Coriolanus and the commoners on the Common

Coriolanus in triumph.  Photo: Andrew Brilliant.

I finally caught Coriolanus on the Boston Common (across two nights; it closed Sunday), and as usual I was slightly mystified as to why people lug out their lawnchairs once a year and swat mosquitoes while watching amplified Shakespeare.  But maybe that's just what the groundlings like to do on a midsummer eve, I dunno.

Well, the mob that watched the mob in Coriolanus saw pretty much what they see every year, at least: some cleanly-spoken, if over-amplified, verse (and as this is late Shakespeare, that's no mean feat), a production that tagged several perspectives on the play without deciding on any particular one, a few good local actors, and a fair amount of spectacle.  I think even the uninitiated could tell the show was about this Roman warrior dude who just couldn't bring himself to bow and scrape to the common herd, which led to their banishing him, only then he totally turns the tables on them, which is like ironic. Or something like that.

But as usual for director Steven Maler, little of the production cohered emotionally (or politically).  And actually, despite the roaring sound effects and a charge of riot police, there wasn't quite enough spectacle this time; Coriolanus works best when the lifestyles of its warrior class clash with the squalid conditions of Rome's lower 99%, but on the Common, everyone had to make do with Cristina Todesco's toppling fort of a set (a rare misstep for Todesco, btw).

And I wish I could say the acting made up for this gap, but it didn't, not really.  Last year's All's Well that Ends Well marked an uptick in the quality of the Commonwealth Shakespeare ensemble - I remember only the heroine, Helena, wasn't up to snuff.  This year many of the same performers returned, so I had some hope for Coriolanus (even though it's an even more difficult play than All's Well).  But this time around the local stars, strong as they are, could't really play to their strengths; Karen MacDonald can play solid brass when she wants to, for instance, but she's just too warm-hearted to conjure the cold steel of the vulpine Volumnia, Coriolanus's blood-thirsty mama-vulture,  and while Fred Sullivan, Jr. nailed his laughs, as he always does, he had his usual trouble conveying emotional attachment on stage, so as Coriolanus's father figure, Menenius, he never really connected with his protégé .


Such disconnects left the emotional heavy lifting to muscular lead Nicholas Carrière (above left), who's not only easy on the eyes but also totally credible as an athletic killing machine (the sine qua non of this role).  What's more, Carrière proved himself more than a hunk of martial man-candy; he spoke the verse well, and even had a flair for physical comedy - his was the funniest (and psychologically healthiest) Coriolanus I've ever seen; the performance never dripped with the unhinged contempt so many have brought to the part - nor did Carrière hint at anything like the frightening political dimensions of, say, Ralph Fiennes's proto-fascist figure from the recent movie.

But Coriolanus shouldn't be just an action figure, he should dazzle us with something like inhuman grace; and conjuring the character's sick connection with his mother - the source of the inflexible pride that is his downfall - seemed beyond Carrière and MacDonald, at least under Maler's direction.  To be fair, the dysfunctional complex at the bottom of this relationship is obscure even by Shakespearean standards - partly because Coriolanus never gets anything like a real soliloquy; the drama operates entirely on its political surface.  Still, this was the first time I've seen the play where I got the impression the actors weren't even trying to connect at some intensely perverse personal level.  So Carrière's Coriolanus joined the long list of Shakespearean characters - from Helena to Iago to Hamlet - who have strutted their hour upon the stage at Boston Common without ever getting at anything like their subtexts.

Oh, well!  There were at least a few sparks struck elsewhere in the supporting cast.  But alas, the talented Maurice E. Parent never caught fire as Aufidius, our hero's nemesis (perhaps because Maler seemed to suppress both his exotic differences, and fraternal similarities, with Coriolanus).  Meanwhile, as the scheming tribunes of the people, Jacqui Parker and Remo Airaldi got to have a little wicked fun, even if sometimes they were all but twirling their (virtual) mustaches - particularly as Carrière seemed like merely a dude with too much 'tude rather than a potential Il Duce.

