So with the new movie out in theaters (and a certain special review on the way), I’m in a Coriolanus mood. I’ll be honest, I’m just not that familiar with the play. Here’s my nutshell understanding:

Caius Martius is this war hero for Rome.  He’s recently given the title Coriolanus for almost single-handedly winning the battle at Corioles (reminds one of Macbeth getting his Glamis/Cawdor titles).  He’s also got this really uncomfortably close relationship with his mother, and everybody knows it.  Anyway, his advisors tell him to seek a political career, even though he’s a warrior not a politician. It goes bad and he ends up banished from his own city.  So he takes up with his sworn enemy and leads them in an attack on the homeland the betrayed him.  That is, until his mother comes and talks him out of it.

So, I have a couple of questions that I thought maybe people could explain to me?

* How exactly does it go so badly for Coriolanus in his political quest? How does someone go from national hero to banished traitor literally in the span of two scenes?

* How are we supposed to read his mother?  That she loves her son, or that she loves Rome (and herself) more?  The more it seems obvious that she manipulated him to get what she wanted, it just makes him look stupid for not seeing through it.  Or, is that what we’re supposed to see? He’s just this war machine that others manipulate for their own purposes, his own mother included?

I’m sure I’ll think of others.  Feel free to add your own if you’ve always wondered.

Long-time readers of the blog know my special love for The Tempest, my excitement over the recent movie version by Julie Taymor, and my eventual crushing disappointment that followed.  I can’t begin to link to all the stories on those subjects over the years.

But that was then and this is now, and I’ve got a copy of the DVD here at home and I’m walking the kids through it in these little 10 minute before-you-go-to-bed bursts.  They don’t understand a word of it, and they tell me.  And I’m ok with that, because I’m standing right there explaining to them, in these 10 minute chunks, precisely what’s going on.

Last night it dawned on me that I’d stumbled across what I’ll call the “mute and pause” teaching method.  Specifically we were watching the scene where Gonzalo and Alonso have suddenly fallen asleep, and Antonio and Sebastian plot to kill them. I mute the scene, since the kids aren’t getting the words at all.

“You see that guy?  He’s the real bad guy.  He’s here thinking, hey, the king’s asleep, his son’s dead, nobody else is around … he’s telling his friend, if we kill the king, then you can be king!  His friend here, he’s more of a medium bad guy, he’s not the kind of guy that thinks of that first.  But when somebody plants the idea in his brain he’s all Yeahhhh…..*I* could be king! Good idea!”

You can’t do this with a book, or a retelling, or even a stage play.  From a child’s perspective, that scene is long.  They talk a lot.  If you’re forced to sit through that, or read that, and you don’t understand it?  Sure, I can see where it’s confusing and boring.  So what we get in my house is we get to *see* it, we get to see the bad guy’s face and how he pulls his friend aside and whispers conspiratorial thoughts in his ear, all while getting the high level summary of what’s going on.  So they get more than just “story and character”, they get a visual to go along with it.  We bridge that gap toward “Shakespeare must be seen, not read!”  Seeing goes a long way toward understanding, I agree completely. But not the whole way.  So why not help the kids along?

Even better than the mute option is the pause option.  *Click* pause. “See that, kids?  See how Ariel has frozen time for a second?  Ariel knows that Gonzalo – the nice man with the gray hair, who won’t stop talking?  He’s Prospero’s friend from a long time ago.  Ariel sees that there’s trouble, and he knows that Prospero would want his friend to be protected, so Ariel’s about to foil the bad guys’ plans.”  *Click* resume.

I could *never* do that for a stage performance.  In the time it took me to lean over my seat and try to whisper that explanation, the scene will have progressed and we’d never catch up.  But when reading it, you don’t get that great tension of exactly how close it is, how they’ve got their swords up and ready to strike right at the moment Ariel wakes them.

One last thing, I’d also like to point out that I’m not just sacrificing the text in my muting and fast forwarding. I’m just picking my spots.  For instance they got to hear the whole introduction of Trinculo and Caliban, and for the most part they understood it (and laughed their behinds off). 

Today’s lesson, though, was about Gonzalo.  “Watch for something, kids.  You know the white haired guy that won’t shut up?  He’s a good and loyal friend, and that’s a big deal. Even though he’s in with the bad guys, he’s a good guy.  When they kicked Prospero and Miranda out of the kingdom and stuck them in the boat? It was Gonzalo who put the food and water and most importantly Prospero’s magic books into the boat with them.  You know how Gonzalo is a good guy?  Because when the king falls asleep, you’ve got these two other guys over here whose first thoughts are let’s kill him and become king!  But good old Gonzalo, who is really pretty old to be doing any fighting, when Ariel wakes him up watch this – his very first words aren’t ‘Holy cow I fell asleep!’ or “What’s going on?” or anything, his very first thought is “Preserve the king!”  So that’s how you know that he’s a good guy.  That’s the guy you want on your team.”

In any other context you might completely miss that line.  But once your attention is called to it, it’s a very important character trait.  At least, in my humble opinion. 🙂

…so, where was I?

The 5yr old, after getting a shortened form of Macbeth, wants the one about the king who divides his kingdom up among his daughters. Here we go!

Once upon a time there was a king, who had gotten so old and tired that he didn’t want to be king anymore.  He decided to split his kingdom into three parts and give each part to one of his daughters.  So he called them all together and said, “Tell me how much you love me.  Whoever loves me the most gets the best part of my kingdom.”

Well, the first daughter got up and said “I love you *thhiisssss* much, and I love no one else but you.”  The king was pleased by this and gave her a share of the kingdom.

The second daughter got up and said, “Forget her, *I* love you *TTTTHHHIISSSS* much, and I, too, love no one else but you.”  The king was again very pleased, and gave the second daughter her share. 

