It’s a perfect Berkshires afternoon at an unprepossessing picnic table on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. I’m listening to Daniela Varon, the daring, accomplished director of Red Velvet, Kelley Curran, the richly subtle embodiment of 19th century professional actress Ellen Tree, and John Douglas Thompson, who plays legendary black actor Ira Aldridge talk about their experiences rehearsing the play. Aldridge, born a free black man in New York City in 1807, attended the African Free School where he benefitted from a classical education. He later acted in New York at the African Company, saw that his opportunities were limited in the U.S. before the Civil War, and sailed for England. He built a fine reputation outside of London, and finally appeared as Othello at Covent Garden at the age of twenty-six.
That engagement is central to the dramatic story of Red Velvet, and sets Aldridge on a course that leads him to take Shakespeare to the continent, winning critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences. While presenting the facts of this courageous man’s life, the English playwright Lolita Chakrabarti invented a powerful narrative, first performed in London in 2012, of Aldridge’s imagined personal reactions to circumstance — because while it might be said that he was born at the right place and time for his considerable achievements, there’s no denying he and his white, English wife of twenty years struggled mightily against racism and discrimination every step of the way.
Our little group has just left rehearsal, where my first shock was experiencing the contrast between Curran’s sensitive Ellen Tree in Red Velvet after recently enjoying her over-the-top, constantly venting Adrianna in Comedy of Errors, a Shakespearean romp already playing to packed houses. Shaded by the umbrella, she explains her ambition as wanting “to expand the boundaries of our imaginations.” I’ve just seen her develop a delicate, difficult moment as Desdemona/Ellen with Othello/Ira/John. Now I recall the director of Comedy of Errors, Taibe Magar, telling me that it was Curran who suggested giving the actors in Comedy of Errors New Jersey accents for the current production! I’m sitting with a young actress with depth and range as well as imagination.
Varon reminds me that Red Velvet is challenging in its historical and emotional complexity, and that it doesn’t stop there. It’s also theatrically complicated — taking place in 1833 Covent Garden and in 1867 in an unnamed theatre in Lodz, Poland. It has one small, clear scene written in German, and there are many different accents for the cast to master with the aid of dialogue coaches — including a struggling young Polish journalist (Halina/Christianna Nelson), who tries to win serious assignments, and eventually, respect by lying to get an interview with Aldridge at a time when women were seriously discouraged from seriousness in that profession. Varon trusts her cast and her audience. She won’t back away from any of it, or from the playwright’s occasional, deliberate anachronisms to remind us that Aldridge was a black, 19th Century American in Europe, constantly struggling through disjointed situations.
Respecting the obvious talents around me, I ask Thompson, (whom the New York Times has called “one of the most compelling actors of his generation”) what it means to him to inhabit one of the greatest actors of the 19th Century. Thompson’s answer is multilayered and deeply honest, but his most immediate remark is that getting so close to Aldridge might “break” him. And the rest of us react with shock. After all, John Douglas Thompson has tackled Shakespeare and O’Neill, and already played in iconic shows like The Emperor Jones, Hedda Gabler, Tamburlaine, Othello, and The Iceman Cometh. He has won two OBIE’s, and a Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award among other accolades. But he tells us Aldridge wasn’t just the first black actor to play Shakespeare in England; he was by all accounts, one of the best. “He was courageous where the stakes couldn’t have been higher,” continued Thompson. Although under constant pressure and with scant stage training, “he developed a new technique of acting — working from the inside of human feelings and understanding outward.” He spoke out against slavery at the end of every performance while the English were still wrangling about whether or not to ban slavery in their colonies. He fought theatrical nepotism by doing his own public relations, creating an exotic African persona for himself out of whole cloth.
“I wonder,” said Thompson, “if presented with the same set of adversities, I could do what he did, achieve what he achieved?” Ira Aldridge’s love of theatre was so all-encompassing, he wouldn’t abandon it no matter what the personal cost. He toured hundreds and hundreds of miles on terrible roads in conveyances that were beyond uncomfortable at an age when, as Thompson put it, “sixty was the new eighty.” He not only played black roles, but in white face, Lear, Macbeth and Shylock. He brought Shakespeare to Eastern Europe and Russia for the first time. He intended to return to the United States after Emancipation to show Americans what a black actor could do with the classics of our culture, but he died at the age of sixty while on tour in Poland. “There’s nothing like comparing myself to a legend,” Thompson mused, almost to himself.
As Thompson became more and more animated and articulate in his praise of the historical Ira Aldridge, the rest of us smiled. It was clear the only kind of breaking that’s going to happen to John Douglas Thompson in Red Velvet is breaking away even further from the rest of the pack — like Ira Aldridge.
Red Velvet will be at The Tina Packer Playhouse at Shakespeare & Company from August 14th through September 13th. Previews are from August 6th to August 13th. To buy tickets and for further information about the Shakespeare & Company season, click here for the Berkshire Edge calendar, call the box office at 413-637-3353 or go on-line to general@shakespeare.org.