Which leads me, I suppose, to how I'm supposed to be in awe of how relevant Coriolanus is to The Way We Live Now.  Only don't we say that about every Shakespeare play every year?  What struck me most about Coriolanus this time around was actually how much of it is no longer relevant to the postmodern political scene: of course we still want leaders we can "have a beer with" - sure - but we no longer expect them to actually go into battle, as Coriolanus did.  Genuine physical courage is no longer required - and that's a big difference.  I mean, if George W. Bush or Dick Cheney had ever actually risked their lives for their country, as they asked so many other Americans to do, would they be so obviously contemptible, and wouldn't our moral relationship with them be more complicated?  And would a real, honest-to-God soldier (like Coriolanus) ever have lied to his country (much less his brothers in arms!) about anything as risky as invading another country?  Indeed, watching this play, I was struck by a strange nostalgia for its ruling class, and their cruel but honest principles and their cold, tragic élan (if this production had managed anything like  élan, that is).  Damn - I thought - if only we had conservatives like Coriolanus!  If only we had Volumnia to deal with instead of Barbara Bush!  Sure, we might be living in an overt, rather than covert, oligarchy - but at least we'd know that the deaths of our soldiers counted for something.

And one last note - at the final performance, a seemingly unscripted meta-scene was enacted by a groundling who suddenly staggered on stage just after Coriolanus had been rejected by the Roman mob. Dazed, possibly drunk, and clad only in a pair of gym shorts, the fellow began to clumsily make like a Roman plebe, but he seemed both vaguely hostile and seriously out-of-it.  Here, I thought, was Unaccommodated Man, the poor, bare, forked animal of Lear's blasted heath - as security guards (not actors with riot gear, but actual security guards) rushed onto the set to subdue the interloper.  Meanwhile the actors fell silent and stared at each other, like unstrung puppets, unsure of what to do next.  The 99%!  Onstage!!  For a moment, the false political metaphors of the production were torn open; the mob of the present day had suddenly manifested itself on the boards of its phony Rome, and the air seemed to crackle with a sketchy kind of political electricity.  But the hand of the actual State descended quickly; the police had soon drawn the unwelcome visitor off into the shadows, and the actors, after conferring with management, trudged obediently back to their entrances.  The lights dimmed for a moment, and then came back up, and the players began hitting their marks all over again, shouting in "passion" and raging against the machine, right on cue; indeed, the whole show went on just as if nothing had happened.

All's Well that ends, well, okay

Parolles (Fred Sullivan, Jr.) gets his comeuppance in All's Well that Ends Well.

The critics have been singing the praises of Commonwealth Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, so I stopped by the Common last night to check it out - who knows, I thought to myself, maybe Steve Maler has finally come up with something.

Well, I didn't last through the whole thing, but I admit the reviewers are right on one count - this is probably the best I've seen Maler and company do. It's not great, but it's solid arena Shakespeare. And it's obvious why - for once Maler has by and large cast experienced stage veterans in the major roles rather than cable stars, and he has colored well within the lines of the interpretive consensus regarding All's Well. When you've got Karen MacDonald, Will LeBow, and Fred Sullivan, Jr. all on stage, trust me, the show will keep moving. And even the sound was a little better than usual.

Meanwhile Maler's direction, though inoffensive, is also rarely compelling. As usual, he has staged appropriate chunks of pageant to denote the play's themes, which move rather like placards across the stage. He knows from his reading, for instance, that All's Well is the most melancholic of the comedies, and shot through with images of death and decay. So he stages a funeral at the beginning, and usually lights the stage in blue. He doesn't actually know how to imbue the performances themselves with this interpretive slant; but he can communicate that he himself is aware of it. And, once this message has been received, most of our local critics put a "check!" in a little box on their mental scorecards.

