Putting Shakespeare's Dog to Sleep

Sail Boston 2000, the zealously hyped Tall Ships extravaganza that filled the city with a multitude of international visitors from July 11 through 16, left scores of questions roiling in its wake. Among the most troubling and perhaps least answerable of these questions is by what sequence of events a respected Canadian theatre company came to be, in effect, banned in Boston.

Six performances of an adaptation of Leon Rooke's prize-winning novel Shakespeare's Dog were to have been presented by Caravan Stage aboard the 90-foot Canadian Tall Ship Amara Zee, which Sail Boston had assigned a berth on Museum Wharf alongside the Children's Museum. Two took place. The scheduled opening, July 7, was rained out. In response to complaints about the content of Shakespeare's Dog from a handful of audience members in attendance at the actual opening, on Saturday, July 8, Sail Boston project manager Dusty S. Rhodes demanded that Caravan censor its show or relinquish its remaining dates.

The company refused to comply. When artistic Director Paul Kirby announced Caravan's intention to complete the Boston run, Dusty Rhodes warned that if Caravan insisted on performing the unexpurgated script, she would withhold money owed the Canadian troupe by Sail Boston. The July 13 performance went on as scheduled.

The next afternoon, however, the Children's Museum conveniently discovered what its subsequent press release called "a significant change in the structure of the boardwalk" adjacent to the ship, and used safety concerns — real, imagined, or wished into being — as an excuse to prevent Caravan Stage from continuing to use Museum Wharf. Audience members who arrived for the 9 p.m. show on Friday, July 14 were barred from entering the spectators' seating area by yellow tape that made the stretch of wharf beside the Amara Zee resemble a crime scene.

Museum Wharf, located on Fort Point Channel near a tourist replica of the Boston Tea Party ship H.M.S. Beaver, is a wooden structure containing some elements that may be a century old. It runs the length of the red brick warehouse building whose principal occupant is the Children's Museum. The Amara Zee was docked immediately behind a former restaurant barge that now houses the Children's Museum's day camp, and about a dozen yards away from a construction site between the museum and the Evelyn Moakley Bridge. Access to the boardwalk adjacent to the Camp on the Channel remains unimpeded. Access to the rest of the boardwalk, an identifiably separate structure, will be blocked indefinitely.

Childs Engineering of Medfield, Mass., the company that handed the Children's Museum the means to shut down the show, is a structural engineering firm focused on waterfront properties. The same experts had declared the boardwalk safe only three days before. No "structural changes" had been noted after the first performance. No one in the Caravan Stage company noticed any shift or gap in the boardwalk at any point. The "three-to-four inch gap between the boardwalk and the sea wall" cited by museum spokesperson Amy Corcoran was not apparent to casual observers, or to those familiar with the site.

It is possible that the weight of about 200 spectators seated on bleachers opposite the Amara Zee might have caused some settling. A likelier possibility is that activity at the neighboring construction site, where pile-drivers had been hammering pylons into the mud at bottom of Fort Point Channel, may have had a measurable effect on Museum Wharf. A third possibility is that the change in the boardwalk, if real, might have been caused by normal fluctuations in a structure built on wet sediment, but that Childs Engineering picked up its cue from Children's Museum officials, and told them just what they wanted to hear. Childs Engineering has not been talking to the press; the individual who conducted the inspection has not returned phone calls.

The relationship between Caravan Stage and the Children's Museum had been somewhat queasy from the start. As the Amara Zee approached Boston, the 18 cast and crew members aboard the ship learned that Sail Boston organizers had handed them over to the museum. It was a not a partnership they had sought. It was one they considered dubiously appropriate, and one that surprised them — especially since they had submitted a description of the play to Sail Boston warning that Shakespeare's Dog might not be suitable for children under 12.

Evidently, nobody at Sail Boston or the Children's Museum bothered to read the material or look at the script. No one seems to have had any prior awareness of Leon Rooke's novel, or to have felt a need to do any homework. The subliterate thinking that shaped perceptions of the play at both Sail Boston and the museum seems to have been grounded in some identification of "Shakespeare" with educational uplift and "dog" with children's entertainment.

The Children's Museum staff seems not to have considered safety an especially urgent issue at first. When Paul Kirby viewed Museum Wharf in advance, he requested that the museum consult an engineer regarding safety concerns; the first such evaluation of the site, which determined that the wharf could accommodate the event, was not completed until after the first performance.

The museum's focus was on marketing. When Caravan Stage arrived in Boston, the Children's Museum had already created its own flyer for Shakespeare's Dog. The six performances were listed in the museum's calendar. Without having first been consulted, Caravan Stage found itself being portrayed as a Children's Museum event.

Attendees at Caravan's performances, which might otherwise have been free, were now to be charged $10 a ticket. The boxoffice take was to be split 50-50 by the Children's Museum and Sail Boston. The Children's Museum says that the charge was intended to earn back its marketing expenses and staff overtime. What Sail Boston's cut was intended to cover is anybody's guess.

The Children's Museum, though designated the official Children's Host for Sail Boston, had created no Tall Ships activities of its own. Apparently, the museum staff was eager for a piece of the action, and had no reservations about using someone else's non-profit event for greater involvement in Sail Boston and perhaps a bit of institutional fundraising. "We didn't really mind if they wanted to make money off us," says Caravan co-producer Adriana Kelder, however. "We know what non-profits have to go through for funds."

While museum staff promoted Shakespeare's Dog as innocuous family fun, Caravan Stage was forthright about the nature of the piece. An article by Louis Porter in the July 8 Boston Globe correctly stressed that the play deals with "inequities, disease, and crime in the late 16th century." Porter quoted Paul Kirby to the effect that Shakespeare's Dog was not "light summer theatre. Theatre is supposed to be challenging." The article clearly stated that the play might "not be appropriate for children under 12."

In addition to selling $10 tickets, meanwhile, the Children's Museum distributed a large number of complimentary tickets to trustees, patrons, and staff for the opening performance. Many of these individuals, oblivious to the kind of performance they were going to see, brought children. According to the museum's Amy Corcoran, "15 or 16 individuals" made "written or spoken complaints." Corcoran describes these individuals, who remain unidentified, as "donors, trustees, administrators... people connected to the museum."

It was after Children's Museum officials had described the show to her as "offensive and sexually explicit" that Dusty Rhodes, who never attended a performance, ordered the play cleaned up or shut down. She made her demands for changes without bothering to investigate the matter personally, or to send anyone from Sail Boston to observe the show in an official capacity. "There was no room for negotiation," says Adriana Kelder. "What she did to us was blackmail."

Kelder and Kirby held a meeting with company members at which everyone agreed that the only course of action was to continue performing the piece unedited. Rhodes, meanwhile, opted to withhold payment of the remaining $6000 owed the company by Sail Boston, which had contracted to subsidize six performances. Determined that the show would still go on, Caravan Stage obtained legal assistance from Framingham attorney Mark Tilden.

The Children's Museum, meanwhile, backed away from the production. At the museum's insistence, a disclaimer was inserted in the program stating that while the museum staff had been under the impression that the show was "PG-13," they now recognized that "the content is R-rated." (Those familiar with both Shakespeare's Dog and recent PG-13 films might disagree.) The museum staff stopped selling tickets once the controversy erupted; if the show had continued its run, admission would have been free.

On July 14, a Boston Globe ran the first of two articles on the incident. Reporter David Arnold cited a remarkable pronouncement by Dusty Rhodes: "If it's unacceptable to some, it's unacceptable to us." The piece noted that Mark Tilden had reviewed Caravan's contract with Sail Boston, and "concluded that only mechanical failure or inclement weather can stop the show — not the `artistic opinions' of Dusty Rhodes."

Accordingly, some means of shutting down the show that would avoid the appearance of censorship seems to have been in order. Evidence suggests that the Children's Museum looked for and found such a solution late in the day on Friday, July 14, following the appearance of the embarrassing Globe coverage. Between 4:30 and 5:00 p.m., recalls Adriana Kelder, Caravan Stage was told "there might be a problem with the boardwalk." Following a repeat inspection early in the evening by Childs Engineering, Children's Museum CEO Lou Casagrande ordered the area around the Amara Zee tied off. The museum issued a statement claiming that "settlement of the pier has occurred, particularly on the supporting piles and deck."

Interestingly, the Children's Museum's press release did not claim that Childs Engineering actually found the boardwalk unsafe. It stated that "Childs' expert opinion is that they `cannot say the boardwalk is safe.'" The area remains closed off, the yellow tape having been replaced by chain-link barriers.

Many members of Boston's arts community instantly read this maneuver as a typically Bostonian way of dealing with undesirable art. Its timing inevitably suggests a link between the controversy and the purported deus ex machina of safety concerns. "These two issues are completely separate," the museum's Amy Corcoran insists.

Caravan's attorney feels otherwise. "This whole thing has been contrived," Mark Tilden told the Globe. "Why on a Friday after 5 p.m. do they do this when they know we have no time for recourse?" This tactic is well known to public relations professionals: if a particular move has potential to generate bad publicity, save it for late on Friday, preferably after normal business hours, when those affected will be least able to defend themselves. This guarantees that protest will be muted, and that there won't be any press coverage for two to four days. The Boston Globe reported the shutdown on Monday, July 17, the day after the Boston run of Shakespeare's Dog would have ended anyway.

It seems probable that Sail Boston and the Children's Museum were following in the footsteps of Mary Driscoll, legendary Gorgon of the Boston Licensing Commission, who in the 1940s and '50s would use any means to shut down entertainment she deemed morally questionable -- like personal appearances by transsexual Christine Jorgensen. Recent instances of Driscollism have included inspectional harrassment that preceded the closings of the White Elephant Gallery and Jamaica Plain's Bad Girrls Studios. The usual strategy is selective enforcement of obscure ordinances, or discovery of a fire, health, or licensing code violation — frequently trumped up for the occasion. Such tactics cinched the 1999 closure of the Safari Club, a South End facility for gay men.

A number of galleries and performance spaces, particularly in areas ripe for development, like Fort Point Channel, have undergone successions of inspections, where the same city inspector has returned and each time cited as a fresh violation some feature not previously deemed to be a problem. The Menino administration, whose support of the arts has been among the weakest of any city government in the nation, has addressed artists' protestations in spotty and halfhearted ways that seem calculated to shut people up.

The Kingston, Ontario-based Caravan Stage had approached Boston with higher expectations. For months the company has been working its way north from the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, where Paul Kirby has recently had a teaching commitment at the University of South Florida. Since April 18, when its production of Shakespeare's Dog premiered in St. Petersburg, an archconservative venue where the show went on without a murmur of complaint, Caravan has performed the play more than 25 times along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States.

The Caravan StageBarge Amara Zee is the creation of Caravan Stage cofounders Kirby and Kelder. Modeled after Thames River sailing barges, the ship was expressly designed to serve as a floating theatre space. Equipped with its own power supply, the vessel is built to meet the demands of staging a performance, and for flexibility of movement under bridges and through canals. In Caravan StageBarge productions, the actors use all visible parts of the ship as playing areas. In Shakespeare's Dog, they perform on the edge of the dock in front of the Amara Zee, along the entire length of the deck, and in the ship's rigging.

Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, and various private sources, the Caravan StageBarge presents works by Canadian authors. Jeff Pitcher of Newfoundland, who wrote the script for Shakespeare's Dog, also adapted Trapped: A Whale of a Tale, Caravan's previous touring show (which Caravan brought to Boston last year), from Farley Mowat's "A Whale for the Killing." The maritime theatre has been traveling to Canadian and U.S. ports since 1998. The company's mission is to bring theatre to underserved audiences; whenever possible, Caravan performances are free.

The piece Caravan is now touring is well known in Canada. Rooke, a U.S.-born Canadian author, won the Governor General's Award for Shakespeare's Dog in 1983. The award, bestowed annually on a Canadian work of exceptional literary merit, is Canada's most coveted prize for fiction. Recipients have included Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale, 1985) and Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient, 1992).

First published in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf and now available here in a 158-page Ecco Press edition, Shakespeare's Dog is a brief but richly textured fusion of humor, scholarship, language, and empathetic imagination. It tells the story of William Shakespeare's early domestic life in Stratford-Upon-Avon, as seen through the eyes of his dog, a mongrel named Hooker. In bringing the work to the stage, Pitcher has made alterations to the story, but retains much of Rooke's canine feistiness, quasi-Elizabethan eloquence, and politicized compassion.

