Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Pearl Theater)

A Midsummer Night's Dream

playwright  William Shakespeare

company  Pearl Theater

theater  Pearl Theater

players

Mark Bedard, Sean McNall, Jason O’Connell, Joey Parsons, & Nance Williamson

director  Eric Tucker

choreography  Birgitta Victorson

set  John McDermott

costumes  Jessica Wegener Shay

lights  Eric Southern

sound  Mikail Fiskel  

An exhilarating Midsummer at the Pearl reduces the show to five players, a bare stage, and no props. Yet it may be the most visually stunning production I’ve ever seen. Throughout the show, the actors mutate and contort themselves to create strange stage images and impressive CGI-like metamorphoses. The show opens with a performer aping a gorilla. Then Duke Theseus and his train arrive to hunt, bate, and shoot the beast. This is Midsummer influenced by Lynch and Cronenberg, and its fairies are the stuff of Guillermo del Toro’s nightmares.

The no-prop, all-physical style frees Jason O'Connell from the masks and prosthetics that obscure most Bottoms. O’Connell plays the part as an everyman who’s vaguely aware of and disturbed by his transformation into a monster. Opposite him, Joey Parsons makes Titania an impressively uncanny presence, moving her arms in slow ripples to suggest the billowing of her gown as her Titania floats regally in the air. Her sexual conquest of Bottom has an element of rape to it, with her fairies dragging him into an S/M scenario with no safe-word. In this Midsummer, the love-flower is a thorny trident that gets stabbed into the victim’s eyes.

Eric Tucker, the director, has already established himself as an inventive interpreter of Shak with Bedlam Theater and with Women of Will, a two-actor feminist perspective on Shak’s career. He reaches a new level with Midsummer by finding a stage correlative for the alchemy of Shak’s poetry. His performers alter their bodies in the same way that metaphor transforms an image. Throughout the play Puck describes his power of transformation, and it’s the core of O’Connell’s performance. His Puck is mercurial as the Genie in Aladdin, taking regular form as a buzz-winged demonoid.

The human characters swat at this hornet-like fairy, who from their POV is insect-sized. This trick of perspective is a signature of Tucker’s; in Midsummer he also fractures time, moving back and forth in the play at strange moments. He repeats Puck’s claims of mutability, once as a soliloquy at intermission and then backwards at the return (like a satanic record). Tucker also revisits Bottom’s transformation from different POVs over the show’s three hours.

These two moments are the foundation of Tucker’s radical Midsummer. But what makes the Pearl’s staging (co-produced with the Hudson Valley Shak Festival) a work of genius is that it doesn’t sacrifice the play’s delights to its dark vision. The lovers are still full of delightful follies, and the clowns are as bumptious as ever. O’Connell may stand out as Tucker’s onstage surrogate, but all five actors cohere as an ensemble and have stand-out moments. The staging is protean and manic, but its action is always clear as day and at the service of Shak’s tale.

Tucker’s Bedlam is one of two New York companies who are rising to the challenge that Shak’s endless linguistic invention poses (the other is the Fiasco Theater). Both companies slim the cast size and double- and triple-cast actors, ignoring gender and type. They relax the realistic impulse that lies under most productions. By following the playwright’s lead—those plots, that verse, all the plays-within-plays—they prove (if any proof was needed) that Shak is great material for experimental theater. It’s too soon to call them the vanguard of a movement. But between this Midsummer and  Fiasco’s Two Gents last spring, NYC in 2015 is the scene of superb, forward-looking Shakespeare.

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The Pearl Theater's Midsummer Night's Dream runs from Sep 8 to Nov 1 at 555 W. 42nd Street.

photos  Russ Rowland

Review: Twelfth Night at Bedlam

Twelfth Night, or What You Will

playwright  William Shakespeare

company  Bedlam

company

Edmund Lewis, Susannah Millonzi, Andrus Nichols, Tom O'Keefe, Eric Tucker

director/set/sound  Eric Tucker

costumes  Valérie T. Bart

lights  Les Dickert

props  Violeta Picayo

music  Tom O'Keefe & Ted Lewis

Andrus Nichols, Tom O'Keefe, & Eric Tucker
in Bedlam's Twelfth Night

Bedlam’s Twelfth Night takes a more serious view of Shakespeare’s play than its twin in rep, What You Will. This version is a melancholy show about unrequited love rather than a frisky, love-drunk comedy. Maria has a yen for Sir Toby, Malvolio mopes in Olivia’s friend-zone, and neither Olivia nor Orsino know quite how to win Viola—who is, incidentally, the only one giddy at the prospect of love. The company again plays multiple roles, mostly recast although Edmund Lewis and Tom O’Keefe stick with Malvolio and Feste. But everyone’s delivery is more subdued and introspective than in Bedlam’s other staging—and more realistic as well, with the script being played as dialogue more than poetry.

