A post-mortem on Pericles: lost and found at sea

Paula Plum gets into the swing of things in Pericles.  Photos: J. Stratton McCrady

I was late getting to the Actors' Shakespeare Project's Pericles (which closed this weekend), but honestly, I wasn't in too much of a rush. This troupe has found their audience, certainly - and good for them (I mean that); but I don't think they have too much to say about the Bard that they haven't said already - and what they have said so far hasn't limned his depths. Their ensemble always offers a few striking performances (but never quite a whole play's worth), and certainly there's a sense of literate smarts about the troupe as a whole. But their productions usually misfire one way or another - certainly they never come together with the resonance that great Shakespeare achieves. 

This is the result of subtle, ingrown issues. The troupe's penchant for casting against type often costs them, and they still betray an inability to fully identify with the Bard's characters and tropes in their historical context, while forgetting their own patronizing, postmodern-collegiate frame. Thus they've almost proven the opposite of what their founding was intended to demonstrate; ASP's light, rag-tag, self-aware, actor-driven theatre has proven just as variable and incomplete as the pretentious director-driven dreadnoughts that it was designed to challenge. In fact, ironically enough, they're most prone to being led down the primrose path to artistic downfall by the wackiest, wildest directorial conceits. (So I guess now we know neither approach works, and that somehow they often end up in the same place.)

Well, so it goes. The trouble is that Boston seems to have given ASP credit for conquering the Bard anyway, and the rest of the theatrical establishment has been all too happy to hand Him over to them. And who's the wiser? Who has seen great Shakespeare in Boston? It's all but unheard of - certainly almost all the professors who jaw about it in town have rarely (or never) seen it; I can only think of one production in the past decade or so - Nicholas Martin's Love's Labour's Lost at the Huntington - that even came close to what the RSC or Canada's Stratford Festival can do at their best (and even those redoubts are beginning to flag in their ability, it seems to me; Shakespeare will go down, too, I imagine, as the general culture does).

But anyway, back to Pericles, Prince of Tyre (the play's full title) - which intrigues because it is so important in the canon while being a strange jumble of a play. Much of it probably isn't by Shakespeare, in fact; these days the latest software tells us that the first two acts (or more) may be by one George Wilkins (who published his own account of the legend prior to the play's quarto edition; it didn't make it into the First Folio).

Now to many observers, the mixed (or contested) authorship of the play somehow makes it of lesser artistic interest than the rest of the canon. But to my mind, the reverse is actually true. Indeed, Pericles fascinates me precisely because, like Timon of Athens, it seems half-finished, so seeing it is like viewing a cross-section cut out of the Bard's work process.

But let's back up a bit and ponder the whole Shakespearean authorship question. No, not that authorship question - the Earl-of-Oxford boondoggle is an utter waste of time. I mean the question of what Shakespearean "authorship" actually means - for I certainly don't think Shakespeare was an author in the Romantic sense of being the "onlie begetter" of his plays, the lone genius who forged our conscience in the smithy of his soul. Not that educated people quite believe that; even schoolboys know the Bard borrowed his plots - but few seem to grasp that this makes Shakespeare something of a critic of his own raw material, a re-shaper and re-caster rather than, well, an "original," for lack of a better word.  Indeed, you could argue (to paraphrase a famous quip about musicals) that a Shakespearean text isn't written - it's re-written.

Hence the uncanny depth of much of the canon - it reflects a genius analyzing extant cultural material rather than heaving it up fresh from his own subconscious. It's all a rewrite, a polish, an enhancement. And thus the peculiar position of Pericles: in its first two acts, the  urtext is bare, or at best only slightly re-worked, sticking out of the script like a bone. Indeed, you can almost feel the script "becoming" Shakespeare as it shifts gears in its third act.

More intriguing, still - Pericles, for all its flaws, represents a major pivot in the canon (and thus a fulcrum in Western literature). In fact Wilkins' scrappy potboiler re-directed the energies of the West's greatest genius into a radical new genre (the romance) which would culminate in his final masterpiece, The Tempest. We can even find among the lines of Pericles the thematic kernel of this final phase expressed in a nutshell: "Did you not name a tempest/a birth and a death?" the resurrected Thaisa begs of her husband in the ultimate scene, unaware she's making a trenchant artistic forecast. In formal and historical terms, Pericles thus looms over many another more fully realized Shakespeare play.

But why did George Wilkins' Prince of Tyre capture the imagination of the Bard?  Part of its appeal perhaps lay in its timing: Shakespeare began working on Pericles just as the birth of a granddaughter no doubt inspired a sense of rapprochement with his semi-abandoned wife and family. But as Celia comments in As You Like It, "There is more in it." I have little doubt that as Shakespeare surveyed the "rough cut" of Pericles he began to perceive in it an amazing coincidence (rather like the many in the play itself): its cartoonish effects paralleled and even extended many of the deep themes that had been moving beneath the surface of his own oeuvre. Storms and shipwrecks, identities lost and found, families broken and healed, societies rejuvenated; twins and doubles and hints of magic; he had been trading in these tropes (in more sophisticated form) since The Comedy of Errors, that is for his entire artistic life.

Thus the challenge to any production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre: to suggest in its crude, tempest-tost action what Shakespeare saw there, even though he wouldn't develop his vision fully until The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

And it must be admitted that while ASP attempted to pick up this gauntlet, it often fumbled the move.

Omar Robinson, Johnny Lee Davenport, and Johnnie McQuarley ham it up as pirates of the Caribbean.

But first the good news: the show basically looked and felt as Pericles should - there were no disastrous high concepts mucking things up as there were in some recent ASP outings. The ocean was central to set designer Dahlia Al-Habieli's rendering, which is exactly right, as Marina, the daughter who reclaims her father from living death, is both born at sea and literally named for it (she is the sea).  Deb Sullivan's lighting was likewise evocative, but alas, costume designer Molly Trainer drew her sartorial choices from the shores of the American colonies, which only recalled the sexual repressions of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible rather than the pagan fires that lit the original myth.  Too bad, but this misstep wasn't fatal (and might have proved fruitful if Al-Habieli had come up with some Greek-revival architecture for the climax at Diana's temple, but the production eschewed the pageant-like elements of the finale - Diana herself never appeared in a masque-like vision, for instance, another small error).

Even more artistic wobbles I'm afraid dominated the first two "Wilkins" acts. The opening presentation of incest (Pericles discovers his intended bride has already been bedded by her father) had little threatening force, and director Allyn Burrows played the ensuing pursuit of his hero largely for laughs - as many a misguided production does, even though stage directions such as "Enter Pericles, wet" clearly indicate that rebirth is the business at hand.  Real evil is afoot in the action, too (as well as genuine good), but all this seemed lost in broader-than-broad antics from the likes of Omar Robinson, Johnny Lee Davenport, and Johnnie McQuarley (above), who are all capable of far more subtlety (indeed Davenport is a tragic talent that ASP seems, for unknown reasons, to refuse to tap). Playing against the slapstick, alas, Jesse Hinson was merely a hunky blank as Pericles, and as his wife Thaisa (whom Pericles wins, then loses, then finds again), Kathryn Lynch was hampered by her Hester Prynne get-up, while the usually reliable Michael Forden Walker looked lost as her father, the benevolent king Simonides.  So there wasn't much going on in the first half, even as Paula Plum wandered through now and then, doing her familiar wise-woman thang as Gower, a narrative host inherited from Wilkins.

Still, the production did move up-hill. Burrows staged the central tempest imaginatively, and Plum brought unexpected depth to Ceremon, the magician who revives the drowned Thaisa.  And while Elizabeth Rimar made Marina rather a pill (despite the fact that she's repeatedly described as radiant), her own misadventures grew more absorbing, as Bobbie Steinbach lit up their central episode with a saucily knowing take on the Bawd who imprisons her in a brothel (alas, Gabriel Kuttner wasn't much more threatening as her henchman, the beastly Boult, than he had been as the silkily perverse Antiochus in the first act).  Basically, Burrows began to achieve something like the right atmosphere as Shakespeare's hand grew more apparent in the text: Hinson put over Pericles' desperate alienation from his tragedy, and by the reunion at the finale, something of the music of the spheres had indeed begun to echo onstage.

You could argue, of course, that these achievements were too little, and came too late.  I was somehow encouraged by the production, though.  Its sometime successes were real, and what's more, they were genuinely Shakespearean - which alas, is not always the case at ASP.  Here's to more like them in the future.

Stuck in the middle with Will

Marianna Bassham, stuck in Middletown.  Photo: Stratton McCrady

I left Middletown (at the Actors' Shakespeare Project through March 10) wondering exactly how a playwright as bright as Will Eno could have written a play quite this boring.  

