thou hold’st a place for which the pained’st fiend

Of hell would not in reputation change.

Thou art damned door-keeper to every

Custrel that comes inquiring for his Tib.

To the choleric fisting of every rogue

Thy ear is liable; thy food is such

As hath been belch’d on by infected lungs. (4:6)

 

BURNED.

             These are the lives around Pericles. The riddle he has to solve at the beginning is presented to him by a king, and the reward for solving the riddle is the princess’s hand in marriage, but the answer to the riddle is that the king is sleeping with his daughter, so if you solve it, he will kill you. And if you don’t solve it, you will be killed too. When Pericles figured it out I was super-excited, I thought he was going to then find a way to rescue the girl and we were going to have this evil king as the monumental villain and we would meet the girl and the whole play would be a fascinating exploration of how he marries and saves this abused princess… WRONG. Pericles RUNS away and the king tries to have him killed. It’s like he wanders into potentially interesting situations, flirting with dangerous lives, rife with dramatic fodder, and then he gets shipwrecked and we never get to any of the fascinating villains aside from the three who try to pimp his daughter.

            But it’s a bigger sea that just his own play in which Pericles finds himself shipwrecked. If there were a panel discussion of Shakesperean title characters who would have a question for Pericles? When he’s sitting beside Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Henry V… He’s Shakespeare’s proverbial one-legged stepchild. Cousin Oliver from the Brady Bunch has more cultural gravitas than Pericles.

            Still, the play is apparently very effective in performance. In much the same way that The Rock is effective in performance. Personally I doubt there was anything effective about my performance of Oliver Twist. I remembered all of my lines which is good. At that age most of us aren’t capable of much acting, so they cast you based on the outstanding qualities of your personality. In my case, I think those qualities were large brown eyes and a decent, boyish smile that indicated an inherent innocence, optimism, and blandness onto which the audience could paste whatever absent qualities were dramatically prescribed.

            I guess I don’t mind that I was that person at age eight, but it wasn’t long before I wanted to be fiercely independent and clever, with the self-assurance to live beyond the realm of Christian morality.

It’s interesting to note that in the novels Oliver Twist and Les Miserables the villains come to much grimmer ends. Fagin is hanged, and although Thénardier gets money from Marius and goes to America… he becomes a slave trader there and well, no one wants to cheer for that.

We all want a chance to flirt with villainy, to waltz off the stage like Thénardier and his wife with the audience’s affections pickpocketed away from even the monumental Jean Valjean. Or to dance into the Sunset arm in arm with Fagin like Dodger at the end of Oliver… “Once a villain, you’re a villain to the end!”

            But what if you’re Oliver? Then what are you to the end? A guy in a coffee shop reading Shakespeare?

Beats the gallows I guess.

Hakuna Matata: It Means Screw Everyone Who Took Timon's Gold

First off, I have to own up to the fact that I missed my year deadline on reading all the complete works. I was supposed to be done on Halloween, but as you can see, it is past Halloween and I've still got a number of plays to go. I got really busy. And I got distracted by a couple of other pieces of reading material. One of which was Freedom, which I wasn’t going to read because I HATED the Corrections, but I was enticed by the fact that several of the main characters went to Macalester. It’s not bad (I say with a grumble). Anyway.

Speaking of St. Paul, I used to work at the Minnesota Children’s Museum, and my absolute, all-time favorite thing to do there was Storytime. 10:30 and 2:30 everyday, we’d swing open a giant wooden book on the second floor atrium, set up a little easel, and yoink 4 or 5 awesome children’s books from our library to read aloud to a group of rapt youngsters. The point of the activity was to provide a model for reading aloud for families, but I didn’t see it that way. I liked to put on a show.

I liked to channel Bill Irwin for an interpretation of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Or fall over in fear at the revelation of the monster in Go Away, Big Green Monster, by Ed Emberley, or stomp my feet and shake my fist along with the children to re-enact the mocking monkeys in Caps For Sale. These books have physical actions and building rhythms, they have call and response, and opportunities to ask the kids questions to which they can yell out “NOOOOO!”

I love kid’s books, but there’s one to which I wouldn’t ever dare expose those impressionable young minds: The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. It is a story of absolute and utter abuse where the boy takes and takes and takes from the tree, even physically assaulting her -- and the tree is happy to be assaulted! Happy to be taken from and chopped down and abused, so long as the boy comes back!