On July 22, this writer saw the first of two performances of the play at Derby Wharf in Salem, Mass., where it was offered as part of the annual Salem Maritime Festival. Over 200 people were present. Some had traveled from Boston to see what the fuss was about; most seemed unaware of the controversy. Many people brought children, the majority of whom watched with rapt attention, caught up in the theatricality of the piece even when they might have had trouble following the text.

The play has been dismissively described in print as a "racy spoof." Caravan's own publicity calls it "a bawdy carnival." Paul Kirby more accurately describes the piece as "a serious comic play about the people who have no voice in our society." At its best, Pitcher's adaptation captures the ways in which lives both extraordinary and humble are caught up in "the mad flutter of history." Its content is unlikely to shock anyone who has ever seen a Shakespeare play or observed a dog.

It's a handsome production. Among the strongest elements are Christine Williston's beautifully evocative costumes. The set, by Kelder and Kirby, makes full use of the ship. Its centerpiece is a 15-foot circular structure that transmutes into a wheel of torture, a Ferris wheel, and the wheel of life.

The company's style and aesthetic have evolved from its origins in puppet theatre: Kirby and Kelder began by performing puppet shows out of a horse-drawn wagon 30 years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia. The four canine characters in Shakespeare's Dog are portrayed by human actors, but their stylized costumes and movements, like those of a pair of swans suspended high above the stage, are rooted in both puppetry and dance. In the play, Queen Elizabeth I is represented by a tall, comically regal orange-haired puppet.

Not everyone in the young, dedicated, predominantly Canadian cast is up to the vocal demands of Rooke and Pitcher's heightened language, but the company works well together as an ensemble. Liverpudlian actor Simon Wright handles the title role with poise and authority. Pitcher's Anne Hathaway isn't quite the lusty, hot-tempered Chaucerian wench she is in the novel, though Sarah Southwell puts fire into Hathaway's climactic confrontation with Shakespeare, and she does get to call him a "loathsome highbrow word-puker."

Fans of the novel may object to some of the liberties Pitcher takes with his source. Rooke taps into the tradition, accepted by most biographers as linked to fact, that William Shakespeare was involved in a deer-poaching incident as a young man. Here, the plot is set in motion by the killing of one of "the Queen's swans." (The change does provide an excuse for cast members representing swan spirits to hang airily from the rigging as they haunt the swan-killer, Hooker.) Pitcher's script eliminates some characters, fuses others, and substantially enlarges the character of Shakespeare's sister Joan in ways that might have been prompted by Virginia Woolf's musings about Shakespeare's sister's hypothetically stifled genius. The radically altered ending evokes Woolf's Orlando.

The Boston Globe reported that "the animals have gutter mouths," but the script makes scant use of words that contemporary audiences would recognize as profane. The two male canine characters indulge in a few leg-lifts, and at one point two dogs sniff each other's hindquarters. The two canine couplings are brief and non-explicit. There are mildly bawdy spoken passages, and Hathaway makes reference to Shakespeare's "squirts between my legs." Shakespeare's Dog is no more "offensive and sexually explicit" than most city-sponsored Commonwealth Shakespeare productions offered free each summer on Boston Common. Ribaldry is, in any case, organic to Shakespeare and fully in the spirit of Elizabethan culture.

One element in Shakespeare's Dog that may have struck a nerve in both Sail Boston and the corporate honchos on the Children's Museum's Board of Trustees is that Pitcher's script, like Rooke's novel, takes Shakespeare to task for his tendency to curry favor at court while turning a blind eye to the problems of his time. The production ends with a coda critical of globalization and unfettered corporate greed. When actors condemn the primacy of "syphilitic wealth and ethical gangrene," and lament "our dreams bought and sold," they inescapably conjure up visions of Dusty Rhodes and Sail Boston.

Ms. Rhodes, the subject of a front-page muckraking piece in the July 17 Boston Globe ("Push for Tall Ships Leaves Hostility in Its Wake"), micromanages the business of Sail Boston in a way that honors the Beantown tradition of exploiting non-profit status for personal gain, financial and otherwise. She carries on in the grand manner of Josiah Spaulding, Jr., whose profit-making non-profit Wang Theatre has been a stepping-stone to a personal empire larded with power and wealth. "I'm totally not motivated by money," Rhodes told the Globe. Be that as it may, she stands to rake in several hundred thousand dollars in fees, beyond the $1.2 million she says are needed to reimburse her firm for expenses.

