The Great Globe Itself: Property Design

For those not engaged in the art of theater, any part of what appears on stage, any thing, which is manipulated or acted with, by an actor, whether it be handkerchief or vase of flowers, if it is handled or used in some fashion, it is no longer a costume or set, but a property, or "prop".

Terry Martin is Prop Master for Great Lakes Theater, and he also designed sets for all of the outreach tours I have written, including On the Dark Side of Twilight, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Double Heart. We met when he designed the set for Bad Epitaph Theater Co's. production, State of Siege in 2003.

Terry has also designed the props for The Great Globe Itself, with tremendous assistance from Lexi and Rachel. In earlier posts I have described the concept behind the Globe Theatre set. One additional element in the set are signs which will help the audience understand which era the characters occupy, 1613, 1936 or 2005.

Terry was inspired to create these signs thanks to a photograph of the eighteen year-old Sam Wanamaker at the Old Globe Theatre in 1936. How clearer to show and convince, and the remind the audience that yes, they did seven shows a day, back to back, all week long, than to recreate this signpost?

There is also an important plot point, the show order for the day, which is represented on this sign. I wonder how many audience members will catch it before our character of Sam does during the performance?

Starting with sing concept, Terry created a lovely poster for the ill-fated 1613 performance of All Is True - or - The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eighth (see top) and finally we needed a sign which said "21st century theatre". Anyone who has attended a performance as part of the Broadway series at Playhouse Square should be familiar with this:

The Great Globe Itself opens Tuesday.

Finding the Old Globe Theatre

Cleveland Press, 1936

Regardless of the time I have spent read or researching about the Old Globe Theatre at the 1936 Great Lakes Exposition, I have never been able to successfully picture where it stood in space, nor what surrounded it. So I contacted historian John Vacha and he agreed to meet me for an informal walking tour.

John arrived more prepared for this journey than I was (though I did bring my copy of Meet Me On Lake Erie, Dearie for him to sign) as he provided a map he found in the Cleveland Press which was much easier to read and follow than others I have seen. We parked on Lakeshore and walked west towards East Ninth.

It has been a beautiful day for walking.

The Olde Globe Theatre

The Main Entrance, the most photogenic entrance, featuring seven grand pylons, was actually a couple blocks south, on the other side of the Public Hall, but that was not our destination. The Expo was divided by East Ninth, with the lion's share of exhibits north of the railroad tracks.

Where the Rock Halls stands was the Firestone exhibit, where now stands the Great Lakes Science Center was the Hall of Progress and Automotive Building. The football stadium stand where once stood, uh, the old football stadium. That was also not my site of interest.

Just north of North Marginal Drive, formerly called "Shore Drive" they had built a tunnel beneath East Ninth for folks to pass unimpeded from the western exhibits to the Midway to the east, and also an entrance north of that right off East Ninth. It is that entrance which would have been the easiest access to the Old Globe Theatre.

clevelandmap.com

With the exception of the creation of North Coast Harbor (see above) the land footprint is nearly the same as that of 78 years ago. Where now rests the World War II submarine, the USS Cod, there had been a World War One sub during the exposition. The Coast Guard had a station right there in 1936 - only several hundred yards to the north, where the Army Corps of Engineers now stands.

By mine and John's best estimate, the Old Globe Theatre, which presented forty-minute abridgements of several of Shakespeare's greatest plays (and also Henry VIII), the very play house where Sam Wanamaker, at the tender age of eighteen, first worked as a professional actor, performing the greatest roles of the canon (Second Citizen, Servant, Guard, Philostrate), inspiring him to one day recreate Shakespeare's Globe on old Bankside, was in fact located where now sits the Coast Guard station parking lot.

Just there, behind the young woman sitting at the water's edge (see her?) reading a book.

"What's she reading?" I asked.

I answered my own question at the same time John did: "Shakespeare."

To be continued.

Shakespeare's Globe

If there is one overriding theme in Barry Day’s This Wooden ‘O’, one which is made early and repeated ad nauseum, it is that not only did it take an American to build a fully-functioning Elizabethan Globe theater on old Bankside, but that only an American wanted to.

It is true that other replica “Globes” already existed prior to Shakespeare’s Globe, all over the world, even as far away as Japan, but to put one right there, in that place, was anathema to post-war British thinking. Valuable river-side property was to be used for offices, factories or public housing. End stop.

Besides, as described by the author, and easily understood if you think about it, it was a dumb idea and one which never should have worked. The first time I visited Southwark was in 1990, as a student.

