Nothing But Wars And Lechery

To paraphrase Shaw, in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare came as close to the 20th Century as the 17th Century would let him. To paraphrase me, he also came as close to the Athens of Pericles as the 1600’s would let him, because Troilus has all the bite, rage and scabrous humor of a lost play by Euripides. It’s talky, it’s satirical, its world view is a bad marriage between bitter and despairing, it’s an ongoing essay on the effects of Time on everything from vows to reputations, and it’s a bleak look at the stupidity of honor, like Shakespeare got angry drunk one night and decided to wipe people’s faces with the truth behind Falstaff’s honor speech.  

None of which are lost in this production, which is  (a) the fifth time I’ve seen this play performed, and (b) the best out of the five. So if you’ve never seen Troilus and Cressida, go see this one. And if you have seen Troilus and Cressida, definitely go see this one because it’s probably better than any of the other versions you’ve ever seen.  

Why? Because for a play that’s got more tonal shifts than Schoenberg, this production manages to find a way to embrace them all in a military bear-hug, thanks in no small part to a stellar ensemble and smart, assured direction by Daniel Sullivan, who establishes a consistent tone that honors all the wounding bitterness of this play while showing you how the wound got there.  

That’s always been the problem for me with Troilus. Either you make it overtly Messagey (like the Wooster Group’s Cry Trojans), or you ride the satire over the top until it crashes and burns (like the 1995 Delacorte version which was given low marks and no wings by director Mark Wing-Davey), or you go for stratospheric camp, like the 1973 David Schweizer-directed version at the Public (with a preening Christopher Walken as Achilles, a dead horse that William Hickey’s Pandarus kept kicking during the Helen scene, and Joe Papp chewing out the director during intermission the night I saw it. Good times.). Only rarely, as in Bill Alexander’s Folger production back in ’92, do you get a solid production that creates a stage on which satire can co-exist with something that resembles reality. That production did it by setting everything in ancient Troy; this one does it by setting everything in a modern Middle East war zone.  

They also have one other thing in common: a Hector who is a flawed rock of integrity. In the Folger production it was Daniel Southern, and he was like a male version of Desdemona: you knew that he was doomed the minute he opened his mouth to talk about honor. In this production, it’s Bill Heck, who has the kind of physicality and demeanor that demands respect, the kind of intelligence that sees the problem and knows how to solve it, and the kind of religious adherence to vows and words of honor that compounds the problem and ultimately kills him.  

I’ve been thinking about this production a lot since I saw it, and I can’t think of anything it did wrong. Corey Stoll’s Ulysses is dressed in a suit like a Halliburton adviser, and he is totally the manipulative dick that Attic Greek tragedy made out of Homer’s hero, the voice of reason who literally takes reason to a homicidal level. John Glover’s Pandarus is sublime and delightful. Max Casella’s Thersites threatens to steal the show, but the one who really does that is Alex Breaux as Ajax, a dim-witted Bro to whom self-knowledge is as incomprehensible as particle physics. (Although the real star the night I saw it was the understudy for Achilles, KeiLyn Durrel Jones, who went on for the injured David Harbour, and. Was. Amazing.)  

Something else done right: the women. Sullivan says more in two scenes about women as property in a male-dominated world than Phyllida Lloyd did in all of Shrew. Helen of Troy is a weary captive with a half-filled goblet of wine that never seems to get any emptier no matter how much she drinks, and she’s drinking for a reason, because she’s a trophy, a trophy who's ghosted by two men whenever she moves, men who shadow her and block her from going anywhere Paris doesn’t want her to go. (Paris is such a tool; for this one scene alone, you love to hate him.) And when Cressida is in the Greek camp, and Diomedes is talking to her, it’s done while a bunch of soldiers are watching them, ready and willing to move in on Cressida if and when she refuses Diomedes’ protection. And she knows it. So what else can she do but break her vow to Troilus, when the alternative is gang rape? The play is full of moments like this, stinging and sharply-observed.  

As for the title characters, Andrew Burnap and Ismenia Mendes are a matched set of awkward, vulnerable youngsters whom you want to see get together. Mendes in particular is awkward in a modern way that fits the setting of the production—the words rush out of her, spoken not in verse but in bursts, like the artillery fire that keeps hammering away at the walls of Troy. But because both of them are real and likeable, it really hurts when they’re forced by circumstance to learn the hard way that whenever you make a vow in this play, the gods laugh at you, and then make you either revoke that vow and lose your honor, or keep it and lose your life.  

And not just the gods but Time, who is the presiding deity of this script. Perhaps because of the clarity of the way it’s presented, this is the first production where I actually felt like I was watching everything through a temporal kaleidoscope. Troilus keeps getting described as a second Hector; so that means, once he and Cressida get married, that he will treat her the way Hector treats Andromache, like her fears are womanish and weak. When Troilus loses Cressida, he rages like Achilles when he’s lost Patriclus, and I think: ah, this is what Menelaus must have been like seven years ago, when he first lost Helen. And now look at him: the war has beaten all the anger out of him, and every line he says in this play (and he has, what, maybe 10 lines in all?) is a cracked window opening up onto a dour and defeated soul. This is what Troilus will be in seven years.

Seriously: everyone in this play is a temporal echo of everyone else, from Old Man Nestor who remembers fighting with everybody’s grandfather, to Cassandra who remembers things that haven’t happened yet. Only Ulysses, asshole that he is, is untouched by Time; and whatever he’s going to do when this war is over, you can bet it won’t involve trying to get home. This guy is too much in love with running things to come up with the Trojan Horse idea. If anything, this particular Ulysses would think of it and then deliberately forget it, just to keep the war going on forever. 

Two final notes. It feels a lot shorter than its three hours, which is something I never thought I would say about a production of this play (the 1995 version was as interminable as current David Mamet).  

And how weird is it that, when you look at the last three plays Sullivan has directed for Shakespeare in the Park, it’s the two weirdos which he’s done proud (Cymbeline and Troilus) while it’s the old warhorse that was totally out of his wheelhouse (Lear).

Let's hear it for weirdos. Go see this.

 

 

 

The Trumping Of The Shrew

Young girl, get out of my mind.

 

Ever wonder what women will have to put up in a world run by Donald Trump? Look no further than Shakespeare In the Park's current all-female production of Taming Of The Shrew, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, which is just as over-the-top, and almost as incoherent, as the man it's satirizing.

Framed by a beauty pageant whose voiceover announcer is modeled on a New Yorker whose name rhymes with The Ronald, and containing a character (Gremio) who’s a cross between Trump and Sinatra, with a Vegas Rat Pack attitude towards dames, this production has a ton of energy and a RV full of great ideas, but because it panders by going for easy laughs instead of the jugular, it’s like a complacent liberal: it thinks it’s a lot sharper than it really is in exposing misogyny. If the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom, we should be getting a lot more wisdom than we do by the time that raucous curtain call starts. Instead, we just get patted on the back for being smart. 

But fun? God yes. The play’s been trimmed down to two hours with no intermission, and you don’t miss a thing. (Although what I got was a renewed impatience with the whole Bianca subplot. It felt like there was a lot less of Petruchio and Kate in this play.) Instead of the Christopher Sly Induction, we get the beauty pageant, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about Bianca and Katherina right from the start. The Latin lesson between Lucentio and Bianca is replaced with an extended quote from Gone With The Wind. Gremio’s report of the wedding is done totally meta—he comes out with a copy of Shrew in hand to tell us what he’s supposed to say, and then goes off on a sexist rant. The curtain call dance is done to Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation,” and in a brilliant touch, it includes elements of the Maori Hata war dance. And towering above it all is Janet McTeer’s Petruchio, a lanky cross between a totally pissed Peter O’Toole and a totally entitled rock and roll bad boy, whose every move and line is just magic. If some of this production comes across as a raucous shit-show, it’s McTeer who is the shit and the show. If the rest of this production was as good as her performance, this would be one of those Park plays people talk about for years.

