Review: Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing

The Public Theater at Shakespeare in the Park

director: Jack O'Brien

FYI, an edited version of this piece appeared on NY Theater Review. I wanted a more complete record of the show, so I've decided to let everyone read the longer account! This version includes the effect of rain on the show the evening I saw it.

Lily Rabe & Hamish Linklater make as perfect a Beatrice & Benedick as you'll see,
despite (or because of?) their unorthodox choices
(photo: Joan Marcus)

The chemistry of Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater, in their third collaboration onstage, makes a success out of a moody Much Ado About Nothing. Their Beatrice and Benedick are too clever, and have skin too thin, to let their guard down around each other. Linklater’s Benedick is an angry, edgy guy who craves attention; Rabe’s Beatrice half-regrets her own lack of interest in love. And when she overhears a list of her faults as reasons for Benedick to steer clear, this Beatrice sobs with self-reproach and emotional confusion. Rabe and Linklater imbue the air of the Delacorte with melancholy—even when one of them is dangling from a fruit tree—and add an emotional richness to Shakespeare’s comedy.

Building on these ironic performances of merry sadness, Jack O’Brien’s Much Ado shows his mastery of stagecraft and focus of vision. The few flaws detract a little, but are easily overlooked—especially given the perfection inherent in the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. John Lee Beatty’s long stage offers several playing areas for O’Brien, primarily the terrace of a Sicilian villa, c. 1900, but also a balcony for Beatrice in her first volley with Benedick (a typically clever nod to another pair of Shakespearean lovers), a set of vegetable gardens, and a rather overused fountain. It’s both public and private, bustling with servants, ripe for eavesdropping and rumor. O’Brien also emphasizes the atmosphere of celebration, with masks and music imparting a ready friskiness to the household’s daily affairs.

For me, Mitchell singing "Hey Nonny Nonny" was the show's high point.
(photo: Joan Marcus)

But given its solidly realistic sensibility, the show’s few moments of enchantment seem incongruous (albeit lovely). Brian Stokes Mitchell harmonizes least with the show’s prevalent mode of playing. He plays Don Pedro with a hearty gusto and a sailor’s laugh, and with none of the psychology of Rabe and Linklater. Yet his participation in a round of “Hey Nonny Nonny” makes that misfit moot, and his skill at the verse and bass voice suggests great potential as a Shakespearean actor (as far as I can tell, the closest he's come has been his Tony-winning perf in Kiss Me Kate). His lusty 2D approach is complemented by his stage-brother, Pedro Pascal as Don John. Nearer to Linklater & Rabe's method is John Glover, an experienced Shakespearean, who makes a great role out of Leonato, especially in his grief at his daughter’s supposed infidelity. As for the sentimental lovers, Ismenia Mendes and Jack Cutmore-Scott fill their roles generically. More interesting is Zoë Winters, who brings a sexy vivacity to the small role of Margaret, the duped accomplice in Don John's intrigues.

But this review comes with a caveat: the night I attended Much Ado, it drizzled all through the show. The weather’s effect on the show’s energy is hard to gauge, but it probably dampened the audience’s spirit at least. The actors never lost their focus but some adapted to the circumstances better than others. John Pankow, as Dogberry, effortlessly upped the tempo to his schtick, as if he were ready to skip the curtain call and meet us at the alehouse. Scenes like Claudio’s ceremony of remorse for wronging Hero, on the other hand, probably would’ve been stolid even on a lovely night.

Best of all, however, was Linklater’s casual “whoop, that’s wet” as he sat on a chair, mid-soliloquy—the biggest laugh of the night, until Rabe entered and perched herself onstage to chat with him. She winced too, and only then noticed Linklater’s warning gesture. The tart, ironic charm of her invitation to sit with her, and his disgruntled acceptance, epitomized their interpretations of the characters. It was a perfect you-had-to-be-there moment of spontaneous theater.

I'm not a fan of realistic sets in Shakespeare—they tend to muddle the location
rather than clarify it—but Beatty's design is lovely
(photo: Joan Marcus)

Review: Much Ado About Nothing (The Public Theater)

Benedick (Michael Braun) and Beatrice (Samantha Soule)
are too wise to woo peaceably, so they commit to a merry war
(photo: Carol Rosegg)

After a three-week barnstorming tour of the five boroughs, the Mobile Shakespeare Unit returns home to the Public. Presumably the rehearsal period for this Much Ado About Nothing was as brisk as its 100-minute runtime or 21-day tour, since it has a spontaneity that’s refreshing after an autumn of elaborate and often artificial Shakespeare.