A troop of us were taking a whirlwind, seven-day tour of London and Stratford. We took a walking tour of Surrey at an important period of transition in the project. The place looked a great deal as it did for Sam Wanamaker when he first skulked bankside and found the legendary, blackened plaque-on-the-side-of-a-brewery, that which was the sole indication that the playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote his plays had, at one time been … around here ... somewhere.

We saw the exact same plaque. But we also saw the construction area where they had recently discovered the remains of the Globe’s main competitor (for three years, anyway) Henslowe’s Rose Theatre.

Tearing down one factory in order to construct a new office block, they had expected to find evidence of the The Rose, but not with its foundations so well-preserved. The decision was yet to be made, in December 1990, as to what the fate of The Rose would be.

Meanwhile, the Globe was as yet a great muddy pit. We stared into the hole, and it stared back. Perhaps Wanamaker, who had not yet received the diagnoses of prostate cancer from which he would die in less than three years, stared at us through the windows of the nearby Shakespeare's Globe Trust, but that’s ridiculous.

The question, even then, as recounted by our tour guide, was why build this theater? They have so many great commercial theaters in the West End, new drama created for the Royal Court among so many others, and the National Theatre for the classics. What on earth would a replica Elizabethan theater provide? What if the work is just, you know, Shakespeare? You can get that absolutely anywhere in the world.

My next visit was on June 12, 1997 with my (then) girlfriend Toni. What we did not realize was that ours was the final tour through the completed Shakespeare’s Globe on the afternoon of the Royal Grand Opening. Seriously.

They had had a workshop season in the space the summer of 1995, and another in 1996. For two summers artistic director Mark Rylance and his company had been working the space, when the stage was still plywood, and the pit for the groundlings unfinished, testing the space for best use. How far apart should the posts supporting the stage be, how far from the edge of the stage? Are the doors to the tiring house working? There was time to correct these things, and best to do it prior to the office commencement of this new theater.

We received our tour, it all looked really good, but I never got to see a show there that summer. We were scheduled to leave in another two days and all the opening weekend performances were sold. After our tour we had tea in the adjacent restaurant, and as we relaxed the place began to fill with very important people in tuxedos and dresses.

Jesus, is that Michael Maloney? I stared at him for a moment as he talked to someone and he did a double-take at me, staring, and I looked away. Yeah, that was Michael Maloney. Later I saw him head into the loo and thought of cornering him to apologize but then I thought, wow, right, that would make the world such a better place, and didn’t do that.

If we had stayed any longer we would have been chased out, the Queen was coming. Seriously.

Not Sleep No More

Visiting the theater, as built, made me want to experience a show there in a way that it had not when it was merely a theory or a dream. That opportunity did not come until 2001, and even then it was to see one of the few non-period productions from Rylance’s first few years, the much-maligned fancy dress party Macbeth.

This was actually an excellently performed production, featuring Eve Best as the best Lady M. I have ever seen. It was a thoughtful, cerebral production, performed entirely in tuxedoes, except for Ms. Best.

“The real horror is that this production has been allowed to reach the public in this state.The real horror is that this production has been allowed to reach the public in this state.” - The Guardian

The script was cut in a truly magnificent way, and did, in fact, highlight the special advantages of the Globe stage. One example I love to give when working with the residency actors, is how Act IV was collapsed into one scene, cutting back and forth between the Weird Sisters' apparitions, the murder of Macduff's family, and the scene between Malcolm and Macdfuff where he learns of their fate.

All three scenes climax, one after the other, making what would otherwise seem drawn out and obvious into a highly immediate event.

 There is a story here. I can't remember what it is.

My brother served as a steward at Shakespeare’s Globe for a time, what we might call a “Red Coat”. As such, he was able to get us into one of the less-offered Heaven and Hell tours of the Globe when we returned in 2006. As might be guessed, the “heavens” is the house above the stage, and Hell below. We also got to experience everything inbetween, including standing on the stage, which was a new, exciting experience.

By this time, Rylance had stepped down from his directorship, leaving it in the hands of the more traditional Dominic Dromgoole. Rylance raised a few eyebrows when he announced he was uncertain as to whether the “Stratford Man’ had in fact written the plays, Dromgoole stomped those eyebrows right down again, a committed Stratford champion.

Kelly and I attended The Merchant of Venice on 2007. You can read my thoughts here. In brief it was well-done, enjoyable … except I was troubled by the amount of “set” which had been added, including a platform set into the groundlings area, accessible from a short bridge, evocative of the canals of Venice. There was a great deal of set dressing, around the columns, the front of the tiring house, which I found distracting and not very pleasant to look at.

My brother has described to me the truly remarkable works presented at the Globe in its brief history, I am sorry not to have ever seen Rylance perform there, or any of the works he has directed - not even in New York, where he recently remounted his all-male productions of Twelfth Night, the hallmark of his career at the Globe.

Regardless, even with the mere two productions I have seen performed there, it was evident the unique relationship Shakespeare's words have with his stage, illuminating them in a manner which is challenging on a proscenium stage, and producing them with a greater accessibility to and relationship with the audience.

This Wooden "O" (book)

Finally completed Barry Day’s This Wooden ‘O’ a book which is at once very interesting but also unsatisfying to read. This book remains as the only document of the struggles of Sam Wanamaker to have built what is now known as Shakespeare’s Globe, and as such was necessary reading.

Unfortunately, like many who write tales tangential to the works of Shakespeare, he indulges in a great many wearying verbal flourishes, and punctuates every page with quotes from the canon which are sometimes barely evocative of the subject at hand e.g.: the description of a minor 1970s city council appearance, juxtaposed with some obscure reference from Henry VI, presumably relevant because it has something to do with battle.

A couple years ago I expressed my frustration with the short shrift this author lends to Wanamaker’s experiences at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. As with much of the narrative, Day imagines what Wanamaker was thinking at any given moment in his life. There are very few quotes attributed Wanamaker, those evident are from available records. In other words (or, as Day would inevitably have written, “to wit;”) the author never met or spoke with his subject.

Sam Wanamaker (1936)

So he makes stuff up, as he did when denigrating Wanamaker’s Olde Globe Theatre experience in Cleveland. Day suggests that Wanamaker’s imagination was captured by the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago, which the Chicago native may have attended. However, upon witnessing a model Globe he had commission to promote the project back in 1964, Wanamaker was quoted as saying, “The years rolled back and I was that kid again in Cleveland.” (emphasis mine)

The quest to build the Globe began in Cleveland, not Chicago. He said so.

Recently, we took the kids to see Mr. Peabody & Sherman. While I was surprised by the sheer volume of poop jokes, what surprised and delighted me was Sherman’s use of the word apocryphal. That tales you learn in school - in school, from teachers - might actually be entirely false, is something most are unaware of.

Perhaps these tales were originally devised to teach some valuable lesson about honesty or integrity (the example in the film is Washington chopping down a cherry tree) but that they are not shared as tales is irresponsible and even dangerous. That’s how religions get started.

It did not surprise me that Day would flog the old saw about Queen Elizabeth loving the character of Falstaff so much in the Henry IV plays that she requested Shakespeare write a new tale for him, one of “Falstaff in love” and so he penned The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Never mind the fact that if your Queen asked for a story of Falstaff-in-love and you gave her a story of Falstaff-as-lascivious-scheming-would-be-multiple-rapist ... Well, that would be rude. The cold fact is Nicholas Rowe first pulled this story of his ass in 1709, it’s fanciful nonsense, like so many other references to Shakespeare I found in This Wooden ‘O’.

What is truly disappointing is that the exact same story is recounted as truth in Players, a book which otherwise toils valiantly to dispel precious legends of Shakespeare.

American Iago

From the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre 100th Season (1959) Souvenir Programme:

OTHELLO directed by Tony Richardson

Paul Robeson, a world-famous Othello, has played the part three times before, once in London, twice in America. His rare and intense power has not been seen on the English stage in twenty-three years.

Mary Ure, Desdemona, has shone in (John Osborne's) "Look Back in Anger".

Sam Wanamaker as Iago. During eight years in England this brilliant American actor-director has done consistently original work. His imaginative enterprise gave the New Shakespeare Theatre Liverpool a distinguished life.

Oh, and Cassio? Twenty-three year-old Albert Finney.

The former performance of Othello by Robeson in London was with Peggy Ashcroft in 1930. Twenty-nine years later, however, Robeson "was Othello but, alas, the years and his persecutions had left their mark and he no longer had the energy and the technique he once had," according to director Richardson.

However, rather than pick on the legendary performer, critics had knives out for the other American, Wanamaker, who was taken to task for his "gangster" performance.

"Iago should be disarming. Mr. Wanamaker ... is profoundly arming."
- Kenneth Tynan
Ironically - or perhaps, poetically - Sam Wanamaker never played Stratford again.

Source: This Wooden 'O' by Barry Day

How the British see it ...

Sam Wanamaker in Cleveland

The only true account of Wanamaker's life is one which really ties his life together with that of Shakespeare's Globe on Old Bankside. Whereas the Cleveland papers of the era raved about the painstaking efforts towards authenticity of this reduced-size Shakespearean theater, and went ga-ga over the high-energy, if abbreviated productions, this is what a British historian has to report sixty years later:

(Wanamaker) talked his way into the prestigious Goodman Theatre School at the Civic Repertory and made a precocious debut at seventeen. Prophetically he joined the Globe Shakespearean Theatre Group and a photograph of him taken only a year later shows him heroically posed in front of a sign board next to a plywood replica of the Globe in which the company was to perform. It was half size and a pretty slapdash job, by all accounts a gift from the British government to the 1936 'Great Lakes Festival (sic)' in Cleveland, Ohio.