He then turned to his third daughter, the youngest, and said, “And now let’s hear the best of all, because you are our favorite and we know that you love us the most of all.”

“No, father,” she told him.  “I love you very very much, but I will not lie to you and tell you that I only love you, because when I get married I will love my husband, and when we have children I will love them too.”

Well, her father the king was not happy with this answer at all. He got so mad that he said she would not have any share of the kingdom, and he banished her.

…at this point a choked little voice asks me, “But did he still love her?” And I am caught so by surprise that I don’t quite know what to do with myself.  My little guy has been hanging on every word, and he’s an emphathetic little bugger.

“Oh, he absolutely still loved her,” I told him, “He was just really really mad because he thought she was saying that she didn’t love him.  He didn’t understand her answer.  Are you sad?”

He nods, unable to get any words out.

I squeeze him a bit tighter and remind him that this story has a happy ending, remember?  “We’re going to find out that she loved him most of all.”

So, the story continues.  The king wanted to go live in the castle of the first daughter, but he wanted to have 100 soldiers with him just like any king should. But the soldiers ate all the food in the castle and made a big mess and didn’t pick up after themselves…

Again, I am stopped. “Why didn’t they pick up after themselves?”

“Well, soldiers can be pretty rowdy, and they really didn’t listen to anybody.  The king wasn’t the king anymore, so they didn’t think they had to do what he said.”

He thought about this.  “If I had 100 soldiers and I told them to pick up after themselves, would they listen to me?”

I assured him that absolutely, his soldiers would listen to him.

So, anyway, the first daughter told him that if he wanted to live there, he couldn’t have his soldiers.  So the king decided that he would go live with the second daughter.  But, alas, the second daughter agreed with the first and said that no, he could not have his soldiers with him there, either.

So the king, who was very old and starting to get really sick, said that he would live alone and went out into the forest in the really bad rain.  His remaining friends, Fool and Kent and Edgar, who were the most loyal of all, went out with him to protect him.

But remember the third daughter?  The one who was banished when the king got mad at her for not saying she loved him the most of all?  That daughter had gone out and formed an army of her own.  And with her army she came charging back into the kingdom to do battle with the two evil sisters. She beat them, took the kingdom back, and rescued her father from the forest and told him that he could come and live with her forever with as many soldiers as he wanted.  Because she really was the one that loved him the most of all.

And they all lived happily ever after.

“Were the other sisters allowed to come visit too?” asked my little empathetic guy, who didn’t want to see anybody’s feelings hurt.

“Oh, absolutely,” I told him.  “Once the third daughter came back and said that the king could live with her, everything was forgiven and they were all happy again.”

He’s probably going to hate me when he gets older and learns the real story, but if you’d heard his little voice crack over concern whether Lear still loved Cordelia, it would break your heart.

So I’m walking my kids slowly through last year’s Tempest movie, now that I have it on DVD.  By slowly I mean about 5-10 minutes at a time before they go to bed, with heavy voiceover.  They seem to be confused (not understanding a word of the dialogue), but interested.

So we’re at the scene where Ariel, singing “Full fathom five,” guides Ferdinand across the island to where Miranda can see him.  It’s easy to see a how a big part of the play is missed here.  The kids can see Ariel, singing.  They ask me whether Ferdinand can see Ariel, I say no.  I try to explain this whole idea that, from the perspective of the shipwrecked sailors, all they know is that they miraculously survived the wreck, showed up on shore with their clothes completely dry, and they hear music. It’s very important in a number of scenes that they want to follow the music, which we as the audience know is Ariel’s way of bringing them where he wants them to go.  The music is so prevalent that even the child-monster Caliban gives his beautiful speech about how not only is this magical sound no big deal, but he’s actually come to quite love it.

Very hard to convey that on film, where we’ve become so used to separating out the idea of “soundtrack” that it’s difficult to understand when the characters on screen can hear the music and when they can’t. On top of that you have to get across the idea of “following” the music, which seems to be coming from over there somewhere.  To the film audience, the music is coming from the same place the dialogue is coming from, it has no direction.

So that gets me to my discussion question.  Let’s say that you’re staging a Tempest.  What sort of special things can you do with the music to get this point across?  I’m thinking of stuff like having speakers randomly behind and around (under?) the audience so we can feel where precisely the music is coming from, and have the characters actually come out into the crowd, literally trying to follow it.

That’s a very specific question, but I’m also curious about broader answers on the whole “What can you accomplish with live theater that is hard-to-impossible on film?”

My girls got Kindle Fires for Christmas, so my 5yr old son has basically taken my old iPhone and uses it for his own game playing.

Just now he wanders in, face in the screen, and says, “Daddy, I’m reading Shakespeare.”

I look at the iPhone and sure enough he’s gotten into my Shakespeare app.  Specifically, Winter’s Tale.

“Oh,” I tell him, “You’ve got Winter’s Tale there.  That’s a hard one.”  He is actually looking at the Dramatic Personae.

“Well I don’t know what the words say,” he tells me, “But I like to look at the words.”  He has never grown out of the little speech thing he has were all his “er” sounds come out like “or”, so “words” actually sounds like “wards” and it is the cutest darned thing. 🙂

“You can always sound out the words and find the ones you do know,” I tell him.

“Can you find me Hamlet?”

“Sure,” I tell him, and bring up Hamlet, Act I.

He tries to walk away reading it, then quickly comes back saying, “I don’t know these words. Can you find me To be or not to be?”

“Sure,” I tell him again, and show him how to look up Act III.  I find the speech he wants and show it to him.

Off he goes, reading Hamlet.  I’m sure he put it down 2 seconds after he left the room, but still, gotta love the boy.