One of the cultural happenings out here in Portland that lately has my attention is the growth of the theatre company Anon It Moves. It was founded by Erica Terpening-Romeo and Caitlin Fisher-Draeger, graduates of Lewis & Clark College, where I knew them as brilliant students. The company, which emerged out of Caitlin and Erica sitting in a public space and speculating on how they would use it to stage A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is dedicated to finding fresh ways to produce Shakespeare’s plays as well as to provide women actors with robust roles. Although these plays provide interesting parts for women, roles traditionally defined for men far outnumber those for women. Of course, one solution has been for women actors to occupy the male roles—witness Sarah Bernhardt’s 1899 Hamlet for the stage, followed up by a 1900 film version, as well as Terpening-Romeo’s Hamlet for Anon It Moves in 2014; but Anon is dedicated to finding other ways as well.
The company is also interested in experimenting with physical movement. As their website states, “We’re very attracted to using various mediums of story telling along with the text: dance, puppets, music. We’re excited by the depth offered by site specific works.” Much of what it means to translate a text into performance is to decide about things such as movement, use of stage properties, lighting, and so forth—things that exist beyond the words of the text—to bring meaning into action. (A marvelous anthology of essays about this topic is More than Words Can Witness: Essays on Visual and Nonverbal Enactment in the Plays, edited by Sidney Homan in 1980.) In its brief life so far, Anon It Moves has mounted some marvelous productions.
Their most recent endeavor brings them back to the letter of their founding impulse, The Winter’s Tale, from which the company name comes. The words are spoken by Paulina (played with tremendous though understated authority by Victoria Blake) to King Leontes of Sicilia when she is showing him the “statue” of his wife, Hermione: “No longer shall you gaze on’t, lest your fancy / May think anon it moves.” Anon, the statue is about to move, for it is not a statue at all, but rather Hermione herself, whom everyone save for Paulina has thought dead for the last 16 years. It has been that long since Leontes accused her of infidelity with his visiting boyhood friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, and she faked her death, going into a kind of internal exile on hearing that Mamillius, her first child with Leontes, has died. The moment of the reveal—that Hermione is not dead, that the statue is not a statue but Hermione herself—is grandly emblematic of the theatre, a moment of spectacle, a marvel on display. Terpening-Romeo, the production’s Hermione, enacted the moment with tremendous aplomb, allowing the astonishment to spread from the audience within the play to the audience within the theatre.
Another moment that lends itself to spectacle is the play’s famous stage direction, perhaps the most famous and debated stage direction in all of Shakespeare: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” No one really knows how they might have handled this direction in Shakespeare’s day—perhaps a more or less tame bear from the nearby bear-baiting pits? an actor in a bear suit? For her part, the Anon It Moves director played it cool, opting to make the direction refer to soldiers decked in bear headgear. The moment takes place when Antigonus, one of Leontes’ lords, is abandoning Leontes and Hermione’s second child, to whom the latter gave birth just before her apparent death, and whom Leontes suspects to be the “bastard” issue of Hermione and Polixenes. It is at this moment that Antigonus is pursued by the “bear,” and we hear of his dismemberment from a Clown (in the Anon production beautifully played, with just the right dimension of antic disposition, by Winston Bischof) who describes the scene to his Shepherd father, who adopts the child—aptly named Perdita (little lost one)—as his own. All this takes place in Bohemia, which is quite a different world from Sicilia.
Caitlin Fisher-Draeger’s director’s note provides an apt description of this production’s understanding of the difference: “Sicilia is rooted in class and ceremony, where the King draws his power from his heritage. Bohemia is an eclectic community of nomadic performers, whose king is respected for his ability to guide and provide leadership. The cirque aspects, along with the costumes and music, work to add depth and texture to the world.” As the audience members entered the theatre to find our seats, the circus performers and clowns were already performing on the stage space, a floor-level area with banks of seats facing each other from opposite sides. Bishof’s clown, complete with red nose, was handing out water and spray bottles in the manner of a hotdog vendor at a baseball game, gamely receiving playful squirts in the face from audience members. By the time the play begins, we realize that we are privy to a performance in King Leontes’ court; he is in control, and the performance is at his behest. By contrast, when the action takes us to Bohemia, we find that the circus performers and clowns circulate through the world much more freely. It isn’t that Polixenes does not desire control—he tries, for example, to make sure his offspring does not marry a member of the wrong class—but rather that his Bohemia is structured in such a way as to prevent him from overseeing his world the way Leontes keeps watch over his.
What has long been for me a central moment of the play is the dialogue between Polixenes and Perdita, who for all he knows is the Shepherd’s daughter and not a princess. In discussing the status of hybrid flowers, they engage in the old commonplace debate about the relationship between art and nature. For his part, Polixenes holds out for the breakdown of the binary between the two: “This is an art / Which does mend nature—change it rather—but / The art itself is nature.” In other words, as Father Ong used to say, it is natural for humans to be artificial. We make things, from cave paintings to hybrids to categories; it’s what we do, what we’re born to do. As the editor of the Arden edition, J. H. P. Pafford, points out, this idea of natural artifice is an ancient commonplace as well, one aptly spoken by Polixenes. The dramatic irony of the moment is that Polixenes is not aware that he is, by implication, arguing against the very class division that he seeks to uphold, for his son, Florizel, and Perdita are in love and seek to form a hybrid of class that discloses the artifice of the class structure. Even though it turns out that Perdita is of royal blood, thus reinforcing the class structure (she carries herself in the manner of a princess), the discourse has nevertheless loosened the structure’s hold.
But the Anon production goes one step further. As Terpening-Romeo said to me in a recent conversation, ‘Because it’s us, Florizel is a woman.’ Thus, the breakdown of the nature-law dichotomy challenges the old appeal to natural law as a basis for prohibiting same-sex union, and the play ends with a promise of same-sex marriage. Whatever the old natural law might have referred to calls for further rethinking and revision, the work of further human creativity and artifice, from plays to poetry to theatre to political and theological discourses, on and on. We need all the creativity we can muster. The work of such a company as Anon It Moves provides hope that we are up to the task.