But it’s not. Cush Jumbo’s Katherina is a study in exuberant overkill, but her final monologue—which should be the coup de grace of the play—totally misses its target because you don’t know what it’s aiming at. She delivers it simply and honestly, with no spin or subtext, and for the first time all evening, you wonder just what is going on with this woman who has been so vocal and forthright about what she feels and believes. Is it a pose? Is it sincere?  

And then you realize that you’ve been asking the same question about a lot of things in this production: “What is this supposed to be?” Like the set. It looks like a traveling carnival, but it also seems to be a trailer park. It’s specific enough so that it should be one thing, and thematically represent something meaningful; but it doesn’t. Or like the fact that, when they get married, husbands get paid off like crooked politicians, with briefcases of cash. Are they being bribed? Are they being rewarded? (Both—right, ladies?) Or like Cush Jumbo’s visual look as Katherina, with those Pippi Longstocking pigtails and those baby doll dresses. Are we supposed to inhale the whiff of pedophilia this implies? Or get creeped out because we’re even smelling it? 

Thematically, the beauty pageant frame is meant to be Meaningful with a capital M—at the start, Bianca enters on a bike that Katherina is pedaling, and her performance is interrupted when Kate, like a protester at a Trump rally, hijacks the microphone and denounces the whole event. Which tells us, right from the start, what to look for in what we’re going to see. And sometimes it’s there, but other times it’s not; and it’s not like it has to be there all the time, but the whole point of staying on message is that you don’t mix them, and in this production, those messages have been put through a Waring blender. In a show where everything is out there, to hilarious effect, it pulls back in crucial places instead of taking that firm extra step, or at least committing to the premise behind its shenanigans. Is this the destruction of a “disobedient” woman, or is it saying that such a thing is impossible? 

The perfect example of how it goes right and then wrong at the same time is the final scene. Katherina extends her hand for Petruchio to step on, and what do you know? She wins the beauty queen title! Which makes perfect sense, given the beginning: you tame a woman to win male beauty prizes. And if it had ended there—with Katherina becoming either the trapped or the willing beauty queen bride—pretty, subservient, a trophy—THAT would have been the perfect sting to the tail of this production. But no sooner does Kate win the contest than she does exactly what she did in the opening: hijack the mike and denounce the whole event—whereupon she’s hustled down a trap door and locked away. While Petruchio just stands there. (While. Petruchio. Just stands there.) And Bianca is named the Beauty Queen, and everyone gets their picture taken together, the end.  

If that doesn’t leave you scratching your head and saying “Huh?” then you are going to adore this production.  

Me, I feel like it was a great concept that wasn’t fulfilled with a lot of great ideas that weren’t tied together. But it has a lot going for it. It’s appealing and enjoyable and full of itself. It blusters, and it preens; it pats itself on the back for being enlightened; it says a lot but its words cancel each other out; and it makes promises that it never commits to. 

In other words, how perfectly male.

Ten Things About Twelfth Night

Ignore the program notes. Like all program notes, those of Oskar Eustis have nothing to do with the production you’ll see. This Twelfth Night is not about loss and rejuvenation, it’s about the world going topsy-turvy under your feet. This is because, in this production more than any other I’ve ever seen, the Sir Toby/Maria/Sir Andrew/Malvolio subplot takes total precedence over the main plot. Why? Because

Anne Hathaway is the weakest link on the stage. Her performance is not bad -- it's just not up to the level of everybody else. And it's not a drawback, either. In a strange way, it's a definite asset. Because Hathaway is (you should pardon the expression) playing the straight man to everybody else, her performance exposes the dirty little secret at the heart of this play: it’s not really about Viola. She’s just the rock that shatters the mirror everybody else is staring at whenever they talk to each other. “Sick of self-love” describes not just Malvolio, but EVERYBODY in this play. In a different universe, where Viola gets shipwrecked in Bohemia? Everybody in Illyria will go to their graves without budging an inch from their stubborn positions in Act I, Scene 1, because those crazy twins who can sing both high and low never entered their lives. In terms of this production, this means