The non-profit Sail Boston's own board members admit that their organization is little more than a carapace inhabited by Dusty Rhodes and Conventures, Inc., her for-profit management consulting firm focused on the orchestration of events. The board is largely a figurehead structure. Both Rhodes and Conventures are deeply enmeshed in the greed-driven politics of Mayor Thomas Menino's millennial Boston. Rhodes apparently views herself as a distillation of the city's essence. Paul Kirby insists that when he asked her who acts as arbiter of local taste, Rhodes replied, "I do. I know the standards and tastes of Boston."

Of all the American cities that have hosted Tall Ships visits this year, Boston, Land of the Big Dig, is the only destination where the event was placed in the hands of a private, profit-making business enterprise. The all-volunteer staff of Sail Baltimore, for example, worked for free. Sail Boston did not even own its own logo; T-shirt royalties went to Conventures, Inc. Quoted in the July 17 Boston Globe, Walter Cronkite, honorary chairman of the nonprofit Operation Sail, whose participation in the Boston Tall Ships presentation was spurned, noted that the involvement of Conventures was "contrary to the spirit" of Tall Ships events.

Rhodes, 51, a mother of six from suburban Weston, may consider mimed impressions of doggy antics verboten, but her own behavior has inspired Sail Boston staff to refer to their boss in decidedly canine terms. She has a reputation for being ruthless, abrasive, confrontational, and implacably stubborn. By July 21, when articles ridiculing Boston for the Shakespeare's Dog incident began to appear in the Canadian National Post, the Ottawa Sun, and other publications north of the border, she had stopped talking to the press. She could not be reached for this report. Sail Boston phone numbers were disconnected soon after the Tall Ships left town.

A decade ago, the incident would have raised a hue and cry. In 2000, Caravan Stage received little support beyond the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. A few members of the Boston arts community, like Kathleen Bitetti of the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, called or wrote both Sail Boston and the Children's Museum to protest the treatment of Caravan Stage. Otherwise, the Boston cultural establishment chose to ignore the affair. "Wasn't that some kind of non-Equity thing?" sneered a Boston official of Actors Equity. Despite the Globe coverage, the artistic director of one arts organization near the Children's Museum remained oblivious to the existence of any controversy. Others who were more aware could not have cared less.

There was a widespread reluctance to admit that the Children's Museum could be guilty of an act of censorship or even a gaffe. More tellingly, there was widespread fear of tangling with the moneyed forces that run Boston, or with corporate entities that have become the new power brokers — and the new censors — in the arts. In the brave new cultural millennium, where the animating principle is corporate image, artists are learning not to make waves or cause trouble, and to produce good, clean fun. The present funding structure of most American museums encourages commercialism, caution, and suppression of controversy. The flight from public funding to corporate ownership of the arts — a flight into territory where First Amendment protections do not apply — is taking its toll.

Caravan's Paul Kirby has complained both privately and to the press that efforts to abort the Boston run of Shakespeare's Dog amounted to "a clear violation of the First Amendment." What this Canadian artist may not realize is that when an event like Sail Boston 2000 is largely privatized, the First Amendment favors the organizing entity. (It was for this reason that the U.S, Supreme Court upheld the right of the private group that organizes Boston's St. Patrick's Day parade to exclude a gay and lesbian contingent.) A private institution like the Boston Children's Museum has a right to censor its own events.

Apart from people with close involvements in the Menino administration, the dominant strain among the Childrem's Museum's trustees and overseers is corporate. Its officers include representatives of Continental Wingate Mortgage Group, Fidelity Investments, Fidelity Brokerage Group, Wang Laboratories, Polaroid, Genzyme, Hale and Dorr, Citizens Leasing Corporation, The Partnership, and John Hancock Insurance. Some have ties to behemoths like Fleet Bank. At any gathering of the museum's officers and benefactors, Dusty Rhodes would be completely in her element.

The Children's Museum is, of course, following the zeitgeist of contemporary American cultural institutions, whose survival has come to demand an immersion in corporate values. As somebody says in the closing moments of Shakespeare's Dog, "Every era has its plague."