The show opens to swanky synthetic music and an intro for each character, lightly suggests a world found mainly in reality TV. The conceit reinforces the play’s exploration of eavesdropping and of toying with other people’s romantic lives. But director Kwame Kwei-Armah barely acknowledges such frippery as concept or theme, and leaves the spectacle to Broadway. Instead, he directs the cast to perform with a conversational clarity. His tone fits the design, which suggests the show’s origin as a touring production: a 15’x15’ square of artificial turf for the stage, a boombox for sound, minimal props, and whatever lighting is available. The costuming has a factory-made, off-the-rack look: women in pink dresses and gaudy heels, men in inoffensive khakis and blazers.

That DIY design means that the actors must hold the audience’s focus unaided (all the more firmly for the Mobile Unit’s audiences, presumably unaccustomed to regular theatergoing). With eight actors taking 15 roles, their approach to playing is broad rather than refined (Shakespeare’s script is helpfully prose-heavy). More practiced than rehearsed, the style favors the comedic subplots over the romantic ones. So, predictably, Dogberry and the Watch make a strong impression. Lucas Caleb Rooney triumphantly leads the clowns, preening and bullying his way through a mockery of an interrogation. He also earns hisses from the audience as Don John, whose petty acts of villainy run from defaming the ingenue Hero before her wedding to bogarting his henchman’s joint.

But the company’s rough style does short the play’s more passionate scenes to some extent. The only scenes that measure up to the comic turns are those later scenes of romantic negotiation between Beatrice and Benedick. Samantha Soule’s Beatrice takes no BS, and her demand that Benedick challenge his friend to a duel puts him at a loss for words for the first time in the play. Ironically, she and her Benedick, Michael Braun, do better with the tough romantic wooing than with the scenes where they’re tricked into loving each other—usually a showcase of farce, here a set of stumbles that are the show’s only missed opportunity.

That flaw, however, is balanced by Kwei-Armah’s one addition to Shakespeare’s action. Late in the play, Claudio, the juvenile lead, makes a public apology at Hero’s tomb. In this staging, Hero eavesdrops on the scene and then decides, with a thought and a gesture, whether or not to forgive him. It’s a brilliant silent moment that gives the young woman a measure of autonomy and amends an outmoded aspect of the plot, as well as echoing the scenes of spying that Much Ado is packed with. It’s the sort of detail that makes this Much Ado as strong as this fall’s more elaborate (and expensive) Shakespeare.

Hero decides to wed Claudio,
despite his betrayal, and so redeems him
(photo: Carol Rosegg)

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Incidentally, I interviewed this production's Leonato, Ramsey Faragallah, for New York Theater Review. Once he read Shakespeare in his California high school, he "became actively interested in things other than surfing, street racing and loud music." Me too.

Review: Julius Caesar (St. Ann's Warehouse/Donmar Theatre)

"Think you I am no stronger than my sex?"
asks Brutus' wife ironically
in an all-female Julius Caesar

Phyllida Lloyd, working with the Donmar Theatre, has cast Julius Caesar entirely with women, and justifies this casting (as if she needed to!) by setting the play in a women’s penitentiary. Her vision contains a beautiful irony: that Brutus and his fellows conspire to live freely though they’re incarcerated. Her Rome is Darwinistic, with its embodiment Caesar at the apex of the hierarchy. But it’s inaccurate to say that in Lloyd’s staging, Rome’s a prison. After Caesar’s assassination, he continues to lurk about the stage; then some of the convicts break character; finally, as Octavius assumes power, “Caesar” stops the show, pulls out her warden’s cap, and orders the prisoners back to their cells. The whole show has actually been a cruel prison game. The inmates can play at killing Caesar, but only as a lesson that they can’t escape what he represents—absolute authority.

Lloyd’s concept could work just as well with an all-male cast, of course. But the women’s prison has an alienating quality that a men’s prison wouldn’t. The artifice of masculinity that most of these women adopt (think Snoop on The Wire) undermines the Roman and Elizabethan definitions of manhood that our culture still presumes are natural. Plus, it gives some incredible actors the chance to play juicy roles that would conventionally be denied to them.