Alas, that scorecard may not be as sophisticated as the critics themselves assume. I noted with amusement, for instance, that one local reviewer enthused that Larry Coen, "always a delight to watch, is doubly so when he's uttering that iambic pentameter." Now Coen is, indeed, often a delight to watch, but I don't think he has any of "that iambic pentameter" to say in All's Well; his character, Lavatch, speaks only in prose.

I'm aware, however, that such praise points up a special problem around critiquing Shakespeare on the Common: to be fair to Maler, he has to please that lady who can't tell blank verse from prose. (And his wealthy sponsors and donors are much the same - most of them have been 'educated' without really getting educated.) So it's worth noting that this production probably meets that populist standard - indeed it's chief virtue is simply that most of the cast makes this text intelligible. The language in All's Well may represent Shakespeare at his most obscure; it is expressly designed to suggest a decadent society transfixed by legalistic equivocation, and the Bard himself is intent on suggesting an equipoise of oppositions in almost every line.

The play opens, for instance, with a famous mouthful: "In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband." Shakespeare explicitly is equating birth and death here, but it's hard to parse that the very first time you hear it. Just btw, he closes with a similar equivalence, when the pregnant Helena is introduced with the line "One that's dead is quick" - in All's Well death itself is fecund. Probably the resonance of this strange, impacted theme sailed right over the heads of most of the folks on the Common - still, the actors made superficial sense of just about everything they said, however convoluted its expression - they spoke a bit slowly, but always clearly, and I felt that the audience was generally following the action, which is no small achievement.

But as an evocation of what's special about All's Well That Ends Well, you couldn't point to this version; it was solid, generic Shakespeare, but it had little of the haunting atmosphere All's Well should have, because there was little that was specific to the text about it. Part of the problem was that plays with subtle atmosphere don't lend themselves to arena stagings (imagine The Glass Menagerie in Fenway Park - that's roughly equivalent to trying to stage All's Well That Ends Well on the Common). But another central issue was that Kersti Bryan's competent Helena had little of the mystique that goes a long way toward excusing the plot's fairy-tale oddities (magic potions, bed tricks). Then again, nobody else was exactly right for his or her role, either; the great Karen MacDonald, for instance, is far too hearty for the frail Countess of Rossillion (who is generally seen as slowly failing over the course of the play), while Fred Sullivan, Jr., as the cowardly braggart Parolles, tended to bark his comic lines like a cross between Falstaff and Pistol, when what is essential about Parolles is his smallness. Meanwhile Larry Coen did manage to wring some laughs from Lavatch (Shakespeare's least funny clown), but failed to convey the jester's despairing temper (he's a hanger-on from the Countess's dead husband).  And even Will LeBow, though sonorous as ever, only brought the occasional interesting touch to the King of France.

Thus, I confess, my attention slowly drifted, and in the end I only made it about two thirds of the way through.  So perhaps the finale is fantastic - I just don't know (although I doubt it).  I confess I'm getting a bit bad that way - I bailed on Company One's 1001 last week, too.  But seriously, folks, I'm not getting any younger, and life, as they say, is short.  I certainly don't owe these people anything - in fact, I owe Company One and Steve Maler a bad turn or two.  Still, this time I have to admit that even if all doesn't end well with All's Well, it ends up pretty much okay.

Notes on Othello

Sigh. What I give up for this blog!

Ok, I finally went to the Commonwealth Shakespeare production of Othello last night because, I admit, several people were begging me to. "I know I won't like it!" I kept telling them, but they said what theatre people always say in reply: "Puh-leeeeeze! We want to know what you think!"

This is what comes of actually thinking about things, I suppose. The other critics hate you, but the performers secretly - well, I understand what it's like to work your tail off and send your vision into the void, where your best hope of being understood comes from that smart, bitchy queen who writes a blog.

Anyway, back to Othello. I didn't like it. First, for the usual reason: I don't like arena Shakespeare. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the original Globe was an "outdoor" theatre - no kidding! - but it was fairly small, and intensely focused, and had no planes flying overhead. And anyway, Shakespeare played indoors a lot, and his company bought an indoor theatre as soon as they could. Maybe indoors is better. I certainly think so. Or rather, I think it's better than watching tiny, puppet-like figures (with faces like pinheads) moving stiffly on a stage four hundred feet in front of you while amplified voices shout from four hundred feet behind you, and mosquitoes suck your blood. But I guess that's just me! Zillions of people turn out every year for this strange ritual - then return to the NASCAR circuit. (Just kidding - I know they go back to Cambridge and Brookline!!)


Arena Shakespeare at its best. The actual Globe's "pit" wasn't all that much bigger than that gazebo.

I do wonder, however, why we blow hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on an extravaganza which doesn't really deliver the real thing - i.e., Shakespeare. The answer, of course, is: We do it because other cities do! To which my mother would have replied, "But if other cities jumped off a cliff, would you do that, too?" Oh, well. Fat chance the fat cats who fund this kind of thing would ever listen to a wise woman like my mother. Still, couldn't we fund two - or maybe three - shows at smaller venues for the same price, and with better results? Just a thought.

To be fair, this Othello was clearly spoken (that's not always the case). And it was free of the really stoopid interventions we now expect from the loopier denizens of the local academy. Nobody showed their tits, and of my friends' famous "ART Checklist" (leather corsets; over-amplified music; funereal set), only one - water on the stage - made its dreaded, pointless appearance.

But then there's Steven Maler, artistic director of Commonwealth Shakespeare, and director of these summer shows. And why, exactly, is that true? As far as I know, Maler had no record of great Shakespeare going into the job, and - let's be honest, more than a decade later, he still doesn't. (Oh, I forgot, he won an Elliot Norton Award. I stand corrected!)

Of course, Maler is sexy, and good at separating wealthy people from their money. The funny thing is, he's also pretty good at directing other playwrights - I've seen some staged readings by him that were quite strong. He just has no feel for Shakespeare; he's in precisely the wrong job. To be honest, he is great at pageant, which is no small part of arena theatre; he's a resourceful and clever orchestrator of crowds and complicated set pieces. If all of the Bard were like the opening scenes of Romeo and Juliet, he'd be in business. But Othello is practically a chamber piece (it shrinks down to a chess game between four or five people), and when it comes to the nitty-gritty, you can feel Maler's just got no Shakespearean chops at all. He rarely draws strong internal work from actors, his blocking is abstracted, and his scenes seem cleverly aimless; I keep hearing a little voice in my head going, "The beat goes there, Maler, not there!" whenever I'm watching one of his productions.

And then there's his dreadful penchant for casting under-equipped TV and movie actors in demanding Shakespearean roles. A stage actor will typically get his Shakespearean sea-legs in the part of a spear-chucker, or Second Senator From the Left. But a typical Commonwealth Shakespeare press release goes something like: "This summer Zac Efron will essay his first Shakespearean role for Steven Maler - and it's Prospero!" This year we got Seth Williams (of The Wire and Oz) as Othello, and James Waterston, whose qualifications for playing Shakespeare are, apparently, being sired by Sam Waterston and being friends with Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke (who are also eminent pseudo-Shakespeareans). For the record, Williams at least stayed afloat, though he splashed pointlessly quite a bit - until he suddenly turned in quietly moving renditions of "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul" and Othello's last moments of remorse in the play's terrible climax; I left thinking he might be able to do the role in ten or twenty years. Waterston, meanwhile, just sank. But he was in good company at the bottom of the tank. Marianna Bassham, one of my favorite local actresses, was thrashing down there too, trying to make Desdemona a kind of husky-voiced 40's siren, while Adrianne Krstansky (my other favorite local actress) worked on making Emilia alternately bitter and sleepy.

