Overcoming Cardenio

CARDENIO

By maybe William Shakespeare &

John Fletcher

Later adapted by Lewis Theobald & Others

As performed by the Hudson Shakespeare Company (website here: http://www.hudsonshakespeare.org)
August 3, 2012 in Van Vorst Park, Jersey City

Five hundred years or so after the Bard invented the human in literature his works now so define what we think of as Elizabethan or Restoration theater (and literature) that we cannot truly isolate even say Philip Marlowe from Shakespeare. Even as we strive to appreciate a work from that era on its own merit, ultimately we are unable to interpret Shakespeare’s contemporaries other than through a process of compare and contrast with the writer that dominates the Western Canon.

The Hudson Shakespeare Company embraced this conundrum by staging the controversial Cardenio. Also dubbed the Double Falsehood, this play – based on a chapter in Don Quixote  (the Van Vorst performance seemed set in Renaissance Spain –  has caused some controversy about authorship. Claims to being written by Shakespeare have never been substantiated and to be fair, never completely dismissed.

 Jon Ciccarelli, director of the play, introduced the play by challenging the audience to decide for themselves if this is a Shakespeare play. But whether it is by the Bard or not, the play is somewhat representative of the theater of the era. It reminds me of something – and I’m paraphrasing here – that Elaine Pagels has written about her studies of the gnostic gospels, that they don’t tell us anything about the Historical Christ but reveal a lot about early Christianity.

Unfortunately, Cardenio is not a very good play and the gimmick of detecting Shakespeare within its text does little to improve it. I’m a devotee of Harold Bloom. Last year, Brian Kulick was staging Cardenio in New York.

The New York Times: “And then there are those, like the critic Harold Bloom, who believe that Shakespeare never touched the play. At a recent symposium on the topic at Classic Stage, Mr. Bloom declared that “Double Falsehood” was a “palpable forgery” and, turning to Mr. Kulick, commended “your courage and your marvelous foolhardiness” in choosing to stage it.”

So Bloom biased me from the get-go against believing Cardenio is the Lost Shakespeare play. I also read it before the Van Vorst performance – well, I tried to but I had a busy week and the damn thing I found tedious and confusing and didn’t finish it until a couple of days after the Van Vorst show. Nobody claims it is solely the work of the Bard. The play is believed to be co-authored by John Flecther, and even a Lewis Theobald, a playwright who lived 100 years after Shakespeare. Fletcher co-authored Two Merry Kinsman, a mediocre thought not as bad as Two Gentlemen of Verona play – and especially in the first portion of Two Merry Kinsman, Shakespeare is apparent.

Like Two Merry Kinsman, Cardenio is a buddy story. In fact, there are basically two parallel and eventually intersecting stories. Fernando, the son of a duke and a cad for most of the play – he was Othello earlier this summer and directed Comedy of Errors, becomes attracted to  Doratea (Melissa Meli), a farmer’s daughter beneath his station. Cardenio loves Lucinda, but Fernando sees Lucinda, falls in love with her and gets Cardenio out the way on some pretext with the Duke. The scenario of couples exchanging partners through mishap and shifting emotions is familiar Shakespeare territory but the dialog and action in the text are flatfooted in Cardenio. I was confused to some particulars, and the text itself isn’t much help. The story details are incoherent. Fernando and Doratea marry – the text is vague – and they go behind the curtains that form the backdrop at these Van Vorst productions and make some loud funny throes of passion groans, after which Fernando abandons her – from what I can tell, for no reason – and Dortea decides to wander or follow him, I’m not sure which although she declares her fidelity throughout the play. A thankless role, the character is mired in the customary subjugation of women of the era. It’s hard to see her as anything but silly and self destructive, yet we are meant to identify with her and the only reason we find her sympathetic is the performance by Melissa Meli, who infused  Desdemona with a refreshing feminist sensibility in June and played a Dromeo in July.

Here, when she goes behind the curtain with Fernando to consummate their relationship, I felt it was more a matter of a lower class obeying the upper caste member, more akin to date rape than mutual passion. I found nothing in the text to convince us of her love for him. She spends the rest of the play pining for him and I just didn’t buy it.

I felt that basically the cast rose above the material, and even at times seemed quite frustrated with its obvious dramatic holes and flawed logic.

Later in the play, during her wanderings, Dortea disguises herself as a Shepard boy and hides amongst a group of shepherds, where Cardenio also finds himself. Oh yeah, Fernando marries Lucinda, although the marriage is never consummated. It’s a one thing after another play with a frantic succession of incidents, which only services the plot and gives the cardboard characters something to do as they head towards the final act.

 Meli has a nice bit of business as a shepherd boy. Henri Douvry as “Master of the Flocks,” noticing the boy is too fair to be a male, attempts to rape her. It never gets to the point of a struggle, but the insinuation is there and Douvry goes into a very creepy sexual predator mold, removing his belt to both have a weapon to beat her and to free his loins. I like this meshing and clashing –  Shakespeare contains these contrasts – and the Hudson gang seems quite adept at, overlapping the farce with the tragedy.

This play could use all the help it can get, but maybe its weaknesses allowed for performance elasticity. Histrionics were the rule of the evening. When you are performing in the open air, with ambient din a constant, the cicadas louder than the traffic and the hordes of mosquitos feasting on any open skin in a what was a dreadfully humid evening, exaggerated gestures and antics are a good strategy, When Cardenio hides among the shepherds, he goes mad and David Rosenberg had some nice bids, raving in a torn shirt. Another notable piece of comical hysterics were by David C. Neal, as Don Bernardo, Lucinda’s father, whose physical humor choices – his face is rubbery and he has a body whose arms were built to flail – were genuinely funny.

 A commendable attribute of the Hudson Shakespeare  Company is how they relish physical acting. They have fearlessness when it comes to everything from swordplay to pratfalls. For Cardenio they exploited the open air theater, going into the crowd more, shouting the lines, expanding what the boundaries of the stageless performance space. At one point during the proceedings, there’s a carnival going on and the whole cast did some not-half-bad core graphed, flamenco inspired stomps and twirls.

 In other words, the Hudson Shakespeare Company did the best they could with annoyingly weak material.  The troupe for any given play is relatively small, and like so many theater companies, actors double and even triple up in roles. A regrettable decision was that Meli plays a novice nun when Lucinda seeks sanctuary in a convent (one thing after another), and Noelle Fair, who plays Lucinda, doubles as a Shepard. Usually the moonlighting doesn’t bother me, but having leads pull double duty was not wise. Cardenio with its undeveloped characters and pointless action is confusing enough, asking the audience for further disbelief that she is not a main character in a scene was cruel.

Well, at least I can say not only have I read all of Shakespeare but now I haveexperienced the fake Shakespeare. The actors often seemed as exasperated as I felt about the material. Their performances came as anxious and desperate, but more often then not, they turned those qualities into entertaining outrageousness. Hated the play, liked the performance. Like Bloom, I am unconvinced this was Shakespeare but wish the production well!

 

CARDENIO

Hudson Shakespeare Company

Directed by Jon Ciccarelli

CAST

CARDENIO - David Rosenberg

FERNANDO - Michael Hagins

DON PEDRO - Rich Wisneski

LUCINDA/SHEPHERD 2- Noelle Fair

DOROTEA/DUENNA - Melissa Meli

/

DON BERNARDO/

SHEPHERD 1 - David C. Neal

DON CAMILLO - Tom Cox

DUKE/

MASTER OF THE FLOCKS - Henri Douvry