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.

A broken Coriolanus

The shattered monument to Constantine in Rome.

With a text like Coriolanus, the Actors' Shakespeare Project is working at an interesting advantage to its critics: it's clear from the notices that none of its reviewers has ever seen a decent production before, or in some cases any production before (even I've only seen five versions). So the tendency is to give more credit to the production than is actually due - although to be fair, people can tell the play is rarely done for some very good reasons. It requires a large ensemble that can bring off convincing battle scenes, with all that means in terms of costume and set; what's more, its leads are very difficult to cast - and even when these obstacles are surmounted, unfortunately it's also true the play's central figures are just not that sympathetic.

I wouldn't say that the Actors' Shakespeare Project is well-positioned to deal with any of those challenges; the troupe doesn't have an obvious Coriolanus or Volumnia in its company, nor a large resident ensemble, and of course leads a gypsy existence from one improvised venue to another, so it's unable to bring a panoply of physical resources to the play's realization. But despite all that, the group has persevered, and thus the puzzled-but-positive response to the production; like Samuel Johnson's dog on its hind legs, this Coriolanus may be not be done well, but we're surprised to find it done at all. And a certain collegiate conceit seems to have attached itself to the group, and I think is indulged with pleasure on all sides: ASP tears through the canon at an astounding clip, whether or not they've got the actors or resources to match the play they're doing, and the press always applauds - in a way, the group apes "gonzo" modes of undergraduate thought and experience (unsurprisingly, many of its actors are teachers in the local academy). Indeed, their unconscious re-enactment of freshman-dorm drama may be the real source of their popularity: they take us all back, only this time with our professors onstage, and sure 'nuff they're better than we ever were.

If all this sounds cruel, let me say I'm really writing more in sorrow than in anger; I want ASP to get better, to develop, to build. I like them for some reason, even though they irritate me, as when I recall that this is actually their fifth season and yet they seem precisely where they were at their first opening: some good ideas, some thoughtful line readings, and some interesting DYI grappling with the space they've selected this time; and then all sorts of raggedy edges and let's-pretend-we-pulled-that-off moments. They still behave like a clique, but they're funded like a theatre company - and you can feel the rest of the theatre scene sort of ceding Shakespeare to them, which is perhaps what's most frustrating about the situation, as they don't nearly do him justice.

Of course the Boston audience is so ignorant of how great Shakespeare can be that it's not hard to understand the popularity of the troupe. And after all, they're not pretentiously antiseptic like the ART, to which they were at first seen as a shaggy, but still Harvard-branded, antidote. ASP is accessible, somewhat hip, slightly cool in a grungy way - and yes, in their productions something of the play, or at least its conceptual skeleton, always comes over. I also get the idea from some ASP fans that they imagine the troupe's postmodern-troubadour style roughly corresponds to how Shakespeare's plays were done originally, which is almost certainly a mistake in the case of Coriolanus; lefty academics routinely leave out the fact that Shakespeare was eventually part of the King's Men, with more resources (including, yes, an indoor theatre) than just about anyone; their analogue today would not be the Living Theatre but a White House-sponsored company performing on the mainstage of the Kennedy Center.

Which brings us back to politics - and Coriolanus, which is famously Shakespeare's most political play. It's unique in the canon in other ways, too; it's the bard's last tragedy (if you don't count the tortured fragment that is Timon), but it feels nothing like a culmination and something like a U-turn, as with it the Bard seems to abandon his own methods. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare strips out most of the paired narratives and cross-plots that give breadth and depth to Hamlet and Lear, and suppresses the imagery that flickers like lightning through Macbeth; he even forsakes the soliloquy, from which he conjured the depths of both Iago and Othello (Coriolanus gets one or two short solos, but all lack introspection, and nobody else looks inward, either).

To some, the play therefore lacks personality and poetry; what it has instead is a corruscating irony, and a muscular form. Like its hero, it's a kind of experiment in pure externality, an homage to the utterly public tragedies of the ancients, in which the essence of man was embedded in action, not thought. And perhaps as a result, Shakespeare hews (for once) to something like the Aristotelian model of tragedy: he posits, almost simplistically, a hero with a major flaw that brings him down: Coriolanus is Rome's greatest soldier (and savior), who simply cannot humble himself in order to gain his "rightful" political power - instead he insults those he would lead, and his arrogance brings ruin, and even death, down upon his head. But the simplicity of that arc belies the many ironies of both the play's plot and its central mystery, which turns out to be (in another nod to Aristotle) literally Oedipal: Coriolanus's tragic flaw and public downfall are the result of his private dependence on his mother.

And it's at this crux - the embodiment of private essence in public act - that ASP stumbles. The troupe doesn't seem to realize that to make any artistic sense, Coriolanus's personality must be framed in a palpable sense of glory; if he's not a dazzling rock star, he seems merely delusional, and there's no tragedy. Indeed, as he has no interiority, his tragic climax cannot be the transforming self-awareness that sears Othello and Lear and Hamlet; it can only be his apprehension of his own destruction, his Lucifer-like fall from the glitter of grace. But this is precisely the kind of theatrical effect which the troupe's rag-tag aesthetic perforce excludes. And compounding this problem of style is the simple fact that Benjamin Evett, talented actor that he is, lacks the physical glamour to pull off a golden boy like Caius Martius (Coriolanus's given name, which he rather pointedly shares with the god of war). Evett instead tries to limn the character's childishness and devotion to discipline, but none of this really works without that gilded outer shell.


Coriolanus (Evett) clashes with his arch enemy Aufidius (Ted Hewlett).

And much of the rest of the play doesn't work, either. Evett's Coriolanus simply isn't imposing enough to sew the seeds of envy in others, and if he doesn't seem invincible at some level, the play's other major role becomes suddenly complicated - in short, if Coriolanus is not a kind of god, then his mother comes off as psychotic.

Or she would come off as psychotic, if Bobbie Steinbach weren't playing her as yet another feisty, pint-sized spitfire. Evett may be somewhat disappointing, but Steinbach's actually irritating. Volumnia is Shakespeare's most intensive treatment of a mother, and boy, is she ever a mother. She longs for her boy to be wounded, or even killed (for the greater of glory of his - and not coincidentally her - name); in her very first line she unconsciously muses on what it would be like for her son to share her bed, and things only get more fucked-up from there: by withholding all affection except on terms of military success, she has simultaneously masculinized yet infantilized her son, and tellingly has an almost-erotic relationship to his wounds (hence he cannot bear to show them to the public). She's a nightmare version of the founding Roman she-wolf, hanging leech-like from her offspring, and her very name lets you know she's an enormous void, able to devour everything in her path, military heroes included. Indeed, Volumnia achieves her apotheosis only by bringing about her son's death (by which time she's already got her claws on her grandson). It's a wild characterization that's constantly skirting the edge of satire; still, you'd think Steinbach could come up with more than drawing herself up with dignity and begging the audience for laughs (which they're happy to give her). To be fair, she does get down to business in her climactic scene, which works, but only far more superficially than it could work if she'd built up a twisted foundation for this monstrous matriarch.

Not that any one else is doing much character work, either. Perhaps taking a tip from that previously mentioned lack of soliloquy, director Robert Walsh seems to have directed everything externally, as well - as if the play were actually about its battles, rather than their meaning. Thus the character of Aufidius (Ted Hewlett), the military nemesis of Coriolanus, is basically a blank, and the tribunes who bring their general down (Maurice Emmanuel Parent and Noah Tuleja) are jealous stick figures (when the key to their characters is their sense of pique and wounded pride- they're as outraged by Coriolanus as he is by them). There's some better work around the edges of the production; Robert Najarian sketches a little feeling into Cominius, and Susannah Melone and (particularly) Hannah Husband strike some sparks as Coriolanus's wife and friend. Perhaps the most accomplished performance comes from Ron Goldman as Menenius, basically because Goldman's vocal and rhetorical skills are simply stronger than anyone else's in the company.

Much of the local press comment has revolved around the production's solution, or near-solution, to the problem of the play's epic violence. Director Walsh is widely known as a fight director (as are several of the men in the cast), and he and "movement designer" Karen Krolak have devised interesting martial-arts-inspired dance forms - think mass capoeira (above) - to put over the many clashes of the play. I admired all the effort that went into this, and the actors' skillful commitment to it; and the battles did catch fire in one brilliant gambit, where Aufidius and Coriolanus slogged away at each other within a kind of cage (left). But clever as it was, the movement design blurred or ignored many essential elements of the various scenes of combat. Shakespeare clearly intends Rome's enemies, the Volscians, to be seen as an even more savage society than the nascent republic on the Tiber; yet this is lost in Krolak's designs, which feel more like cooperative dance than conflict (a similar distinction between plebe and patrician is likewise lost in Molly Trainer's costume design). Walsh seems to imagine that the play can be seen as a clash between Soviet-style communism and Italian -style fascism; to which again I can only say: not quite; the Roman mob had neither theory nor discpline, and the Fascists had a lot more style than seen here. There were many more such gaps and blind spots in the production; the homoerotics of the military (and of the eventual coupling of Coriolanus and Aufidius in particular) was mysteriously absent, when it isn't just indicated but directly stated by the text (coming right after Walsh's similarly strait-jacketed turn as Antonio in Merchant of Venice, we're beginning to wonder about this guy!). And in the end, the setting - the interior of the Somerville Armory - didn't really deliver much in the way of militaristic atmosphere, as it was basically indistinguishable from a high school gym. ASP sometimes imagines that the social meaning of a space trumps its actual physical aesthetic, which just isn't true; their most successful venues (The Tempest, Titus Andronicus) have succeeded because the existing space roughly approximated an appropriate "set," not because of any social or philosophical "overtones" of the venues. This is just one of the many illusions I wish this talented troupe could shake themselves free of.