Harriet Walter plays Brutus,
and Brutus is an honorable woman

Harriet Walter, who ruled Broadway as Queen Elizabeth in Lloyd's Mary Stuart a few years ago, navigates smartly her character’s early monologues. Shakespeare’s Brutus uses pretty specious logic to convince himself of Caesar’s ambition; Walter turns this into a tragic lack of self-knowledge, as her Brutus recognize that he’s duping himself. She and Lloyd lean hard on Brutus’ claims of Justice to defend the assassination, another irony given the setting.

Frances Barber outdoes her and everyone as Caesar (she played the eye-patched baby-napper on Doctor Who); she's an electrifying, bullying ranter with a muscular plug of a body and a great swaggering entrance. But then every performance here uncovers facets of the characters that rarely get explored, like Antony’s arc of growth from callow lieutenant to Caesar’s true heir, or Cassius’s kingmaker maneuvering. In the latter role, Jenny Jules has great chemistry with Walter, especially in those lovely late scenes of argument and camaraderie.

Frances Barber plays a particularly
thuggish Caesar

Like many British directors of Shakespeare (but not most American ones), Lloyd reads her play carefully and thinks out every moment. Her show opens before the play itself, with a lecture from the guards as the audience waves our tickets like security passes. Searchlights are used as spotlights, with the crew dressed in guards’ uniforms. That and the large dark warehouse space gives a real sense of conspiracy to the opening scenes. The music doesn’t really fit with the show’s concept—the soothsayer gets accompanied by a calliope organ; a punk guitar’s thrashing underscores the civil war/prison riot—but it’s appropriate to Shakespeare’s Rome. Like most productions of Julius Caesar, Lloyd doesn’t quite fulfill the play’s tragic aims. Unlike most, it does offers several stunning theatrical coups instead, climaxing with that hammer-blow of an ending.

Scifi Theater: Goldor $ Mythyka and Geek!

Goldor $ Mythyka

New Georges at the New Ohio Theater

written by Lynn Cohen

directed by Shana Gold

April 6, 2013

Geek!

Vampire Cowboys at Incubator Arts Project

written by Crystal Skillman

directed by Robert Ross Parker

April 11, 2013

Actually, this pair of shows aren't quite SF theater. But they're close, since they both take the role of fandom (especially the scifi/fantasy/comics fan) as their subjects.

Goldor (Garrett Neergaard), Mythyka (Jenny Seastone Stern),
and their DJ-commentator (Bobby Moreno)
Photo credit: Jim Baldassare

Basically, Goldor $ Mythyka revisits the Bonnie & Clyde myth. Its title characters are a pair of social misfits who find their ideal selves in role-playing games. Emboldened by their fantasy lives, they stage a heist and become folk heroes. But with a halfling on the way, Mythyka abandons fantasy and Goldor's revolutionary self-aggrandizement. The playwright adds flesh to the conventional arc by reframing the American myth of self-creation in light of the Great Recession. Her smartest twist is to suggest that parenting, in a sense, is a valid mode of self-creation. The play's only flaw is an onstage MC who comments on the drama. Though played by Bobby Moreno with charm and crack timing, the role's only substantive purpose is to exposit subtext that lies under the dialogue. The play's strong enough, with snazzy projections to set the scene and a cast of confident young and not-young actors, to establish its own identity.

Geek!, meanwhile, follows a pair of cosplayers through an actual convention. The two teens revel in the sense of belonging that dressing as manga characters offers them, but find that identity is more complex than pursuing an obsession, adopting a costume, or even abandoning those passions to stand alone. The sentiment that sorority and support is necessary could easily devolve into glib phrasing about belonging to a like-minded community. But Geek! goes beyond that by showing that self-disclosure (in this case, mourning a friend and sibling's suicide) is individualized and intimate. But that theme sounds heavy, which is the opposite of Geek!. Playwright Skillman knows pop subculture and, with director Robert Ross Parker and an exuberant design team, translates it into imaginative theatrics: dayglo hairdos and a steampunk cuirass; DIY YouTube videos that serve as flashbacks; crossdressing and crosscasting; a multiracial cast with a range of body types. It features plenty of stage combat―always a plus―yet it resolves the rivalry between two girls (not over a guy, incidentally) by joining them in friendship. 

The Geek! trio of Emily Williams,
Allison Buck, and Becky Byers

G$M and Geek! are both smart shows. Both have advantages and drawbacks, both succeed on their terms (modest) and Off-Off-B'way budgets (also modest), and both are fun and smart evenings at the theater. More broadly, taken together, Geek! and G$M suggest that American culture has converted everyone into “fans” of one thing or another. Fandom is an aid to self-discovery and the foundation of a community, a path to belonging. But that fact raises a dicey proposition: much of what we're fans of is corporate-owned (in my case, it's Marvel comics and Yankees baseball). So we're required to tithe to the owners (not the comics artists, not the ballplayers, note) to understand ourselves and discover others. Of the two, Geek! is more optimistic, maybe because it's less socially engaged than G$M. It finds a subversive streak in the DIY ethos of cosplay and in geekdom generally. G$M is more of a romance―like late Shakespearean plays, it leaps ahead 17 years to resolve its family triad. But both ultimately claim that eccentric passion strengthens a person only when it's shared with another.

Review: Clown Bar

Ain't too much sadder than the tears of a clown

Pipeline Theater Company at Parkside Lounge

written by Adam Szymkowicz

directed by Andrew Neisler

attended Feb. 28

Man walks into a bar, looking for the joker who killed his brother. Sounds like a gag, this piece of clown noir, and most of its cast wears a cherry red nose. But Clown Bar pours its pulp strong enough to tickle fans of Bogart and Mitchum too. Staged in the back room of an LES dive, the show plays out in real time as its cop protag investigates a crime syndicate. The script is tight and funny—hard-boiled schtick. The direction serves to tell the story, ignoring the implications that link clowns to class and the Sophoclean sense of fatalism that makes noir so cynical. Shane Zeigler gives the lead detective a voice like Batman and an attitude like Leslie Nielson: so square he's hilarious. But he can't prevent the theft of Clown Bar by Kelly Rae O'Donnell. Muttering like Popeye used to do, she gives her floozy in facepaint an emotional fragile undertone. The whole show's as substantial as a helium balloon but seriously funny.

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Clown Bar plays at Parkside Lounge, closing on March 23. Tickets?

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Shakespeare Notebook: Much Ado About Nothing

Once again, Beatrice gets the better of Benedick
photo: Gerry Goodstein

TFANA at the Duke on 42^nd Street

directed by Arin Arbus

Feb. 16, 2013

Happily, this taut Off-Broadway staging of Much Ado is less schmaltzy than most versions, approaching the play as an adult romance rather than a romantic comedy. In a nod to the script's characterization of Beatrice & Benedick's relationship as a “merry war”, director Arin Arbus shows an Italian court where men woo women with salvos of wit and negotiate marriages like they do treaties. It's no surprise when, in the play's main plot, a young aristo too readily doubts his fiancee's fidelity, since he's always approached romance with suspicion. And if love is a battlefield, Beatrice and Benedick are Hector and Achilles. In that stupendous scene where Beatrice requests that Benedick “Kill Claudio”, she redraws the battle lines, and Benedick's acceptance of her charge suggests the brokerage of a separate peace.

Onstage too, the performers stand above their peers. Maggie Siff (who played a superb Kate in Taming of the Shrew last season) suggests that Beatrice hides a lonely soul with a tart tongue and chilly demeanor. Her stage partner, Jonathan Cake, shows less depth but more range, charming the audience with direct-address and arguing himself into love in soliloquies. A sweet scene on a swing together, fishing for compliments from each other and getting teased instead, makes superfluous their grudging admissions of affection in the final scene. The duo don't have perfect chemistry but they're talented enough—and the script's done so much already—that they're still a pleasure to watch.

The play's two other keys are Don John and Dogberry; one instigates the main plot and the other inadvertently unravels it. Both are tough roles to play. The motiveless malignance of John implies a full psyche, smart but antisocial (an extreme version of Bea and maybe Ben); in the role, Saxon Palmer relishes how the character hides his nature. Like the villain, the citizen-constable cannot articulate his deeper thoughts, but unlike John he utterly lacks guile. His foolery can get tiresome in many productions, but John Christopher Jones coaxes inspired laughs from his cracked vocal chords. The rest of the cast gives workmanlike performances, though a few servants make the most of their stage-time.

