Cooperative Performance's 'CORIOLANA' a Timely Story of Bad Male Behavior

×

Expand

Photo Credit: Nathaniel Schardin Traveling Lemur Productions LLC

What if women assumed male privilege and behaved as men do? CORIOLANA is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in which the title character, a Roman patrician and prime example of what’s commonly called “toxic masculinity,” is not merely played by a woman but is reconceived as a female character. The voting members of Cooperative Performance were excited enough by the potential of the concept that, when writers/directors Maria Pretzl and Andrea Rodel-Schroeder pitched it to the organization last winter, they decided to open this season with it. Given the onslaught of bad male behavior in the recent U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, it may be timelier than they’d imagined.

Shakespeare’s play is rarely produced, which means it’s ripe for exploration—an archeological site that’s only partly excavated. It was written immediately after the string of great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Anthony and Cleopatra. Maybe The Bard was burnt out, who knows? But Coriolanus is relatively simple in plot and characterization. Its most remarkable feature may be that its hero is an unrepentant almost-monster.

Coriolanus is obsessed with his self-image as a warrior. He defends the ancient Romans so ferociously in a war against their Volscian enemy that the people adore him. But, when they urge him to serve on their behalf in the Roman Senate, he shows them only contempt. When they then banish him, he teams with the Volscians to destroy Rome. In Coriolana, the Volscian general is also a woman; it’s two women against Rome.

The challenge in a production of Coriolanus is to make an audience care what becomes of the hero. Pretzl, who is directing CORIOLANA, notes that every character in Shakespeare’s version behaves badly. In her adaptation with Rodel-Schroeder, she says, “you can cheer for Coriolana because she’s the least terrible of the bunch.” She points to the relationship between Coriolana and her mother, which is unchanged from Shakespeare’s version. “I’ve always found it fascinating,” she says, “that Coriolanus is this unapologetic, very strong warrior, and still, the one person who can absolutely get to him is his mother.”

‘This Play Can Be Something Special’

That was one of the things that impressed her in an English National Theatre production of the play that she enjoyed while double-majoring in theatre and film production at UW-Milwaukee a few years back. It convinced her that, “OK, this play can be something special.” She was also inspired by news of a recent London production of Hamlet in which all the hero’s pals were gender-swapped.

So, she and Rodel-Schroeder started talking. “What if we have this very strong, silent woman who sees herself as a soldier first? And here come people that think they know what’s best for her; like, the next step in your career is this job in government where you’ll have to work with people you don’t like and have to change who you are in order to fit in. What happens when she says no, I’m not going to be mild because I’m not mild; and I don’t like these people, so I’m going to tell them I don’t like them. So, now you have to talk her out of burning Rome!”

She and Rodel-Schroeder found other aspects of Shakespeare’s hero “problematic, like the fascist side of him.” But they had an overriding vision. “For whatever reasons, violent women are kind of being celebrated in pop culture right now. Look at Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, or Charlize Theron in Atomic Blond or Wonder Woman, which I loved,” Pretzl said. “So, there’s a part of me that said, let’s ride that wave. But also, what’s going on today is legitimately terrifying. We’re at the cusp of seeing a lot of people get their rights stripped away by people in power who want to condense and keep that power.

“One of the unfortunate things about Coriolanus and CORIOLANA is that, if you look at some of their speeches, the character would probably be just like the people in power right now,” Pretzl continues. The class system in ancient Rome was very much like the inequality that we have today. “But that’s not the story we want to tell,” she insists. “We’re hoping and trying to shift the focus to woman characters that, unlike now, are very much in positions of power and are taking control of their destinies. Whether what they want to do is good or not is definitely up for debate, but they are strong and unapologetic about it.

“You’re seeing bits of that with the Women’s March today. Women are saying: ‘This is our power. You can’t take away our rights. We’ll fight tooth and nail to the very end. Even though our society is very patriarchal, and women have been beaten down a lot and have to work hard to be seen as equals, we won’t stop fighting until our voices are heard.’”

Coriolana runs Oct. 12-21 at Alverno College’s Wehr Hall, 4100 W. Morgan Ave. For more information, visit cooperativeperformance.org.