Before it turns tragic, Romeo and Juliet is one of the all-time great hangout plays. The contents of Shakespeare's acts one and two, with Juliet's poetry, Mercutio's ramblings, Romeo's imagination, the Nurse's ribaldry, Capulet's joviality, and many other items, all make it one of the most amiable dramatic couches on which to crash. Rio Bravo has nothing on fair Verona. The first two-fifths of Shakespeare's great apprentice tragedy are a delightful comedy-in-miniature, and at the Great River Shakespeare Festival, under the direction of H. Adam Harris, those early scenes are really quite pleasant to be around. A huge part of this is thanks to Serena Phillip as Juliet, who makes the text both strikingly clear and muscular. As the Capulet's daughter, Philip's trajectory in the play from child, to fiance, to wife, to widow, proves as indelible a journey as any dramatist has provided a creation. Her presence onstage is always welcome and appreciated.
This leads us to a bit of critical awkwardness. At the performance I saw, Romeo was played by understudy Denzel Dejournette. Understudies are the unsung heroes of the theatrical industry (especially according to themselves), and often don't get paid until the technical process begins (if you see one in the building during the second week of rehearsals, you are, economically-speaking, in rarified air). All in all, Dejournette was not ready to provide an equal foil to Phillip's Juliet, and thus the air was largely out of the production's sails. In addition to the presence of several understudies, this seemed to be a performance where a number of practical effects just plain went wrong: knives accidentally fell from scabbards, poison canisters were dropped, the center set-piece was wobbly, lines were flubbed, headdresses toppled from performers' brows, and the lovers’ kissing was "marked" rather than actualized (the last was genuinely puzzling; shouldn't the intimacy be rehearsed as part of the understudy's track?) That being said, Dejournette got by reasonably well in the first half, as the vibes were just so good: the balcony scene was effortlessly charming, even if you wish he inhabited the language with more surety. Also, the light frustration he found with Benvolio (Clay Cooper at my performance, another understudy) and Mercutio (Diana Coates) via the innocuous line "good morrow to you both" was genuinely charming.
Director Harris frames the production as a "memory play" narrated by the Nurse (Stephane Lambourn), though this is an interpretation largely available to us through his program note. Lambourn is a strong performer, and her passion for her adopted-daughter, Juliet, is never in question. But Harris's focus on the Nurse's personal grief at the story's events directs the play too far away from its central conflict, which is how the elder generation so often fails the younger. The decidedly tragic acts three, four, and five, feel plodding when it seems like we're simply driving towards disaster, and not biting our nails at every missed connection along the way. Yes, we know from the play's first speech that these two star-crossed lovers will die at the play's (foregone) conclusion, but somehow Shakespeare makes us hope against hope for their salvation. Harris's choice to have the show open "inside the Nurse's head," as it were, and thus casually bypass the choreographic need for an Act One swordfight, opens up a can of worms as to how one experiences Shakespeare's stories without foreknowledge. The first ten minutes of a Shakespeare production, under the absolute best of circumstances, are tough enough even for the most dexterous theatre-goer, and Harris's opening style-choices feel more likely to alienate than welcome.
Harris does have some fine flourishes: the rose petals that fall from the ensemble's hands, signifying the blood of the feuding Capulets and Montagues that fills Verona's streets, proved doubly effective when it was also how Romeo recognized the presence of a recent-swashbuckling. You wish there had been more such directorial surrealities, though Harris's collaboration with lighting designer Avery Reagan is commendable in its incisiveness and lack of showboating. His excision of the Mercutio conjuring scene and the Capulet speech about drizzling dew were very appreciated by this reviewer, though the costumes (by John Merritt) could have used a stronger directorial perspective: their semi-timelessness crossed with a general nod to certain early modern styles left my eye “cold.” The vagueness of the costume's setting especially did no aid to Friar Lawrence (Gavin Mueller): a tough emotional assignment on the best of days, here Lawrence felt like a man adrift for reasons exterior to the drama, and placing him in a more literal religious setting would have been nice. As written by Shakespeare, Friar Lawrence seems to be the ultimate well-meaning liberal: willing to claim belief in progressive ideals, but only ever willing to sacrifice the safety of others' for those ideals’ success. You should walk out of R&J ready to beat Lawrence to death with a baseball bat. Here, at GRSF, such ire is remote.
In its own corner, the moment when the Nurse drew a knife on Capulet (Michael Fitzpatrick) was a real head-scratcher, and should have been relegated to the short-lived enthusiasm of the rehearsal room. Fitzpatrick, a GRSF regular, delivers an affable patriarch (though this one, like most productions, shies away from how truly mean he has to be to Juliet in Act 3, Scene 5). His presence, as well as the ever-sturdy William Sturdivant (as Prince and the Apothecary), begs a question: where have all the (other) regulars gone? Melissa Maxwell, Christopher Gerson, Tarah Flanagan, Benjamin Boucvalt: their absence is as dispiriting as the uncomfortably small audience present with me at the R&J matinee. Let's hope this isn't a signal of waning days for the Great River Shakespeare Festival. Any aesthetic quibbling aside, and this R&J is certainly more ponderous than passionate, they really do deserve all the best.
The other show in the repertory this year is Artistic Director Doug Scholz-Carlson's rendition of The Comedy of Errors. Set in a bright and funky 1980s milieu, this show is notably allergic to seriousness (with one exception, which will be addressed). For the most part, the production is amiable, even if James Shapiro's quote that The Comedy of Errors is "Shakespeare's most underrated play" continues to be as true on the stage as it is in the academy. The largely fine ensemble do decent work telling the story of a long-coming reunion between two sets of identical twins, Antipholus of Ephesus & Antipholus of Syracuse (William Sturdivant), and Dromio of Ephesus & Dromio of Syracuse (Emily Fury Daly). Occurring basically in real time, the play takes place in the fun yet spooky town of Ephesus, and is mainly a delightful excuse for hijinks to play out on the road to a restorative comedic conclusion. While me and Daly will simply never see eye-to-eye on what constitutes "theatre funny," the audience I saw the play with (notably more packed than earlier that day at R&J) ate up the silliness with goodwill. They particularly responded to the presentation of exorcist Dr. Pinch (Fitzpatrick) as a Christian televangelist (a character whose presence could have been more exploited).
Scholz-Carlson casts one actor as each pair of twins, which works reasonably well until they have to have a joyful reconciliation in Act 5, and the "theatrical solution" allowing each actor to "talk to themselves" utterly fails to convey the transcendence required of the moment. The production's ending is marred by several such choices. In addition to stick-puppets serving as human stand-ins for the twins, the tearful reunion of Egeon (Fitzpatrick again) and Amelia the Abbess (Stephanie Lambourn) is totally blown, and if blinked through could be missed. More attention should have been paid to the most canonically joyful meeting of husband and wife in all of Shakespeare, this side of Hermione's statue coming to life.
This brings us to the scene of a great Shakespearean crime. Both right after intermission, and then near the play's ending, Scholz-Carlson adds extra-textual insertions from the collaborative early modern play Sir Thomas More, with lines from a scene believed to have been at least partially written by Shakespeare. In the scene, the sainted More quells the rage of an angry mob attempting to expel "the strangers" from England. This text is a Bardolator's wet dream, as it paints God Shakespeare on the right side of history as a supporter of immigration rights, even way back in the days of yore. However, such a sanctimonious addition reads as the worst kind of "smart" Shakespeareana. The self-satisfaction of the choice wafts over the audience as Shakespeare's most narratively perfect comedy is plastered over with self-righteousness of both the political and dramaturgical kind.
The power of The Comedy of Errors comes from its irreverence: yes, the play deals with spousal abuse, human trafficking, class warfare, domestic violence, the rights of displaced persons, even a freakin' cold war. However, the wild casualness (and even hilarity) with which all of these subjects are treated, ends up making the play more emotional, not less. If you treat the denouement as an excuse for a civics lesson, you rob the drama of its power. The inverse is also true: this comedy has some brutalities. Dromio of Ephesus has a heart-rending monologue about being beaten by his Antipholus since "the hour of [his] nativity," and Adriana and Luciana express acute yearning over the failure of the men in their lives. If you slink away from the real pain expressed in the text, I come to question whether you are actually producing this play in good-faith. Artistic Directors (I’m recalling a quotation from Richard Monette) do have a habit of believing that directing this play is the Shakespearean equivalent of slumming-it.
The Comedy of Errors has the most pound-for-pound laughs in any of Shakespeare's plays, but also has one of the great tear-jerking moments, when the twin Dromios each find their missing person. If you can't appreciate the play at its toughest, you don't deserve it at its funniest. Shakespeare never served us only dessert, and The Comedy of Errors is no exception. (And I won’t begin to catalogue how the play is also a riotous takedown of Christian mysticism.)
This same lack of true belief in the play is also found in the cutting of certain "problematic" material, such as Dromio's fat-shaming of the kitchen maid, Luciana's exclamation that men should at least try to pretend they appreciate their female partners ("Alas, poor women, make us yet believe, / Being compact of credit, that you love us"), as well as the "cattier" interactions between Adriana and the Abbess. All these cuts serve to show us a director not entirely at ease with the play's sexual-satirical agenda. Yet just last year, GRSF didn't bat an eye at including (untreated) the more misogynistic elements of Hamlet's interactions with Ophelia and Gertrude, which only proves there is a limit to this company's (supposed) dedication to not "fixing" plays.
Though truthfully, none of these choices approach the unforgivable insertion of the Sir Thomas More dialogue. I exited the curtain call fuming, and internally raging that it was time for the Shakespeare nerds to get back in their lockers.
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