I think it’s a dangerous book and it demonstrates the perils of one-sided, unconditional love. But even though I hate it I found myself wishing that Timon of Athens could have been a little more like that maligned tree.

Timon of Athens is one of the plays Shakespeare wrote that may never have been performed in his lifetime. It has no love story to distract us from the main plot. The only female characters are prostitutes. It’s about a rich guy who spends all his money throwing parties for and bailing out his friends. Then he runs out of money and none of them help him out. He gets banished from Athens and becomes a hermit and a misanthrope, but he happens to discover gold buried in the ground and thieves and artists come back to try to take it from him. He gives most of it to Alcibiades, who is marching on Athens to conquer it for his own vengeful purposes. Timon never forgives anyone. He’s pissed off and complains and then he dies. The end.

There’s something Gatsby-esque about the giant parties Timon throws and the way he is completely abandoned by everyone when the parties stop. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out and all that jazz. If Shakespeare had given Timon a Daisy to long for, then this might rank among his stronger plays. But there’s no Daisy. Timon can’t even relate to Apemantus, the churlish philosopher, who shares his disdain for humanity:

TIMON: What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?

APEMANTUS: Give it to the beasts, to be rid of men… the commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts. (4:3)

These guys should be bros, but Timon just wants to get rid of him too:

Mend my company, take away thyself. (4:3)

When he is visited by the only character comparable to the boy from The Giving Tree -- his honest steward Flavius -- Timon recognizes him as the only honest man in the world and gives him gold and this directive:

Go, live rich and happy.

But thus condition’d: thou shalt build from men;

Hate all, curse all, show charity to none,

But let the famish’d flesh slide from the bone

Ere thou relieve the beggar. Give to dogs

What thou deniest to men. Let prisons swallow’ em,

Debts wither ‘em to nothing; be men like blasted woods,

And may diseases lick up their false bloods! (4:3)

Timon seems so generous and happy early, and when he’s betrayed he does not have the capacity to forgive. Even when Athens is in direst need, he wishes them all to hang themselves from his own giving tree before he’ll lift a finger to Athens’ defense:

I have a tree which grows here in my close

That mine own use invites me to to cut down...

Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree,

From high to low throughout, that whoso please

To stop affliction, let him take his haste,

Come hither, ere my tree hath felt the axe,

And hang himself. (5:1)

The bitterness and misanthropy of Timon is so tyrannical that it’s impossible to care about him in the end. He has no dead Cordelia to mourn with wild howling. There is no moment where we recognize goodness in him, he’s just filled with hate. He was generous with his fortune, but it was not because he was a generous person, it was because he was a fool with money.

Timon the misanthrope is an old story, and Shakespeare maybe knew better than to ever allow it to be performed. Like The Giving Tree, he might have known it was a character who could be interpreted to unfortunate ends. Why present the world with a model of dangerous behavior and attitudes when there is no redemption for them in the end? The Tree may have been an idiot for allowing herself to be so used by the boy, but at least the boy did come back and love her in the end and they were happy.

I was raised Catholic and so my model for unconditional love was Jesus. The bloody, crucified Jesus whose 6-foot-tall statue haunted the hallways of St. Mark’s Catholic school. His magically-roaming, forlorn eyes made me hurry uneasily past that statue even when I returned to the school as an adult to substitute teach for a few weeks. We were raised to believe that life without sacrifice and suffering isn’t heavenly. This lesson was mixed in with the better lessons about being good to everyone, forgiving, and living a life of service and compassion, but still. Bloody Jesus… He’s just as bad as that dang tree.

It’s no wonder that the first time I fell in love I thought I could just hope and be good and sacrifice and that would win out. There are more important things to fall in love with than devotion. Love is a biological tool, and the science of it deems that strength overshadow alacrity for forgiveness.

But compassion still has its place. What good are the great abuses we commit against each other if they don’t give us a chance to find redemption? In television writing we joke that the theme of every single story of every single television show is redemption. Redemption is the cleanest. It’s a word that implies an entire story: fall, fight and forgiveness. Timon is never redeemed.

Instead of finding gold or an abusive Boy in the wilderness, what Timon really needed was to find a hippie-ish warthog sidekick to show him the delights of impoverished exile. Hakuna Matata, motherf-----s.