This prosy style grounds the characters in a post-college drift (Sir Toby is an alcoholic bro, Sir Andrew his stoner pal). But it doesn’t prevent the trio of Orsino/Viola/Olivia from shining in the romantic scenes. In a play-appropriate bit of perverse casting, Viola is played by a man, Eric Tucker, as female; the male Orsino is a woman, Andrus Nichols; only Olivia is conventionally gender-appropriate Susannah Millonzi. The first scene between Viola and Olivia just swings, staging a Shakespearean battle of wit and metaphor that’s absolutely charming and clever, and shows just how, why, and when Olivia falls in love. O’Keefe has a similar comfort with the Fool’s paradoxes, and for good measure he steals many scenes with his country-folk guitar. Lewis goes furthest, however, as Malvolio.

Generally I’m wary of stagings that play up sympathy for Malvolio. But in this melancholy take on Twelfth Night, his one-sided feelings for Olivia have more humanity than I’ve ever seen. Lewis plays him as an uptight cynic, vaguely misogynist, with an obvious crush on his jaded best friend. He’s a ripe victim for the bros and Maria, but he’s too familiar a type for that humiliation to wash as simple hijinks. Anyway, there are plenty of extraordinarily clever moments of staging that are Bedlam’s signature. Scenes that should present problems for a five-actor troupe, like the climax that has everybody meet face-to-face, are finessed with ingenious theatricality. And so the show resolves itself with Viola and her brother smooching their partners. With Tucker playing both twins, part of the joke is that the director ends the play in a clinch with both leading ladies, even if one is playing a man. This Twelfth Night, which starts in melancholy, ends in knowing laughter.

Edmund Lewis, Susannah Millonzi, Eric Tucker,
& Andrus Nichols in Twelfth Night

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Bedlam's Twelfth Night runs from Mar 13 thru May 2 at 312 W. 36th St.

photos: Jenny Anderson

Interview: Eric Tucker of Bedlam

To celebrate Will Shakespeare’s birthday and deathday (which was yesterday, April 23), I got you a gift! Last month I interviewed Eric Tucker, the artistic director of Bedlam, during his company’s rehearsals for a double-staging of Twelfth Night and What You Will. My article got aborted but I didn’t want to waste the work, especially since I found Tucker very insightful about how Shakespeare works. So to celebrate the great playwright’s life and work, here’s an edited transcript of our conversation in March!

Bedlam in What You Will
(photo: Jenny Anderson)

How are rehearsals going?

Not bad, not bad. We have good days and bad days. Sometimes a lot of good stuff comes out and some days we’re nowhere.

Well you’ve bitten off a lot with two versions of Twelfth Night at the same time. How did that idea come about?

We were actually going to do Twelfth Night in rep with The Country Girl, the [Clifford] Odets play. We weren’t able to get the rights though. So I was thinking I wanted to find another play while we were working on Twelfth Night. But you know, in rehearsal you come up with these ideas that could be cool but they don’t fit in the play you’re doing. So then I thought maybe it would be fun to do it two different ways.

How are you approaching each version of the play?

Well they’re both with five actors, the same actors. We go into the rehearsal room every day and we all try a lot of things and talk about it a lot. We don’t plan things out or have anything programmed. It’s a team effort.

So we started approaching it from a place of what the themes of love were that we might pull out from each one. And one was about the trials and tribulations of love and how difficult it can be, but hopefully the message is that it can end up rewarding and exciting and worth it all. And then with the other one, we were looking at it as love being a madhouse or a sickness or disease, and it doesn’t always end up well.

I don’t think that’s exactly where each one is now, several weeks later. Now we’re just figuring out what the language of each one is, what the world is, what the rules are and what each one of them can hold aesthetically. Sometimes we’ll have an idea and think, ‘That’s better for the other version.’ So it’s like a devised piece in many ways. 

Bedlam in Hamlet
(photo: Elizabeth Nichols)

Is that similar to the approach you took for Saint Joan or Hamlet, or last fall with The Seagull and Sense and Sensibility? Did you go in without a plan and instead discovered and experimented? Or is this a new approach?

