Hag-Seed

When I was working as the writer-in-residence at Broad Ripple High School’s Center for the Humanities and the Performing Arts (best job ever), I worked on special projects with other faculty in addition to working with my writing students. My favorite of all was rewriting “Romeo and Juliet” with a “regular” class of sophomores—“regular” meaning students considered to be extremely unlikely to get into Shakespeare. My friend and colleague, Gloria Hasler, a wonderful teacher (especially of kids who thought they hated to learn), wanted to disprove that.

We watched Franco Zefirelli’s gorgeous adaption of the play, watched “West Side Story.” It was the late eighties, her students chose Preps vs Punks when asked to do their own rethinking of Montague vs. Capulet.

Their hero and heroine: Randy and Crystal.

(This still makes me swoon with delight.)

We divided the kids in teams to read the play, each responsible to interpret a scene, then rewrite it for our time. Having seen the movie adaption, they struggled less over the language. “West Side Story” helped them better feel the story.

OMG. What a pleasure it was to observe them talking, thinking, lightbulbs bursting on top of their heads. Best of all, arguing over the interpretation of an act, the meaning of a word.

The moment a kid who couldn’t have told you what a metaphor was made one, describing Juliet in the presence of her lover.

“Eyes like diamonds!” he said, his own eyes shining.

I know. A cliché. But he didn’t know that and I wouldn’t have said so for the world. After all, don’t phrases become cliches because they’re perfect?

Gloria and I were so proud of them; they were proud of themselves. For years afterward, I’d run into those kids around town and they’d light up. “Remember when we did ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in Mrs. Hassler’s class?” they’d say.

I will never, ever forget it.

Or the fact that Gloria got in trouble with “downtown” when some curriculum bureaucrat got wind of it and claimed the project was an insult to Shakespeare.

No wonder kids hate school.

But don’t get me started on that.

Anyway. The Shakespeare project came to mind as I read Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood’s retelling “The Tempest”, set in a Canadian prison.

Felix Phillips, the widowed artistic director of the small-town Makeshiweg Festival, is a bit full of himself, prone to over-the-top productions that receive uneven reviews. He leaves the boring aspects of festival management to his right-hand man Tony, who’s been secretly conspiring with the Heritage Minister to fire Felix and take over his position.

Felix gets the news he’s out not long after his three-year-old daughter Miranda’s death. He’s devastated by the news, not least because he’d planned a production of “The Tempest” for the upcoming season. In it—

“Miranda would become the daughter who had not been lost; who’d been a protecting cherub, cheering her exiled father as they’d drifted in their leaking boat over the dark sea; who hadn’t died, but had grown up into a lovely girl. What he couldn’t have in life he might still catch sight of through his art: just a glimpse, from the corner of his eye.

Humiliated, enraged, he retreats to a primitive house in the countryside, plotting his revenge.

There, he feels the presence of his daughter. He shares his meals with her, teaches her to play chess, observes her dancing amongst the butterflies beyond the window—watches her grow into the girl she should have been.

Meanwhile, mourning and brooding, he tracks Tony, who eventually leaves the Festival to run for public office—and wins, now operating in cahoots with Heritage Minister, wreaking havoc in the arts.

Nine years pass; Miranda is twelve years old. Felix is bored, he’s running out of money, he lacks a sense of purpose. There are two things left that he must do, he realizes.

First, he needed to get his Tempest back. He had to stage it, somehow, somewhere. His reasons were beyond theatrical; they had nothing to do with his reputation, his career—none of that. Quite simply, his Miranda must be released from her glass coffin; she must be given a life…

Second, he wanted revenge. He longed for it. He daydreamed about it. Tony and Sal must suffer.

Fate intervenes when a job opens up in the Literacy Through Literature program at the Fletcher County Correctional Institute. He applies as “Mr. Duke”, gratified to be recognized immediately by Estelle, who interviews him for the position—though she balks at the idea of teaching Shakespeare to the inmates.

“But Shakespeare is such a classic,” she says.

Too good for them, was what she meant.

(Sound familiar?)

Nonetheless, the Fletcher Correctional Players are born—among them Leggs, PPod, Shiv, WonderBoy, Red Coyote, 8Handz, and SnakeEye. They play by Mr. Duke’s rules, which includes no swearing except for the collection of curses used in whatever play they’re putting on.

From “The Tempest”: “Born to be hanged. A pox o’your throat. Bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog. Whoreson. Insolent noisemaker. Wide-chapp’d rascal. Malignant thing. Blue-eyed hag. Freckled whelp hag-born. Thou earth. Thou tortoise. Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself. As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed, With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen, Drop on you both. A south-west blow on ye, And blister you all o’er. Toads, beetles, bats light on you. Filth as thou art. Abhorr’ed slave. The red plague rid you. Hag-seed. All the infections that the sun sucks up, From bogs, fens, flats, fall on—add name here—and make him, By inch-meal a disease. Most scurvy monster. Most perfidious and drunken monster. Moon-calf. Pied ninny. Scurvy patch. A murrain on you. The devil take your fingers. The dropsy drown this fool. Demi-devil. Thing of darkness.”

But to go backward a moment. “The Tempest” is what Felix decides to produce when he learns that this years Fletcher Correctional Players production will be visited by Tony and the Minister of Justice. An honor that makes Estelle, Felix’s greatest fan, absolutely ecstatic. Felix is ecstatic, too: his time of revenge has finally come.

What ensues is hilarious and extremely satisfying in every possible way with, according to The Gardian, a “fantastic climax of dark calamity.”

I loved this book so much. It made me laugh out loud again and again, it made me furious at how little the world expects of or cares for those who are imprisoned. I swear, at the end of it I was as proud of the Fletcher Correctional Players as I was of those kids at Broad Ripple High School all those years. They were that real to me.

But, most of all, Hag-Seed reminded me about how much art matters. How it is for everyone, how it has the power to change us.