Oh, well; another evening I could have spent watching reruns of Two and a Half Men gone down the drain! But in the spirit of avoiding future bad productions of Othello, I thought I would throw out a few obvious interpretive pointers about the play. These precepts are all rooted in the text; this is what Shakespeare says, flat out; and yet directors and actors almost always ignore these guidelines, and then wonder why the play just isn't working. Of course the public wants to ignore these ideas, too; we want to "do" Shakespeare without listening to him; we'd prefer to grant ourselves the benefit of his greatness (thanks so much!), then pound him down into an enlightened, "improved" modern template - when of course he's deeper than that.

So in the interest of paying attention to the play, so that maybe it will work, here goes nothing:

Not Othello.

1) Othello is not Denzel. Or Taye.

We like our modern Othellos to be not merely hotheads, but also hotties as well. An understandable matinee-idol impulse, to be sure. Shakespeare's Othello, however, is an old soldier, weathered rather than beautiful, and engaged in an obvious May-December romance. To be blunt, if he and Desdemona are the hottest people in the room, then a key point in Shakespeare's vision has been occluded. We should never, ever expect that they would fall in love.

2) Othello has a tragic flaw beyond his jealousy.

Everyone "knows" that Othello's tragic flaw is jealousy. But he has another, secret flaw beyond that - perhaps alone among the tragic heroes, Othello is presented as psychologically unstable at the deepest level; his career, his success, his entire life is built around denying an inner terror of "chaos" that manifests itself in frightening "epilepsies." Iago's whole strategy wouldn't work without this (like Iago, Othello "is not what he is"). Therefore a corollary to this observation that I've seen manifested in the best productions is: Iago alone knows this secret about Othello; it's part of their kinship, their supposed mutual trust.

3) Desdemona is not a strong, modern woman.

Because strong, modern women do not acquiesce in their own murders for adulteries they did not commit (or for any reason, period). Is that clear? Yes, Desdemona defies her father - but she leaves him for another father figure. Endowing her with self-possessed, liberated power may make for a kicky Act One, but leads to inexplicable Acts Four and Five.

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4) Desdemona and Othello don't have great sex.

In fact, some critics have insisted that Othello and Desdemona never have sex at all. Certainly, despite all the racial hysteria and talk of "the beast with two backs," the couple's wedding night is interrupted - and then their honeymoon is, too. Some readers have pointed out, in fact, that Othello's instructions to Desdemona on the night he kills her are weirdly like those of a bridegroom, and she asks Emilia to put her wedding sheets on what becomes her deathbed (why?). It's quite possible this couple never actually does the nasty (which of course would humanize both of them), and at any rate, some level of uncertain distance between the two, predicated on the wild elevation of Desdemona's purity (think how she's contrasted with the earthy Emilia), helps explain Othello's crazed behaviors.

4) Iago may be many things, but above all he is good at simulating intimacy.

By now Iago has almost become a totem for unfathomable evil - because his malice is so intense, and so unclearly motivated by self-interest. Sure, he has his "reasons" - in fact, the play sometimes seems like a catalogue of possible explanations for his behavior - but all these excuses are questioned or outright contradicted by the text at one point or other; thus a characterization can be built on one, or all, or none of them. The one thing that Iago cannot do without, however, is his talent for intimacy. Only Emilia, his one true intimate, sees through it - and even she, despite his abuses, never guesses at just how dark his soul actually is. Meanwhile everyone around him is utterly fooled by his social face, and he smoothly moves into relationships of absolute trust with not just Othello but also Cassio, Roderigo, and even Desdemona. "Deep inside," Iago may be a tortured, alienated void, but that's what the soliloquies are for - on the surface, he's a stand-up guy, your best and oldest friend. That's the whole point.

There are more where these came from (including "Is Othello an African - or an Arab?"), but I think that will do for know. Study these precepts, directors of Othello, and perpend! And now I've got episodes of Two and a Half Men to watch.