It depends on the play. With Joan, I had done it in Los Angeles with three actors. It turned out pretty good but there were things I still wasn’t satisfied with. It was very hard with three people. I always knew I wanted to do it again, I loved the play so much. So when I came to New York and formed a company, I thought that would be a good one to start with, just add another person to make life a little easier. But I had a road map of that one already, there was a blueprint for me as a director.

When we added Hamlet, I had directed the play many times, played it once. But I knew basically how I wanted to split the roles up amongst us. I knew that I wanted both plays to be in the same world and be interchangeable in terms of the visuals. But other than that, in terms of how we would tell it, the aesthetic was that we were constantly just experimenting.

And that was what I did in the fall too. I had a vision for what I thought Sense and Sensibility would be. But when things are very actor-driven, you need time to play and experiment. It doesn’t always look like what you think in your head. Or you get surprised by these things you never thought of that the actors are doing. And I like to be open to that.

Do you think there’s something to Shakespeare that allows for that sense of play and exploration that more realistic theater doesn’t have?

I do think Shakespeare allows for that. There’s almost no stage directions, nothing very descriptive other than what’s in the text. There’s so much left to our own imaginations that you can do just about anything with them. Oftentimes that leads to them having a shell put on them, a time and place that gets chosen because maybe the costumes will look cool or—I don’t know, I think if you do something like that with Shakespeare you have to think about what that means for the play in depth. But also there’s such a freedom with that, because you can tell the story in a modern way. I think when they’re done at the speed of thought, when they’re done quickly and economically, then a modern audience still gets it. So you don’t underestimate an audience.

Again, I think it’s just because so much is left for us to decide. If you follow the text and the stage directions are there, but it’s really open to play. You can see five Twelfth Nights a year and get five different types of storytelling. His plays, the stories are so fantastic. There’s so much about human nature and the characters are so three-dimensional that we’re always finding new stuff. I think it was Ben Kingsley said how everyone, whether they’re male or female, has a Hamlet in them, because he’s written so completely and fully. How could we get tired of seeing it? If we’re seeing someone else play it we’re seeing this whole new person.

That leads me to another question. You did Chekhov last fall, which has a sense of realism, a ‘you’ve gotta have a samovar onstage’ type of attitude that doesn’t necessarily fit with Bedlam’s style. What sort of things do you look for in scripts to enable your aesthetic of activity and movement? How do you approach a script that’s rooted in realism?

One is the language. The dialogue. There’s a rhythm to it that’s slightly, I don’t know—it’s like the first time when you read Angels in America or a Stephen Adly Guirgis play. Some people have this gift to write characters that lift off the page and you just see it up there. And those two guys, you can do almost anything with them. We know where they’re set and we know the situation between two people. They might be in an apartment having a fight but that apartment can be anything, you can put it on any stage, bare or not bare.

It’s also definitely plays that you read and think that can only be a play, it couldn’t be a movie. Then you can really get in and have fun with it and give the audience something that can only be gotten in a theater. That’s what I look for, that’s the key, the theatricality. That real gift of language and dialogue is rare. There are a lot of really good plays that are new, but it’s rare to get one that is extraordinary, they don’t come along quite as often—the kind of boldness that Kushner has, or Rajiv Joseph, who wrote Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. There’s just so much magic in them even when they’re highly violent or when the subject matter is dark. That’s hard to come by. So that’s why I go back so often to classics.

Are there any classics that you feel would not mesh with your aesthetic? Do you pull Sophocles off the shelf and say, “I just don’t see how I could stage this?”

No, not really, nothing comes to mind. I get excited to tackle anything. I think when a story’s exciting or I feel like we have the cast for it, I get excited about it. But I can’t think of anything that I would say I don’t think that would mesh at all. For me it comes down to a story that gets me excited, then some sort of image of how I could present it, and then I go.

You mentioned story and you also mentioned language. That’s surprises me simply because the first thing I think of when I think of a Bedlam style is the movement and the use of space. How did you developed that aesthetic?

Early on, when I was in college in Rhode Island, I saw an outdoor production of Midsummer Night’s Dream—in Washington Square Park, I think. And the audience was being led around and we would watch a scene then go somewhere else. I kind of fell in love with that aesthetic for outdoor theater. I started doing that when I went back to college, learning how to move the audience around and keep them involved in a way that wasn’t their average experience in the theater.

Then I went to Trinity Rep for graduate school, and the aesthetic there has always been about the audience and how the actors relate to the audience. It’s always thought out: ‘what will the relationship be for this story? where will we put them and where will we be? and will that change?’ For me, I just kept switching that up. One time I did a Macbeth with everybody on moving risers and we moved them in their seats throughout.

