Review
Shakespeare
Robert
Cohen
at Shakespeare Festivals in the American Northwest
America’s
largest professional theatre company is not to be found in New
York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other metropolitan center,
but in Ashland, Oregon, population 20,500 - a one-time logging
town 300 miles from any city that could be considered a population
center. Yet despite its demographic isolation, the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival currently employs 96 actors – 60 of them Equity
professionals – and is currently on track to better its
2007 attendance record of 404,730 paid admissions for an eleven-play
season performed in their historic outdoor and two newer indoor
theatres.
What’s
more, the OSF attracts these crowds by a repertoire of genuine
classics (they’ve completed the Shakespeare canon three
times) and an exceptionally provocative assortment of contemporary
plays and premieres, often in newly commissioned translations.
And in both play selection and personnel, the festival emphasizes
gender and ethnic diversity to an extraordinary degree –
an emphasis that is even expanding under the administration
of incoming Artistic Director Bill Rauch - whose initial production
this year was the two thousand year-old Sanskrit Clay Cart.
The
OSF’s success (it was the 1983 recipient of the Tony Award
for Best Regional Theatre and now operates on a $26.5 million
annual budget) has fathered many state Shakespeare Festivals
in the American Northwest over past decades. This August, I
treated myself to a swing around four of them – seeing
a show at each.
Starting
in Oregon, Laird Williamson’s Coriolanus was
the third Coriolanus I have seen there, after Jack
Crouch’s sonorous and stolid 1962 production in the outdoor
theatre, with a heroically grave Peter MacLean in the title
role (and a very young Robert Cohen at his side as Titus Lartius),
and Jerry Turner’s richly poetic 1980 version in the indoor
Angus Bowmer Theatre (named after the festival’s founder),
with Denis Arndt’s acidulous Coriolanus and Stuart Duckworth’s
enraptured Aufidius intertwined in mutual ardor and hatred.
Williamson’s modern dress production largely (and wisely)
dispenses with the sonority, elegance, and rapture of the earlier
ones, however, in favor of the political miasma of a democracy
at war, where armies, police, politicians and protestors clash
by night, and where no segment of government or society can,
by itself, create social order.
Staged
arena-style in the company’s New Theatre, an indoor black
box that seemed for this production largely lit by gunfire,
the scruffy Roman civilians and their demagogic tribunes confront
war-making generals and peacemaking diplomats on a grim stage
overrun with political placards, laser-targeted AK-47s, and
barbed-wire fences. Blood flows - but the war of words is always
atop the war of weapons in this fast-paced staging, and never
has Shakespearean rhetoric seemed to this reviewer so pertinent
to current events. In a brilliant casting stroke, a frizzy-haired
and trench-coated Demetra Pittman plays the tribune Sicinius,
seen here as a militant populist reminiscent of the late “Battling
Bella” Abzug in her determined undermining of the old
guard, all-male patriotism of an aging Roman (and, by extension,
American) republic.
The
acting was vigorously expressive, particularly by Pittman, Jonathan
Toppo as the obsessive but confused First Citizen, Richard Elmore
as the haplessly diplomatic Menenius, Mahira Kakkar as the devoted
wife of the doomed warrior, and Danforth Comins as the seething,
snarling, implacable Caius Martius/Coriolanus himself. A slight
let-down was Robynn Rodriguez’s Volumnia, whose climactic
speech that overturns her son’s vows (and leads to his
assassination), while argued intelligently enough, lacked the
emotional fire that could turn a head that had already rejected
all possible rational arguments. But in sum, this is a production
that makes you think deeply, and in its best moments it makes
you complicit in the panic of public anarchy and insurrection.
The
Utah festival is, at 47, the second oldest of this foursome.
It too has received a Tony Award for regional theatre (in 2000),
and now, with a $6 million budget and 20 equity actors (in its
summer season alone), it draws 150,000 annual attendees into
three theatres. I directed there this summer (Molière’s
School for Wives), and so saw all six summer performances;
each was well attended and received but I’ll limit myself
to reviewing the most surprising of them, which was Jane Page’s
1940s adaptation (several lines were changed) of Taming
of the Shrew.
No
one who directs Shrew can avoid the challenge of making
its theme acceptable; more than a hundred years ago, George
Bernard Shaw wrote that “the last scene is altogether
disgusting to modern sensibility.” Page, however, welcomed
the challenge. Instead of the more usual escape valve –
that Petruchio and Kate fall in love at first sight and are
only negotiating the terms of their future relationship - Page
sees Katherine as a woman suffering with inchoate anger, as
painful to her as it is to her family, and Page’s Petruchio
is a suitor who, forewarned of her rage, senses a “Kate
conformable” beneath the shrewish behavior. The production
is set (superbly, as designed by Jo Winiarski) in front of Baptista
Minola’s restaurant in post-WWII Padua, where a small
contingent of the U.S. army – including one Captain Petruchio
- remains billeted in tents outside the town. The clash of cultures
(American crassness, mafia opportunism, and European savoir
faire) mingles with the battle of the sexes, while some ingenious
staging choices on Page’s part (Petruchio looking up Hortensio’s
Italian greeting in his pocket dictionary, his dunking Grumio’s
head in the town fountain, his dressing in drag for the wedding,
the married couple wrestling inside Petruchio’s tent)
make this comedy refreshingly comic. The acting, particularly
of the leads (Melinda Parrett and Grant Goodman as K&P)
and Dennis Elkins as the increasingly flustered Baptista, is
thrilling.
