King Lear - Stratford Festival (08/26/2023)

Why does Paul Gross's voice sound like that?

Not much for hard-hitting insight. I am not without my vain fixations, and it's true that in the first half of Kimberley Rampersad's production of King Lear on the Festival Stage at Stratford, I was rather preoccupied with what to me sounded like a vocal affectation: Gross's organ pipe had a bullish, mannered intonation that felt like the noted Canadian TV actor "playing age" (Gross is 64, a few years wide of Lear's textual mark of "four-score and upward"). It never really went away, but I decided to let it alone. I was in the presence of Geoffrey Tennant from Slings & Arrows and getting hung up on the laziest of audience annoyances began to feel stupid.

As a whole, the production is neither travesty nor transcendent. I suspect it'd be a good starter-Lear, which I also remember thinking when I saw Colm Feore in the same role on the same stage in 2014, though that version had a few more stand-out performances. Rampersad's rendition is mostly orthodox in its generally Jacobean setting. She does good work providing some rehabilitation for Goneril (Shannon Taylor) and Regan (Déjah Dixon-Green), who are neither unnatural hags nor somehow deeply misunderstood, but two women caught up in the whirlpool of forces beyond their control. The implication is that when your father divides his kingdom leading to civil war and chaos, one's own moral choices are left to the hands of a power larger than yourself. Goneril didn't poison Regan due to preternatural cruelty: in the fog of war certain terrible choices sometimes seem the only ones available. 

No ensemble member is embarrassing themselves, and a few do shine: David W. Keeley is the best Kent I've ever seen. A tall, grizzled veteran of many campaigns, with a missing right eye to prove his loyalty to the cause of Lear, Keeley effortlessly imbues the role with the rugged, unwashed, and sometimes brutal honesty that you need out of the inveterate truth-teller. Not many actors or theatre-folk in general can believably pass as having military service in their past, but Keeley is just such a bulldog. Gordon Patrick White also does commendable work as Lear's Fool: not a role known for its observable personality, White presents the Fool as a Shamanistic sage, notable for his mystery and possibly divine connections in the psychic realm. Michael Blake admirably takes the bastard Edmund from introverted transplant to feudal warlord, and his final duel with Edgar (Andre Sills), an axe-and-shield versus rapier showdown, is a ton of button-mashing fun.

When you have an actor like Paul Gross, who is perhaps better known for playing a great actor on TV than for being one himself, I personally expect a revelation at the end of each verse line, which is perhaps an unfair burden. Though it must be said, the way he points to the far reaches of the Festival Theatre's balcony and implicates the audience in the guilt of "A plague upon you, murderers traitors all" is just such a revelation. Rampersad's insistence on keeping the action light, and surprisingly amusing, especially in the second half, makes the latter portions of the drama sag much less than usual. I mainly wish she had watched the production more from my particular seat on the aisle in the second row, house-right: she would have seen far too many actors staged in a stacked way for far too long, a directorial oversight possibly due to the stage management table being center in rehearsals; such is a temptation to directors newer to the Festival and its unique thrust-stage demands (gotta keep those onstage actors moving). 

Having seen Rampersad's 2019 production of G.B. Shaw's Man and Superman at the Shaw Festival, I was happy to see some operatic staging return in the storm scene, with a memorable image of hail descending on a spotlighted Lear. That section is really the only time Rampersad opens up the play to a larger metatheatrical palette, and you find yourself wishing she'd do so more often, as it results in an inventive button to act one. Hopefully she'll continue to have more chances to make Shakespeare weird on the Festival stage.

Love's Labour's Lost - Stratford Festival (08/25/2023)

The performance this critic saw was the production's second preview.

While watching the Stratford Festival production of Love's Labour's Lost directed by Peter Pasyk, two past productions were at the forefront of my mind: the first was Brenda DeVita's 2022 production of the same play at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, WI, and the second was the 2022 Stratford Festival production of Hamlet, starring Amaka Umeh, and also directed by Pasyk. This Stratford Labour's suffers by comparison to both. Pasyk's Hamlet was written in divine fire, Umeh delivered the perfect Hamlet for the "not okay" generation, and you could sense the zeal of the whole production team conspiring in unison to make this Hamlet kick serious ass. The same was true, albeit in a different key, for DeVita's Love's Labour's Lost: a dense comedy packed with academic arcana became sparklingly alive as an uproarious and bittersweet crowd-pleaser. Both of these productions are a tough act to follow, as they constitute the best theatre I've seen since COVID. 

And of course, there's the matter of the preview. Obviously reviewing a preview is both cruel and unusual, but such is the nature of the Stratford Festival repertory schedule: while you're in town, you might bump into one. I could say that this rendition of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare's four-brides-for-four-brothers romcom with the surprise sad ending, lacks visible enthusiasm from the creative team, and that might be both true and profoundly unfair. Sure, things like pace and volume and staging coherence and curious lighting-looks and overall drive can be adjusted on the road to opening. I don't know that even if they get there you'll be able to care about any individual romance of any of the four couples on the way, but I may be wrong.