Also, I’d walk into a space and know I have to do this story here, and I’d ask, “How will it fit into the space from corner to corner and wall to wall, not just necessarily up on the stage?” Sometimes I think the space should come first; it’s nice when that can happen, though it’s rare. So the audience feels like they’re in on something from the start, when they come in the doors. Over the years I’ve tried to keep exploring the nature of the audience and the actors, and how we’re in relation to each other. I think that’s at the heart of it.

Taking it back to Shakespeare, how do you conceive of his plays’ relationship to the audience?

What’s great is that it’s already there from the start. These solilioquies were meant to be spoken to the audience, so you’ve got a person just speaking out, asking them questions. There’s also something about the speed at which the scenes come together. Things just go, and I think it should be as seamless as you can make it. In the modern day, people cut a lot of text and then they add a lot of transitions. I do that too, I suppose, but I think it’s nice when you can keep it as seamless as possible. That is part of the relationship to the audience, because you’re keeping them in the story and on their toes.

The great thing about Shakespeare is that you can take one of his plays into the library of a school or you can do it around a campfire or on a Broadway stage or in a warehouse. He says it to us in Henry the 5^th: ‘you’re going to have to bring something to this. You have to imagine armies, you have to imagine location.’ And I love that, I love to go and watch people pull something out of thin air. With Shakespeare, his mode of storytelling was to pull things out of thin air. He didn’t have anything but that wooden O. It’s magic, actors have to perform magic. And that’s the stuff that excites theatergoers, because it takes us by surprise.

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Bedlam's Twelfth Night and What You Will runs from Mar 13 thru May 2 at 312 W. 36th St.

Review: What You Will at Bedlam

What You Will, or Twelfth Night

playwright  William Shakespeare

company  Bedlam

company

Edmund Lewis, Susannah Millonzi, Andrus Nichols, Tom O'Keefe, Eric Tucker

director/set/sound  Eric Tucker

costumes  Valérie T. Bart

lights  Les Dickert

props  Violeta Picayo

music  Tom O'Keefe & Ted Lewis

The company of What You Will

Twelfth Night, a play that revels in gender ambiguity, is perfectly suited to Bedlam’s fluid method of staging classics. They dub this version What You Will while its twin, Twelfth Night, plays in rep—same cast, different roles. To make the play even more protean, the company double-cast Viola. Effectively (but not invariably) she’s played by Susannah Millonzi, while Cesario and his twin Sebastian is Tom O’Keefe. The actors look nothing alike, but realism in Shakespeare is a fool’s pastime anyway. Bedlam, led by Eric Tucker, would rather find insight in a theatrical staging than a mimetic representation. So in What You Will, as Tucker’s Orsino dances to a bossa nova beat, his partner alternates from Millonzi to O’Keefe. Viola’s ambiguity is a self-confusion that’s only straightened out by Shakespeare’s endgame. But Bedlam gets the final word, since it’s O’Keefe who ends up as Viola. Millonzi, who started the evening in that role, finishes up as Sebastian.

Millonzi, in her rookie effort with Bedlam, sounds the emotional depths of Viola’s soliloquies. Doubling as Maria, she also steals the comic subplot: a pinch-voiced nerdlet in love with a female Sir Toby, here an aging debutante. This puts her opposite Andrus Nichols in both plots, and their great chemistry justifies the unconventional approach all on its own. Nichols matches Millonzi’s shape-shifting abilities as Sir Toby and Olivia. The latter begins the play in deep bereavement, so that when her affections are tossed around by the twins, she’s naked-hearted and vulnerable. It’s a pleasure to see two talented Shakespearean women make the most of their chance to carry the play. Against their formidable performances, the male actors offer simpler takes on their roles, but presumably they find more in the partner staging of Twelfth Night.

Actually it’s worth noting that most of the backstage team is also female, from Valérie T. Bart (who supplies elegant post-war whites that get smeared with a passionate red) to the stage managers and PAs. One exception is Les Dickert, whose lights do more with less. Actor/director, Tucker also supplies the sound design, although the use of vinyl records (Ella Fitzgerald and other post-war sounds) is so closely intertwined with the staging that it probably fell under his role as rehearsal captain. Bedlam is a strongly collaborative company, and its sense of equality likely results in a more open-hearted work. In its short (two-hour) runtime, this What You Will beguiles the audience with an emotionally lush and sensitive staging.

Susannah Millonzi & Andrus Nichols
in What You Will

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Bedlam's What You Will runs from Mar 13 thru May 2 at 312 W. 36th St.

photos: Jenny Anderson