The
Idaho Festival, in a delightfully comfortable outdoor theatre
six miles from Boise, surely has the best food service of any
of those visited, with a café that serves basket dinners,
wine and beer - all of which can be taken into the amphitheatre
bleachers, which incorporate several mini-boxes with mini-dining
tables. This year’s production of Macbeth is
anything but dinner theatre, however, and is – at least
pictorially - utterly absorbing. Director Charles Fee (also
the company’s Artistic Director) has collaborated with
costume designer Star Moxley to create three amazing witches
(one male and two female), who sport clown-white faces that
pop out of jet-black, hooded robes, which can be extended by
each witch’s two long walking sticks – allowing
them to expand their robes to either side or to the sky. So
when the robed and hooded witches hobble down scene designer
Gage Williams’s’ central staircase side-by side
and arms akimbo, they seem like gargantuan bats descending on
the audience. And when they raise their sticks to the sky they
suddenly become the white-faced woods of Birnam.
Two
drummers, also black-garbed, perform on either side of the stage,
underscoring most of the action by pummeling their matching
tympani and artfully designed thundersheets, creating a sonic
as well as a kinetic, visual frame. A slightly raked red disk
served as the play’s stationary centerpiece; designer
Williams has clearly executed his Macbeth commission con
brio.
Fee’s
adaptation of the text is brisk and efficient, with the character
of Seyton incorporating a large variety of lesser roles (including
the third murderer, which is common, and the Porter, which is
not), and Banquo cloaks himself to play the Old Man, which proves
pertinent as well as economical. And Fee’s stylized staging
is mostly effective, although I do hope that the use of long
red ribbons to indicate spilled blood (first employed, to my
knowledge, by Peter Brook in his 1955 Titus Andronicus)
will be retired one of these years. Other staging tropes, including
the at-a-gallop entrances and exits, and the near-continuous
on-stage percussion score, echo (coincidentally, I imagine)
Ariane Mnouchkine’s kabuki-inspired 1981 Richard II
at Avignon (as well as the 1982 Colorado Macbeth, which
I directed), but the hyperactive mis-en-scene certainly creates
an accelerating urgency. The acting, from a cast that included
14 equity members, was solidly professional, with fine clarity,
tempos, and inflections; still, I must report that the play
seemed seriously in need of the psychological/emotional and
even intellectual character arcs – and experiences –
that are usually considered fundamental to the play. The sound
and fury was there, to be sure, but such signifying as came
across the footlights was largely left to the designs, the witches
and the percussionists.
The
youngest of these companies is Marin Shakespeare, in the pretty
town of San Rafael, just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco.
The Marin was founded nineteen years ago by the husband-and-wife
team of Robert and Lesley Currier, who remain, respectively,
the company’s Artistic and Managing Directors. The festival
is still largely a family affair, performing on a temporary
stage erected each year in the outdoor, woodsy amphitheatre
of a local college, and operates with a tiny staff and a bare-bones
budget of $750,000. Still, the Marin mounts three summer shows,
employs close to a dozen equity actors (tapping into the rich
store of professional actors living in the SF Bay Area), and
in addition produces, along with Shakespeare camps and school
programs, a winter show in the Los Cabos area at the tip of
Mexico’s Baja California.
This
summer’s Winter’s Tale was co-directed
by both Curriers – a first-ever experiment – and
it perfectly reflected their differing directorial styles, with
Lesley handling the somber Sicilian scenes with which the play
begins and ends, and Robert taking over for the play’s
raucous Bohemian middle. “Time” - Shakespeare’s
character who explains the play’s curious sixteen-year
gap at the start of Act IV - was converted in this production
to a thematic presence who, accompanying himself on the largest
didgeridoo I have ever seen, interacts with the characters at
various points throughout the play, and stands in for the ursine
presence of Shakespeare’s famous stage direction, “exit,
pursued by a bear.” Rafael Untalan (with three Ashland
seasons under his belt) was an intense and compelling Leontes
in this altogether satisfying production, while Celia Madeoy
was an extremely convincing Paulina and the young Kate Fox Marcom
proved an especially appealing Perdita. Older veterans George
McGuire and Jerry Hoffman were charming and beguiling, respectively,
as the gentle Old Shepherd and the smarmy Autolycus. Design
elements were simple yet appealing – the borrowed facility,
temporary stage, and perpetually gusting winds do not permit
great technical elaboration – and while the Marin festival
probably does not yet have the reputation that would draw large
audiences from surrounding states or counties, the Bay Area
residents who attend can be assured of a thoughtful and wonderful
encounter with the great Bard of Avon in the glorious redwood
kingdom below Mt. Tamalpais.