The real stars are Jay O. Sanders, Julie White, Hamish Linklater and Michael Cumpsty, whose Malvolio is Shylock-like in its sense of entitlement and wounded rage. But of them all, it’s Sanders who's the star. After winning the acting triple crown by playing the Ghost, the Player King and the Gravedigger in last summer’s Hamlet, he goes 4 for 4 as Sir Toby Belch, ably matched by White’s Maria and Linklater’s scene-stealing Sir Andrew. (The more I see the play, the more I realize that the role of Sir Andrew is the closest thing you’ll ever find to a totally bad-actor-proof part. Steven Segal could gets laughs playing Sir Andrew.) But still:

It’s not the funniest Twelfth Night I’ve ever seen. (That trophy was retired by the 1998 Nicholas Hytner Lincoln Center production with Helen Hunt.) One of the reasons, again, is Hathaway. She acquits herself well, but she tends to skate over the jokes in her part very lightly, when she should take a pause here and there to propel herself into a little pirouette. This is especially rueful because all her jokes are sly little asides to the audience about the fact that she’s really a girl, which means they only work when they’re delivered out into the house. Or at least delivered with a knowing sense that there’s an audience out there to get the joke. And she doesn’t do that. And it doesn’t help that she’s playing opposite

Raul Esparza as Orsino, who does the best he can with the thankless Zeppo part, but you can tell he’d rather be playing Malvolio. Especially in this production. The Sir Toby scenes are so much the heart of the play that when Orsino shows up at the end of the second act, you’re like “Oh yeah -- I remember him -- he’s that guy from the beginning of the play.” Something you do not say when you see


Audra McDonald as Olivia. Talk about epitomizing the whole world-turned-upside-down thing. She goes from stiff-backed widow’s weeds to giggling June bride whites like (duh) a great singer with a four-octave range. There’s a couple of moments she misses in the first half, but after the intermission, every time she walks onstage she’s so electric it’s like she just stuck her finger in a light socket. She gets more laughs out of ad-libbed Ngung-ngung-ngungs than Curly does in any 10 Three Stooges shorts. And speaking of stooges,

I found David Pittu’s Feste to be more arch than amusing, and certainly not as funny as he thought he was being. Maybe it was me, but I got that weird F Murray Abraham vibe I sometimes get when Abraham walks onto a stage saying “You owe me” instead of “Here’s something you’ve never seen before.” Speaking of which, during the last ten minutes of the play,

Director Daniel Sullivan steals two classic bits from the Hytner production, when Orsino mistakes Sebastian for Viola, and when, during Feste’s song, the minor characters are shown leaving Illyria. Not a criticism -- just a note; chalk that one up to me knowing too much to live. In which spirit, I offer up two pieces of advice:

Dear reader: go see it. You will be delighted. You will walk out happy. And if you’re lucky? Like me, even though you’ve seen maybe 20 different versions of this play, you’ll find something new in this production. What new thing did I see? Well, it wasn't really a sight, it was a feeling. (Don't all faint at once now, okay?) Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age, but it's the first time I have EVER been moved when the twins meet at the end. I thought it was honestly touching. Which made my happiness at the end that perfect, bittersweet, joy-in-departing mix of “Yay!” and “Awww . . .” And (because, y'know, WTF, right?)

Dear Anne Hathaway: play to the audience more. We’re on your side. We're in on the joke. We will laugh, I swear to God. All you have to do is wink our way. Or throw the lines over your shoulder at us. We want to like you. We want to care about Viola. We don't want to be sitting there thinking, "This is okay, but when are the drunk guys coming back?" We want to be laughing at the joke we're in on. And the more we laugh at that joke, the more we'll like you. And vice versa. I keep flashing on Susan Egan's great line as Léonide in the musical Triumph Of Love: “I LOVE me in this!” Viola needs more of that. She needs to feel totally cocky (pun intended), so that when she falls for Orsino, her world gets turned upside-down too. And the best way to do cocky? Play to the audience. And we'll be thinking, "This is okay, but when is Viola coming back?"

Elsinore by Moonlight

Random thoughts about the Hamlet in the Park:

Michael Stuhlbarg. Probably the most manic Hamlet I've ever seen, which is not a bad thing at all. It really makes "Now I am alone" a potent moment when, for the last 20 minutes, you've been watching a guy bounce around the stage like a little kid who just had one brownie too many, a big smile on his face, saying anything that comes into his head; and then when he's alone that mask drops to the ground along with his father's coat. That's the brilliance of this performance: you can actually see the words coming into Hamlet's head. Stuhlbarg isn't reciting -- he's thinking out loud, in that high-pitched voice of his that switches back and forth between fiddle and violin, now grating and edgy, now lyrical and sweet. During intermission, my friend said: "I thought it was Joaquin Phoenix until he opened his mouth and I could actually hear him."

Hamlet and Hamlet. Running time with intermission: 3 hours and 15 minutes. Cuts I noticed in the script: no Second Gravedigger; no "Our ship got attacked by pirates;" and (oddly) the moment just before "To be or not to be" that contains Polonius' set up ("With pious action we do sugar o'er/The devil himself") and Claudius’ response ("How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!") (Disclaimer: I might have totally missed it because I couldn't take my eyes off Lauren Ambrose, and was much more interested in her than in anything Claudius had to say.) Kudos to director Oskar Eustis for creating that rarity of Public Theatre evenings, one in which all 20 actors are not in 20 different plays. Double kudos for not having an Interpretation into which the text must be shoe-horned. (Which makes the final moment a powerful kick in the teeth.) On the "Did Gertrude know anything beforehand?" debate, the verdict is out (thanks for nothing, Margaret Colin). On the "Did Hamlet sleep with Ophelia?" debate, hell to the yes (thanks for everything, Lauren Ambrose). [Sidebar story: when John Barrymore was asked "Did Hamlet ever sleep with Ophelia?" back in the day, he replied: "Only in the Chicago company."] And on the mad/sane debate, this Hamlet is always mad with a purpose. Does he ever really lose it? Yes, with Ophelia -- and it breaks your heart.

The Meh. Andre Braugher and Margaret Colin just didn't do it for me as Claudius and Gertrude. Braugher was likable but bland; his soul-searching monologue was more like a rant, going up and out instead of down and in. He had an odd "Whoo hoo!" moment when the treaty with Fortinbras was announced -- it was like a Yankees fan watching Rodriguez hit a home run -- and if memory serves me right, his whirling of Colin in a victory hug was their only passionate moment. After which Colin made a point of straightening her skirt, which got a laugh, but epitomized the Nancy Reagan vibe in her character. And that cool public distance sure didn't help her when she got to the "Ophelia is drowned" speech. I have to say, if she was actually using her performance to suggest possible reasons why Gertrude would marry her brother-in-law so quickly, then I missed it entirely. Overall, I didn't get any chemistry between the two of them, and that's the one thing these two characters need.

Lauren Ambrose. An alabaster acting god. The “Watch every emotion register on my face” style of acting which, in Claire Danes, comes off as affected and technical, always feels like the real thing with Ambrose. She hurts so much you just wanna hug her, and then sneak a look at her face to see how she’s taking the hug. How good is she? If there’s a god in heaven, she will get to play Hamlet in the next 10 years. And it will be talked about for the next 50.

Ophelia. The hardest thing for an actress to do as Ophelia isn’t the mad scene –- it’s the stupid “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” monologue after the Nunnery scene. The more she gets emotional about Hamlet telling her to get to a nunnery, the bigger the leap to channel that emotion into a speech that says “He coulda been a contender” instead of “Why are you DOING this to me?” [Just the existence of this speech after that scene is a window into (a) how Shakespeare’s characters constantly surprise you, (b) how in Shakespeare rhetoric always takes precedence over everything, and (c) how Shakespeare’s boy actors were expected to play their female parts.] Even in the best of productions, this speech is a pothole, which means the only way to get past it is to hit the gas and try to convince the audience (and yourself) that Hamlet isn’t really like this, honest, and it’s all my stupid fault because I listened to my father. It’s the acting equivalent of an Immelman Turn, and Ambrose comes the closest I’ve ever seen to pulling it off.

Sam Waterston and Jay O Sanders. The anchors. Waterston makes Polonius proud and blind and helpless. There's a moment after the nunnery scene where Ophelia reaches up to him as he stands on the scaffolding, reaching up as if to beg him to come down and take her in his arms, and the look on Waterston's face is shattering. (It's a visual that Ambrose echoes in the mad scene; nice touch.) As for Sanders, there are probably people in the audience who will think that the Ghost, the Gravedigger and the Player King are played by three different actors. Praise doesn't get any higher than that.

Fresh Eyes and Ears. I went with a friend who had never seen a production of Hamlet before. She gasped when Polonius died; had a hard time remembering who Claudius was because (Hamlet trivia) he’s never once called by his actual name in the course of the play; got a little confused about what happened to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (because the pirate ship scene was cut); and loved every minute of it, not the least because all the catch phrases and famous lines that she knew as “Hamlet quotes” were spoken as part of the play itself, so she could hear them literally for the first time. It’s not true that she turned to me after Hamlet’s “The rest is silence” and said: “He dies?!?" But at the actual end of the production she did turn to me and say, "Whoa -- that’s not in the script, is it?” “Hell no,” I said, “but it’s great, isn’t it?” “God, yeah,” she said, “what a kick in the teeth.” So, uh, stay to the end, people.

And yes, okay? I do hang out with people who have never seen Hamlet before.

The Seafarer, or, How To Write A So-Called "Play" For Broadway

Step 1. Take a ten-minute ghost story.

Step 2. People it with a Main Character who sits there and takes everyone's crap for two hours, his incredibly annoying older brother, two slightly-less-annoying inconsequential friends, and Lucifer.

Step 3. Have the Main Character, his brother and one friend talk for 45 minutes about anything at all. This is what passes on the modern stage for "drama".

Step 4. Bring Lucifer onstage at the 45-minute mark.

Step 5. Figure out an awkward way to get everyone offstage for ten minutes so Lucifer can reveal himself to Main Character.

Step 6. Have Lucifer reveal himself to Main Character. Because audiences are really stupid, make Lucifer cause the onstage lights to flicker and have him give Main Character stomach cramps.

Step 7. Do not--repeat--DO NOT--have Main Character stand up to Lucifer. This would cause dramatic conflict.

Step 8. At end of Act One, set up a poker game for Main Character's soul in Act Two.

Step 9: At beginning of Act Two, repeat Step 3, with the addition of Lucifer and second inconsequential friend.

Step 10. Have Lucifer not like music. This is what passes on the modern stage for "depth of character."

Step 11. Repeat Step 5.

Step 12. Have Lucifer deliver a pedestrian monologue about Hell to Main Character. This is what passes on the modern stage for "a stunning tour de force."

Step 13. Make sure ending is an act of God.

Step 14. Cast great actors because otherwise people will fall asleep.

Step 15. Wait for standing ovation at end as audience applauds their own recognition that the play is just deep enough for their shallow idea of drama.

Step 16. Wait for glowing reviews from critics using words like "dazzling," "enthralling," and "intelligent," all of which are character revelations about their authors.

Step 17. Close March 30th.

The Private Theatre strikes again!

Seems like Sunday's 7 AM cut off for the Private Theatre's production of Hair was a walk in the park compared to Monday. For Monday's performance, you had to be there at 11 PM Sunday night or you were SOL.

Pictures from Newyorkology