The show has some chuckles. Amaka Umeh appears as Rosaline and as a result boy do you wish Rosaline had more to do. Michael Spencer-Davis as Holofernes staring daggers at the Herculean over-acting of Moth (Christo Graham) is inedible. Tyrone Savage is well on his way to concocting a rakish convertite out of Berowne, the leader of the wolfpack of four dudes who swear "to fast, to study, and to see no women" right before four ladies of France arrive and put that vow to rest.

Nothing about this Love's Labour's Lost is likely to offend, you just wouldn't call it a passion project. If such a one were happening, whatever messiness of actors walking backwards or uncemented intentions, you would still be able to feel a pressing urgent need that this story be told in front of you tonight. In spite of the lack of an intermission, rapidity is not the name of the game. Hopefully the show's roots take hold and all ends as it should. Though I also really don't know why any production would keep the passage between Maria and Rosaline about Maria's sister dying, with its implication that Rosaline and Maria actually hate each other; it's a real vibe-killer.

Oh, and the fact that a woman's cell phone went off at the tail end of Berowne's majestic Act 4, Scene 3 aria declaring the beauty and necessity of love probably didn't help. It was like six or seven rings. Yikes.

Richard II - Stratford Festival (08/25/2023)

Untold numbers of Bardolators are wholly identical in the shared belief that they on an individual level understand and appreciate Richard II more deeply than anyone else. Belief in and love for the Poet King is the Shakespearean silent majority. While the tragical history isn't exactly performed often, its defenders are legion, and its story of an ineffectual politician, Richard, being deposed by his populist cousin, Bolingbroke (who later becomes Henry IV), inspires intense devotion. While reasons for this fanaticism may vary, Richard II is without a doubt Shakespeare's great epic poem: a play entirely written in verse, its rhythms and oratory create a singular universe to the attentive listener, and its specific flavorings of poetry make one feel as though they had been transported to the "other Eden, demi-paradise" that John of Gaunt calls England in the play. 

Well, not in this production. At the Stratford Festival, that speech is cut. Many passages of note are gone. Major sections of Mowbray's banishment speech, where he declares the prime reason for his exile-blues to be the lack of ability to speak his native language, also absent. Gaunt and Bolingbroke's tearful goodbye, York's origin story, the Duchess of Gloucester, and innumerable other shimmering passages both great and little, have been excised from the text by director and "conceiver" (thus spake the playbill) Jillian Keiley, and adaptor Brad Fraser. The two transpose Shakespeare's medieval drama to the 1970s New York City gay community, with Richard as a fabulous, dancing denizen of Studio 54, and his court a glamorous Queer underworld of sequins and bathhouses. Adaptation is both standard and rather too severe a term for what has been concocted by Keiley and Fraser: every production of Shakespeare takes some liberties with the full, extant text, and is in that sense an adaptation of the original uncut gem. The act of crediting an adaptor for a particular show implies a more radical rewrite than one finds here: Fraser's primary contributions are an extended focus on the love between Richard (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) and Aumerle (Emilio Vieira), and an added subplot between the lords of Ross (the excellent Matthew Kabwe) and Willoughby (Charlie Gallant). The production makes Richard and Aumerle's passion for each other explicit, and Keiley and Fraser expropriate dialogue from other Shakespeare texts (Coriolanus and Venus and Adonis caught my ear) to remove any doubt of romance. Gallant's Willoughby is portrayed as a closted Republican, by day supporting the conservative faction of the usurping Bolingbroke (Jordin Hall), and by night reveling in the bathhouses with Richard's supporters, a fact which eventually causes him to contract an unnamed disease (clearly HIV/AIDS). The addition of this thread is curious: since Richard's party is the party of gay liberation, that makes Bolingbroke the reactionary right to a notable degree. What exactly this production is saying by rendering the executions of Bushy (Andrew Robinson) and Green (John Wamsley) as a hate-crime, or by the implication of Willoughby, the closted gay man, being the one who contracts the then-deadly illness, goes more hinted-at than fully explored. Shakespeare's history never tells us who to side with, but this production does. (The Winter's Tale, King Lear, and Twelfth Night and possibly others make cameos in the actor's mouths in this subplot; it's a real smorgasbard.) 

I found myself frustrated that so much new text was being added at the expense of text already provided: do we really need Aumerle telling Richard "I do love nothing in the world so well as you" when a perfectly delightful Much Ado About Nothing is already running up the road at the Festival Theatre? Isn't such well-meaning public-domain plagiarism kind of awkward? On some level I object to so many precious words being excised in the face of what feels like ambience: club-dancing and theatre-movement (the production has an ensemble of angels) is a poor substitute for the dialogue of one of Shakespeare's most lyrical plays. Perhaps this is overly conservative on my end, I just don't get why you'd want to do Richard II if you're not interested in what makes Richard II special. 

I don't often find myself complaining about auteurism. I personally enjoy when the individual personality of a director is apparent in the onstage production. I just think Keiley's production over-values its socially-specific setting and undervalues the whole wealth of virtuosic poetry that could have made that era sing. And do you as a director really need a playwright to serve as adaptor when all the transpositions are going to be rooted in extratextual additions from other Shakespeare plays? The ability to copy-and-paste is not inherently adaptation. 

Writing about a production of Richard II without mentioning the actor in the title role feels obscene: as the boy who grows into the poet, we certainly have no trouble believing Jackman-Torkoff emerged from the chrysalis of Christopher Street. You mainly wish Keiley's production allowed him a broader tool-kit: his Richard tends towards the frivolous and the weepy, and while his "sad stories of the death of kings" monologue has its intrigue, his performance tends to feel ornamental and upstaged by the world-building Keiley imbues the show with throughout. Michael Spencer-Davis as York brings his customary effortless charisma to the role of the company-man duke, though casting David Collins as Gaunt and not giving him the great ‘England’ speech should be considered elder abuse. 

Richard II as a Queer figure is nothing new, nor are comparisons to Jesus or Saint Sebastian. Rewriting and cutting and altering Shakespeare's text is even less new, and so the way this production goes so far out of its way to telegraph that this rendition has been newly adapted and conceived strikes this critic as showboating. The production generally runs cool-to-the-touch, and it's a shame the raw material so many Bardoloators treasure is barely on display at the Tom Patterson Theatre. 

Much Ado About Nothing - Stratford Festival (08/24/2023)

I tell ya, people are REALLY bothered by Hero and Claudio.

And not without good reason. The entire engine of Much Ado About Nothing's plot hinges on whether or not Claudio perceives Hero as a virgin. When he does at love's first blush, she is marriage material; but when he believes her foul and besmirched, she deserves contempt and public shaming. But then once Claudio realizes he was only TRICKED into thinking Hero had cheated on him, all is well again and a happy ending can ensue (to the tuneful screams of that trickster Don John being tortured). 

And yet Hero and Claudio, despite holding the definitive A-plot position in the narrative, can often go disregarded in an actual viewing experience. Isn't this comedy the saga of Beatrice and Benedick? Don't we come to this story to see two brainy, guarded wittiers square off via verbal swashbuckling but then ultimately open themselves to the glorious and messy possibilities of love and vulnerability? Pretty sure we do. 

And so the fact that Chris Abraham's production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Stratford Festival employs playwright Erin Shields to write a whole-ass brand-new duologue between Hero and Claudio before Hero will accept him upon the occasion of their second marriage ceremony (the first having been abortive) materializes as both admirable and curiously unmoving. Appreciating what Shields is doing is easy: she writes reams of new blank verse whereby Hero (Allison Edwards-Crewe) admonishes Claudio (Austin Eckert) for his slut-shaming: Claudio then apologizes and says he was wrong and misled, and then Hero takes Claudio on a hypothetical situation whereby she asks how he would react now if he found out she had in fact not been a virgin at the time of their betrothal, to which Claudio admits messy feelings of hypothetical jealousy, and promises to be a better and more progressive partner going forward, understanding his personal neuroses will not be conquered in an afternoon. The loose ends are addressed, and director Abraham successfully shields himself from any sort of righteous backlash. The solution is perfectly acceptable, it just remains cosmically amusing that so much spilt ink and wrung hands need to be employed in the justification of one of Shakespeare's least endearing couples. 

That being said, as is appropriate, the dancing stars of Beatrice and Benedick shine brightest in what is overall a funny and moving production of Shakespeare's great domestic comedy. Graham Abbey brings the rakish charm of a matinee idol to his Benedick, both cad and confidante, and the way he intones "are you yet living?" to Beatrice, as though he earnestly did harbor a secret hope of entering Messina and finding her corpse untimely laid to rest, is totally hilarious. Maev Beaty as Beatrice is wonderful: both sensible and sensitive, she and Abbey serve up a full emotional meal as the Bard's most hopeful marriage, and Beaty's soliloquy after hearing that Benedick is in love with her (as part of the gulling plot to bring the two together) is open and honest and vulnerable and served up without any pyrotechnics other than Beaty's own body and voice and soul.

Other fun items: the return of "Peace, I will stop your mouth" to Leonato (begging B&B to shut up and kiss already); the notion that Borachio's 1000 ducats end up as Dogberry's fee for delivering justice on a local level; the image of Ursula gagging every time she has to pretend Benedick is a marriageable prospect; and the transference of Benedick's "I'll devise thee brave punishments for him" to Beatrice (and changing it to 'we'll) just feels right. 

Andre Sills is also lots of fun as Don Pedro, who as Sills portrays him, is a man who seems only to be happy when he is concocting some new plot or good-hearted scheme. The only elements of the production that don't come alive are when the comedy feels forced: this production has about 50 dick jokes too many, and the humor in the Dogberry scenes feels artificial (and the choice to explicitly call the Constable's group a 'neighborhood watch' has unwelcome implications in 2023). But nevertheless, one comes away from this Much Ado, set in a rustic, Italianate villa with oranges and palm trees (beautifully designed by Julie Fox), with a smile and a belief that even for the crankiest of stodgers, love can, under highly particular circumstances, conquer all or most. Abraham's use of onstage music lends the show a useful buoyancy, and the whole thing is a great time.

Rent - Stratford Festival (08/24/2023)

I suspect no theatrical emotion will ever be purer than the feelings you have for a musical you love. Perhaps you missed the musical boat. "I hate musicals," you sneer. I sort of believe you. In that I see all the reasons why one should, and yet have some trouble believing anyone actually could. While my sensibility may in fact be the zealousness of an over-enthusiastic twelve-year-old, I know I'm not a partisan. I wouldn't say OBCRs occupy a large (or even substantive) portion of my listening diet, but there are certain showtunes so deep in my marrow they couldn't be surgically extracted. 

So even though Othello and Henry IV Pt. 1 and Harlem Duet and Arcadia are definitely the plays that I consider the gods of my idolatry and use as beacons in my adulthood's consideration of and appreciation for live drama and more broadly of the miracles of art, I also know no piece of theatre will ever mean more to me than Rent. "Give me the child when he is twelve years old," someone probably said, "and I will give him a passion for a musical he happened to discover in CD form at his Grandma's house and he'll never be able to escape its big-hearted, gravitational pull," they probably added.   

The Stratford Festival's production of Rent directed by Thom Allison drives the story's engine as sturdily as one could imagine. The ensemble serves the piece uniformly well, with no individual performance towering over or crouching beneath any other. The Puccini-inspired tale of Bohemians living in Alphabet City in the '90s is primarily and enjoyably an opportunity for us to spend time with the artists and addicts and survivors who populate the world of Jonathan Larsen's 1996 rock-operetta. Especially in the second half, the action gets more scattered, and one wonders how it might have developed had Larsen not died so tragically young (he's the closest thing theatre has to a Buddy Holly). But Allison's production moves sturdily along, and serves up the flavorings of Rent with confident sentiment. 

Though really, I don't believe most people's experience of Rent has much to do with Script Etiquette 101. Dramaturgical niceties matter little in the world of Mark and Roger and Mimi and Collins and Angel and Joanne and Maureen. While the scoffer will find much to roll their eyes at in Larsen's blindingly earnest morality play, the deep-rooted passion on display in numerous songs still has the power to shake you to your core, as you listen to lyrics like "all the scars from the nevers and maybes" or "how do you leave the past behind when it keeps finding ways to get to your heart" or "we'll open up a restaurant in Santa Fe" and are left with no alternative than to ask "how did he know that?" Seriously, how did this relatively young composer have such bitter and hard-won wisdom and yet remain so wide-eyed and hopeful and not in a gaggy way but in an infectious way that had the power to leave audiences themselves wanting to be more like him at the end of watching his show? The alchemy is powerful when you both want to make the world a better place with your art and actually succeed, which Larsen did and does. 

I write these words from a hotel room in Stratford, Ontario, in a hotel I first stayed at about 15 years ago. I've read many great Canadian plays here, regrouped after seeing stellar and otherwise Festival productions, and have a distinct memory of staying up late to read Miss Julie because I didn't want to arrive at freshman orientation and be caught never having read any Strindberg (a downy lad I was, and twee). There's nothing wrong with having places of your life in such immediate proximity to plays of your life. Thankfully, Allison's production of the show gives no former Renthead cause for despair, or any application of revisionist history: it is loving and loveable.

My love for Rent is, in the words of Leonard Cohen, "stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay." I doubt I'll ever relinquish my passion. Rent is a childhood friend whom you may not see for years but within a few sentences are immediately who you were back when you were still finding your heroes. Knowing such pieces are out there is comforting; they quite literally never die.

Romeo and Juliet - American Players Theatre (08/22/2023)

American Players Theatre's production of Romeo and Juliet directed by John Langs is something other than magical. Before the griefs, a few excellent performers deserve highlighting. Colleen Madden brings warmth and sweetness and when necessary acidity to her role as Juliet's nurse: her first scene with its speech about Susan and the earthquake and her "merry" husband (which Madden decides means the guy was a lush) is heartwarming and you feel confident in the comfort that, if Juliet barely had a mother in Lady Capulet, at least in the Nurse she had a mom. Also, Lindsay Welliver as Friar John stands out: Welliver often serves as verbal American Sign Language interpreter for Friar Laurence (Robert Schleifer), as well as Romeo (Joshua Castille), both characters portrayed by Deaf actors in this production, who communicate through ASL, and whose words are translated by various members of the ensemble throughout the performance. Welliver manages to make her Shakespearean oratory crystal-clear, finding characteristic resonance particularly when translating as John for Laurence, and the way she tears up translating Romeo's pre-wedding speech is everything you want out of an evening with Juliet and her Romeo.

Langs' work with Castille (they collaborated on the adaptation) to place ASL next to Elizabethan verse has nothing to do with the production's numerous weaknesses. Indeed, the most fully-realized elements of the production, such as when Peter (Joshua Krause) struggles to understand Romeo's quips as conveyed through the vocals of Benvolio (Nathan Barlow), or Friar Laurence attempting to use his lecture on herbs to subdue the tempers of violent Capulet and Montague youth, are when the production's point of view shines through most clearly. These moments happen in direct correlation to when it seems the character's Deafness appears to be (and sometimes is) written into the dialogue by the Bard (or by Castille and Langs). But those strengths sadly don't dominate the evening. 

To start with the big crime, there's a set-change after Every. Single. Scene. Romeo and Juliet is a play that thrives on pace and rapidity and is about age versus youth and demands verve and passion in every step of its narrative. So, when you have the lights dimming and the theatre-music starting and the actors moving the set-on-wheels to some new configuration every damn time you've basically rendered the play dead-on-arrival. It's hard to get past.

Also, the production suffers from a real lack of memorable characters. Aside from the previously mentioned, you just never feel like you get to know anybody all that well, which is doubly upsetting for how long the production takes (with intermission it's a three-hour-and-ten-minute affair). Certainly actors like Isabelle Bushue as Juliet and Daniel José Molina as Mercutio bring intelligence to their interpretations of Shakespeare's language, but they each suffer under Langs' lack of directorial imagination, together with uniquely unfair burdens placed on those two characters. Juliet is either written-in-light or she is not, and with Langs at the helm Bushue remains earthbound, as this curmudgeonly reviewer can personally point to examples of Juliet's Act 4, Scene 3 soliloquy being more illuminated by actors not fifteen years of age. One wishes the director had taken a greater interest in Shakespeare's most delightful creation. Molina gives a Mercutio that likely would have killed in say 2006, but more and more in our current era finding the dazzling life-force behind the ribald jokes that feel more predatory with each passing year is a real hurdle for Mercutios to overcome, and Langs' production is not up to the task, as it seems unsure whether we should find such crotch-indicating and body-shaming openly funny or actually disquieting or some combo of the two.

The rule is a reviewer should never attempt to offer advice to the artists he's criticizing. I believe that to be true, and am about to ignore it. Skip the next paragraph if you're not in the mood. 

Don't apologize for the characters' misogyny. Don't try and pretend Verona isn't a harsh place tyrannically indebted to gender norms. Don't give us four people fighting with swords and hope we feel a community in peril. Don't try and soften Capulet's outburst when actually the meaner he is the more we feel his tenuous connection to the empire he's built for his daughter. Don't cut the lamentations of grief for the seemingly-dead Juliet and still expect us to feel badly for her family. 

By this point, hopefully it's clear my beef is with Langs, and not any individual actor or their personal talent. Romeo and Juliet is about what happens when the older generation fails the younger, though you'd never know that from Langs' production. Langs' 2013 Hamlet with Matt Schwader in the title-role played like a hyper-eloquent, high-speed thriller, and remains as fine a Danish tragedy as I've ever seen. His productions of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! and Long Day's Journey Into Night are a major part of why O'Neill is my favorite American playwright, as I've never seen a director more capable of tuning into the dead Irish-American scribe's literary cadences and writerly dialogue. The man is clearly an excellent director, it's just a shame that's not on display in Romeo and Juliet.

No Man's Land - Steppenwolf Theatre (08/19/2023)

A critic's challenge: write a review of a Harold Pinter play without using the word 'menace'.

Well I guess I've already failed. Though really menace as a buzzword hardly does justice to Pinter's dramatic talents. Focusing on such shibboleths as 'menace' or 'power' can encourage one to either take Pinter's dramas as raw and contextless exercises in theatrical aggression, or devalue the richness of his theatrical poetry. Of course, as has been said before, there is a difference between poetry IN the theatre, and poetry OF the theatre: if T.S. Eliot and W.B Yeats's verse dramas are in the former category, Pinter certainly belongs in the latter. His cadences have all the verve of Stoppard and all the lyricism of Jose Rivera. No Man's Land it could be argued is the ur-Pinter text: with its eloquent digressions and delightful foulness and intense though pleasurable confusion, it may in fact be the Pinteriest of all Pinter plays. 

So the fact that Steppenwolf Theatre's production of the cryptic text succeeds is a relief: it makes the play's strengths all the more notable, and the rewards all the more fun and also funny. The play appears to tell the story of Hirst (Jeff Perry) and Spooner (Mark David Kaplan, at the performances I saw) stumbling home to Hirst's stately London mansion after a chance encounter in a bar, and talking circles around various subjects, possibly on their way to a one-night stand. Hirst is an august man of letters, apparently a British national treasure, and Spooner is a down-at-heel gutter-snipe with unfulfilled poetic aspirations, of whom we get the sense his failures have somehow occurred in inverse proportion to Hirst's successes. The scene then shifts as Hirst's two manservants, the bullish Briggs (Jon Hudson Odom) and the boyish playboy Foster (Samuel Roukin) enter the scene and put their hooks into Hirst as it becomes possible Spooner may believe the great poet needs a rescue. 

Even describing the plot of No Man's Land requires a certain amount of editorializing, as in terms of sheer narrative, it's likely the most elliptical drama Pinter wrote. That being said, experiencing No Man's Land is anything but daunting: the play's universe creates its own self-justifying reason for existence due to the sheer joy of being alive in its linguistic adventures and spending time with its world's inhabitants. Part of the major fun of any Pinter play is NOT knowing exactly what's going on: he manages to make an enjoyable experience out of head-scratching. You wouldn't accept obvious answers even if they were offered.   

While not possessing the same innate impressiveness as Sir Ralph Richardson (the original Hirst), Jeff Perry finds a far more neurotically interior and energetic man behind the opaque facade, and works overtime to never let his character's thoughts and feelings disappear into the haze of an alcoholic stupor (all four characters in the play drink enough to make your uncle blush). His Hirst is more weirdo than Godhead, and there's nothing wrong with that: it's fascinating to watch him move about the downstairs Steppenwolf stage with a physicality more lycanthrope than Byzantine. Kaplan expresses Spooner's mellifluous meddling with a voice that's a great fit for the language, and his final speech to Hirst surprises in its tenderness (though could go further with its embarrassing auto-servility). Odom acquits himself just fine as Briggs, and Roukin brings real surprising feeling and innocence to a role that could be dismissed as too-cool-for-school; his Foster has genuine sentiment which adds a welcome color to the drama's tapestry. Director Les Waters stages the play without too many frills, though a few technical elements, such as the act-ending sound cues, and second-half lighting looks, could have stood to be less abrasively stylized. 

I first discovered No Man's Land in March of 2020, and watching and rewatching the 1978 filmed-for-television version with the play's original cast has become a common and constant component in my life ever since. Remembering a time before I knew the world of No Man's Land materializes as tough and disbelievable. My relationship to living within the room of this play feels incredibly personal, so much so that I worry I can't communicate such a singular experience in written-form. No Man's Land guided me through quarantine, and now lives deep in my bloodstream. So I could leave it at the fact that the production at Steppenwolf is really quite good, and Waters and cast mine the beats as intelligently as one could ask. But really, this play deals with ultimate things. The scholar Owen Barfield said that he was personally guilty of believing that Shakespeare's thoughts were his own feelings: and really, how often have any of us put on a song for someone and uttered some variant of "this song just so perfectly expresses how I feel," when, in reality, if that song is the best encapsulation of our feelings, it is not enough to say the song EXPRESSES how we feel, it IS how we feel. I feel the same as Barfield when I hear Hirst say late in Act II that "There are places in my heart...where no living soul...has...or can ever...trespass." And yet unlike with Shakespearean interpretation, where eloquence and feeling go hand-in-hand, Pinter gives you the feeling and leaves the meaning to what Spooner calls "psychological interpreters, the wetdream world." 

Just know that regardless of such a weakly expressed recommendation, this play has secrets for those who listen. Enter its world at your own peril.

As You Like It - Great River Shakespeare Festival - 07/08/2023

I'll have no worse a name than Jove's own page,

And therefore, look you, call me Ganymede.

The words are fairly simple. Rosalind has been banished by her wicked uncle, the usurping Duke Fredrick, and decides, along with her cousin-by-family (but sister in love) Celia, to venture out of the harsh environs of the court and seek their fortunes in the forest of Arden. Along the way, to bypass the treacheries of potential assailants, Rosalind will disguise herself as a young man, named after Zeus's messenger (a figure in which Elizabethan audiences would have heard homoerotic connotations, especially when spoken by a boy-actor playing the female Rosalind). Thus, when Celia asks "What shall I call thee when thou art a man?", Rosalind retorts with the unrhyming couplet: "I'll have no worse a name than Jove's own page, / And therefore, look you, call me Ganymede" [pronounced: GAN-uh-mead]. Pinpointing exactly why this statement is so incredible and moving is as wily and mercurial as Rosalind herself, but its glory has something to do with being present at the birth of a heroine. At the beginning of As You Like It, Celia speaks much more than her more-famous cousin (Celia is, after all, the current princess, due to her father's usurpation), a balance which shifts as the play goes on, as Rosalind invents her persona as a young adult in a turbulent world. Rosalind is the most scintillatingly neurotic of Shakespeare's women characters, and somehow these two lines give us an origin story for an adventurer we didn't know we needed until the thought emerged, Athena-like, out of Rosalind's psyche. "I'll have no worse a name than Jove's own page. And therefore look you call me Ganymede."

In the presence of such a glowing intellect, we the audience are only too happy to oblige.  

I realize this is a long way round. But unpacking the unique pleasures of As You Like It as a text and dramatic blueprint is key to understanding why Tarah Flanagan's production at the Great River Shakespeare Festival is such a success. Fundamentally, As You Like It is a hang-out play: productions live or die with how much you do (or don't) have fun spending time in the drama's cosmos with the cast of characters Shakespeare has assembled. The plot is fluid and more emotionally grounded than tied to the jackhammer of narrative (a nail biter it ain't). Flanagan manages to honor the play's grimness while keeping the action sparkling and genial. Despite its lack of plot-based tension, As You Like It is somehow just so pleasant to be around that stepping into its universe is like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket: the experience calls for sensation, not suspense. 

Flanagan starts off on the best foot possible, whereby we simply love watching Rosalind (Ashley Bowen) and Celia (Elian Rowe) spend time together. As performers, these two actors combined are greater than the sum of their parts: their focus is totally on investing in each other and their sisterly connection, and as such the framework for As You Like It has the ideal ground from which to spring. While GRSF sometimes goes too far with its trademark house-style of speaking Shakespeare's language with anxious vehemence, as if each actor is terrified on a line-by-line basis of not being comprehended by their Winona County counterparts in the audience, Bowen uses the emphatic delivery to place Rosalind's language in the listener's lap, mixed-metaphorically speaking. Thus, you get more than your money's worth. Spending time inside the genius of Rosalind is worth any price of admission, and Flanagan's production allows you to luxuriate in it with Bowen as a more-than-capable vessel. Perhaps it's unfair that I fixate here on the release of Rosalind as a spiritual entity, rather than as the revelation of an individual performer's particular stamp of interpretation, but such is the overwhelming sense one leaves this production with: you feel like you've been gifted time in the play's presence, more than you feel like you've witnessed a grand renovation of a classic text.

Some other features worth mentioning: the wrestling match between Orlando (Chauncy Thomas) and Charles (Christopher Gerson) is hilarious, using live slo-mo fisticuffs to delightful effect (fight choreography by Benjamin Boucvalt). Gerson also does commendable double-duty as Jaques, delivering his infamous "All the world's a stage" monologue with intimacy and spontaneity (no one really knows what to do with that speech or why exactly it's in this play in particular, so any heartfelt stab is appreciated). Thomas brings intelligence and charm to Orlando, who's a bit like Romeo if the Montagues were more of a salt-of-the-earth variety. Act II, Scene VII, when Orlando brings his elderly servant Adam (Michael Fitzpatrick) to a rustic friendsgiving sponsored by the banished Duke Senior (De'Onna Prince) and an autumnal ballad is sung during the breaking of bread by Amiens (Duncan McIntyre), is as sparse and elegiac as you could hope for and I know I couldn't contain my tears. 

The demerits come from sins you'd hardly dub cardinal: Prince's Duke Senior is unlikely to inspire camaraderie outside the play's confines, especially when his scenes are staged with Amiens as his only functional attendant. Gerson is a charismatic and uniquely sunny Jaques, though leaves the character's darker implications unmined. (The back pages of Jaqeus can flummox even the toughest Bardolater: he's a traveller? he's been a libertine? marriage makes him anxious? what a weirdo.) Phebe and Silvius (Alegra Batara and Adeyinka Adebola) are fun enough, though hardly solve the problems of the play's queasiest couple (if left not seriously revamped). And this is hardly the first production of As You Like It I've seen where simply by virtue of the way Shakespeare asks us to listen to this particular rustic yet demanding idiolect, by the time Oliver re-enters as a changed man to tell his lioness-attack saga, I simply feel like I've heard everything I can hear and find myself on an auditory level (to borrow a phrase from food overindulgence) stuffed. Luckily, William Sturdivant is as beguiling an Oliver as you'll ever meet, and the rare performer who improves in the character as the night goes on, without feeling like he's better suited to just the villain or just the reformed lover.

Senior and her "country copulatives" also suffer from a real visual oddity in costume designer John Merritt's pallette: their clothes are simply too garish, as if the focus outside of the harshness of Fredrick's court was somehow being amended by the Arden residents wearing bright and elegant plumage. The fact that Duke Senior appears in purple garb with peacock-like feathers doesn't help us take the character, or her role in this makeshift society, seriously. However, the black-and-white coloring of the court garb under Fredrick's regime rings true to the play's crueler beginnings. The fact that so many productions of As You Like It in recent memory highlight the play's initial harshness, and view the story as moving from winter into the blossoming of springtime, shows that just because you have, say, 10 different directors, that doesn't really mean that 10 different functional interpretations of a given play exist. An epoch defines a play more than any individual artist. Kimberley Sykes' 2019 production at the Royal Shakespeare Company emphasized the deconstructed theatricality of the play, which got more wondrous as the story went on. Polly Findlay at the National Theatre in 2016 used the automated elements of Fredrick's court to juxtapose with the greater (though colder) freedoms of Arden. And really such a strain can be seen going all the way back to John Hirsch's 1983 production at the Stratford Festival, which began with a child begging for food while singing "it was a lover and his lass" in the midst of a brutal wintry mix. Clearly our current era has the items it values in As You Like It; the collective consciousness seeks the elements that are germane to its own time. Cosmetic changes may occur, but directorial or performative influence always takes a backseat to the priorities of an artist's larger social context. 

The pleasures of As You Like It are a balm and a respite. "True is it that we have seen better days," says Duke Senior to Orlando. As the audience, we both agree, and somehow feel Senior and his merry band were with us in those days. As You Like It plays on the fantasy that the suffering of our lives produces restorative meaning, and any production that can make the comedy's spirit sing is worthy of praise and love. I don't know that any play of Shakespeare's so completely wipes the adult brain of the fear that your best days are both behind you and also badly spent. Flanagan weaves her thread in such a way that one feels like they've been presented with a warm-hearted tapestry full of wisdom and good will, combating the darkness of the world with a forest that can heal and unify. 

If it's good enough for Rosalind, it's good enough for you.

The Comedy of Errors - Chicago Shakespeare Theater - 03/29/2023

A wife in distress pleads with her philandering husband to remember their former happiness. A bereft father begs for recognition from the young man whom he has cause to believe is his only living son, and is coldly rejected.  An introverted, emotionally cauterized young woman opens her heart to another person and is rewarded with love and affection, where previously life had only provided her punishment. 

But Barbara Gaines isn't interested in any of this. The beating, lyric heart of The Comedy of Errors holds little sway for the veteran Artistic Director, found here producing the swan song of her administrative tenure at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. This rendition of Shakespeare's early farce believes the play to be of limited pleasures, and is content to skim that surface and ignore the depths or assume they don't exist. 

The story is naturally pretty goofy. Wacky hijinks occur when Antipholus of Syracuse (Robert Petkoff) and Dromio of Syracuse (Ross Lehman) land on the strange shores of Ephesus and are promptly and unwittingly mistaken for their long-lost identical twins, the Ephesian Antipholus (Dan Chameroy) and Dromio (Kevin Gudahl). The general vibe is one of shtick and lulz. No one could quite accuse Gaines and team of misinterpreting their play, only of enshadowing it. One hears the title and hopes for slapstick and a happy ending preceded by extended and ridiculous mistaken identity, and all of that is delivered to the stage at CST's Courtyard Theatre. In tow is a lengthy framing-device by playwright Ron West which places the action in the context of 1940s Britain, where a mid-budget film studio is turning the play into a vehicle of much-needed wartime cheer. That extra plot works reasonably well (though MAJOR demerits for the insertion of a dunder-headed Trump joke), and neatly pads out the running time of Shakespeare's shortest play (the event at CST is about 2:40 with intermission, when, without the West material, the show could likely clock in at 90 minutes without a break). 

The seasoned ensemble has its virtues. Lehman is a reliable character actor committed to imaginary reality. Chameroy passes well as a cad, and when given the opportunity, sings with the voice of a nightingale. Petkoff mines as much interiority as the situation allows, and brings a palpable sense of intellectual distress to his Syracusian twin. The production simply leaves you with a sense that you have witnessed a product that was "theatre funny," rather than real funny. The distinction being that real funny is irresistible and overwhelming, and theatre funny more a force of mechanized antics, whereby an audience automatically laughs at something it feels programmed to laugh at, and pratfalls and dick jokes are responded to out of a dutiful acknowledgement that they have happened at all. Obviously the criteria are completely different, but the average weekend at any regional comedy club would find your average theatre joke being used to wipe the floor. 

Perhaps one production is too subjective and singular to encapsulate the merits of an artist's entire career, but if this Comedy of Errors can be said to sum up Gaines' approach to Shakespeare over the years in any way, it comes off as overly concerned with a type of ease-of-access that belies a deeper lack of interpretive verve. Even if you're trying to make Shakespeare a popular entertainer again (which late-period capitalism will just never allow), who cares about that if you don't believe in the joys of the Shakespeare vehicle you're attempting to bring to life? Not every Shakespeare play is a titanic achievement, but to quote Harold Bloom (Shakespeare studies' most useful punching-bag), we underestimate the bard at our own peril. 

I guess I just wish Gaines had liked the play. I really think there's more to love.