Strode – Sprockets and Springes

IF Spring 2016

Just a brief note about everything IF will be doing this spring:

There will be a production of Aristophanes’ The Assembly Women, directed by Steve Burch, on March 25th at the Tuscaloosa Cultural Arts Center. The production will be part of “Women, Democracy, and the Ideology of Exclusion from Antiquity Through the Early 20^th Century”, an international conference will be held at 205 Gorgas from March 24-25, 2016, organized by Prof. Tatiana Tsakiropoulou-Summers (Modern Languages and Classics): womenanddemocracy.ua.edu
In conjunction with UA’s EN 208 courses (World Literature II), IF will hold informal readings and film screenings about once a month in Morgan 301, featuring the work of Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Beckett, and Soyinka. Details TBA on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/313455652125964/
Finally, the Strode Shakespeare Film Series continues, starting tomorrow (Jan 13) with Billy Morrissette’s 2001 appropriation of Macbeth: Scotland, Pa. For details, check out our department page: http://english.ua.edu/grad/strode/films

scotland-pa-original

We hope to see you at one of our many events!

~nrhelms

Program Notes for Scotland, Pa. by Tyler Sasser:

Macbeth

Theatre people always say that Macbeth is the unluckiest of plays, particularly for actors who literally risk “breaking a leg” should they bid each other “good luck” before a performance. Such a hapless reputation, however, has not taken away from the immense popularity of the Scottish play. With Romeo and Juliet, Juliet Caesar, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth has long been a staple of American high school education. The Scottish play often serves as our introduction to Shakespeare, if not to theatre more broadly.

One reason is because of its brevity. At merely 2,000 lines long, Macbeth is approximately half the size of Hamlet. Macbeth speaks almost 30% of those lines, thus making him more central to his play than any other Shakespearean protagonist, except Hamlet who speaks about 38% of the lines in his play. Since we spend so much time with Macbeth—by comparison, Lady Macbeth essentially exits the play in 3.4, only to return briefly in 5.1—audiences and readers at times find themselves identifying with him. Bloody career aside, Macbeth’s intense human desire to see his ambitions realized—no matter the cost—can become very personal for us.

Macbeth was first published in the Folio (1613), the collection of Shakespeare’s plays published seven years after his death. It most likely was written near the end of 1606, and it is often identified as the last of the so-called “great tragedies” of Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello). As is so common in Shakespeare, the playwright borrows his narrative from another source. In this case, Shakespeare turns to the famous Chronicles (1577) of Holinshed, a popular history of England, Scotland, and Ireland familiar to the playwright and his contemporaries. Chronicles tells the story of Lady Macbeth, a high noble woman and cousin to King Duncan, whose husband and son are murdered. Macbeth marries her, and becomes king after Duncan dies in battle. As in the play, Macbeth never fathers a child.

Shakespeare significantly alters this history, and in the process provides us with fast-paced action and tragic characters. To be sure, Macbeth is a dark and bloody play. Probably the most famous and controversial (and there are many) adaptation of the play is Roman Polanski’s 1971 film, produced in the aftermath of the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate by members of the Manson Family. As you will see with Scotland, PA, the play does not always inspire gloomy productions, but it is simultaneously unsettling and compelling. It forces us to realize, with Macbeth, that “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.”

Scotland, PA

Scotland, PA irreverently repackages Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a 70’s style mystery, and like all good satire, this one is based on disgust.

Writer-director Billy Morrissette began drafting his script while forced to read Macbeth in high school and flip burgers at Dairy Queen. Of his employment, Morrissette disingenuously states, “I hated my boss, and I wanted to kill him.” Hence, while Shakespeare’s play is about murdering the king of Scotland so Macbeth can take his place, the movie is about murdering the owner of a burger joint so Mac can become owner. The movie also is about the fast-food style bloodbath that follows.

Joe “Mac” McBeth (James LeGros) and Pat McBeth (Maura Tierney) are unhappy with their life working at Duncan’s, a burger stand operated by Norm “The King of Burgers” Duncan (James Rebhorn). After Mac is passed over for promotion, the McBeths elect to take things into their own hands and make true the prophecies of one fortune teller (Amy Smart) and two stoned hippies (Tim Levitch and Andy Dick). Scotland, PA faithfully follows in the tradition of Macbeth being Shakespeare’s bloodiest drama, as a gruesome murder brings the amiable scatterbrained Lt. Ernie McDuff (Christopher Walken) to investigate.

Anyone familiar with Macbeth will enjoy, even if superficially, the parallels Morrissette creatively imbues into his movie, such as Pat’s grease-stained hands. Yet despite the comedy, Scotland, PA maintains much of what makes Macbeth memorable. For instance, LeGros’s Mac resembles a feckless Macbeth easily led by his wife, and Tierney’s Pat recalls traditional performances of Lady Macbeth when she challenges her husband’s manhood. Further, this fast-food themed appropriation uses food and hunger not only for laughs, as when viewers see Christopher Walken with a carrot hanging out of his mouth, but also recalls its Shakespearean original. With approximately 30 references to consumption, Macbeth is chock-full of food-related imagery, whether Macbeth’s metaphorical hunger for ambition or the physical hunger noted by the witches. Even one of the most famous lines from the Scottish play—Lady Macbeth’s lamenting that her husband is “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness”—suggests a dramatic concern with nourishment. The film’s fantastic soundtrack, composed almost entirely of Bad Company songs, also makes telling connections between play and film. “Bad Company” playing as Mac first approaches the stoned hippies (i.e., witches) is a hard rock caution, and “Can’t Get Enough” sums up the ethos of both Mac and Macbeth.