Like a lot of people, I was struck by Eno's spiky monologue Thom Pain (based on nothing) a few years back, so I was quite excited to see one of his full-length plays. But just a few minutes into Middletown I was checking my watch, and by the end of the first act I was all but climbing the walls - although I can't really blame director Doug Lockwood's slightly-light but generally perceptive production; despite a Quirky-with-a-capital-Q decision to angle the audience sideways to the stage (ASP likes playing hide-and-seek behind pillar and post), the talented ensemble essayed intelligent and sensitive performances, and delivered Eno's lyrical non sequiturs with just the right spritz of unspoken pathos.

Indeed much of the production is pitch-perfect; that's the problem. This is what Eno wanted, I kept telling myself, as I wondered why, exactly, being trapped in a bad play is so exquisitely insufferable; why is it so much worse than waiting for two hours in an airport, for instance?  I'm not sure - although perhaps it's that you never feel the airport begging for applause or approval.  It doesn't care about you, but it also doesn't care whether you care about it.

But a garrulous (if soft-spoken) playwright is quite a different thing, particularly one with only a single idea.  For it turns out Middletown, like Thom Pain, is a monologue, albeit a monologue for chorus; there's but one voice here, and one perspective; indeed Middletown only counts as a "play" because it has been rather obviously draped over the borrowed scaffold of Our Town.

You get the impression Eno thinks he's subverting that warhorse in a sneakily awesome way with his quizzical re-enactment of its themes.  All I can say is - if only!  For here Thornton Wilder's rubrics of Everyday Life, Courtship, and Death all wilt under the Aspberger's-Syndrome treatment that is by now the default mode of millennial theatre; no one in Middletown can connect, everything is pointlessly questioned, logic runs inevitably toward contradiction, etc., etc., and oooh look at this funny little thing I noticed about human behavior; isn't that formally interesting?

Sigh.  Yes, kids, you're ironically sweet and clever as hell, and you know just how to sell that, too (Middletown is obvious Charles Isherwood bait) but God, are you ever monotonous; to be fair to Eno, his jokes do sometimes land (it helps if you're in college, either as student or teacher), but they battle a relentless undertow of boredom, because his play, like a lot of plays these days, doesn't really have a reason to exist. And honestly, at forty-something, isn't this author a bit old to be twirling his hair and sighing ruefully, all while doodling on somebody else's text, like Annie Baker or Sarah Ruhl? Aren't we tired of millennial autism yet?  How about somebody writes - oh I don't know - a villain for a change.  Or a hero?  With a goal?  I know it sounds crazy - but how about it, huh?

Okay, right now every literary manager in America is doubled over in laughter at the sheer gaucherie of such a suggestion.  (Only a white male would even think of that! That would be like so awkward!) And again to be fair, maybe it's Eno's bad luck that we just saw a stunning revival of Our Town, so his miniature critique, seemingly sculpted out of a single bar of responsibly-sourced soap, looks even smaller than it otherwise would.  Although hang on, I agree, there are "mysteries" secreted in its various lacunae. (Whose baby is really born in the last act? And why the Native American war dance in whiteface?) But honestly, who cares; I'd prefer a little action instead.  And contrary to Charles Isherwood's vapid suggestion, this is NOT Samuel Beckett, because there's no expanding frame of artistic reference; Middletown gets sadder (and sadder), but it doesn't get any deeper. And I think even those who missed David Cromer's re-invention of Our Town will remember the shocking emotional boomerang of that play's finale: what had seemed a sentimental reminiscence, shot through with starchy wit, suddenly becomes a devastating comment on death.  Here death is just one more reminder that we're all stuck in the middle of something that we cannot understand.  Which is very true, but Eno has been saying it for two hours by now.

Oh well, here's the part where I get repetitive.  Once again I was struck by the pathos of talented actors struggling to put over thin material.  The ASP cast is quite fine across the board; I don't know why director Doug Lockwood (who is an acquaintance of mine) was attracted to this text, but he has certainly drawn an exquisite ensemble performance (probably one of the year's best) from his cast.  Marianna Bassham, Michael Forden Walker, Steven Barkhimer, Paula Langton and Gabriel Kuttner are all known quantities, and have often been praised in these pages.  The news here is that local hottie Grant MacDermott, who has always shown potential, delivers by far the best work he has ever done, and two young actresses make their first major impression on the professional scene.  I've admired the lovely Esme Allen and Margaret Lamb before in either minor roles or student productions (Lamb just graduated from Boston Conservatory).  Here they steal almost every scene they're in.  Both could shine as any number of classical heroines; but I imagine they'll be stuck doing variations of millennial melancholy for some time yet.

Double, double, this Macbeth is in trouble

Allyn Burrows reacts to slashing something - maybe the text?

I don't know why, but Macbeth seems to drive the Actors' Shakespeare Project crazy.  Their last version of it was an all-female free-for-all that cut the play to ribbons and was pretty much completely incoherent.  And while there are some boys on stage this time, once again a strange kind of feminine hysteria hovers over the production, and needless to say, the play has been cut to ribbons and is pretty much completely incoherent.

Sigh.  Local affection for actress Paula Plum, who directed this disaster (for the record, I love her as much as anybody as an actress) will no doubt lead to misleadingly positive notices for this turkey.  But I'm warning you, do not believe her middle-aged fanboys!  This talented lady is over her head here, I'm afraid, and her dude-posse - yeah, nice guys all, I know - should really be reviewing the Patriots rather than Shakespeare.

I will admit there's a method to Plum's madness - let's call it back-story mania. And the back-story she has made the backbone of her Macbeth is Lady M's, not her hubby's.  Now decades ago, when I was in college, the question "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" was considered evidence of amusing aesthetic naiveté.  But basically that's the question Plum has built her production around.

For those not familiar with this particular text, that notorious query stems from one stanza that sticks out from Lady's M's murderous suggestions to Macbeth like a sore thumb (given that there are no kids in evidence at Dunsinane):

I have given suck, and know 
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: 
I would, while it was smiling in my face, 
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, 
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn 
As you have done to this.

It's memorable, isn't it - and essentially evidence of Lady M's mad, willful stripping away of all feminine feeling.  She has already called on the fates to "un-sex" her, and elsewhere she taunts her husband with the jibe that a real man would have no problem committing murder.  Now she tells us her vaunting ambition has pushed her beyond even any maternal feeling (surely the deepest instinct of the species).

This being Shakespeare, of course, those lines resonate and echo throughout the play; part of what makes the canon great is the way in which its texts operate not merely as narratives but as webs of thematic investigation.  And here sterility and gender and power are at the center of Shakespeare's concerns - only not at all in the way Plum imagines.

For clearly the Macbeths' vanished spawn are yet another example of those Shakespearean lacunae (like the disappearance of the Fool in Lear) that are meant to tease us subconsciously; what's more, they're just one more facet of an incredibly wide mosaic: the Macbeths themselves may be sexy as hell, but they're childless, and so essentially sterile - while the Witches, Banquo tells us, are genderless: both men and women (and not quite either), they play with strangled babes, and the blood of animals that have eaten their litters.  Meanwhile Macduff, the only person who can kill Macbeth, is "not of woman born" (and he is only able to do so once his own children are slain, and thus he also has become "sterile").  And we note that Malcolm, who replaces Macbeth on the throne, is a virgin, "yet unknown to woman" - while Banquo's issue only joins the royal lineage once he himself is dead.

So the grim sterility of power is one of the cruxes of Macbeth - those among its characters who would tempt or tamper with the political fates are almost always "sterilized" as a result.  Perhaps Plum understands this, but she turns these concerns into a strange, neurotic back-story for Lady M that pulls focus from the actual drama and adds nothing to our understanding of the play.  She actually opens the production with a confusing funeral (later we realize it must have been for that babe who so tenderly milked our leading lady), and then keeps Lady M around in scenes she's not in, listening via radio to the battles of Act I (the production is set, to some positive effect, somewhere after - or during? - World War I).  But alas, the nuns who attended that initial interment stick around too, and turn out to be our Three Witches, and this proves a disastrous choice - nuns these days simply come with too much comic baggage, and of course Plum has to slash their lines to the bone to dodge all the pagan references, and keep her Catholic-school conceit going.

