{"id":3729,"date":"2020-10-12T19:30:31","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T19:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pashakespeare.org\/?p=3729"},"modified":"2021-01-13T19:04:02","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T19:04:02","slug":"true-love-true-friendship-and-being-true-to-oneself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pashakespeare.org\/press\/true-love-true-friendship-and-being-true-to-oneself\/","title":{"rendered":"True Love, True Friendship, and Being True to Oneself"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By Heather Helinsky,
\nDramaturg<\/p>\n

Two gentleman, two servants, two cities, and two lovely ladies provide unparalleled comic possibilities in this play written by the twenty-something William Shakespeare. Yet, audiences should not expect apprentice work. The rawness and openness of this play excites veteran Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival director Matt Pfeiffer. \u201cThe play contains some of Shakespeare\u2019s best ideas. He really starts to find his voice with this play. The play is about the loss of innocence as Valentine and Proteus grow up and discover that they didn\u2019t know anything about life. Emotionally, it explores how a young person feels when they leave home and become part of a more sophisticated world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under Pfeiffer\u2019s direction, audiences will enter the theatre with a live band already on stage to give the sense of celebration and summer revels. The musical style will be developed with the cast and PSF sound designer Matt Given.<\/p>\n

The music both unites and underscores the relationship between Valentine and Proteus. \u201cThese two guys know each other better than they know themselves. However, they\u2019re at a critical point where they both want different things: one guy wants love, the other wants education,\u201d says Pfeiffer. \u201cIt\u2019s dramatically exciting to see how much they change over the course of the play as they begin to question the value of friendship. And yet, when the truth is on the line, they are able to look deep and recognize each other. It\u2019s an unspoken connection, it\u2019s something spiritual, like music can be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shakespeare immediately creates a symmetrical relationship in Valentine and Proteus, introducing them in a pair of speeches of almost exactly the same number of lines, playfully sparring in a witty exchange. Yet this perfect friendship is disrupted by the need for the friends to part. Valentine plans \u201cto see the wonders of the world abroad\u201d and travel by ship to the Duke of Milan\u2019s court, while Proteus is going to stay at home and woo his beloved Julia. But Proteus\u2019 father sends his lovelorn son to Milan as well, where Proteus promptly falls in love with the object of Valentine\u2019s desire: the Duke of Milan\u2019s daughter Silvia. Proteus then decides to follow his changeable heart.<\/p>\n

In Elizabethan times, the idea of male friendship was a higher state of unity than even our contemporary understanding of brotherhood. Young Elizabethan schoolboys like Shakespeare were well versed in Cicero\u2019s\u00a0Di Amicita<\/em>\u00a0which stated the ideal friend was an \u201calter ego\u201d or \u201canother I or self\u201d. The French Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, whose essay \u201cOf Friendship\u201d was well known by Englishman in the 1580s, builds on Cicero with his assertion:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the rest, what we commonly call friends and friendships, are nothing but acquaintances and familiarities\u2026.by means of which there happens some little intercourse betwixt our souls. But in the friendship I speak of, they mix and work themselves into one piece, with so universal a mixture, that there is no more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined. If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For the Renaissance audience, the friendship of Valentine and Proteus exemplified the classical deep friendships of Orestes and Pylades, Theseus and Pirithous, Achilles and Patroclus. The male friendship bond was higher than marriage, as women were seen as inferior beings and therefore not capable of the kind of friendship men had. In later plays, however, Shakespeare gives similar weight to female friendships, such as the bond between Helena and Hermia in\u00a0A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>\u00a0or Celia\u2019s declaration about her cousin Rosalind in\u00a0As You Like It<\/em>: \u201cIf she be a traitor,\/Why, so am I\u2026.And wheresoe\u2019er we went, like Juno\u2019s swans\/Still we went coupled and inseparable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Director Pfeiffer sees Proteus\u2019 dilemma around betraying his best friend in pursuit of Sylvia as \u201cone of the play\u2019s best features, the fact that your lead romantic character is both Orlando from\u00a0As You Like It<\/em>\u00a0and Iago from\u00a0Othello<\/em>\u00a0all wrapped up in one. My goal is the audience both loathes him and loves him, but that in the ultimate climax of the play, they have an understanding that Proteus recognizes his own folly and will change for the better. The journey of the character matches Shakespeare\u2019s own journey as a young writer. He hasn\u2019t quite mastered his craft. He\u2019s impulsive and the play is messy at times. But in the end, like Proteus, he discovers truth in a way that resonates with me and I hope the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Male friendship at a dramatically explosive crossroads is familiar terrain for Pfeiffer as a director. From his recent Theatre Exile production of Sam Shepard\u2019s\u00a0True West<\/em>\u00a0to Annie Baker\u2019s new play\u00a0The Aliens<\/em>, Pfeiffer says he \u201cgravitates towards these stories because I value the vulnerability of growing up. Friends are the family you make for yourself and come to appreciate through adulthood. Men fundamentally push against vulnerability, so I\u2019m always interested in stories that address this and feature characters compelled to find the courage to deal with oneself. At the end of the play, the characters know who they are as adults–which can be a scary thing. But we all have to go through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

With such themes, perhaps it\u2019s not surprising that some of the most popular productions of\u00a0The Two Gentleman of Verona<\/em>\u00a0include adaptations into musicals. In 1821, an operatic version with a libretto by Frederick Reynolds and music by Henry Bishop opened at Covent Garden. Popularity followed thanks to the featured song \u201cWho is Sylvia?,\u201d an overture, and eleven elaborately arranged vocal pieces—solos, duets, glees, choruses, and a grand finale. The words for the music were derived mostly from Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets and passages from other plays. The 1971 Broadway musical\u00a0The Two Gentleman of Verona<\/em>\u00a0was adapted into a rock opera for the New York Shakespeare Festival\u2019s Shakespeare in the Park by John Guare and Mel Shapiro with music by Galt MacDermot. As playwright John Guare remarked, \u201cThe play itself was freewheeling enough that it didn\u2019t have the sacred textual holiness of\u00a0Lear<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Hamlet<\/em>. It\u2019s shot through with beautiful poetry, and it\u2019s a good, funny little story.\u201d<\/p>\n

PSF director Matt Pfeiffer will neither turn his production into a musical, nor update it to a contemporary time period. Pfeiffer\u2019s instincts are to use the same kind of scenic architecture that Shakespeare would have used. Since the play jumps back and forth between a rural area, a city, and a forest, the play will not be set in a specific time period or place, but evoke an environment that is at once progressive and country to celebrate the follies of young love.<\/p>\n

Part of the play\u2019s charm is the confusion created by letters that get destroyed, misdelivered, or misread. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to evoke a fable that\u2019s not our world,\u201d states Pfeiffer. \u201cThe space between our time and these characters gives the audience some distance to enjoy the comic misunderstandings. Words and communication are not simple things. The stakes are higher when communication happens through letters delivered by people rather than text messages conveyed instantly. Besides, if these characters had cellphones, half the plot would disintegrate!\u201d<\/p>\n

While all Shakespeare\u2019s comedies are a mixture of darkness and light,\u00a0The Two Gentleman of Verona\u00a0<\/em>is rich with laughter and merriment as passionate, impulsive teenagers experience the transformative power of love through the double funhouse mirror of comedy.<\/p>\n

Heather Helinsky is a freelance dramaturg with an MFA from A.R.T.\/Moscow Art Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard and is a 2001 alumna of DeSales University Theatre.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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