There’s a regular Trojan Spring underway in Staunton right now; in addition to the ASC’s upcoming production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, two MFA projects from Mary Baldwin College’s program in Shakespeare and performance will treat on the subject; both of them new works. My own Ballad of Dido opens later in the spring, but just on the horizon is Asae Dean’s Cressida, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida that draws on other sources to tell the eponymous heroine’s story.
Partly to help me get my head around my own project, I sat down with Dean and chatted with her about some of the challenges of producing a new work from an already existing one. The question most on my mind was why this adaptation instead of a production of Shakespeare’s play: by Dean’s estimate, 85% of the Cressida script is from Shakespeare’s original, and we’ve all seen productions of Shakespeare’s plays that have used less of the received text without advertising themselves as adaptations.
“I’m interested in how we judge women for their sexual behavior, for sexual assaults, for their experience of love than I am in Shakespeare’s story,” says Dean. Shakespeare’s story has a lot of those elements, but I’m more interested in telling a whole story that thoroughly explores those issues than in exploring Shakespeare’s story.” Focussing on Cressida’s story helped Dean see holes Shakespeare left that would be interesting to fill, and she turned to Chaucer, Homer, Marlowe, other works by Shakespeare, and other poets to help fill those gaps and explore Cressida as a character “who refuses to not have agency, even though she doesn’t.”
Fair enough. But I couldn’t help but wonder why use Troilus and Cressida as a springboard to a new project. There are certainly better known, and arguably better plays in the canon to choose from. “There’s something more realistic and more disappointing about Troilus and Cressida as a love story than Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra,” says Dean. “Troilus and Cressida don’t kill themselves, so they just have to live through heartbreak, which is probably more relevant to most of our lives. Troilus and Cressida is a story where everyone loses, and it’s no one’s fault.”
Rather than try to find a more idealized version of the characters as Dryden did in his Restoration adaptation, Dean doesn’t shy away from the problems of Troilus and Cressida‘s world that have attracted modern audiences. By sharpening the focus on Cressida, Dean shows us a society burdened by endless war, and a generation raised without a real hope of victory, or even peace, through the lens of a character who is unable to see a path that isn’t hurtful, and who never once considers suicide. “This might be the idealist in me,” says Dean. “But for some beguiling reason, Troilus and Cressida prefer living, even if it means a lot of pain.”
Asae Dean’s Cressida, which she also directs, gets its world premier at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA on January 30th and 31st at 8 PM. It features the acting talents of Brian Falbo, David Ashton, Johnny Adkins, and Melissa Tolner. You can read more on Dean’s blog: http://asaedeandirects.blogspot.com/
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