Romeo and Juliet & The Comedy of Errors - Great River Shakespeare Festival (07/05/2025)

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.

Othello - Ethel Barrymore Theatre (Broadway) - 04/24/2025

Toni Morrison said that Othello was the most American Shakespeare play because, in this country, America doesn't kill what you love, it makes you kill what you love. While that ideal reading of Shakespeare's classic tragedy of passion, race, and violence isn't exactly what's happening onstage at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre, under the direction of Kenny Leon, it's at least an aspirational interpretation of a play that can seem so utterly vital and yet simultaneously so resistant to progressive reimagining. 

Any future quibbles aside, Leon's production keeps you narratively riveted, and renders the events of the story serviceably moving. The play is the saga of the noted general Othello (Denzel Washington), the so-called "Moor of Venice" (a term of no precise ethnic identity, but clearly Shakespeare imagined a Black man in this drama), who falls in love with the (white) Venetian Desdemona (Molly Osborne). Othello is then brought catastrophically low by the machinations of the wicked Iago (Jake Gyllenhaal), a soldier in Othello's army who has recently been passed-over for a promotion. The drama takes its form when Iago seeks revenge on Othello for the snub. (As John Milton with Satan so the Bard with Iago: both knew there is nothing more dangerous than a white man who feels he is acting "from sense of injured merit.") 

Leon has chosen to direct the ensemble towards a manner of Shakespearean communication that has no whiff of metric verse. The entire cast is devoted to treating Shakespeare's language -- its hills, its dales, its five-feet-per-line -- as totally conversational realism. This is not necessarily a crime, as the results basically speak for themselves: many of those here to see the play likely being more engaged by Denzel than the play's author, there does seem to be a real value in presenting the words in an essentially "regular" way, as the crowd at the performance I saw often responded to the action as if they were completely unfamiliar with the source material. Such a circumstance is ideal: if you can experience one of the world's great artistic masterworks sight-unseen, can a greater pleasure be found on this earth? 

However, such an approach to the language has its limitations. No character in Shakespeare has as many soaring poetic arias as Othello, and Washington really only reaches for such moments during his "O blood, blood, blood" outburst, and in his speech on if it "had pleased Heaven to try me with affliction." In the former case, he nails the shift in Othello's early stunning and grandiose imagery ("Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch Heaven") which when poisoned by Iago's lies about Desdemona's infidelity, become the bestial and grotesque imagery of the later-play ("goats and monkeys"). And the latter speech takes you, via his tortured eloquence on how he could bear every plague from the gods other than the one he's been cursed with, to a gutting conclusion.

The rest of the time? Well, you leave the theater more impressed by the fact that a Denzel Washington exists than by the uniqueness of the Othello he's created. Leon has encouraged Washington to play up certain moments of comedy in the earlier half of the play that mostly relate to his love for Desdemona, and it's tough for such moments not to ring as cheap due to the sanctioned Denzel persona. With the singular greatness of Othello as a vessel for dramatic poetry, and Washington as both a great star who is also a great actor, you wish Leon hadn't unilaterally demanded such a flippant, casual, over-the-shoulder approach to Shakespeare's rhetoric. Onstage, just being yourself isn't always enough, and it would have been nice if Washington had more chances to catch the verse and soar. In Leon's production, you will never find any actor "discovering" their words or treating Shakespeare's verse as "living thought," and you can either beat your dramaturgical head against the seat in front of you or accept the show as given. 

While the streamlined approach to the language has its basic functionality, it's hard to imagine your average theatre-goer being able to appreciate the richer ironies of the text along the way. The fact that in one scene Iago tells Cassio that "reputation is an idle, false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving," and then in an about-face later tells Othello that "good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of our souls," is likely to go wildly unnoticed. 

An oft-touted issue in the text of Othello is the amount of soliloquy-time given not to the title role, but to his diabolical tempter. While sheer tonnage of soliloquies is a poor metric by which to judge how well we know a character (Lear has zero), it's hard to escape the fact that Iago is given more stage-time than the people whose lives he ruins, particularly Othello. As the evil ensign, Jake Gyllenhaal dives in feet-first and creates a totally credible psychopathic grunt, the type of Marine who thought he could get ahead in the Corps but just ended up reenacting the traits that made him unimpressive as a civilian. The technical apparatus of his solo-speeches (lit by Natasha Katz), plus the raw feeling he invests the character's stated motivations (especially his curious belief that Othello has made him a cuckold), go a long way towards a vivid rendering of Shakespeare's most purely intellectual (and thus most purely terrifying) creation. You feel Gyllenhaal is building a character from the ground-up with no reliance on his screen identity, and the role feels totally credible. 

The rest of the cast is largely stalwart, with Osborne never striking a wrong note as Desdemona. Andrew Burnap is a fantastic Cassio, a role that can easily feel anonymous, and his breakdown after a night of drunkenness that loses him his lieutenancy is genuinely devastating ("I have lost my reputation"). His too-forward kissing of Emilia (Kimber Elayne Sprawl) feels strong-armed by Leon into a conversation the play isn't really having (never except then does this Cassio feel so socially clueless), but Burnap excellently communicates that Cassio is not just bad at holding his liquor, but also truly does not like the experience of intoxication. Sprawl herself shines in her ultimate confrontation with Othello after his murder of Desdemona: Leon deftly understands that there is no one we'd rather see dress Othello down in that moment than a Black woman, and while the relationship between Emilia and her husband Iago feels largely unmined, Sprawl sticks Emilia's most important landing. She also gives a moving rendition of the speech about female agency in regards to marital infidelity: "Let husbands know their wives have sense like them..." Anthony Michael Lopez delivers a well-balanced Roderigo, not a total idiot but clearly dangerously gullible. However, a character-as-directorial-misstep is Bianca (played by Julee Cerda): the role of the sex-worker/girlfriend of Cassio feels like it was given short-shrift in Leon's vision, and while the moment when Emilia castigates Bianca as a "strumpet" is certainly fascinating from a literary standpoint, why we need that insult from that particular character (who is largely the play's voice of feminist agency) remains unclear, and her thread of the production arrives undercooked. (Also, Leon's decision to make Emilia a lieutenant in the army has great potential but goes unexplored.) 

Leon's Othello purports to take place "in the near future" (an opening projection tells us so), but all that really does is situate the action functionally in a chronologic neverland; it might as well take place at no time at all. Othello benefits from a grounded, realistic setting as terrestrial as its military inhabitants. In Shakespeare, Venice has a tactile locality as deliberate as the way Bohemia or Illyria have an evocative surreality. Leon's production appears to be a basically contemporary military setting (program notes specifically cite the Marines), and while costume designer Dede Ayite missed an opportunity to have Cassio in his civvies after his ousting from Othello's command, everyone on the design team is speaking the same language. That being said, fight director Thomas Schall seems to have taken the path of least resistance with Othello's strangling of Desdemona, and Othello's "be sure thou prove my love a whore" outburst against Iago would have benefitted from an actual laying-on of hands. 

The production stumbles with its rushed treatment of the ending. Obviously Shakespeare giving the final words to Lodovico (Rob Heaps) is deeply frustrating, but concluding the play with Othello's self-slaughter can't help but feel melodramatic. We need just a touch of falling action before the denouement. Also, the excision of Othello's speech about his "sword of Spain," while comprehensible in its desire to streamline the play's conclusion, loses a beat of decompression that it turns out the show deeply needs, otherwise everything is just too frenzied; you find yourself wondering how Iago could have been interrogated by Cassio and Lodovico when he was only offstage for like two seconds.

(Commenting on the obvious use of microphones by Broadway actors in non-musicals feels as unnecessary as it is discouraging, and we can leave that discussion at the fact that this show is no exception.)

Much scholarship (particularly by Dr. Ayanna Thompson) has been done on how the rehearsal room dynamics of producing Othello often place actors of color at a disadvantage to their white collaborators. When you (frequently) have a white director helming the process, the implicit tendency is often to favor the actor playing Iago over Othello (as Iago does textually have a higher line-count), which puts Othello at a social disadvantage in addition Shakespeare's dramaturgical one, which was the placement of his pain and trauma in the dramatic structure of a comedy. We in the audience are in on the Iago "joke" but Othello isn't, and this can take a real physical and psychic toll on the Othello performer. Such performative pitfalls feel generally avoided in Leon's production, and the performance deliberately strays away from mining the possible comedy of Iago's machinations: many of the references to Iago being "honest" -- and there are a ton -- have been cut, likely to avoid morbid laughter at sensitive moments. 

However the dynamics of the rehearsal room or the play's racial representation are addressed, the event of viewing Othello, regardless of the subjective quality of the production being viewed, tends to be a totalizing experience. The tragedy has been referred to as "not [Shakespeare's] greatest work, but his best play," and the time-art of theatre makes this value-judgment tough to resist. When you hear the actor playing Othello admit that he has "loved not wisely, but too well," and hear the following passage about the tears streaming down his cheeks --  

"...one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unuséd to the melting mood,

Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinal gum."

-- it is incredibly hard not to believe that you are experiencing the best possible story, despite intellectually understanding every reason to the contrary. Such is the power of Othello. Like the poison of Iago's lies, it burrows so deep in the bloodstream that its power is ineradicable and overwhelming. Such power can be felt even in the presence of a very good if not sterling production. Apparently it's possible to experience your full love for a play even when not every single one of your individual standards for that play have been met. A tangible pleasure is felt in being in the same room as the poetry of your life. You could say Shakespeare's words and drama endure via a unique poetic half-life. They have incantatory force that, apart from performative representation, discharge their self-evident power by doing nothing more than existing. 

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.