Manfred Follow-up: Omar F. Miranda

Omar F. Miranda, one of the organizers of the recent Manfred performance at the Red Bull Theater in New York City, discusses the humor and eeriness of Byron’s drama with K-SAA. He also reflects on adapting the play to maintain the full-length text, and details what's next for a play witnessing a remarkable revival. 

How did seeing the staged reading of Manfred enrich your understanding and enjoyment of the written text? Did it bring to life any elements of the written text that you were not expecting?

As my talk from the symposium suggested, staging Manfred – especially as a dramatic reading – is a worthwhile pursuit for making Byron’s play accessible in a new and exciting way. The Red Bull Theater’s adaptation of it, which took place at NYC’s Loreto Theater on April 20, 2017, offers an excellent case in point of the benefits of seeing the play as a performance. Take, for example, the actors’ placement on the large stage, which emphasized Manfred’s isolation: how he is an outcast who is caught in a liminal phase between the human and superhuman worlds. Positioned at the front of the stage, Manfred (played by Jason Butler Harner) stood apart from the rest of the characters / actors throughout the entire performance. While the mortals (the Chamois Hunter, the Abbot of St. Maurice, Manuel, and Herman) – all men – sat upstage right behind Manfred, the immortals (the Spirits, the Witch of Alps, Destinies, Nemesis, and Arimanes), who were cast as all women by director Michael Barakiva, were seated opposite them upstage left. As the plot unfolded before us, we were made continuously aware that Manfred could neither identify nor connect with any other being – not even the Phantom of Astarte.  The NYC staging also allowed the opportunity to foreground the play’s humor. This may come as a surprise because one usually thinks about Manfred as a cosmic drama that centers on its protagonist’s Weltschmerz and guilt. A good illustration of this occurred during Manfred’s opening monologue, when he, in his attempt to conjure the spirits of earth and air, fails to summon them not just once but twice. Combine such writing with a talented actor such as Butler Harner, who used silence and bedazzled facial expressions to his advantage, and you succeed in earning several laughs from the audience. Along with many other instances like this one, it became clear that the play contains light-hearted and indeed humorous moments. As an audience member, rather than as a conventional reader, I took away from the experience that Byron was having some fun with writing his drama – an idea that had never occurred to me before. 

Given your understanding of the intimacy of connection between Romantic-era theater and the Gothic, did you feel the staged reading of Manfred brought to life some of the concerns regarding the Romantic/Gothic divide to a contemporary audience? Did you experience some of the fear and terror that Byron creates in the written text?

My answer to both questions is yes. Our stage production transformed the more traditional, individual experience of reading Byron’s play, especially by emphasizing the text’s gothic aspects through the actors’ use of vocal variety. A good example of this was when the Destinies, Nemesis, and Arimanes all appeared together on stage – aghast and indignant that Manfred had gained access into the Hall of Arimanes because of his supernatural powers. When the actors read their lines either in unison or in rapid succession, the characters came across as a threatening and intimidating collective unit; whether the actors varied their tempo or pitch, they succeeded at producing the haunting and “fearful” effect that Byron intended for this wonderful scene.  Another moment that allowed the eerie features of the text to come into relief occurred when the actor who played Arimanes, Jacqueline Antaramian, uttered her first of only five words in the drama. In response to Nemesis, who asks “Great Arimanes, doth thy will avouch / The wishes of this mortal?”, Antaramian sneered at Manfred for about ten seconds – in complete silence – before uttering “yea” in a prolonged, menacing, and even chilling fashion (2.4.80-1). Her manipulation of sound and facial gesture as well as her specialized delivery of the word itself signaled to me once again the benefits of translating this play from the page to the stage. Through her acting skill, she made evident that brevity can be equally as powerful on stage as one of Manfred’s lengthy monologues. Because of this performance, I not only read Arimanes’s first word in a completely different way but am more generally inclined to imagine how actors can animate each of the play’s lines in varied ways. 

Certain scenes and lines from the written text were cut for the purposes of the staged reading. If you were directing Manfred, what elements of Byron’s play would you bring to the fore? What would you cut from the play entirely? And why?

There are two ways to frame my response. If one wanted to create a version of Manfred that seizes strictly upon the play’s performative potential, then I think one should turn to Barakiva’s script. Barakiva mercilessly cut lines from the text, pruning the script down to a show whose full running time was no longer than 50 minutes. After the Abbot had said the play’s final line and the actors proceeded to bow, I was quite stunned that the performance had come so rapidly to an end. When I spoke with Barakiva during rehearsals earlier that day, he told me that he was most interested in sustaining audience engagement; he therefore removed lines that he felt were superfluous or took away from the play’s dramatic potential (As a side note, we will be publishing Barakiva’s version of the play alongside an upcoming commemorative Romantic Circles Praxis volume that will turn all the papers at the recent Manfred symposium at New York University into articles).  The second way to frame my answer is that one can feel fully satisfied with the complete text that Byron originally created. That is, with a staged reading, one can perform all the play’s lines from start to finish without a single cut. This approach would be my preference, as it does not compromise the integrity of the text. In keeping valuable lines of poetry and dialogue intact, one can experience the entirety of the text as an adaptation on the stage, which, as I’ve already suggested, brings much value to “reading” Byron. I have a lot more to say about this subject, and I intend to do so in an article in the upcoming Romantic Circles volume that I mentioned above. My essay will focus on the possibilities of the staged reading in relation to Romantic closet drama and mental theater more generally. 

It’s hard to ignore the resemblance between Manfred and Astarte in the play and the incestuous relationship between Byron and his half-sister Augusta Leigh. How did this relationship come across in the play—was the director able to make more of this relationship without the constraints of the written page? 

This is a great question, since I couldn’t help but think throughout the performance about how the actor playing the Phantom of Astarte, Gisela Chípe, resembled the image of Augusta Leigh that James Holmes captured in his famous portrait of her. Chípe was not only of fair complexion but had also styled her curly locks in a manner reminiscent of Leigh. While the parallel was remarkable, it was merely coincidence. I don’t think Barakiva was keen on emphasizing such biographical dimensions. For me, as a scholar and a teacher, however, it was important to provide the audience with this essential background information. To this end, both Jerome McGann and I wrote program notes that offered an overview of Byron’s life and some background on the play, including its reception, circulation, and performance history. Each audience member received a printed copy of these notes, and they were also published online: http://www.redbulltheater.com/manfred