Probably estimating audience interest all too accurately, each of the plays performed was cut down to 30 minutes. It was 'fast food Shakespeare'. Whatever its shortcoming, the pseudo-Globe caught his imagination. So what if the structure was somebody's best guess and the plays being performed severely truncated - the words were the real thing and he was there to hear them.

When he returned to the Goodman in his Fall vacation, not only was he the only 'professional' actor in the school by somehow acquiring an Equity card, he was now considered to be an authority on Shakespeare. Ironic since, to the end of his life, he never claimed Shakespeare expertise - simply enthusiasm.

In hindsight, it is easy to dismiss the events at the Old Globe at the Expo as cut-rate Shakespeare - but that's why those with authority in history (and I am not claiming to have such expertise - merely enthusiasm) owe it to themselves to read up on what people were saying at the time. What really got under my skin is how the author is on such a disdainful roll that he can't help but wonder at an actor's obtaining an Equity card "somehow" when the evidence of a long summer spent performing shows an average of six hours a day, six days a week isn't entirely obvious.

"'Professional,'" he says, in quotes. That's "right." Now excuse me, I need to finish reading your "book."

Source, Barry Day, This Wooden "O"

Un-American American

Sam Wanamaker as Iago

This totally rocks. I had no idea Sam Wanamaker played Iago to Paul Robeson's Othello.

In 1957 the MI5 were observing Mr. Wanamaker for being "one of those 'un-American Americans'" and for "disseminating extreme leftwing propaganda under the guise of culture." These bits of info were turned up earlier this year by Warwick U. professor Dr. Tony Howard, who has been investigating harassment of Mr. Robeson.

The performance in question was in 1959 for the RSC in Stratford. Wanamaker and Robeson had met in the 40s at anti-fascist meetings.

Sources:
The Guardian
Shakespeare's Globe

Sam Wanamaker

Sam Wanamaker was born in Chicago on 14 June 1919.

His first job in the theatre was acting in Shakespeare, ironically in a representative Globe which was one of the highlights of the Great Lakes’ World Fair (sic) in Cleveland, Ohio. This early experience significantly influenced his entire career.

In 1949 Sam paid his first visit to the UK to star in (a) film. - Shakespeare's Globe

Check the provided link for additional info on Sam and his cv, especially his British cv. The significance of his first visit to London, following his formative experiences in Cleveland, have become ensconced in myth.

He had apparently developed a burning desire to see the original theater where Shakespeare's plays had been performed, or what reconstruction thereof had been created to commemorate it. Shocked to discover that not only were there no functioning, or even non-functional Globe-like structure anywhere in the City, there was also merely a blackened plaque on the wall of a brewery to mark that Shakespeare's or anyone else's theater had even been near there.

And so began the almost fifty year drive of this Chicago-born, Cleveland-trained, Hollywood-employed and Washington-blacklisted, American theater artist to recreate a legitimate, accurate, professional recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. None would argue that due to his efforts, Shakespeare's Globe (which celebrates it's fourteen season this year - which was as long as the original Globe existed before burning to the ground) opened in the summer of 1997.

Wanamaker died in 1993.

Old Globe Theatre

Showtime in Cleveland: The Rise of a Regional Theater Center by John Vacha has a section on the Old Globe Theatre exhibit at the Great Lakes Exposition. There were approximately 30 actors employed for $15 a week, presenting six to eight of these performances (which ran 30 minutes to an hour) every day.

The repertoire included Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry VIII.

Henry VIII? WTF?

Reports suggest it was hard going early in the season, pulling in tiny audiences but by the end of the summer they were playing for hundreds of exposition visitors.

Now here's the weird thing ... I found an Old Globe facsimile playbill as I was cleaning my desk last month, and I have completely forgotten where I got it, I do not know if I printed it online, if someone dropped it off for me, or what, I simply cannot remember. But it does include a list of the company for some of the shows and I would like to follow-up on as many names as I can.

There are two stand-outs in the ensemble, from an historical perspective, including Arthur Kennedy, who went on to originate the role of Biff in Death of a Salesman and was also in the original production of The Crucible. David Wayne also went onto greater success in Broadway productions of Finian's Rainbow and Mr. Roberts.

And then there's young Sam Wanamaker, who at the age of seventeen played mostly "spearcarriers" even in these abbreviated productions. He would later act and direct in films, become a target of HUAC, and most notably establish Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London.