But then she can't keep her hands off the text in general - I'd say the play has been cut by a third; I actually lost track of all the great lines that are missing, even though incredibly, somehow the whole thing still clocks in at two and half hours!  (How'd they do that?)  What's more, Plum has re-arranged things at will, so sometimes missing speeches pop back in when you least expect them.  And needless to say, she has made several male characters, like Banquo and Macduff's son, female because - well, just because, you know, women and stuff!  Oh, and Banquo seems to be a Red Cross volunteer - what?

While watching all this, I admit I had no idea what Plum thought she was plumbing; luckily, she has provided her own exegesis in the program notes, where you can read that she was inspired by Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon, which of course has absolutely nothing to do with Macbeth (but which did inspire Ken Russell's The Devils).  The director also writes that she was greatly influenced by a player piano she came across in the pit of the theatre.

O-kay!  No wonder Allyn Burrows, probably this troupe's most reliable actor, seems to have checked out as Macbeth until the last act (where he does finally show some life, to be fair). If only Mara Sidmore had followed suit - she's capable of a much better Lady M. than the melodramatic caricature Plum has drawn from her here; but then I get the impression she and her director were involved in a kind of folie à deux during rehearsal.  The witches, for their part, are helpless before their gi-normous wimples, but some of the boys get some traction when they're left alone. The skillful Richard Snee made a wry Porter, and James Andreassi understood that it's best to underplay Macduff's grief; meanwhile Ross MacDonald managed an intriguing (if minimal) profile as Ross.  The surprise was newcomer Edmund Donovan, who actually pulled off Malcolm's impossible speeches in Act 4.  Indeed, oddly, this trickiest of all scenes in Macbeth - which I've never actually seen work before - was probably the strongest sequence in this addled production.

You know, I'll vent a little further here, probably because I just saw an exciting production of Hamlet from London that featured actors no more talented than we have here in Boston.  Honestly, between Allyn Burrows, Ross MacDonald, James Andreassi, Edmund Donovan, Joel Colodner, Nigel Gore, Johnny Lee Davenport, Bill Barclay, Benjamin Evett, Richard Snee, Steven Barkhimer, Michael Forden Walker, Maurice Parent and Gabriel Kuttner, among others - not to mention Marianna Bassham, Marya Lowry, Obehi Janice, and Ms. Plum herself  - we have a fine troupe of Shakespeareans in Boston.  You could do just about every goddamn play in the canon with these people. So why can't ASP pull it together more often than they do???  Seriously, I'm just frustrated by now - how do these wacky, half-baked misfires keep happening? Clearly internal politics, bad castings, and variable direction often undo the troupe's best intentions.  Or is their very M.O. - that the actors call the shots - fundamentally flawed, perhaps actually as fallible as the model behind the ART's dreadful old director-driven Shakespearean train wrecks?  Can these good actors ever admit that they need better, stronger direction?  Oh, who knows - in the meantime, let's just blame Aldous Huxley, or maybe that player piano . . .

The trouble with Troilus

No, it's not Les Miz, it's more like Les Troyz. Photo(s): Stratton McCrady

Of all Shakespeare's "problem" plays, none may be more problematic than Troilus and Cressida.  For in it, the Bard awkwardly yokes together a savage parody of the Iliad with a poignant, but derivative, romance  (the inconstant Cressida does not appear in Homer, or anywhere else in Attic literature; she is a medieval invention).

The tone of the resulting amalgam has puzzled readers from the start - indeed, the Quarto edition of the text decided it was "history," while the Folio deemed it "tragedy" (even though many today consider it a peculiar kind of pitch-black comedy).  Compounding the confusion was the fact that it seems Shakespeare's troupe never produced Troilus and Cressida; so even though its performance history has slowly burgeoned (and even ballooned in the past few decades), it may be true that it was always intended for the page rather than the stage.

Which may give you some sense of the basic problem with this problem play: Troilus and Cressida is a travesty, yes, of Homeric heroics; but it is an elaborate,  subtle travesty - indeed, some critics have called it Shakespeare's most sophisticated creation (I wouldn't go that far, but it's definitely up there).  And the tension between the Bard's extremely dark themes and his exquisitely discriminating tone has thrown many a production into chaos (in fact I've never seen this play quite work), as it does the current version by the Actors' Shakespeare Project (at the Modern Theatre through May 20).

It probably didn't help that this Troilus was directed by Tina Packer, the widely lauded founder of Shakespeare and Co., which has long been known for its hearty brand of Shakespearean brio.  And while I won't deny Packer's productions have often packed a punch, her forte has always been rollicking, even gonzo, comedy; no one ever called the lady subtle - and they're certainly not going to start now.  Not after this.  For Packer has pounded Troilus and Cressida down into a really complicated, but essentially simplistic, screed against war - which it isn't, not really (in fact not at all, not at all).

For at this particular phase of his career, of course, Shakespeare was simply beyond "simplistic," and at any rate, "war" is not his theme anyhow.  His theme is inconstancy - he all but says so over and over - and he means inconstancy in both love and war (where, as everyone knows, all is supposedly fair).  Indeed, what would have leapt out at any audience in Shakespeare's day about Troilus and Cressida (had it been staged then) seems to have been missed entirely by the Actors' Shakespeare Project, and that is that Cressida is just about the only romantic heroine in the canon who is sexually unfaithful (unless you count Cleopatra, but then she's a historical figure).  Just btw, it's also hard to think of a romantic hero in Shakespeare who's untrue, either (although his men tend to be more feckless and inconstant than his women).  Indeed, it's fair to say that for the Bard, fidelity was almost an artistic obsession.

But as the slave Thersites sneeringly sums up the Trojan War, in Troilus and Cressida,"all the argument is a whore and a cuckold" - a unique environment for Shakespeare. But is the scurrilous Thersites really referring to only Helen and Menelaus, the fulcrum of this epic conflict?  I don't think so.  For Cressida, too, becomes a "whore" once she is a prisoner of war, and Troilus thus her "cuckold" - although they never actually married, did they (they never even seriously discuss that option), which makes their tryst another rarity in Shakespeare - and in some sense only a case of infidelity waiting to happen.  But wait, there's more; Patroclus is explicitly described as Achilles' "masculine whore" - and we also learn that Achilles actually has a liaison going with a Trojan princess, too.  Like the twins in Comedy of Errors, whores abound in Troilus and Cressida.

Patterns of thematic twins are, of course, typical of Shakespeare in his late stage, and Troilus is as densely structured in this regard as anything he ever wrote.  What's different here is that it's difficult to make sense of how the twins are to be morally categorized - or rather, we sense that Shakespeare himself is unsure how they should be categorized (a frightening prospect, frankly).

For are Helen and Cressid and Patroclus really morally equivalent, the way the twins in the Comedy of Errors (or Lear and Gloucester, or even Hal and Hotspur) are?  And if not, is there a moral structure that could accommodate them appropriately?  Always till now in the full arc of a particular drama, the Bard has at least hinted at answers to such questions, but we remain permanently at sea in Troilus, whose namesake even asks aloud, when arguing over Helen's fate,"What's aught but as 'tis valued?"  Hector has an answer to this, of course, which probably aligns with Shakespeare's - "Value dwells not in particular will;" - but Hector ends up dead, doesn't he (and perhaps tellingly, he leaves a wife but no mistress).

And note Troilus's faith in market valuations are echoed by Cressida herself, who (unlike, say, the Marina of Pericles) lacks the inner resources to resist a push into something like prostitution, and essentially uses her lover's own words to justify his betrayal.  To Cressida, if she is being valued as a whore, then she is a whore, and may as well act like one.  (Yes, there is a wicked satire of libertarianism lurking in Troilus and Cressida, my confident millennial friends.)  And it's some measure of the topsy-turvy quality of the play's environment that the heroine is first pimped by her own uncle - and then essentially by her own father, the calculating Calchas, in an obvious parody of the actions of every other father in the canon.

The mismatched, and miscast, lovers meet.

Thus it's quite easy to argue that Troilus and Cressida is all about making love (particularly free love) rather than war, and that it's a travesty of romance as well as violence (which casts it as a critique not of only the Greek heroes, but also of the long romantic shadow cast by Troy).  But then it's literally love that's driving this particular war, isn't it. And so it's worth noting that the pivotal figure of Helen proves an elusive presence in the play - even in her big scene - and when she begs for a song of "love, love, nothing but love," the singer muses in response, "Is this the generation of love? . . . Why, they are vipers.  Is love a generation of vipers?"

An interesting question, particularly in the harems of Troy - but Helen doesn't answer, and Packer doesn't seem to hear it, indeed seems deaf (or blind) to this entire dimension of the play.  To her, Helen is a squealing bimbette, and thus the central moral question of her elopement can be ignored - much like the essential instability of the romantic identities of Cressida and Troilus themselves (unsurprisingly, when they discuss their identities, it's always in the context of the legendary figures they expect to become, an intriguingly postmodern quibble right there).  Thus Packer reduces the play to something like "Romeo and Juliet - on acid!," which couldn't be more wrong - although to be fair, she's only behaving like almost every other Shakespearean director and professor alive today.  The theatre shrinks from sexual critique these days, and thus at least half of Troilus and Cressida simply cannot be interpreted in the classroom or on stage, which only raises the question whether modern Shakespeareans understand the Bard at all.

Sigh.  So in the end, not much is really going on in this production save garish, erratic gambits designed to keep its anti-war protest parade moving, no matter what.  The text is spoken clearly at least, in that familiar, forceful Shakespeare & Co. style, but somehow this doesn't give the action much traction.  The downside of the Packer style has always been its lack of lyricism (and oddly, this play is often quite lyrical); but what's more damning here is that even the sharpest linguistic clarity can't cut through the confusion of the production's misguided concept.  Indeed, at intermission I heard two different couples arguing over whether Troilus was a Trojan, and Cressida a Greek, or the other way around; this is not a good sign (for the record, they're both Trojans, and certainly not Montagues or Capulets).

There is one shockingly good turn in the show, however: Craig Mathers offers the most convincing Ulysses I've yet seen.  Mathers is one of the best actors in the city (even though we don't see much of him), but I was still surprised at how far he got in this notorious role; he all but sailed through the character's lengthy orations, and slyly made the case in his ensuing machinations that the unromantic, amorally realistic Ulysses was often speaking in the Bard's own voice.  (I'll admit that if Packer's concept was that Ulysses is the only complex character in the play, then I suppose you could count her production a success on its own terms.)  I should also commend, I suppose, Ross MacDonald - another actor we don't see enough of - who is obviously a natural Shakespearean, and at least didn't make any obvious mistakes, but didn't bring much intriguing subtext to Hector.  And surprisingly, the usually reliable Michael Forden Walker only did about as well by Thersites.

There were plenty of other talented actors in this cast, but everyone else seemed to stumble. As the eponymous lovers, Maurice E. Parent and Brooke Hardman were almost amusingly miscast, and made little headway against their own natural presences, so their scenes were often wooden. Robert Walsh, who it seems is a naturally butch stoic, made an intermittently effective Agamemnon, but alas, he tricked out his Uncle Pandarus with all manner of actory tics while utterly missing the point of the role.  Meanwhile the versatile Danny Bryck was stretched beyond his powers as Patroclus and Diomedes (Cressida's eventual Greek "seducer"), and as Patroclus, he was so busy playing "gay" that he didn't seem to realize that it's actually hero worship that's driving his affair with Achilles (De'Lon Grant's Achilles seemed down with the worship, but returned little of the love - another mistake).  I won't go into the other performances, because most were just terrible, but rather obviously they were bad because they'd been directed badly.

Still, the production does lumber along, which is something, I suppose; in aesthetic terms, it's sometimes as painful as the Trojan War, but at least it's a whole lot shorter.

More thoughts on Medea

Last night I came home to an unusual comment on my recent review of Medea at the Actors' Shakespeare Project. Here it is in full:

I have just seen the performance of Mrs Israel. Well I liked it. It was kind of a modern Medea : a Medea that transforms her passion which should normally be viewed as something very shamful (it's an understatment), to something very intellectual and logic. We are all reassured by these "scientific" almost and very eloquent arguments. Could the spectator not see the children , we would willingly believe that Medea's murder is no more than a kind of abortion... oh sorry I must have hurt the pro choice people. Medea is a very modern woman.

What leapt out at me was the mention of abortion - along with the grammatical and spelling misfires (which often signal that something has been typed in passion, as I myself can attest).  It's rare that anyone mentions abortion at all in the theatrical sphere, of course - there's a kind of cultural lacuna in operation around it - and even rarer that someone should criticize abortion rights (at least implicitly).

But I was also jarred by the fact that I had simply edited out of my own consciousness, while writing my review, the fact that Ms. Israel was also the first visibly pregnant Medea I'd ever seen.  Without even realizing it, I had turned a blind eye to what seems to have been the salient artistic statement of the production for my commenter.  And which of course puts a destabilizing spin on the idea of a "modern" Medea.  To my commenter, I'd guess, Medea wasn't unusual at all; he (probably, but perhaps she) may feel that this child-killing character is the new female norm.

But before I thought about that, I realized I had to interrogate myself; why had I "forgotten" that Ms. Israel was visibly pregnant as she mused about killing children?  There's one easy explanation - to put it awkwardly, I realized I had assumed that her pregnancy wasn't part of the "planned" show.  (I know, it's rude to speculate on these kinds of questions, but I'm afraid right now I have to.)  And I'm used by now to seeing female artists, particularly musicians and singers, perform while expecting.

Still, I'd also put out of my mind the fact that Ms. Israel sometimes stroked her "baby bump" during her performance - she seemed to be consciously putting her own condition into artistic play; Medea was musing on her own pregnancy, not Ms. Israel's.  But again, I'd ignored that - probably because I just couldn't understand how the actress's condition could be brought into artistic play without raising all sorts of ugly political arguments with which I disagree.  I really wish she hadn't done that.

But she did do it, so you see the problem.  If I'm opposed in general to the practice of replacing theatrical art with liberal propaganda, what's my reason for ignoring these aspects of this production?  I'm afraid I can't really come up with one.  I may disagree with my commenter politically, but I have to admit - he or she has a point, there's a disturbing, if perhaps unintentionally invoked, political dimension at the center of this version that has been clumsily half-disguised (and half-declared).  To be blunt, if the production had been self-consistent, it would have ended with Medea at least attempting an abortion at its climax, after killing her other children.  Why would she not?  Why would she drive off in her dragon-drawn chariot with two dead babies, but a live one on the way?  I suppose you could posit that Jason might not be the father of the child she's expecting - but that kind of undermines her righteous fury at his own faithlessness, doesn't it; if she herself has been unfaithful, then in some ways she's even more horrifying than she is already.

I have to confess I think it might be an interesting, if potentially blood-curdling, experiment to see whether Euripides' text is actually tenable in an explicitly pro-abortion political environment.  Perhaps there's even some theatre company out there that is gonzo enough to try that; but I think it would throw into weird relief the proto-feminist stance that some people - including the Globe's Don Aucoin, who wrote about the production in the Sunday edition - have been reading into this Medea.  I know, I know, Aucoin is just trying to make hay out of the current Republican wing-nuttery over contraception, which I, like every right-thinking person, of course oppose.

Still, if we begin to think of Medea as a feminist symbol, does that mean we're okay with viewing children - born or unborn - as simply collateral damage in the war between the sexes?  Does sexist oppression really grant a mother some sort of implicit sympathy in the killing of her child?  I think Euripides says no.  But I think Israel, her director, and the Actors' Shakespeare Project are saying yes.  Or at least they're half saying yes.  Whether that's an honest approach or not I leave up to you.

Medea, Actors' Shakespeare Project

The heroine of Euripides' Medea is half martyr, and half murderess - and not just any murderess, but a killer of her own children. This makes her - special, shall we say.  But these days we like to dwell on the first of her personae, while only half-acknowledging the second.  Which may be understandable given our current theatrical politics - we have trouble gazing directly upon women capable of filicide, and resist even the suggestion that we could grant one our theatrical sympathy; but in the end I'm afraid this basically emasculates (sorry) Medea as tragedy.

Which may be why the new staging by the Actors' Shakespeare Project feels simultaneously ferocious and somehow unfocused.  The actors give it their all, and so there's always one kind of intensity on offer.  But it's a vague, misdirected intensity - it seems to have been imported from some other play - largely because in the title role, Jennie Israel is all martyr, and no murderess - even though she does off her kids in a splashily gory manner.  Too bad we can still see. despite all the stage blood, that she has closed herself off from the act internally, and is unable to allow herself to experience her crime as the "triumph" it is.

This is probably a compliment to Ms. Israel, of course; for the actress who successfully limns Medea must find her way to, and back from, emotional places it's generally ill-advised to contemplate or speak of, much less experience.  Not that she's a mystery; indeed, perhaps we understand her all too well.  The character has certainly been wronged by her husband Jason - for whom Medea gave up literally everything in her former life, but who now has abandoned her for a younger wife.  So she has our sympathy, and there's a clear way for an actress to enter her frame of mind - until she begins to plan her revenge.  For Medea is bent not on wounding her betrayer himself, but instead in triumphing over him, "destroying" him figuratively - in winning, and being seen to have won; and thus she plots the deaths of those around her former hero, including, yes, her own children by him.

Such a choice means Medea has to be more than a little crazy - or rather demonic, in the old sense of the word; she's a witch, after all, and makes her final exit in a chariot drawn by dragons; she's in touch with literally supernatural forces of passionate ego. And perhaps it's worth mentioning that in earlier myths, Medea is a murderess several times over before Euripides picks up her story (she even killed her own brother, in some accounts, for Jason's sake).

Photos: Stratton McCrady

So Medea is bad news, and this makes her in many ways a problematic tragic heroine.  She doesn't even die at the end of her "tragedy" - instead, she gets away with a horrific crime.  So it's no surprise I've only seen the play work as tragedy one time - and that was when the actress devoted herself to her own horror at what she knew she was capable of, indeed was even planning.  This gave the script a remorseless momentum - and tellingly, at the finale, in her triumph over her faithless husband, this Medea seemed to be literally out of her mind.  Her own personality had driven itself over the edge; in a way she had died.

But none of this kind of intensity is forthcoming, I'm afraid, at Actors' Shakespeare Project, which under the stylized direction of David R. Gammons is something of a conceptual muddle - even if it looks terrific.  The set is a house straight out of Leave it to Beaver (it even splits apart on cue), but the chorus seems to have wandered in from a Stevie Nicks concert; meanwhile Medea mopes around in mourning (at left), while her husband is dressed for his wedding.  And did I mention the blinking chandelier?  There's a justification for all these choices, actually, but somehow these variegated visual gambits never seem to cohere.  And it doesn't help that director Gammons - who was a designer before he became a director - tends to resort to dumb show to put over what the actors should be conveying in their performances.  (When Jason first appears, for instance, he and Medea do an awkward roll in the hay to communicate that there's still sexual tension between them.)

There are good moments in several of the performances - including Israel's - but perhaps only Joel Colodner's amusing turn as Aegeus really comes together (Nigel Gore does his best as the smarmily calculating Jason, but he's miscast; he's simply not slick enough).  But I don't really expect a Gammons cast to do their best work, I'm afraid - at least not in a piece as thorny as Medea. This director is always busy around town, I know, but behind the visual flash of his productions, I too often feel a dramatic void. I know for a lot of people the flash is enough; I'm just not one of them.

Wife swap

Ruby Rose Fox, Bill Barclay, and Gabriel Kuttner in various disguises.  Photo(s): Stratton McCrady

Part of the Actors' Shakespeare Project gestalt is the idea that they're always on the run, searching for a found space to evoke, or match in some idiosyncratic way, the play they're putting on.  This is an interesting conceptual challenge - but for once, they have kind of scored with The Merry Wives of Windsor, which they're doing at Jimmy Tingle's in Davis Square (through Jan. 1), with Budweiser pennants festooning the stage, and swinging saloon doors for set pieces.  We're slumming, the set design telegraphs, but then so was Shakespeare when he wrote this play.

And fair enough - Shakespeare probably was slumming when he wrote this play; legend has it that Merry Wives was scripted in just a fortnight, at Queen Elizabeth's command that the Bard present "Falstaff in love." And I certainly agree with the consensus that the results are the weakest play in the canon (so it's good to have a legend like that one to explain its existence). Built around a watered-down version of Falstaff (probably because Elizabeth's edict contradicted everything the character stood for) and devised almost purely as an audience pleaser, Merry Wives in a way reveals Shakespeare at his most eager to please, as well as his workmanlike worst/best: he piles on the complications and plots-within-plots, as if to distract us from the lack of theme or development.  And thus, I admit, Wives is probably the one Shakespeare play that Diane Paulus is actually equipped to direct - it all but wags its tail at the audience and begs to be loved.  Still, this puppy is by the Bard true-bred - and so, inevitably, it has its fascinations.

Perhaps the first of these is the fact that, shocking as it may sound, Merry Wives of Windsor may be the most influential play Shakespeare ever wrote.  Why?  Because in it you find perhaps the first formulation of dinner-theatre and summer stock, as well as sitcom - the script even plays out as a series of episodes, and its wacky middle-class housewives pretty much bang out the template of frustration, exasperation and mock castration that has dominated domestic bourgeois comedy ever since.  And perhaps because it carved out this new niche in what had generally been a more anarchic and satiric comic tradition, Merry Wives is unusual in the canon in several ways: there is a wedding at the end of it, for example, but only one, and it's surrounded by a kind of mockery of the multi-couple nuptials that provide the finales of Shakespeare's courtship comedies (like Much Ado and Twelfth Night).

There's also hardly any nobility stalking the stage - except for Falstaff himself, who is, I suppose, only a knight errant, but who nevertheless represents something like the drunken dregs of the landed gentry in an emergent market-based economy.  Thus in the bustling suburb of Windsor, this lesser noble - who imagines his diminished status may still help him to a sexual conquest - is a laughing-stock, and the social structure of much of Shakespeare has been subtly up-ended.  Perhaps most surprisingly, despite seeming moments of misrule, and almost too much comic action, nobody in Windsor much changes - and nobody is ever actually cuckolded, or really gets much of a comeuppance, either; thus the social compact doesn't budge an inch, and nothing about the society detailed in the script is truly transformed. Indeed, after his final humiliation, Falstaff doesn't march off, swearing revenge like Malvolio, but merely laughs at his own gulling and joins the party at his own expense.

This diminution of Shakespeare's general aims is reflected in the diminished horizons of one his greatest creations: the Falstaff of Merry Wives is only an anorexic shadow of the overstuffed giant who dominates Henry IV,  Parts 1 & 2 (and who haunts Henry V). Shakespeare affords him only the occasional good line, and none of the shrewd, subversive insights that light up his earlier appearances in the canon (for truth be told, the suburbanites of Windsor should really be the victims of his wit, rather than vice versa).  This has led many a postmodern critic - most of whom are more enamored of Falstaff than, I think, Shakespeare was - to decry the play.

Richard Snee is tickled by merry wives Esme Allen and Marianna Bassham.

But intriguingly, real Shakespearean fire does occasionally flicker in The Merry Wives of Windsor - not around Falstaff, but rather in the lines of Master Ford, who is driven to a jealous monomania by the (all-in-fun) flirtations of his clever wife.  I'm not sure why, but I always feel something like the sketch of a Shakespearean self-portrait in this character.  Certainly, there are other jealous obsessives in the canon (Othello, Posthumus, Leontes), but there's a psychological (rather than poetic) edge to Ford's rantings that always reads to me as close to the famously elusive author's own voice.  Then again, perhaps it's the rustic, middle-class setting that gives this echo to the character's cadences; after all, the town of Windsor is not that far from Stratford-upon-Avon, as Shakespeare has ripped Falstaff from the Plantagenet era of Henry IV and plunked him down in the world of his own upbringing.  Does this mean, however, that in the fraught relationship of the Fords we can catch a glimpse of the marriage between Will and Anne Hathaway?  Maybe - but maybe not.  All I have is a hunch, but then I tend to trust my hunches.

Anyway - back to the Actors' Shakespeare Project. I've only seen Merry Wives three times before (it's not like I seek it out), but all those productions generally worked about as well as this one did. At ASP, under the direction of Steven Barkhimer, a general, vaguely gonzo, atmosphere of "actor's holiday" pervaded the goings-on - there was a good deal of double (and even triple) casting, which led to many punchy caricatures and ree-dee-culous Franch ak-sants - along with a sing-along chorus borrowed from Love's Labour's Lost - but perhaps not quite as much depth as the play can, indeed, afford.  I also wondered whether the double casting - particularly around the romantic sub-plot (the same actress played the ingénue as well as one of her suitors, while her other pursuers were both played by the same guy) scrambled the convoluted plot beyond recognition; my advice is, if you don't know the play, be sure to read the synopsis before going in. Still, even if you can't follow the plot, a lot of the hijinks are cute and clever - the show generally charts the arc of a smart-alecky college production.

But I'm afraid as Falstaff, local stage vet Richard Snee proved a disappointment - Snee's so confident that he sometimes phones things in, and I'm afraid he's too often on speed-dial here (although to be fair, he still wins the occasional laugh).  The wives themselves were quite a bit better - newcomer Esme Allen beamed like an Elizabethan-era Amy Poehler, while ASP stalwart Marianna Bassham made a smartly confident Mistress Ford.  Alas, she didn't quite limn her complex relationship with her husband as much as I've seen some actresses manage - an obvious missed opportunity, given that the reliable Michael Forden Walker gave Master Ford a surprisingly twisted intensity.  Meanwhile, around the edges of the production, there was droll, inventive work from Gabriel Kuttner and Bill Barclay.  But I also have to confess that I missed the hints of the green world that the Bard brings to his finale (here, the fairies of Windsor forest danced to disco); still, overall I enjoyed myself, off and on, which may be all you can really do with this particular play - although I hope someday to be proven wrong about that.

Out at sea with A.S.P.

Omar Robinson and Marianna Bassham catch the wave in Twelfth Night. Photos: Stratton McCrady.

Long-time Hub Review readers know I am fascinated by the Actors' Shakespeare Project.  Some years ago, the group coalesced around actor Benjamin Evett - when he was let go by the A.R.T. in one of its periodic purges - as a kind of reaction to the "director's theatre" which that pretentious institution had long been committed to. The idea, as expressed by Evett, was that the actor could be the wellspring of a valid approach to the Bard - and I thought back then that I agreed with him.  So did a lot of other people - money rolled in before A.S.P. had put up even a single production, and the company has consistently enjoyed an indulgent and supportive response from the press.

But from the beginning, A.S.P. seemed to grope for a coherent company style - and, I'd argue, several years on they still haven't found one.  Instead, the chaos evident in their first productions became their style, almost their calling card.  A.S.P. usually plays in "found" spaces, with bad sight lines and ill-defined playing areas (and when they do play in a conventional theatre, they often alter the stage, or obstruct part of the space, as they have this time around).  The gypsy style extends to the costumes, which are usually from thrift shops.  And lighting is often patched together by incidentals; I've seen productions where the techies followed individual actors with flash lights - even the show's tech didn't cohere.

Evett himself was purged from the group after a few seasons, and the sense that a "collectivist" mentality had taken hold in the company soon became the conventional wisdom.  But what was funny was that high directorial concept still flourished at A.S.P., just as it had flourished at the A.R.T. - I suppose because the acting corps felt that control of such excesses was outside their professional purview.  (As long as the director wasn't telling them what to do, he could set King Lear on Mars for all they cared.)  But the actors didn't necessarily feel tied to the director's vision, either - that was clear as well.  Nor did they feel tied to the classical tradition - many never learned to fence, or sing, or dance.  That hardly mattered, however, as casting was likewise often outside the director's control - such artistic decisions, it was rumored, where largely the result of groupthink and internal wrangling.

The result was that a coherent, sustained focus from these actors on their acting - a sense that developing a genuine ensemble was their real "project" - never seemed to flourish.  (Compare with the ensemble down at Trinity Rep, where everyone's on the same page.) Occasionally things did come together, as in productions of The Tempest, and Timon of Athens - but ironically enough, those high-water marks have all depended more on their visual ideas than their performances.  And in other shows, the actors never really fell into alignment with either the concept or with each other; the ensemble always had a certain raggedness to it.  Sometimes things even degenerated into a really embarrassing mess, as happened last fall with Henry IV, Parts I and II.

To be fair, however, the average A.S.P. production moves along briskly, and sports intriguing moments - the actors are very smart and resourceful, particularly when it comes to comedy, and many are by now quite familiar with each other.  Thus the better productions are wittily conscious of their own deficiencies, and dance cleverly, even campily, around our awareness of what's missing onstage (as was the case with last winter's amusing Cymbeline).

Still, there are aspects of the Bard that seem beyond the company's grasp - perhaps permanently.  You just don't go to A.S.P. to hear Shakespeare's poetry - there are one or two memorable voices among the company, but no one, save perhaps Allyn Burrows, is a consistently sophisticated speaker of verse; nor do you expect any attempt at what I call the symphonic side of Shakespeare - that sense that many themes and strands of thought are coming together beneath the surface of the action like the pieces of a puzzle.  Instead, in most A.S.P. productions, you feel that things are only just hanging together, that they might fly apart at any minute.

Sorry for the long preamble - I am going to get to Twelfth Night eventually, I promise.  These thoughts have been occupying me, however, because of my experience with the director of this latest show, Melia Bensussen.  After seeing the first of her local productions - Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew, both for A.S.P. - I dismissed Bensussen as addicted to concepts and trends but unable to direct her way out of a paper bag; both productions had one or two Big Ideas, but a corresponding lack of general focus, and long stretches of tedium.  Then I caught her other work around town - The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, at Merrimack, and Circle Mirror Transformation at the Huntington - and saw direction that was subtle, insightful, disciplined, balanced.   I did a critical 180; when it came to naturalism, Bensussen seemed like one of the most reliable directors in the city.

But now she's back at A.S.P., with Twelfth Night - and her work is disappointing in much the same way it was before.  An intrusive concept frames the action, and several actors seem to be groping within it - and thus their through-lines have been left undeveloped, indeed, have all but been undone; this is a romantic comedy, in fact, in which nobody seems to be in love.

So what's the story, Morning Glory?  What happens to Melia Bensussen when she directs the Bard - or does it only happen to her when she directs at A.S.P.?  Where does her superb touch go?  Does the intellectual structure built into Shakespeare somehow drive her to a directorial midsummer madness?  Or is she simply unable to wrangle the A.S.P. actors into something like alignment with her highbrow ideas?

I guess we'll never know.  In the meantime, though, there's Twelfth Night to consider - which to be fair to Bensussen, does cry out for a concept.  It's the last of the Bard's "festive" comedies, and we can feel in it a whole mode of artistic feeling pushed to the brink; after Twelfth Night come the tragedies, and the problem comedies; Shakespeare's world - at least his artistic world - is about to crack up.  And the fissures are already evident here: for the first time, the comic mood is inherently neurotic, and there's a deliberate cruelty to much of the farce.  Indeed, music and malice seem weirdly intertwined in Twelfth Night, and a few characters, like Feste the jester, are so detached from the action they operate at a level of near-abstraction.  At the same time, there's a sense of greatest hits revisited about the play; the central pair of twins and their shipwreck pop up from Comedy of Errors, the heroine cross-dresses as she does in Two Gents and As You Like It, and the gay Antonio reappears from Merchant of Venice (only in pirate drag).  Twelfth Night is clearly a kind of artistic summation that's headed for a crash.

Yeah, you can tell it's a party - Steven Barkhimer and Paula Langton in Twelfth Night.

At the same time, it's among the most densely patterned of Shakespeare's plays.  Indeed, it may be the most densely patterned.  What distinguishes Shakespeare from almost any other playwright is the sense in his mature work that we're watching merely the stage manifestation of a hidden thematic structure - almost a thematic argument.  In Twelfth Night, this embedded discussion has reached almost a fevered pitch, and Bensussen has clearly latched on to "twinning" as a conceptual handle on it; but she has done so in a standard-issue New Age way - she cites Jung in her program notes, and you can feel yin-yangy issues of gender hanging in the theatrical air.  Only it's always problematic citing Freud or Jung to "explain" Shakespeare, because, well, they derive from Shakespeare (and literary content in general), rather than the other way around; Shakespeare explains them, they don't explain him.

For the "twinships" in Twelfth Night extend far beyond the gendered example of Sebastian and Viola, the genetically-impossible identical brother and sister torn apart by shipwreck at the play's start.  Yes, these two are twins, and the fact that they operate as a single love object for half the characters in the play is an intriguing meditation on gender and disguise.  But Viola is also a "twin" of Olivia, who falls in love with her (they've both recently lost brothers).  And the anagrammatic names of Viola, Olivia, and her servant Malvolio let you know that they're a mismatched set of triplets.  And then Orsino and Olivia can be considered a pair of twins, because both are in love with their own emotions; and Olivia and Antonio are twins too, because they're in love with someone in disguise.  Even Sir Toby and Sir Andrew Aguecheek operate as a "twin" couple, because their dishonest relationship mirrors the deceptions between Orsino, Viola, and Olivia.

As you can see, the "mirrors" in Twelfth Night, as one critic put it, basically ramify into infinity.  But that's only one of the thematic schemes operating in the play - madness, foolery, the sea as a metaphor for emotion - Shakespeare juggles all these concepts, too.  But perhaps a clue to his central aim is hidden in his title.  Most scholars interpret "Twelfth Night" as a reference to the madcap finale of the Christmas season, when in Elizabethan days households were up-ended, and a "Lord of Misrule" held sway, if only for a day.  But of course on the religious calendar Twelfth Night is also the Feast of Epiphany, and to my mind epiphanies are what in the end Shakespeare was getting at - epiphanies that perhaps only arise when the normal conventions of life have been overthrown.  Almost all the Bard's comedies, of course, end with a scene of discovery - but for the first time in Twelfth Night we feel shocks of self-discovery are the order of the day, in which true love and self-love are rudely forced apart.  Indeed, one by one, the self-image of just about everyone in Illyria is smashed over the course of the long final scene.

Okay, that was a lot of ground to cover; I only went into it all to indicate that I have some sympathy with the rather bald methods of expression Bensussen deploys in her Twelfth Night.  Indeed, she all but diagrams parts of this thematic matrix for us; designer Cristina Todesco, for instance, has actually re-configured the BCA's Plaza Theatre to allow a painted tsunami (the sea as emotion!) to come crashing through the pillars of Illyria - which are hung with mirrors (of self-love!).  (Tellingly, the vain Malvolio prefers a tiny stretch of sand to the rising tide around him.)  Key costumes likewise look water-logged.  And to make absolutely clear that her focus is on twins, Bensussen gives to Viola many of her brother Sebastian's scenes, the better to underline their thematic unity (it's confusing to newcomers, I think, but we get the point).

These are the kinds of things that directors with an intellectual bent are prone to do with this play.  But you have to also make the drama and comedy work minute-by-minute on their own terms; and this is where Bensussen fails.  There are plenty of bits that work here and there, but they all feel like ironic, self-aware scraps hung on her conceptual scaffold; the "characterizations" behind them are inconsistent or unrealized.  And there's no joy in Bensussen's Illyria, either - none at all; she has taken Shakespeare's melancholy undertow and made it a storm surge.  Indeed, the production's emotional spearhead is not Marianna Bassham's confused Viola but rather Paula Langton's bruised, bitter and vicious Maria (Langton's is perhaps not coincidentally also the best performance in the production; I didn't like it, but I could appreciate it).

Elsewhere, Doug Lockwood actually makes comic hay of Sir Andrew Aguecheek's wackiness, but again, only in discombobulated snatches; there is a daffy core to Sir Andrew that Lockwood misses. But honestly, you could make the same observation about almost everyone else in the cast.  And there are some moments that simply mystify; Malvolio (Allyn Burrows) doesn't just prefer sand to sea - he also likes to meditatively rub his butt in the dirt; why?  Likewise Sir Toby splashes around in the onstage pool because . . ?  And what's with Maria's lip-lock with Feste - as she marries Sir Toby, is that supposed to be symbolic (or is the affair with Sir Toby one of convenience)? At the same time, other gambits are overly obvious: we understand why Olivia is wearing a big fat Jungian symbol on her chest, for example, we just don't want to think about it.

Sigh.  At least, for once at A.S.P., there's an honest sword fight.  And there's one moment when the show suddenly grips you: as the betrayed Antonio, newcomer Omar Robinson delivers his accusations to Viola (whom he thinks is Sebastian) with an emotional force that briefly wakes you up and makes you listen (my companion by this time was literally dozing, but I saw him stir).  And for a few minutes, the production leaps off the chalkboard and something real seems to be at stake.  Robinson's not yet a polished actor, but he at least knows his big moment when he sees it.  And for a while, all the other actors began to connect a little bit, too.  Maybe they'd had some kind of epiphany.

Grand Hotel

The talented cast of The Hotel Nepenthe in an alternative mood.

There have always been two sides to local playwright and actor John Kuntz: his apparently perky, eager-to-please pop sensibility is always dogged by a weirder, more menacing shadow. (Imagine the Brady Bunch spending an episode at the Bates Motel and you've got roughly the idea.) Indeed, this creepy/corny yin-yang pretty much is his sensibility, and he has teased it out over the past few years into a variety of queasily sweet dramatic landscapes, over which he presides like some whimsically appalled Don DeLillo.

Sometimes (as in last year's dreadful The Salt Girl) Kuntz can't keep these thematic poles in alignment; and to be honest, he's also a bit structurally challenged - this playwright is far better at spinning actory monologues (about a story he's not fully telling) than actually telling that story.  But in The Hotel Nepenthe (which which has been extended through this weekend at the Actors' Shakespeare Project Winter Festival), Kuntz manages to find a balance between his yin and his yang, and even a pretty good excuse for not really telling a full tale.  Moreover, his monologues this time have grown into tight little scenes (hooray!) which, if they don't quite fit together, still are played to perfection by a dream supporting team of Marianna Bassham, Georgia Lyman, and Daniel Berger-Jones - who all seem to be operating precisely on their co-star's gay-Twilight-Zone wavelength.

Carl Sagan (not to mention Brian Greene!) fans will be pleased to discover that the animating idea of The Hotel Nepenthe is yet another variation on the old alternative-universe canard so popular in Cambridge and other "alternative" locales (yes, Kuntz's scenes are this time strung together on string theory).   The playwright's many eerie episodes - populated by potential suicides and killers and vengeful wives, and their mysterious hatboxes and bathtubs and kidnapped babies - all meet and greet at that eponymous hotel (named, I think, for a drug of forgetfulness), which we may never actually enter, but which still stands as a kind of ontological-dimensional clearing house where celebrities of every era mix on the red carpet, and maybe that kidnapped baby turns out okay, while maybe its kidnapper is run down by (maybe) that vengeful wife.  All while (maybe) being watched by some cosmic voyeur, who (maybe) is us.

Now this may be a little silly as metaphor, but it works pretty well in practice - Carl and Brian offer John just enough connective tissue to keep you thinking you're watching something develop, while at the same time giving him enough leeway to riff as he pleases (he can always explain this or that indulgence as just another quick dash down a worm- or rabbit-hole).  True, at times the whole pop-sugar confection feels a bit too derivative - the themes of paranoid voyeurism aren't exactly new, and one device of repetitive car crashes seems to barrel in directly from Crash - but even when he's cribbing, Kuntz gives his kidnapped dramatic goods his own weirdly bemused spin.  And he may never find a better context for his deep sense that the sweet distractions of the pop world are designed to disguise some sort of terrifying conspiracy - indeed, in Hotel Nepenthe, not just the government, or society (or a malicious lake) is after us, but the whole space-time continuum. When a character muses that he loves riding the ferris wheel, because at the top you can see everything in perspective, you can almost hear the playwright muttering to himself, "Trust me - you don't want to know."

But at least we have the droll performances of these talented actors to savor as the walls close in on us.  Everyone in the cast is basically at the top of his or her game (including the playwright), and are clearly having a great time as they shed personae and roles as easily as wigs and costumes.  Which they often do, right on stage, as director David Gammons's conceit seems to be to imagine the whole morbid goof as occurring in some otherworldly changing room (populated, of course, by video cameras and screens, which didn't actually help all that much with this space's awkward sight lines).  I would have preferred a more visually coherent setting - I'd love to see the show done again (with this cast) - as it deserves a longer life than ASP has been able to give it - but in the kind of arresting set this director is usually know for; perhaps the dark corridors of the Overlook-like Hotel Nepenthe itself could serve? And honestly, some cuts to tighten up a few metaphysical string-thingy dead ends wouldn't hurt, either (a perkily desperate dance number at the finale might be the first to go). But until it's re-incarnated in some alternative playing space, you only have a few more performances to check into this grand hotel.

The Great Recapitulation

Hardman and Grant in Cymbeline.

Once you get to be my age, with decades of watching and pondering Shakespeare behind you, the whole canon can begin to seem like one very long play. And when I consider Cymbeline, I sometimes think the Bard himself might have begun to feel the same way.

For Cymbeline, written late in Shakespeare's career, is a strange enormity, and one that all but cries out for explanation. It's one of Shakespeare's longest plays, and certainly his most variegated - whenever I think of it, I'm reminded of Polonius's hilarious description of the players in Hamlet, who specialize in "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited."

Cymbeline, I suppose, counts as "tragical-comical-historical pastoral" (unless it's "poem unlimited"). At bottom, it's a national foundation myth - it concerns a legendary war that separated Britain from Rome. But literally a dozen different plots and modes flower briefly within that frame - the play opens with an unequal marriage that seems a variant of the one in All's Well that Ends Well, but it soon morphs into a miniature Othello (with a villain named "Iachimo," or "Little Iago"), before transmuting itself into something akin to As You Like It, with a subplot borrowed from Romeo and Juliet. And this is before we even get to the tropes lifted from Twelfth Night, Comedy of Errors, and King Lear. It's hard, actually, to think of a play by Shakespeare that doesn't have an echo in Cymbeline (maybe Henry VI), which is why I sometimes call it "The Great Recapitulation."

But why a recapitulation at that stage of Shakespeare's career? Well, Cymbeline does stand at a key juncture in the canon - after the great tragedies, and the "problem plays," and just after the odd patchwork that is Pericles - the latter half of which is almost certainly by the Bard, the first half of which is almost certainly by somebody else. But that latter half - in which a daughter is restored to her father, and a family re-united - would prove the inspiration for Shakespeare's final period, the "romances," with their uniquely haunting combination of tragedy and comedy. The greatest of these, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, take two opposed tacks to the structural problem of a tragi-comic synthesis. Cymbeline, by way of contrast, is something of a pile-up; watching it, it's tempting to guess that, armed with a new motif that he felt could serve as the culmination of his life's work, Shakespeare's first impulse was to stitch it into a vast recapitulation of his entire oeuvre. In a way, with Cymbeline the Bard took a very, very deep breath before saying, "And now for something completely different."


The results are, I admit, sometimes somewhat bizarre. Cymbeline shape-shifts at will, and though there's a central character - Imogen - who ranks among Shakespeare's finest, almost everyone else feels like a minor variant of some other, earlier personage, and poor Imogen's adventures grow almost maddeningly convoluted and extravagant (Headless corpses! Roman invasions! Visits from Jupiter!). Still, I have seen Cymbeline work - and work superbly; but only once, and only when enormous resources, and brilliant talent, were thrown at it (in the great Robin Phillips's masterful production at Stratford in the mid-80's).

But the Actors' Shakespeare Project, which is presenting this enormity just through this weekend as part of its Winter Festival, is producing it behind a storefront in Davis Square, with only seven actors seemingly attired for yoga, and only an oriental rug for a set, and without even proper theatrical lighting (but with a background soundtrack of bass guitar pumped in from the bar next door). I'd like to report that somehow a miracle has taken place, and that against all odds ASP has produced a brilliant sketch of this epic text. But I'm afraid any reduction of Cymbeline would be impossible; its gnarly sprawl is central to it; you can't "sketch" it.

What we get instead is a kind of delicate burlesque of the play by a small troupe of funny, talented players - which works, off and on, particularly if you know the script already and are in a forgiving mood. If you don't, or are not, the whole thing may strike you as inexplicable. I'm an acquaintance of the director, Doug Lockwood, and he's a smart and funny guy - and an inspired Shakespearean clown. So I wasn't surprised to find a light, clowning mood assert itself - the villains were prissy or over-the-top, and we never thought for a moment that things might turn out badly for sweet, innocent Imogen. This isn't right for the play - the chief thematic feature of which is the slow emergence of love and order from Lear-like cruelty and chaos. But if you don't have the resources to do the play - well, it's better than nothing; and it seemed to me that for much of the time the audience was cajoled into a mood of slightly confused amusement.

As Imogen, Brooke Hardman was always energetic and appealing, but far too sturdy and modern for a fairy-tale heroine whose delicacy we should feel is often about to crack beneath the weight of the horrors she must endure.  But then miscasting is all but ASP's signature, isn't it - talented actors playing against type could almost be described as the troupe's artistic statement, its raison d'être.  Thus we watched as Marya Lowry did what she could (i.e., caricature) the play's evil queen, while the talented De'Lon Grant, though plausible as Imogen's hubby, made her cloddish suitor (and son to said evil queen) Cloten a bitchy hoot rather than any kind of crude threat (we felt throughout that Hardman's Imogen could take down mother and son in two seconds flat if she felt like it).  Meanwhile Neil McGarry seemed a bit lost as Iachimo (is petty malice so hard to play?), but Ken Baltin was a better Cymbeline than most, and a quite funny Philario.  Rounding out the (mis-) cast were two of Boston's best young rising stars, Danny Bryck and Risher Reddick, who did yeoman duty in a bevy of roles that didn't suit them at all (at one point they were even supposed to be twins!). The single intriguing feature of the miscasting was Lowry's turn as the cross-gendered "Belaria" - Lowry turned this Kent-like figure into a haunting version of the powerful, noble mother who always seems to be missing from Shakespeare.

And I have to admit that a good deal of the cast's antics charmed, even if they were consistently off-kilter. I don't know why Doug Lockwood wanted to take on Cymbeline, but he got through it in a way. (With the help of heavy cutting, I might add; he skipped Jupiter's appearance entirely, and did we hear "Hark, hark, the lark"? Maybe I couldn't hear it over the bass from next door.) The curious may find some fun in this production; others may find it cute, but feel that it leaves you clueless.

The Plantagenets go to war.

I went back to catch the first part of Henry IV at Actors' Shakespeare Project last weekend.  But I kind of wish I hadn't.  Their production of Part II at least had the difficulty of the play to excuse its gaps.  But despite Part I's relative vigor, the company still mostly went down for the count.  There were sparks here and there over the course of the evening - as there always are at ASP - but together they couldn't light a fire under this loud, but flat, production.

It was obvious why the show wasn't working - almost none of the emotional connections on which it depends were in place.  Hal and Falstaff seemed as distant as Hal and his father, Henry IV, so the whole prince-and-the-pauper contrast between license and responsibility (being in the tavern is fun; being at court, not so much) just wasn't happening; both options seemed like a drag.   It was pretty clear why Hal wasn't enjoying Falstaff's company, btw - this was the first Falstaff I've ever seen who didn't seem to be enjoying himself.  (So that wasn't happening.) And Hal didn't seem to like his other sidekick, Poins, much either  - and Poins returned the favor (and to be honest, so did we).  There was some rueful affection between Hotspur and Lady Percy, it's true - but Allyn Burrows is at least two decades too old for the role of Hotspur, and so the parallels between him and Prince Hal likewise never happened as they should (this Hotspur already seemed well-seasoned, and a better match to the crown than Barclay's Hal could ever be).  So I kept thinking, in scene after scene - "This just isn't happening."

Meanwhile the production seemed stuck in its historiography - adapter Robert Walsh (who also played Sir John) had appended to it scenes from Richard II which, I admit, gave some context to the conflicts embedded in the text - and particularly to the psychology of King Henry.  Still, the past-as-prologue stuff didn't seem to help things dramatically (undermining, perhaps, the conventional wisdom that it's the actual history that stands between modern audiences and these plays). Despite prompting from Richard II, Joel Colodner never convincingly connected the guilty dots regarding Henry's illegitimacy, and the rebel scenes, despite Burrows's solid work, and Steven Barkhimer's even-better turn as Glendower, didn't pull any extra oomph from the apparent legitimacy Walsh's additions seemed to provide them.

So how did this well-intentioned (and elaborate) effort go wrong?  Casting Walsh as Falstaff (and to a lesser extent, Barclay as Hal) probably is the root cause.  This oft-effective actor seemed to want to avoid all the usual clichés of this famous role; thus his was a reductive, not an expansive, Falstaff - a kind of wasted, misanthropic Vietnam vet (who, contrary to the text, still had some surly fight left in him) rather than  a jolly, mischievous glutton.  I suppose this counted as "interesting" in the rehearsal hall - and of course disillusionment (but not world-weariness) is key to the part.  But Walsh's perpetual, squinting hangover rarely got him anywhere on the actual stage, and it completely destroyed both the irony and the poignance of Shakespeare's grand arc: of course Hal would have to dump this loser, we knew from the start - and good riddance!  When Walsh intoned the famous line, "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!" all I could think was, "Uh - I don't think so."  Meanwhile director Patrick Swanson - who brought a great concept to bear on ASP's production of The Tempest - rarely shaped his scenes effectively, and the pace consistently dragged (until the war-drums began beating again, as they often did).

Sigh.  As Boston so rarely sees the history plays, it was disappointing to find this ambitious production such a misfire.  There was, as I mentioned, some good work around its edges.  Marya Lowry was a touchingly petulant Richard II, and Obehi Janice made a strong impression (as she usually does) in several smaller roles.  As noted, Barkhimer was wonderful as Glendower (as he had been as Justice Shallow in Part II; I longed to see him as Falstaff - he has the impish smarts).  Still, I think that ASP still refuses to realize that Shakespeare often depends not so much on individual performances as on a sense of ensemble - which, despite sharing, it seems, similar politics and ideas, these folks rarely manage to conjure.  The famous tavern scene threw this gap into sharp relief - despite some genuinely funny bits, it felt diffuse and out of focus (we'd never guess it's a turning point for Hal); looking around as it rambled through its course, you could see the individual actors immersed in their own performances ("What am I doing now?  How do I feel about this?") rather than contributing to group effects or responding to underlying themes.  This is, I admit, a persistent problem in American Shakespeare; assumptions left over from the heyday of the Method essentially short-circuit his symphonic intents.  But isn't it time the Actors' Shakespeare Project began to get beyond that?