The stage (designed by Riccardo Hernandez) is simple: a raised playing area of wooden tile, ringed by realistic turf and a tree and bench upstage-right. The lighting (Donald Holder) is a little more complex, and consequently a little more fussy. The costuming (Constance Hoffman) sets the period, for no reason good or bad, in the Sicily of a century ago. But in general, the design stays out of the way so the actors' and the script can act the play. In this respect, Arbus' Much Ado doesn't surprise the audience with radical or unexpected interpretations. It's a professional production of a pleasurable play, accessible and satisfying.

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Much Ado About Nothing plays at the Duke Theater through March 24. Tickets?

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Shakespeare Notebook: an Iranian Hamlet

Hamlet gets antic in
Hamlet, Prince of Grief at Under the Radar
(photo: Reza Ghaziani & Ehsan Matoori)

Hamlet, Prince of Grief

Leev Theater Group at Under the Radar

written by Mohammad Charmshir

directed by Mohammad Aghebati

January 12, 2013

Not Shakespeare's Hamlet, not an adaptation, yet this import from Tehran stays faithful to core elements of the tale. Partly the changes are a matter of format―it's a monologue of mourning, only 30 minutes and change―but more potently the revisions derive from a modern ethos and Persian worldview. The setting is contemporary Iran, where a billboard ad sells its product with the slogan “To Be Or Not To Be.” This existential statement couched in consumerist culture troubles the speaker, who's given to irony and analysis. He's also got a child-like streak, recounting his story by play-acting the roles with toys (uncle = T. Rex).

It's tough to peg what the show's saying about Iranian culture, since its social perspective has been encoded deeply enough that authorities have allowed its export. There's a sense that the mother's poisoning of the student's father (a significant switch from Shakespeare) is part of a political maneuver. And in fact, this Hamlet is darker even than Shakespeare's, since its protagonist gets shot in the back before consummating his revenge. The midnight-dark lighting plot, the toys-as-characters conceit, and the low-key performance of actor Afshin Hashemi all contribute to the play's oneiric quality, but it's the semi-conscious sensation of a culture gap that gives Hamlet its dreamlike character.

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Hamlet, Prince of Grief played at the Public Theater, closed on Jan. 20. Sorry!

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Off-Broadway: In the Summer Pavilion

Early on, the bare stage of Pavilion
evokes a more primal style;
later, it's simply dull & barren
(photo: Gerry Goodstein)

In the Summer Pavilion

Workshop Theater Company at 59E59

written by Paul David Young

directed by Kathy Gail MacGowan

October 17, 2012

An earnest, dull drama about the sundering of a youthful menage a trois. A frisky bacchanal in the titular gazebo segues to an ominous void, from which the protagonist―a melodramatically moody Princetonian―will visit his potential futures. This first “act” of the 75-minute drama has a primal sense of mystery that weirdly echoes late Greek drama like Oedipus at Colonus. But the show doesn't follow through on its initial prophetic promise. Instead, Pavilion cuts together a montage of the trio, ten years on, in permutations of coupledom and solitude. The performers show some green talent; the director and designers adroitly define a new setting every ten minutes. But the script's scenarios are limited to the near-utopian reality of the 1%. No matter how happy or un- they are, these kids will become international art dealers and high financiers. In the worst case, our Ivy grad kicks heroin to join an all-American terrorist cell. It's a preposterous caricature of Occupy as Weathermen 2.0! The woman, for her part, always gets paired off with one man or the other―so much for the future of feminism. Finally, the play repeats its opening. But the scenes that were incantory now seem like an empty gesture at the cyclical nature of something or other.

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In the Summer Pavilion plays at 59E59, closing on November 3. Tickets?

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Sci-Fi Theater: Heresy

Nearly alone in this show,
Reg Cathay doesn't phone his performance in

Heresy

The Flea Theater

written by A.R. Gurney

directed by Jim Simpson

It's a measure of sci-fi's ubiquity in American theater that even A.R. Gurney, an 82-year-old WASP, sets his latest drama in a dystopia. It's “New America” in the not-too-distant future, just long enough for five nation-wide “crackdowns” on un-American activity. The image that conjures—of NYPD bashing Occupy—is the only contemporary aspect of Gurney's setting. His targets are Bush-era: waterboarding, wiretaps, and massive databases on American citizenry get cited but not, say, drone assassination. Not a word about the Great Recession but plenty about a newfound unity of church and state. The near-absence of post-'08 malfeasance makes the play seem behind the times, already dated. The near-future resembles the near-past, but with a paranoid streak stemming from constant police surveillance. The lone bit of future-tech is a whooshing door out of BBC's MI-5.

If Heresy were stronger elsewhere, in script or show, Gurney's failure of imagination wouldn't matter so much. But the play is clumsy, its staging uninspired. Its basic conceit is awful: Mary (Annette O'Toole, wooden) visits DC to speak with Pilate about the arrest of her son, Chris. In case his audience misses his point, Gurney hamhandedly emphasizes the parallel: young officer Mark, transcribing the meeting, likes to re-translate prosaic dialogue back into its biblical phraseology. Jim Simpson ignores the script's blunt-edged satire, instead staging the play with a breezy tone. The flickers of enjoyment come from the always-awesome Reg E. Cathay, a Pilate whose bass voice belies a shallow desire for respect, and by Kathy Najimy as his tipsy wife, a society matron who says the dopiest things. The duo's rapport gives this doddering one-act its only moments of vitality.

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Heresy plays at the Flea Theater, closing on November 4. Tickets?

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Off-Broadway: Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812

Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812

Ars Nova

written and composed by Dave Molloy

directed by Rachel Chavkin

Monday, Oct. 15

Ars Nova: better than BAM and a quarter the cost. This month, the space in Hell's Kitchen hosts a chamber opera by the gifted Dave Molloy. He's set roughly 75 pages of War & Peace to 150 minutes of modernist music―a pomo polyglot of cellos, bass sax, drum loops, and accordions. That scenario could be abrasive, but Molloy, director Rachel Chavkin, and Ars Nova deliver instead a warm, immersive evening. The cozy theater has been converted into a 21C version of a Moscow salon, welcoming audiences with free vodka and black bread. Molloy embodies this generosity by taking the role of Pierre, one of Tolstoy's central characters, a Muscovite with a large heart and unhappy marriage. The character, in turn, represents part of Tolstoy's own artistic spirit: objective yet passionate, and possessed of a judiciously moral voice.

The show draws a slice from midway through the long novel, a brief but catastrophic debut of Pierre's friend Natasha into society and his attempt to salvage her reputation. After he's brought her a modest crumb of comfort, he spots that titular comet in the Russian night and has a moment of cosmic awareness. To reproduce the novel's intimate yet epic voice, Molloy employs a stylistic pastiche and shifts of tone and perspective. Aside from his Pierre, the minor role of Natasha's confidante offers the most “Tolstoyan” moment. As Sonya, Brittain Ashford possesses incredible emotional and tonal range as well as the slightest lisp, which lends specificity to her heart-heavy solo in act 2. Though each act has its slow stretches, it compensates with invaluable moments like this one. Theater of grandeur on a small stage, this show feels somehow indispensible to the artistic life of 2012.

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Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 plays at Ars Nova, closing on Nov. 10. Tickets?

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Broadway: An Enemy of the People

Only Michael Siberry (right), as decadent dad-in-law,
points the way to a new Ibsenesque,
an irrealism haunted by David Lynch hobgoblins 

An Enemy of the People

MTC at the Friedman Theater

written by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz

directed by Doug Hughes

seen on September 28, 2012

A town's livelihood depends on its new spa, so it attacks a local doctor for proving that the cheap & dirty construction will spread disease, not cure it. Timed to coincide with the 2012 election, this revival of Ibsen's 1882 work finds its energy in condemning the know-nothing townspeople. Parallels to the Republican party draw themselves, of course. Adaptor Lenkiewicz polishes the play up with pithy dialogue and canny use of English idioms but she also cuts the protagonist's mulishness. Hughes follows her lead by directing a show that's light on subtext and heavy on rabble-rousing speechifying. Boyd Gaines, as the doctor, provides some depth, allowing himself to appear ridiculous by plumbing his middle-aged character's naïvety. MTC's impulse to stage Ibsen may be socially liberal but its aesthetics are too conservative to produce anything but easily-digestible melodrama. This Enemy's irony is that it's a safe crowd-pleaser about the wrongness of that approach in life, politics, and art.

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An Enemy of the People runs through November 11. Tickets?

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