Morrissette happily dedicated Scotland, PA to all the burger flipping students who, like himself, read Cliff Notes instead of Shakespeare. If you are one of those people, then bon appetite!

10 Things I Love About This Film

Here’s what Dr. Natalie Loper had to say about 10 Things I Hate About You, the first film in the Strode series this fall.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

10 Things I Hate About You is an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, which is one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies and remains one of his most popular. This popularity troubles many people, fearful that the play’s treatment of women is inappropriate in the 21^st century. They do have a point, since the play participates in a long tradition of anti-feminist literature, including folk tales, ballads, and puppet shows in which unruly women are bullied, humiliated, and even beaten into submission. In Shakespeare’s England, women who did not conform to social norms—who scolded their husbands, disobeyed their fathers, or were a nuisance to their neighbors—could be forced to wear a metal bridle with a bit between their teeth, pulled through town on the back of a horse-drawn cart, or strapped to a “cucking stool” and dunked in a river until they agreed to be quiet. Church homilies and English laws upheld the rights of husbands to govern their wives. Pamphlets advised husbands on how to tame their wives, often using methods used to tame hawks for hunting, and Shrew shows Petruchio using them, too. Shakespeare’s Kate is described as a shrew and a scold; she flies into rages, hits people, and throws things. Only one man, Petruchio of Padua, is up to the challenge of marrying her, and by the end of the play, Kate seems to have been reformed; she submits to her husband’s will and advises other women to do the same. Her sister, Bianca, changes, too. At the beginning of the play, she is the model woman: quiet and submissive, she publicly defers to her father’s authority. Privately, however, she slyly manipulates her three suitors and her father in order to marry the man she desires. Is Shakespeare using popular stereotypes about women to entertain people, to reinforce social norms, or to critique a misogynistic culture? The debate has yet to be decided.

10 Things I Hate About You, directed by Gil Junger (1999)

10 Things I Hate About You stars Julia Stiles as Kat Stratford, an unruly teenager who would rather read Sylvia Plath and listen to Riot Grrrl music than attend what she calls “antiquated mating ritual[s]” such as keg parties and her high school’s prom. This causes a problem for her younger sister Bianca (played by Larisa Oleynik), who wants to be popular and date popular boys. The problem? Their father has decreed that Bianca can’t date unless Kat does. Luckily, Bianca has two suitors who scheme to get around this rule: nerdy new kid Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) provides the brains, while pretty-boy Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan) provides the money. Their goal is to convince the mysterious and scary Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) to date Kat. The results of this scheme have divided critics nearly as much as Shakespeare’s play has. Some people applaud the film for how it updates Shakespeare’s play: Kat’s reputation as a shrew stems from her feminist ideals, and the film is seen as a journey of self-discovery rather than a forced submission to social norms. Others think the film offers a restrictive view of feminism and claim that Kat’s transformation is no less disturbing than Kate’s because it perpetuates gender stereotypes and upholds the status quo. Even so, the film remains a popular 1990s teen film, and it contains many elements of the genre: distinct high school cliques, adults whose authority is questionable but nonetheless maintained, and teens who struggle to balance competing desires for autonomy, acceptance, and approval from their peers, parents, and teachers.

~Dr. Natalie Loper

April 14th, Hudson Strode presents Caesar Must Die

Hudson Strode presents Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s *Caesar Must Die* (2012) on April 14th, 2014 at the Bama Theatre. The film is set in a prison in Rome, where inmates rehearse for a prison performance of Shakespeare’s *Julius Caesar.* The screening is free and open to the public.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2177511/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_Must_Die

Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters!

Note that the venue has changed for these performances. Due to battiness and remodeling at Kentuck, we’ll be holding our 4/23 performance at the Strode Mansion (49 Cherokee Road, off Loop Road) and our 4/24 performance at the Greensboro Room. Free admission, though donations to the Save The Orangutans Fund are appreciated. The Librarian will thank you.

IF presents Euripides’ Hecuba

Improbable Fictions presents a staged reading of Hecuba, Euripides’ other great tragedy about Hecuba and the women of Troy, written before Trojan Women, and taking place about three days after the events of the second play. A timeless and terrifying tale of loss, betrayal, and revenge by a group of powerless, voiceless prisoners after the cataclysmic destruction of their city and way of life.

Thursday, September 22, 2011
The Greensboro Room at the Bama Theatre (directions)
7:30 pm
(pre-show music at 7:10)

Free Admission! A $1 donation to the Bama Theatre Restoration Fund is recommended.

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Improbable Fictions is sponsored by the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, the University of Alabama English Department, and the University of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences.