Pericles - Royal Shakespeare Company/Chicago Shakespeare Theater - 12/04/2024

Pericles may be able to claim the title of most universally beloved Shakespearean b-side. While the play is comparatively less known and staged, not since Ben Jonson do you hear many Shakespeare-heads denouncing the play or its performance. Jonson called it a "mouldy tale," as he wished for a more sophisticated public, better able to appreciate his urbane, insider city-comedies. Whatever his gripes, Pericles has certainly had a much more robust dramatic life than Jonson's inscrutable The New Inn, or many other early modern items forgotten to most playgoers. Pericles seems to always get "re-discovered" despite no one ever bearing it that much ill-will in the first place. 

The production onstage at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, a transplant from the Royal Shakespeare Company, makes the strongest possible case for the play as tearjerker. This Pericles, directed by RSC co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey, excels at spinning the play's yarn with a deft and sensitive hand. This light touch serves the production (almost) all the way through, and makes the picaresque, episodic nature of the play (which is really more eventful than actually complex) perfectly charming to follow. To quote from an earlier Shakespeare title, the sheer number of times this show wrings from you "tears that sacred pity hath engendered" is pretty damn impressive.

The play begins with a narrator (Rachelle Diedericks) announcing she is giving us the theatrical equivalent of an antacid. The story, she says: 

"...hath been sung at festivals,
On ember eves and holy days,
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives."

The plot being introduced here is a wild, seafaring voyage, which prominently follows Pericles' adventures as he seeks a wife, finds one in Thaisa (Leah Haile), then chronicles the life and tough times of their child, Marina (also Diedericks). That Diedericks doubles as narrator and Marina is something of a jumpscare to those who know the text, as Shakespeare's original narrator is the poet John Gower, though Harvey's choice to have Marina be our guide feels definitely closer to home. Through various hijinks, Pericles comes to believe he has lost both wife and daughter, then comes to realize he was mistaken, and, in the best folkloric tradition, a joyful reunion crowns the proceedings, and all ends happily. 

The first few beats of Harvey's production begin on a slightly too-muted note. While the emotional ease and openness eventually becomes a benefit, the first couple scenes, where the young prince Pericles (Zach Wyatt) attempts to solve a riddle that leads to his life being at stake in the land of Antioch, do cause us to lean forward but in the uncomfortable way. That being said, Wyatt gives a remarkable performance as the Prince of Tyre. The role of Pericles is something of a dramatic coloring book, encouraging the actor to fill in the blank spaces at will, and Wyatt creates a thoughtful soul who deserves the second chances given to him in the play. The way Harvey has Wyatt speaking directly to the audience, thereby casting us as "the gods" Pericles so often interrogates, is a choice that yields dividends while at the same time being exactly Shakespeare wanted (no fourth-wall in 1609). 

The production really starts singing when we arrive in the land of Tarsus, where Pericles assists the local king and queen by bringing corn in a time of famine. As King Cleon, Chukwuma Omambala delivers a devastating speech on the horrors of his country's starvation, and as he does, opens up the production's heart with delightful results.

Cleon describes his nation's plight in the following terms:

"So sharp are hunger’s teeth that man and wife
Draw lots who first shall die to lengthen life.
Here stands a lord and there a lady weeping;
Here many sink, yet those which see them fall
Have scarce strength left to give them burial."

If read aloud, you could be forgiven for thinking this verse a little clunky and obvious, but Omambala's delivery highlights a particular strength of this production. Pericles is not a text known for its great anthologized poetry: you won't find any instances of "oh, I didn't realize that was from Pericles!" But, in the mouths of the RSC actors, the emotional fabric of the language is real and tender: it makes you forget how much ink has been spilled about swaths of this play being written not by Shakespeare, but by George Wilkins, his contemporary and probable collaborator. It's hard to overstate the benefit to a production when the ensemble actually likes the play, and manages to access the power underneath the verse which can overmaster any surface-level simplicity. 

Such poetic revelations are notable in the mouth of Wyatt: listen (as it were) to these two passages, the first where Pericles is looking at an armor breastplate his now-dead father gave him, and which has been recovered from a recent shipwreck:

"And though it was mine own, part of my heritage
Which my dead father did bequeath to me
With this strict charge even as he left his life,
“Keep it, my Pericles; it hath been a shield
’Twixt me and death,” and pointed to this brace,
“For that it saved me, keep it. In like necessity—
The which the gods protect thee from—may’t defend thee.”
It kept where I kept, I so dearly loved it,
Till the rough seas, that spares not any man,
Took it in rage, though calmed have given’t again.
I thank thee for’t; my shipwrack now’s no ill
Since I have here my father gave in his will."

And now this second passage, where Pericles remembers his father while he's sitting in the merry company of his soon-to-be father-in-law (King Simonides, played by Christian Patterson) and fiancée (Haile as Thaisa): 

"Yon king’s to me like to my father’s picture,
Which tells me in that glory once he was—
Had princes sit like stars about his throne,
And he the sun for them to reverence.
None that beheld him but like lesser lights
Did vail their crowns to his supremacy."

I'd venture this stuff is more heartstring-tugging than report gives out. Listening to this text performed by Harvey's company, and by Wyatt in particular, makes one hear Pericles as a rhetorical bridge between the raw, emotional bluntness of early period Shakespeare verse, and the layered, nuanced strategies of his late-style: somehow this play has a foot in both, and marries the straight-forward, no-nonsense communication of the early plays with the lyric sensitivity of the romance genre to which Pericles belongs. If Wilkins had a notable hand in the writing, he clearly did the play a great service, just as John Fletcher did with The Two Noble Kinsmen, and its devastating Jailer's Daughter subplot. 

Patterson as Simonides brings a surprising amount of Midwestern dad sensibility to his role for an actor based in the UK. His presence as the conduit between his daughter and Pericles' meeting and falling in love provides a delightful texture to the play's first half. The joy Patterson has on recognizing their attraction during the jousting festival, combined with the wistful sadness of eventually losing his daughter, encapsulates the fundamental heart of Harvey's tale. In the words of Bob Dylan & Sam Shepard: "strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content." Productions of Pericles often hit home in the final scenes, but this one manages to make the bittersweet tears flow even before intermission. Falling in love with Pericles and Thaisa in tandem as they fall in love with each other is a great joy.  

The production's humor is a point of interest, as it tends toward the subtle and the suggested. This is absolutely NOT the in-house style of "Shakespeare funny" usually seen at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, where Mistress Quickly has to mime a dick so we get the "prick of their needles" joke, and the host organization suffers by comparison to their overseas guests. Seeing the humor not need to be thumped -- in the vein of an over-zealous waiter seeking to "tempt" you with dessert offerings -- is a major refresher. 

The production stumbles in the second half. The delicate universe Harvey has created is ill-suited to deal with the coarse and barbaric world of pirate abduction and brothel trafficking that occurs to Marina once her narrative time in the sun takes off. Many other pleasures abound, but the scenes in which Marina maintains her chastity due to her inherent virtue, and thus repels all would-be johns, feel out-of-place in this otherwise lilting, melodic world. Those scenes need to be tough and disturbing and upsettingly funny as the sex workers try unsuccessfully to pimp Marina to people whom she ends up converting from deeds of wickedness. Here they stand uncomfortably apart, and not in a productive manner. Similarly, Marina's abduction by pirates could have been just so much wilder: it's one of the unique Pericles treasures, and is there solely for our bewildered joy. Here, it feels like a tonal stutter-step, and any opportunity to marry Shakespeare with Gilbert & Sullivan goes unseized. 

Small details merit cataloguing, like the inclusion of a newborn baby that actually looks bloody and, well, newborn (a rarity in the sanitized world of theatre). The added visual element of Pericles rewarding the fisherman, who aided him in his quest to tourney for the hand of Thaisa, ties up that strand with care. Harvey's decision to have Marina be the narrator (instead of an omniscient Gower) is both commendable for sticking closer to the play's roster of characters, and also for NOT making the horrendous decision made by TOO MANY directors to turn Gower into a choral ensemble. In such productions (like the one seen at American Players Theatre in 2017, directed by Eric Tucker), seemingly any performer in the cast can step out at any moment and begin speaking narration, to which I say: this play is complicated enough! just make the narrator one person! please!! Harvey also avoids another original sin of "creative" Pericles directors by not making young and old Pericles and Thaisa different actors, and thus robbing us of the play's final catharsis: another storytelling crime handily avoided. 

A textual gem that Diedericks manages to highlight as the narrator (FKA Gower) comes later in the play:

"By you being pardoned, we commit no crime
To use one language in each several clime
Where our scenes seems to live."

This knowing apology for multilingual liberties solidifies the words of Harold Bloom, Shakespeare studies' most useful punching-bag: we underestimate Shakespeare at our peril. Diedericks somehow makes this proto-Brechtian commentary emotionally resonant, as we sit in the audience and go "you know, that's actually a great point, and isn't it also great that theatre can bridge our differences in magical ways??"  

The crowning jewel of any production of Pericles is the reconciliation between Marina and her father, and here the scene is unadorned and devastating. No extra design elements are needed to paint the drama with a color called joy beyond the actors' physical embodiment. Whatever hand George Wilkins had in the earlier parts of the adventure, this is a scene where you hear language that, whatever else, can be unabashedly called "Shakespearean":

"This is the rarest dream that e’er dull sleep
Did mock sad fools withal."

While it's possible that if you asked AI to recreate The Winter's Tale it would give you similar text, I tend to agree with Tom Stoppard's character Bernard in Arcadia that "you can't stick Byron's head in your laptop." This reunion somehow manages to feel like King Lear without the mess: in that Everest of tragedies, as well as in The Winter's Tale, you have vivisecting meetings of parents and children after long absences, sometimes even over the gulf of death. The factual deaths of Cordelia and Mamilius render those plays' trauma so acute as to be almost overpowering. The near-perfect ribbon-tying of Pericles manages to keep the linguistic brilliance while removing the psychic horrors, thus making it possibly the most moving denouement in Shakespeare. A stunning feat, and Wyatt and Diedericks navigate the task to vicarious tears of joy. 

Harvey often uses the cast as background movement to fill out the "poor theatre" aesthetic: ropes and tackle suggest the nautical, with scenic design by Jonathan Fensom. The movement direction is by Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster, and while many Shakespeare directors fall back on "movement pieces" to fill vacant spots in their artistic vision, here you feel like the world of the play needed the helpful and unassuming physicality on display. To engage in a bit of hyperbole, it felt like the first time stylized movement actually helped a Shakespeare production.

The beat into intermission felt more like a comma than a period, and the surprisingly unforgiving diagonals of CST's thrust stage obscured the moment when Pericles eulogizes Simonides with the devastating line "Heavens make a star of him!" But all in all, this side of Trevor Nunn's Pericles at Theatre for a New Audience in 2016, this is as poignant an interpretation as you're likely to see. Nunn may have the edge in terms of rendering each individual land that Pericles traveled to as totally unique: Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, and Mytilene, all were totally distinct and pictorially thrilling under Nunn's direction. But I'd reckon Harvey's production reaches deeper into the play's heart and gives you more riches that you forgot or didn't realize were there, and makes the case for the play not just as spectacle but as dramatic poetry. 

If nothing else, to paraphrase a cliche, it's nice to know you haven't yet met all the Shakespeare you're going to love.

King Lear - American Players Theatre - 08/21/2024

The midwestern theatre doesn't tend to produce directorial auteurs. Okay, I know reviews that begin with grandly general pronouncements are a little gaggy but I sorta think I'm onto something here.

It would be pretty weird if we found out that Ivo Van Hove was from downstate Illinois, or that Peter Sellars' childhood was spent in the school districts of Hennepin County. Sure, Joanne Akalitis may have been born in Chicago, but you wouldn't say her artistic voice exactly flourished in the Land of Lincoln. 

I bring this up by way of another generalization. In the contents of this blog, I often find myself saying things like "this production favors clarity of Shakespearean communication over radical new interpretation" (I usually phrase it just that clunkily). I know I've had such a thought at places like the Guthrie, American Players Theatre, the Stratford Festival, Michigan Shakespeare, Illinois Shakespeare, the Milwaukee Rep, etc etc etc. Obviously this is a geographical byproduct of an individual's attendance biases, but you're reading these words for some reason. 

Of course you'll get into arguments over a subject like this: "why is Sean Graney an auteur but not Barbara Gaines? where does Michelle Hensley land? why is Robert Falls an auteur when he's directing Shakespeare but not Rebecca Gilman*? is David Cromer my personal friend???" But so it goes as Billy Pilgrim said. My point here is that Tim Ocel's production of King Lear at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, WI is just such a piece of evidence: fluid, clear, unflashy, if ultimately non-devastating. 

Really, the ideal version of King Lear should not be sad, but heartbreaking on a debilitating level. To that specific end, Ocel's production is a failure, but that's a tough bar to clear. The production is a lean and stable rendition of Shakespeare’s Everest, that leaves you reasonably sad, if still able to feed and bathe yourself.

If you were diagnosing particular rhetorical strategies that make the APT actors easy to understand when speaking Shakespeare's language, you could do worse than to say they really hit their verbs (big deal in Shakespeare, verbs). Brian Mani's Lear is in fact "a man more sinned against than sinning"; a foolish father, but not a cruel one. His choice to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, and the tumult that ensues, does in Mani's case come from a sturdy, stalwart man of state, whose mental and physical faculties diminish until he is paradoxically allowed an extra dose of sanity once he has as they say in Shakespeare "gone mad." 

The rest of the ensemble is uniformly unoffensive, and the choice to have Regan (Jessica Ko) and Cornwall (Ronald Román-Meléndez) be sexually excited by the blinding of Gloucester (an understated James DeVita) is a useful example that in this production their ultimate corruption stems from power and its sadism, rather than inherent personal evil. The vulnerability La Shawn Banks summons as Kent in realizing his service to Lear, even after his patron's death, is not yet over, and he has a spectral "journey" to which he "must not say no" is genuinely moving. Josh Krause does noble service as Lear's fool, attempting to forge a performative arc in a character that so staunchly resists clinical text analysis. And I'd love to see Sam Luis Massaro in more starring roles, as the moral earnestness he brings to Lear's Gentleman counts as (the generous kind of) scene-stealing. 

Jeb Burris's fight direction is clunky and automated (knife fights shouldn't have parries), but other than that the production's visual components serviceably allow the language to take front-and-center in the way you expect to hear in Spring Green. Ocel's no-frills aesthetic is best exemplified in the  elegant simplicity of the storm scene, where he and sound designer Gregg Coffin show admirable restraint in not attempting to shout down Shakespeare's text with ambient downpour: they let Mani and his Lear ask for the storm, and refuse to drown the words with reverb. 

At its best, Ocel and his actors let you sit in immediate proximity to the language. In the scene when the mad Lear meets the blinded Gloucester, Lear tells his old friend: 

"If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.

I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester.

Thou must be patient. We came crying hither;

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air

We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee. Mark...

When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools.—This’ a good block."

Maybe it's trite but the words really do catch your soul. Hearing them spoken clearly in the natural amphitheater up the hill at APT on a beautiful August night is a pleasure unto itself. Maybe the Midwestern audience has endured too many winters to demand a continental style of high-concept directing. Perhaps that’s the reason we seem to value clarity over flash.

*It's called "the public domain" 

Cymbeline - Stratford Festival - 08/16/2024

 Me considering William Shakespeare's late-period romance, Cymbeline: 

Some have called Cymbeline a narrative "feast," though really it's more of an Old Country Buffet. We all have the Shakespeare titles we treasure and keep dear, a few we hold at arm's length, some we're embarrassed to admit we don't know as well as we should, and often one for which we reserve our total ire. My general frustration with Cymbeline (I claim) lies in how much it asks of us not being in consort with how little it rewards: understanding why this formal audacity had to be married to this particular story is tough to fathom. The pyrotechnics of the plot and its ultimate revelations are so folkloric [derogatory] and wild in their soap-operatics that the ideal outcome seems to be me Shaking My Damn Head at all the hijinks on display; maybe I'm just not easily endeared by Shakespeare at his most plot-y. 

But then again, to quote Harold Bloom (Shakespeare studies' most useful punching bag), we underestimate Shakespeare at our peril. Thinking about various past productions of the play I've seen, more than once I've come away convinced that the play's goofy engine can run well if treated with the proper sentimental irreverence: Fiasco Theater's stripped-down take with 6 actors served the drama splendidly, and the characterizations rendered by Milwaukee Shakespeare (RIP) remain laugh-inducing even some 15 years on. 

So know that my issues with Esther Jun's production currently running on the Tom Pattterson stage at the Stratford Festival are not sour grapes related to a title-based grudge. Shakespeare's play tells the story of the princess Innogen (Allison Edwards-Crewe), who runs afoul of her monarch parent Cymbeline (Lucy Peacock) after she marries the non-royal Posthumus (Jordin Hall). The story takes so many twists and turns on its road to something like 27 revelations (that the audience already knows) in the final scene that Shakespeare seems to be wilfully disregarding the causality of drama, and reveling in what people who like the play refer to as fairy-tale logic. 

This Stratford production takes a noble stab at the material, and you can tell the text personally means a lot to Jun. The issue here is it's taken so damn seriously. Of course the actors are going to have to truthfully inhabit the given circumstances of their world, whether comedy or tragedy. But the way Jun frontloads the spiritual dimensions of the play, both in the choreography and the design elements, weights the production in a direction that isn't conducive to being able to laugh at itself. She even begins the first act with a big ol' movement piece, with the ensemble larking about ponderously over the deep thrust stage. The costumes are gorgeous (designed by Michelle Bohn), and they strike so regal a tone that discourages the world having any sense of being light on its feet. Similarly, the set, with its illuminated tree (lights and scenic by Echo Zhou) takes the play as seriously as a heart-attack, in a tale that cries out for a little more self-conscious theatricality. Placing Cymbeline in a more-or-less actual world (however peppered with magical elements) feels like the wrong way to wring fun and revelation out of this curiously wacky item. 

The actors may always have to take it seriously, but not necessarily the director. The mystical elements of characters like Jupiter (Marcus Nance) and the Soothsayer (Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks) are employed to grave and mighty ends, in a manner that belies the ridiculousness of the story in which they appear. Jun's severity also doesn't serve Edwards-Crewe well, whose Innogen seems only capable of dire earnestness, and rarely humor, imperiousness, or the ability to spark terror. Christopher Allen as the comic villain Cloten is very entertaining, though in about 10 variations I don't know that I've ever seen a Cloten I didn't enjoy: his insufferability combined with his eventual malice is apparently an irresistible cocktail. 

To the production's credit, Tyrone Savage as Iachimo is incredible. Dastardly, delightful, and sparklingly clear, his appearance on the stage elevates the entire operation. 

Cymbeline can work marvelously onstage, but if the director asks the play to carry a burden it's not prepared for, you come away asking that most dreaded of audience questions: "why are you telling me this?" This production is not a bad one by any means, it's just not the best version of Cymbeline that Cymbeline can be. 

Jun's rendition certainly has its heart in the right place. All in all, I just think, though it surprises me to admit this, Cymbeline should be more fun than that.

Twelfth Night - Stratford Festival - 08/16/2024

Is it possible to overdose on Shakespeare? Imagine that was the top text posed by the following image:

Ok jokes are over. More on this later.

Seana McKenna's production of Twelfth Night on the Festival Stage in Stratford, ON is a highly amiable affair. Noted Canadian actor (and first-time Festival director), McKenna lightly sets the action in 1967, though the placement is a far-cry from that one As You Like It you're thinking of right now. If all actors who've played Hamlet can be classified either as "to be" Hamlets or "not to be" Hamlets, all Twelfth Night productions can justifiably be dubbed either "basically happy" or "basically bittersweet," and this one is certainly the former. The cap is nodded in the direction of Sir Toby's rejection of Sir Andrew (Scott Wentworth and Rylan Wilkie, respectively), and the highly convincing Laura Condlln renders Malvolio's speech of rage upon his release from imprisonment absolutely as striking as it needs to be. However, this is no Twelfth Night where you feel like Malvolio is going to seek his revenge "on the whole pack" of the assembled via a 3-D printer and an AR-15. This is staunchly a "basically happy" Twelfth Night, and the alternative is starting to feel like a relic of yesteryear (maybe people just seem to be over the idea of an incel Malvolio).

In McKenna's production, the justifiable stars are the central coupling of Viola (Jessica B. Hill) and Orsino (Andre Sills). As the lovelorn woman disguised as a boy in love with the Duke she serves, Hill is customarily excellent. While the production sometimes encourages her into cheaper laughs than she need truly ask for, Hill has emerged as one of the outstanding current talents of the Stratford Festival. Especially after her Lady Capulet and her Helena in All's Well That Ends Well two seasons ago, it comes as no surprise that her Viola shines via a unique portal of rhetorical clarity and emotional generosity. She is one of those performers who get dubbed things like "compulsively watchable," and with her onstage, you know Shakespeare will be done total justice as Hill takes accountability for her part of the story. 

Also, you gotta hand it to a guy who can do both Coriolanus AND Duke Orsino. Andre Sills' physically imposing presence onstage should not belie the fact that the man can suggest bizarre neurotic psychosis at the distance of a country mile. His Orsino is both a commanding potentate and a huge weirdo and asking for more would be unreasonable. 

Vanessa Sears as Olivia fares as well as she did as Juliet, though here with a stronger production backing her up: her joy at learning the newly-discovered Viola is going to be her sister is infectious. And seeing Emilio Vieira as Antonio, a vessel of earnest caring, not rejected but included in the play's ending festivities, is a welcome turn from a typical Twelfth Night shibboleth (Vieira is also a notably feeling Tybalt this year).   

Condlln's Malvolio treads the journey of the pseudo-puritan in a manner that's totally satisfying: watching her "box-tree" scene where she's spied on as she reads the letter Maria (Sarah Dodd) has forged to appear like Olivia's handwriting, you are struck with the impression that Shakespeare's innate understanding of a fun character journey was preternaturally intuitive. Ok ok I know I know yes "Shakespeare was really great" but somehow I do feel he's still kinda underrated as a dramatist. Michael Spencer-Davis here serves a useful function as Fabian, particularly when articulating that the course of revenge against Malvolio was taken out of injury, not inherent cruelty (which helps to lighten the play's finale). 

Which brings me back to the overdose. Nary through a fault of the Festival, or of the Bard himself, I largely find myself really Twelfth Nighted out. Between the two fundamental poles of happiness and bittersweetness, I feel like I am several decades removed from a surprise in Twelfth Night viewing. With surfeiting the appetite hath sickened and so died. That being said, even if the play doesn't mean as much to me as it did when I was fifteen and felt the poetry was a force for cellular manipulation and basically wanted to consume the comedy intravenously (I probably identified with Malvolio a little too much tbh), McKenna's production leaves you warmed and beguiled. Maybe the era of hyper-dark Shakespearean comedy is over, or maybe it was just self-imposed all along. 

Romeo and Juliet - Stratford Festival - 08/15/2024

Some plays work really well in the time-period in which they're set. I mean, for most viewers, even assuming the absolute best of conditions, the first ten-to-fifteen minutes of any given Shakespeare play are going to be a pretty tough plunge in the deep end. Therefore, when you're not attempting to simultaneously decode the author's 400 year-old dialogue, as well as an additional directorial "concept" that is also telegraphing that "certain Things" in fact "in this world" actually "mean Other Things," playing Shakespeare in more-or-less early modern garb has obvious virtues.

But no such notion can clear every hurdle. Sure, by not giving the characters modern clothes, or coming up with some justification as to why they're referring to their guns as "blades," you avoid certain barriers that make Shakespeare hard to understand for a contemporary audience, but one should never back into such a choice. Ideally, the director would have a burning passion as to why the drama needs placement in the Italian renaissance in order to sing, because the inverse is also true that simply transplanting the action into some land of suits and ties will never inherently convey "relevance" to any specific play.

I couldn't say why director Sam White chose this particular brand of generically period, Bard-cosplay costuming for her production of Romeo and Juliet on the Festival Stage at the Stratford Festival, here in charming Ontario. Certainly, her production last year of Wedding Band (in the Tom Patterson Theatre here in Stratford) worked excellently in its grounded, domestic intricacies, though the canvas of Alice Childress' theatre has different demands than Shakespeare's. Only in a few performances does what made Wedding Band special shine in this most heated of tragedies, and the saga of two children finding connection across a barrier of hatred never quite finds its burning zeal. 

Jessica B. Hill creates the most conflicted, emotionally mature Lady Capulet I've ever seen. The way White concocts the conversation between Hill, the Nurse (Glynis Ranney, hokey but effective) and Juliet (Vanessa Sears) to show how Lady Capulet realizes she is less of a mother to her daughter than the woman who actually nursed her, and proceeds to attempt to establish intimacy via the route of presenting the idea of Juliet's marriage, is a route through that group dynamic that is absolutely revelatory. Hill is terrifically served by Graham Abbey as her husband Capulet, and the wails the two impart over the body of what they believe to be their dead daughter is the closest the production has to a tear-jerking moment. Abbey in general is a delightful conduit of dad energy, and until Capulet turns into the ultimate domestic tyrant when he rages at Juliet for her unwillingness to marry Paris (Austin Eckert), he is really quite pleasant to be around.

Attention must also be paid to Scott Wentworth as Friar Laurence, who manages two remarkable feats in his first scene on the stage: he conveys just how much the flora and fauna of the natural world mean on an emotional level to this Franciscan father, and then uses his metaphors about good and evil commingling in all living beings to show why he believes the covert marriage of Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet may actually bring about something positive out of something negative. Also, Wentworth's shift from judgmental in the scene where he's about to marry Juliet to Romeo, when he first looks askance at their easy PDA, then becomes tearful after hearing their verbal protestations of love, perfectly highlights how people should encounter this story: for all the para-critical talk of them just being dumb kids, if you actually spend time in the young lovers' company, you realize their genius and remarkability are self-evident.

Steven Hao provides easy joviality as Benvolio, and Sears lives each line of Juliet's with impressive honesty and emotional commitment (though you wish she had a stronger foil in Jonathan Mason's undefined Romeo). Andrew Iles' Mercutio stands uncomfortably between comic-relief and predator with no directorial commentary on why people seem to find him so irresistible (you get the sense White doesn't like the character much). Iles' delivery adds a roadblock to rhetorical communication: "O, then I see Queen ["who?"] hath been with you"; at the performance I saw, many verbal details on the part of the overall ensemble got swallowed.   

The elements of White's production that reach most towards inventiveness stumble in the attempt. The idea to have Juliet serve as the opening Chorus ("Two households...") and be dressed as a physical embodiment of the dust from the stars that crossed her and Romeo, is a terrific idea, but at the performance I saw something was clearly amiss with the the sound mixing or the microphone or the mic placement or something or another, and thus Sears' singing of the speech as an aria was rendered so tough to understand it began the production on a wildly shaky and unfair note. The doubling of Mercutio and the Apothecary was similarly almost intriguing: a noteworthy idea executed with no real perspective; which was also true of the doubling of Balthazar and Friar John (both John Kirkpatrick), the two dudes who bring news that is both wrong and bad. The suggestion of a sexual encounter between R&J at the top of Act 3, Scene 5 was timid and unnecessary, and Anita Notoly's fight direction of the various duels was so flashy as to render any character-driven story within the violence unintelligible. 

While the bare adornment of the festival stage is a feature of many Stratford productions, here the stripped-down choice feels ill-advised, as the romantic passion of the titular star-crossed lovers doesn't mix the fire and powder enough to consume the theatre solely on linguistic bases. One feels White could have taken more extreme advantage of the thrust stage's benefits, as, in an ideal world, scene-changes could be shrouded with dark while another scene is going on, and thus you wouldn't have to wait for the inevitable "lights change, actors enter with furniture, put it somewhere, leave, beat, lights change, new scene begins" tedium. (And I won't even pretend to understand why Juliet's bed needed so many exits and entrances on its way up and down from the trap door.) The thrust stage's potential for poetic fluidity is largely unused. 

All in all, the production is uninventive, earthbound, and unable to carry you on what should be a heartbreaking journey. Whatever the virtue of certain performers, you leave the production cold and nonplussed. Hopefully White can have more chances to bring her personal zeal to Shakespeare at the festival. As it stands, this R&J loves far too moderately. 

Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet: Chicago Shakespeare Theater: 04/30/2024

Eddie Izzard's comedy is a victim of its own success, and such a natural comedian/intellectual shouldn't be bound to deliver one type of show. Thus, entering her one-person performance of Hamlet at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and expecting some sort of Eddie-fied version of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's repertoire, with Izzard playing all the roles in an extravagant ren faire pantomime, is unfair to her as a performer. 

Izzard does indeed play every role in this version of Shakespeare's tragedy, as directed by Selina Cadell, and adapted by Mark Izzard (Eddie's bro). But sheer laughs-per-minute are not the goal here, in spite of what many well-meaning audiences attempted to will into being at CST's Courtyard Theater (clearly the audience was a mix of both Shakespeare aficionados and Izzard heads, not that there isn't already a noted crossover). 

Despite added chuckles not being the endgame, spending time in the undiluted pleasure of Izzard's theatrical company is, for the believer, a self-contained satisfaction. "But what is her Hamlet saying about Hamlet as Hamlet??' Such pontification is as necessary as it is here inapplicable, though a bit more on Hamlet as relevance-machine later. Her portrayal of the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark, sent on a quest of revenge after learning his father the king was murdered by his uncle (the new king), does in fact include some good laughs: the bit of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as hand puppets may not be deep but is hard to begrudge; the way Izzard pauses as Polonius attempting to distill his information immediately before "your noble son is mad" is flat-out hilarious, and the way Eddie delivers Mark's paraphrase of "these tedious old fools" and turns it into "what a git" becomes both funny and telling. Presumably, it would be easy for Eddie to provide a running commentary as herself as the events of Hamlet unfold (as she does, delightfully, as the narrator of her autobiography's audio version). The "what a git" jab is really the only time she goes for what (among Eddie fans) might be considered a "cheap laugh" (by her heightened standards), and in general she should be applauded for not leaning into her own stage persona as a laugh factory unto itself. Her droll, eloquent lyricism mixed with mental veracity (sometimes at the expense of articulation) can generate a guffaw from her fans even divorced from any context, and the fact that she doesn't pull faces all the way through (i.e. "but he's dead now") proves the severity of her endeavor. 

That being said, Eddie Izzard has a face built for sightlines, and her unique human mask is an indelible pleasure of seeing her perform. Occasionally her pathos yields notable dividends, such as in her careful, quiet setting-up of the first scene, with the tense guards on the battlements, awaiting the ghost of the former king. The overall show is best in quiet and stillness. Hamlet's soliloquies, his "quintessence of dust" speech, and Ophelia's mad singing are when Izzard shines brightest as an actor, bringing real mental rigor and emotional earnestness to Shakespeare's language. 

Shakespeare's text (as adapted by brother Mark) comes through clearest in the times when we get to spend the most extended periods with Eddie as one character, such as those highlighted above. Scenes with more jumping back-and-forth between persons aren't able to sustain the same level of interest, and the more vitriolic sections, like Hamlet confronting Ophelia in the "nunnery scene," or killing Polonius and screaming at Gertrude in the "closet scene," are the production at its weakest. "Tearing a passion to tatters," while derided by Hamlet in his famous speech to the players, is actually something he does frequently in life, and you wish Eddie found more occasion for tears in her eyes and distraction in her aspect. 

Despite the single performer, the text is no more adapted/cut/re-written than any other contemporary production of Hamlet, whatever the cast size or running time (this one's just under 2.5 hours with a break). Eddie, presumably with the aid of Cadell, makes helpful use of Shakespeare's verbs as operatives, and the changing of "since he went into France I have been in continual practice" to "since my father's death I have been in continual practice" (both events actually being at the same time) struck me as revelatory. 

You can probably tell I'm pre-inclined to enjoy an evening with Eddie and the Bard, but this would not be a good starter-Hamlet for the uninitiated. The act of Izzard moving back-and-forth between spots to denote different characters is as familiar from her stand-up as it is a necessary evil in a show like this as it is unlikely to convey plot nuance to someone new to the antics of the melancholy Dane. I had a good time watching the comedian -- beloved for such phrases as "cake or death" and "you're Mr. Stephens" and "don't call me Jeezy Creezy" -- speak (many of) the words of Shakespeare's greatest achievement. 

This now leads me into the waters of Hamlet pontification. Some may quibble that Cadell and Izzard don't have much of an overarching "take" on Hamlet. This production makes no attempt to connect the story to mental illness, totalitarian surveillance, youthful insurrection, or any such topic that could be trendily discussed via a YouTube Q&A. This lack of perspective is an inherent strength; a feature, not a flaw. While the play's status in the canon is secure, it is a drama that by size and scope resists reduction and streamlining more strenuously even than other comparably great tragedies. We all believe Hamlet to be superlative, but none of us quite know why. The poetry, the psychological insight, the revenge tragedy, all elements that can be named present obvious virtues. But does anyone really know how to handle the interpersonal trauma that comes from Hamlet's sexism, or the lack of agency of Ophelia, or the play's militantly confounding timeline, in a way that truly fits that square peg into the round hole of everyone emerging satisfied? Perhaps every era's shibboleths make certain elements of Shakespeareana untouchable: the Victorians couldn't stand Rosalind claiming she was as native to the Forest of Arden "as the cony you see dwell where she is kindled," and cut the ribaldry with extreme prejudice, though the line today would hardly bat an eye. But biases of the times are one thing, and the grandeur of Hamlet another. Something within Hamlet resists narrative problem-solving, but encourages everyone who tackles the role to do so because, for some tough to explain reason, we all feel the story of Hamlet is our fucking story. Maybe experiencing the growing pains of such a mind as Hamlet should be enough. With Eddie Izzard, while recognizing the limitations of the format, I had a good time, and somehow Hamlet remained Hamlet. 

The act of performing all the roles in the play may be more a technical virtue than an artistic one, but to me there is nothing wrong with, considering the militancy of Eddie's approach, relishing her creative feat (as Cassio said of Iago) "more in the soldier than in the scholar." 

RICHARD III - Chicago Shakespeare Theater: 2/23/2024

Edward Hall's first-outing as Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Artistic Director shines most brightly in its Englishness. The British-born stage director happens to be the son of Sir Peter Hall, most widely known for being the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as the second Artistic Director of the National Theatre (not a bad gig to follow Lord Olivier). So while the cast of CST's Richard III is American, the thread of England establishing itself as an imperial power is the most revelatory element in this production as helmed by Hall the younger. Throughout the evening, as the brutal killings of Richard III (Katy Sullivan) are dispatched with perfunctory cruelty, Hall often has his ensemble, dressed in white lab coats and masked like spectral burn victims, choraling religious tunes from Anglican liturgy, as well as jauntier numbers with an air of the music hall. Such inclusion highlights how the prim and proper image of England (and later, Britain), exemplified by such cultural output, was underpropped by innumerable regimes of individual and colonial brutality. Placing ear-catching tunes next to the violent murders of Richard's victims seems a simplistic dissonance, but the intellectual stirrings it creates in the viewer can justifiably be called profound. 

The production takes place in a generically contemporary location, and the ensemble is lead by Sullivan, a Tony-nominated performer and Paralympian, who during the course of the play often uses a wheelchair, being a bilateral above-the-knee double-amputee. In general, both in production and lead, this is a blunt Richard III, without much interest in emotional nuance. Much of the publicity of this particular production surrounds the casting of an actor who is disabled in the lead role, and not resorting to prosthetics as previous generations have done (and largely still do). Sullivan's focus as Richard seems to be expressing each line with volume and spirit, though ultimately does not end up providing a terribly memorable characterization of Richard III. No attempt is made to lean into the trope of Richard as a suave snake oil salesman, and thus the element of Richard's villainy being in any way the result of his own charm or charisma is lost. The notable "when I die, no soul shall pity me" soliloquy of Act V arrives as a foregone conclusion; we never love to hate or hate to love the anti-hero of Sullivan's concoction. 

Overall, the cast serves up a meat and potatoes rendition of the story: clear and efficient, but lacking in emotional texture. The scene where Richard attempts to convince Queen Elizabeth (Jessica Dean Turner) to marry her daughter, after having been responsible for the deaths of her husband and sons, is a notable exception. The production also struggles with humor: it ostensibly uses a darkly comedic lens to peer through the (already) darkly comedic saga of Richard attempting to murder his way to sovereignty, but obvious elements like the two murderers (Mo Shipley and Jodi Gate, at the performance I saw) being interpreted as vaudeville schlemiels falls flat, and feels more 'clever' in a self-satisfied vein than genuinely funny.  The choice to have a citizen rap a speech at the occasion of Richard's monarchical election was a serious misfire, and why in this world of guns and morphine Richard feels the need to call in battle for "a horse, a horse" is a real head-scratcher. However, Mark Bedard makes fine intellectual sense of Clarence's nightmare speech (though the torture of his eyes was a stutter-step of directorial storytelling), and the cursings of Margaret (Libya V. Pugh) feature some thrilling lighting effects from Marcus Doshi. 

The production is no slog, and makes the tangled Wars of the Roses politics as easy to follow as I reckon is possible, but one comes away from the production wondering how this medieval drama of usurpation and subterfuge is meaningful in a contemporary lens beyond the most perfunctory connections. Not a bad time, but not exciting enough to overlook the cut corners.