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No holds Bard
SFA examines Two Shakespearean Actors and their deadly rivalry

By Eric McHenry

	Swordplay within a play within a play: SFA seniors Seth Decker and Eric Rubb rehearse a fight scene from Two Shakespearean Actors, in which their characters rehearse a fight scene from Macbeth. That's Decker playing John Ryder playing Macduff on the left, versus Rubb playing Edwin Forrest playing Macbeth on the right. Photo by Albert l'Etoile

In a dimly lit rehearsal space on the first floor of SFA, some seniors are nursing a 150-year-old grudge. They sit around a table sipping invisible beer and deriding an Englishman who isn't present to defend himself.

"Ever seen Macready act? I have seen him many, many times. Each time - it gets even worse. . . . "

"I saw his Richard in Philadelphia on his last tour. I don't much like that sort of acting. It's not why I go to the theater."

"People like it," a lone voice protests.

"English people like it."

"Not just English people. He's performed all around the . . ."

"Then people who want to be English people. They like it."

And there, as Shakespeare himself has it, is the rub. The resentment 19th-century American thespians felt toward William Charles Macready, dramatically documented in Richard Nelson's play Two Shakespearean Actors, was class resentment. Rooted in self-destructive jealousy and jingoism, it was less a conflict over Shakespeare than a conflict out of Shakespeare.

The two actors of Nelson's title are the English Macready and the American Edwin Forrest - celebrated performers whose stylistic differences carried great symbolic importance at a time when America was struggling to declare its own artistic identity. The play, which SFA will present December 13 through 17 on the Boston University Theatre Mainstage, chronicles their sustained, snarling rivalry, its appropriation by groups of Anglophiles and xenophobes, and the catastrophic consequences - riots that killed at least 22 people.

"It's a fascinating part of theater history," says Eve Muson, executive assistant at the theatre arts division, who chose and is directing the play. "The kids are amazed by the thought that theater would be so important to people that they'd kill over whether or not a play went on. It's a stunning idea to our students."

In 1849, after years of exchanged snipes and snubs in the press, Macready and Forrest - played in the SFA production by Matt Gould (SFA'01) and Eric Rubb (SFA'01) - staged competing productions of Macbeth at nearby New York theaters.

"This was during the great period of actor-managers," Muson explains. "These guys were, in addition to being excellent artists, excellent entrepreneurs, and they would engage companies to tour with them. One of the reasons Two Shakespearean Actors is a fun production is that we get to see portions of both Macbeths. We get to explore the two different acting styles of the time. And, of course, there are no video or audio references, so we have to interpret diaries and reviews and what we know of theater history to create these two different kinds of acting companies."

A contemporaneous illustration of the Astor Place riots, from the collection of the New York Historical Society.

On May 8, 1849, a group of Forrest partisans rose in the Astor Place Opera House and pelted Macready with eggs, shutting down his performance and, for the moment, his final American tour. The next day, 47 representatives of the city's social elite, including Washington Irving and Herman Melville, published an open letter in the New York Herald urging Macready to take the stage again. It promised him that "the good sense and respect for order, prevailing in this community, will sustain you on the subsequent nights of your performances."

When word got out that the petition had been successful and Macready was to perform again, a group of political nativists papered the city with inflammatory handbills. Directing protesters to the "English Aristocratic Opera House," they stated, "We advocate no violence, but a free expression of opinion to all public men! Workingmen! Freemen! Stand by your lawful rights!" On May 10, a volatile crowd of more than 10,000 converged upon Astor Place. They broke its windows and battered at its doors, dispersing only when panicked National Guardsmen opened fire on the mob.

Nelson's Tony-nominated script examines the pettiness and recklessness of the two actors, suggesting that Forrest, in particular, used class antagonism as a publicity tool. But the play also reveals their devastation at the chaos they'd helped create, and their sincere devotion to theater. Two Shakespearean Actors, Muson says, is both of the stories its title suggests - the story of two very real reverences for the author of Macbeth, and of two failures to internalize its lessons.

"The play is full of parallels to our own time," says Muson. "Art and politics have always been very uneasy bedfellows."

Performances of Two Shakespearean Actors will take place at 8 p.m. December 13 through 16, and at 2 p.m. December 17, on the BU Theatre Mainstage. Admission is $10, $7 for students and seniors, and $5 for Huntington Theatre Company subscribers and members of the BU community. For more information, call 353-3390.

8 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations