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)

-----

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.

Malvolio and the Latest Twitter Hoax

Does Maria make a fool of Malvolio, or does he do it to himself?
(photo: Joan Marcus)

Maybe you read about this Thanksgiving weekend’s viral entertainment; if not, here’s the short version. On a delayed flight, a woman took the inconvenience personally and complained loudly. Her fellow passenger decided to pass the time by calling her out on her egotism and goading her via a set of notes. He also publicized his actions via social media. You can read it here.

As memes go, it’s kind of implausible (in fact, skeptics have already started to debunk the story). Still, many readers and viewers have applauded the passenger’s behavior, contending that the woman deserved it for her rudeness.  But I found the whole situation ugly. Even putting aside issues of gender, age, race, and social station (some of which were explicit factors in the targeting, others implicit), I recoiled from the punitive quality of the humiliation.

Shakespeare fans will recognize the scenario as a gulling. In the Shakespearean and Restoration eras, English audiences particularly enjoyed a comic plot which saw ill-mannered character tricked into humiliating themselves. The most famous target is Malvolio, while the Beatrice/Benedick subplot features gulling at its most benign. But once you look for the device, you’ll start to notice some sort of trick or dupe in nearly every one of Shakespeare’s plays.

In the case of Twelfth Night, productions often mitigate Malvolio’s humiliation or apologize for it by making his exit sympathetic. While I do think Shakespeare applies the device with a touch of ambiguity, for the sake of artistic complexity, it’s only a touch. Like Shylock, Malvolio is meant to get punished and banished from the stage; that’s part of the comedy, in an archetypal sense. But those productions are uncomfortable with the abuse of Malvolio.

And so am I. I have a lot of trouble with gulling as a device and (depending on the play and production) I don’t like Shakespeare when he uses it. I recoil inwardly when Titania learns that she’s spent the night with a beast. I had the same reaction to the Thanksgiving Gulling of 2013. It was ugly behavior on both players’ parts. But I suppose it should hearten directors to see that audiences can enjoy a gulling with as much cruel humor today as they could 400 years ago.

Update:

Someone on my Facebook feed has pointed out that the perpetrator of the airline gulling produces a reality TV show. That makes sense, and links directly the pleasure of watching the upstart of Shakespearean drama get his comeuppance and that of watching the fools of reality TV humiliate themselves.

Review: Hamlet (Bedlam at the Culture Project)

Eric Tucker directs & stars in Hamlet
(photo: Elizabeth Nichols)

Bedlam, the Off-Broadway company remounting Hamlet in rep with a riveting Saint Joan, has a talent for finding creative solutions to staging problems. Their biggest obstacle, self-imposed, is a four-person cast that should make large-scale shows like Hamlet or Joan impossible. But the troupe stages these works without compromising the plays’ visions and with a unique method that acts as a signature and an artistic manifesto. At each intermission (they have two in Hamlet), they and stagehands rearrange the stage and house, effectively altering the stage, style, and atmosphere to suit the next act.

This device, one of many, extends the stage space into new dimensions, and also keeps the physical relationship between actor and audience in constant flux. In a sense, it’s a modernist extension of Shakespearean dramaturgy, which defined the location though word and action rather than set and props. Bedlam’s bold, unconventional style establishes their potential for greatness in the Off-Broadway scene.

The bespoke design frees the company to try radical methods, even beyond the triple- and quadruple-casting of actors. But Bedlam’s work rarely feels tricksy or cerebral, partly because they eschew technological solutions, and partly because the company’s designer (John McDermott) covers the blank space in whitewash to create an empty, rough-hewn ambiance—Bedlam’s stage isn’t a lab, it’s a workshop. The sensibility generates remarkably effective theater. Their Hamlet, for instance, has a truly unsettling ghost. The prince himself stands before the audience; a stagehand shines a powerful flashlight at his face at the back of the house; in the surrounding darkness, the trio of other actors delivers the ghost’s lines and sentences in rotation and overlap. The disembodied sound and eerie halogen light prickles our flesh and makes us doubt the ghoul’s integrity.

Polonius (Edmund Lewis) gets mocked
by everyone onstage
(photo: Elizabeth Nichols)

As long as they abandon their reverence for the play, Bedlam’s Hamlet is thoroughly engaging. So it’s unsurprising that their show’s strongest facets are the comedic ones. Edmund Lewis plays Polonius as a sort of portly C-3PO, albeit one with a fried circuit that makes him freeze at times. Another performer, Tom O’Keefe, gets several scenes of hilarity, including a cheerfully obtuse gravedigger. As Marcellus, he sounds a bit like Scooby Doo Shaggy when he delivers the “Something is rotten…” line—it makes sense, since it’s in reaction to that terrifying ghost, and it also breaks some of the orthodox solemnity.

Ironically, the more the company relies on Shakespeare’s script than on their own vision, the more unfocused the show is. Generally, their playing style draws the characters in broad, simple strokes. But in the psychological scenes, especially the setpiece speeches of Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude, they execute the script in deferential fashion. As Hamlet, Eric Tucker has a dashing manner and an expressive face, and he’s plays the character’s ironic self-reflection well. But aside from the nunnery speech, he never comes up with a new perspective on a scene or soliloquy. Though the general tenor is there, he lacks specificity.

So when the show drags in the middle set of acts, it’s because Bedlam mostly backs off from the showmanship. The troupe’s female member, Andrus Nichols, plays both Gertrude and Ophelia; it would’ve been more interesting—and in keeping with Bedlam’s sense of theatrical liberty—to cast one of the men. The numeric limitation in cast means that Nichols plays several men anyway, of course, and in those cases, she often plays the role as genderless. But her Guildenstern is specifically female, because she’s the focus of Hamlet’s misogyny like Ophelia and Gertrude. Perhaps the minor theme would’ve been blunted if Nichols hadn’t played those latter roles, but while her Guildenstern offers new insight into the play, it’s less bold—less Bedlam!—than cross-casting men might have been.

But even in the middle third, Bedlam’s Hamlet is the equal of any Off-Broadway Shakespeare, and its first and final thirds place the production above most. The company’s nonconformist ethos proclaim them to be an electrifying addition to the New York scene and especially to the staid collection of classical companies. I’d love to see their Winter’s Tale or let them loose on a Restoration Comedy; but whatever they stage next, I hope they’ll be inspired to attack in rough and rousing style.

---

Hamlet

Bedlam at the Culture Project

director: Eric Tucker

Review: Romeo and Juliet (CSC)

CSC's Romeo and Juliet is stripped down,
sometimes not just aesthetically
(photo: Joan Marcus)

Shakespeare may work best when we recognize ourselves in his plays. In the Classic Stage production of Romeo and Juliet (not to be confused with the entertaining-yet-bland version on Broadway) director Tea Alagiç finds a modern American city in Shakespeare’s Italianate setting. Through brisk strokes—and helped especially by Clint Ramos’ character-at-a-glance costuming—Alagiç sketches the diversity of class, race, sexuality, and maturity (both age and attitude) that Shakespeare has invented. Yet paradoxically, each scene’s location is as generic as Verona is specific. Alagiç and Marsha Ginsberg set the stage in a minimalist style: an empty space, supplemented by a few pieces of Ikea’s modernist furniture and backed by a white cyclorama that lighting designer Jason Lyons colors subtly to accent the scenes.

The minimalist tactic is mostly successful, though it reaches a baffling extremity in the streetfight between Mercutio and Tybalt, in which guts get spilled though no weapons are visible. And it takes chutzpah to stage the Balcony Scene without any disparity in elevation whatsoever. A careful pruning of Shakespeare’s script brings momentum and urgency: Romeo cries “I am fortune’s fool!”, smash to blackout, catch your breath at intermission. Yet the production is more intellectually stimulating than it is emotionally involving. Typical is the Capulet masquerade, which puts Romeo in a giant Pooh head. This adds a hilarious visual element to a familiar. It also subverts the archetypal scene of love-at-first-sight and enlarges Juliet’s character. This Romeo still falls in love with Juliet’s face, but it’s his words that she falls for first. But though the scene’s formatted (famously) as a shared sonnet, there’s little of the lovers’ emotional and linguistic coupling.

This production adds an especially adorable note
to the meet-cute lovers Romeo and Juliet
(photo: Joan Marcus) 

Alagiç’s design concept forces the dramatic burden onto the company. In delivering the verse, they find a balance between poetic recitation and dialogue. Sometimes the metaphors pop into clarity—especially those involving sex—while other times the sense is obscured. The characterizations are solid but rarely exceptional; Daphne Ruben-Vega’s Nurse is typical, seeming to work outside her comfort zone but with increasing confidence. And the production’s only outright misfire is its Friar Lawrence, Daniel Davis, who plays in the plummy, pseudo-classical style of ye old Gielgud. On the other hand, T.R. Knight (late of Los Angeles and Grey’s Anatomy) totally inhabits his role as Mercutio. He plays the gallant as a coked-up hipster, and his delivery of the Mab speech has the itchy rant of one line too many.

But this production, finally, is about its Juliet. Romeo and Juliet may make the stage reputation of Elizabeth Olsen (who won acting awards for Martha Marcy May Marlene, and who’s set to become a Hollywood starlet since getting cast in the Avengers sequel). Olsen plays Juliet as a city girl in the Manhattan mold: smart, articulate, and worldwise, possessed of a keen sense of irony that’s undercut by her teenaged volatility. She lives every moment of the character, seeming to discover both the thought and emotion that the verse discloses. Julian Cihi, as her paramour, tosses his Byronic locks with passionate intensity; his Romeo’s a bit of a naïf, old-fashioned on its own but it offsets this Juliet nicely. But it’s Olsen’s performance is that scintillates. It’s one that New York-based Shakespeare lovers shouldn’t miss.

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.

The All-Male Casting Tradition of Will Shakespeare

This isn't Mark Rylance as Richard Crookback

This week, a pair of Shakespeare productions start performances in repertory on Broadway. Mark Rylance leads the company, playing Richard Crookback in Richard III and Olivia in Twelfe Night (sic—the Folio spelling!). He's not the only one playing a female role, either; the entire company is male. The absence of women is justified by a concept called “original practices”, which Rylance pioneered as the Artistic Director at the Globe in London. The retro impulse drove the company to build its theater according to Elizabethan construction (where allowed by modern fire-codes) and hand-stitch costumes together out of period textiles! It's an incredible place to see Shakespeare's work, especially when Rylance was onstage, and teaches the lover of Shakespeare, or of theater generally, a great deal about his dramaturgy, which is still so central to modern theater.

But any claims that “original practices” makes to artistic fidelity are obviated by 350 years of tradition and cultural drift. We’re so far removed from what Shakespeare meant by “male” that an “all-male” cast doesn’t possess any intrinsic verisimilitude. Anyway, contemporary troupes like this Broadway company tend to ignore the fact that, in Elizabethan theater, the female roles weren’t played by men, they were filled by young adolescents. It wasn’t exactly drag in the modern sense either, but it was a theatrical artifice that required specialized training.

I don’t mean to say that all-male cast can’t bring a new perspective to one of the plays. About a decade ago, I saw an all-male Taming of the Shrew staged at BAM by Edward Hall’s Propeller company. Casting a man as Kate allowed, in a nearly literal sense, the director to pull no punches. The relationship between Petruchio and Kate was more knockabout, seemingly less inhibited. Testosterone gave the production a locker-room quality, where hazing and roughhousing has an undercurrent of primate hierarchy. Perhaps with women in the role, some feminist impulse or latent sense of chivalry had kept most productions from admitting how violent the taming could get, or had subverted it in the name of modernity. Hall’s Taming, however, was violent and dark, reframing Shakespeare's attitudes for a modern audience.

In that case, an all-male cast added something valuable to the show beyond the gimmick. But more often, the concept has a whiff of boys-club exclusivity. Rose Rage, Propeller’s otherwise excellent adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI felt that way; there was no reason to cast a man as Margaret of Anjou (aside from the talent of the performer in a very memorable part). Similarly, Rylance’s original Twelfth Night at the Globe, back in 2002, failed to capitalize on the meta-dramatic kink of men-as-girls. The “original practices” conceit is no less artificial than any revival 400 years after its premiere. The boy who originally played Viola—and probably Rosalind and Portia too—has disappeared along with his name and his acting tradition.

But Twelfth Night does bring up one crucial facet of Elizabethan dramaturgy: those cross-dressing heroines. Shakespeare plays deliberately with irony when he has a boy play a girl disguised as a boy (especially in As You Like It, where actor/Rosalind/Ganymede roleplays as Rosalind, adding another level of cross-gender masquerade). Most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries did little with the device; Ben Jonson’s Epicene, for example, treats it with sniggering sexism. But Shakespeare elevated his female roles by lending them the pubescent actor’s incipient masculinity. His heroines, both comic and tragic, possess an autonomy that lays just below the surface even when they’re in gowns. The all-male cast is intrinsically part of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, but it’s deep in the bedrock, unseen. A modern all-male production can excavate the playwright’s rich approach to gender onstage, but it has to work carefully and imaginatively.

Review: Romeo and Juliet (Broadway)

Aside from Orlando Bloom on the marquee, the most notable feature of the 2013 Broadway Romeo and Juliet—the one that you should know before you see it—is that director David Leveaux and his casting director (J.V. Mercanti) have cast black actors in the Capulet roles and white ones to play the Montagues. This addition of melanin to Shakespeare’s tragedy is clever, albeit in a juvenile way. It suggests that Leveaux wants to use Shakespearean drama at least partly to give perspective on current events. Presumably he’s thinking about the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the arrest of Cornel West, the stop-and-frisk policies of Mayor Bloomberg, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Civil Rights Act, and indeed the whole Republican Party’s stance towards President Obama.

His concept could work if it were rooted in a mythic approach to the play. In that case, the catharsis would serve as a promise of, or even just a plea for, a way forward from the turbulence of our current state of affairs. But Leveaux basically ignores the setting except as it affects the lovers’ selves and the basic mechanics of plot. This Verona is abstract, little more than atmosphere, and any specificity gets credited to Shakespeare. There’s no sense that the marriage of Juliet to Romeo might have healed the civil wound, nor that their double-suicide will purge the body politic.

In its defense, this R&J does involve
a mixed-race couple, which is still
taboo on many stages
(photo: Carol Rosegg)

Instead, Leveaux’s production is interested in how passion affects the two lovers. One of its strongest and best attributes is its sense of momentum: a heavily-edited script delivers the play in 150 minutes (plus intermission). Scenes follow one another without pause, actors enter on their colleagues’ heels. It’s especially striking how the action occurs within a week’s time, maybe as short as four days. Though Leveaux cuts plenty from the script, he (and maybe an uncredited dramaturg) retains its careful marking of day and night. In this version, the lovers see death as a means to gain eternity, to stop time.

But the hurried pace ends up serving the show poorly. Romeo opens the play mooning over another woman, applying the formulaic terms of love poetry. But in the role, Bloom delivers only the gist of the poetry. This means that his expressions of depth and grandeur sound little different from the verse he’d rattled off earlier. Similarly, Condola Rashad’s Juliet starts the play wide-eyed, writing “naïve” so broadly the balconies can read it. But she doesn’t show how her feelings grow more mature over the play’s passage. Rashad’s J is one who makes that choice because it’s what she’s read in books, not because she’s the embodiment of the tale. That’s a tragedy, but it’s not as rich or complex as the one Shakespeare wrote of a girl who becomes a woman and who chooses love over life knowingly. Leveaux and company hurry past any nuance, delivering a production that's accessible but shallow, pretty but unmoving.