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?

Isaac I vs. Henry V

Good morning, class! 

So Isaac Butler has made another idiotic pronouncement. What else is new?  We already know the blog host and trust-funded bon vivant (having a bad hair day, above) feels that Shakespeare's overrated - so what's the big deal if he has decided that Henry V is proof positive of the Bard's mediocrity?

Well, it's not that big a deal, actually - and yes, yes, I promised to never read his silly blog!  But the post was staring me in the face on Art's blogroll, and besides, as Isaac himself might say (as he gamely suggests in a backpedaling later post), his position is interesting to study.  It's "a fruitful thing to discuss."

And why?  Because Butler's not just an Internet busybody these days - he's also actually teaching Shakespeare, to college students, at the University of Minnesota.

I know, I know - this is a bit like Lamarck explaining evolution, or Pope Urban offering a seminar on Galileo! (I could go on and on.)

But is Butler's current post (and position) just a bizarrely ironic quirk of fate - or a kind of cultural harbinger?  I'm hoping for the former, of course, but I fear the latter.  Because Isaac's such an exquisitely-detailed millennial type; it's like he was designed by computers and sent back from the future to warn us or something.

Hold on, though - back to his points against Henry V; they're so cliched they're somehow delicious. According to Isaac, Henry V sucks because:

1) There's no suspense - we know how it's going to turn out.  It's actually history!

2) The characters are bad.  So what if we're still talking about them 400 years after the fact?  They're still  uninteresting, you know what I mean? Like in that way David Byrne talked about.

3)  It's not that funny, and sometimes the jokes are mean.

4) What's with the plot?  Yeah, even though it's history, it should still have a plot, just like it should still have suspense!  Duh.  That's obvious.

5)  The Battle of Agincourt is not sufficiently awesome.  There's really nothing more to say.

6) The French aren't badass villains, either.  Seriously, they're not.  Just try hissing them, you'll feel silly.

And yes, that's the professor's lecture on Henry V!  I hope the sophomores are feeling edified by now, because I'm not.

Even though I have to admit - everything Professor Butler says is true. I mean, as I read his post, I could only think to myself, "Oh, my GOD!  I do feel silly hissing the Dauphin!"

Ha ha, just kidding.  Professor Butler has only proven that Henry V is a very bad comic book. Indeed, Shakespeare totally ignores the rules of genre!  What was he thinking???

Gosh, who knows?  But what's funny about all this is that the Professor's comments are basically what you'd expect the smart-alecky student in the back row to point out: this play was weird; Henry's a mystery; am I supposed to cheer the hero or not?; and am I supposed to hiss the villains - or not?; I don't get it.  It's not like Star Wars at all!

And then the professor starts talking.  And begins to explain, perhaps, that Henry V is an extended meditation on the meaning of our celebration of "history;" that Henry's "character" seems to be missing because it vanished into his public role slowly, over the course of two previous plays, and that therefore his persona is intentionally mysterious; that the actual Battle of Agincourt for Shakespeare is all but immaterial; and that there is almost no other play extant that can be interpreted in such contradictory, utterly opposed ways - which makes it a "mirror" rather than a "window" (much less a "screen").  It is, in short, a cultural artifact utterly unlike anything in pop culture; indeed, it contains pop culture - what's more, it's a covert critique of exactly what you think it should be.

Only the professor is Isaac Butler!  So none of that is said.  Instead, the student is encouraged to validate his own naive impressions as intellectual insight through "fruitful discussion."  And the academic community takes another small step in its long journey toward intellectual senescence.

Shakespeare's sequel

Shakespeare only wrote one real sequel - Henry IV, Part II, which may be the most difficult play in the canon to pull off. This is partly because the history of this history play is obscure to modern audiences (it follows the death throes of the rebellion that reached its climax in Henry IV, Part I).  But the drama is doubly problematic because it's so very much a sequel to a greater, more vigorous work. Part II follows the schema of Part I quite closely - sometimes scene by scene - yet offers a kind of dark variation on it.  Everything in Part II has declined from its state in Part I - Mistress Quickly's tavern is now a brothel, the king is almost bed-ridden, Hal's sour practical jokes barely come off, and even the rebellion is undone by trickery rather than bravery.  The tone of all this is brilliant - sometimes cynical in the mode of Jonson, but at other times elegiac in a manner that is uniquely Shakespeare's.   But when you ponder that Part I is also a thicket of complexity - it's a chronicle play and a coming-of-age tale, and yet also features a titanic character, Falstaff, who looms over everything in terms of theme but is only a bit player in the story - you realize that a melancholy variation on that plot can easily turn into a muddle.

Which explains why the play is almost never done as a stand-alone evening; it's generally presented in edited form, and interpolated with Part I, as Trinity did in a fairly-successful production a few years back.  (In fact, this is the first time I've seen Henry IV, Part II in its entirety in thirty years.)  Thus the Actors' Shakespeare Project has to be congratulated for its bravery in doing the whole darn thing, in repertory with Part I - indeed, more than the whole darn thing, as adapter Robert Walsh (who also plays Falstaff) has book-ended the production with a prologue from Part I and various bits of Henry V to give its arc more context.

Alas, I don't think he succeeded in doing that - nor was I impressed with his somewhat-flat Falstaff.  I was likewise a bit under-whelmed by Bill Barclay as his foil, Prince Hal; the two had little chemistry - and this is a huge failing in any production of Henry IV because it undermines the power of the play's conclusion (Hal's rejection of his former companion).  Still, Barclay had his moments on his own, and struck a few sparks with Joel Colodner, who probably did the production's best dramatic work as the failing Henry IV. Even he, however, missed the poetic dimension of his best speeches, and another key role - the Lord Chief Justice - was given to an actor, Jonathan Louis Dent, who has promise but nothing like the gravitas the part requires.  Perhaps the production still could have succeeded, given these gaps, if director Patrick Swanson had some strong conceptual gambit up his sleeve (as he had with this troupe's version of The Tempest), but apparently he just didn't (although there were a few moments, such as a slow trudge of wounded soldiers through one scene, that had the right kind of mood). And the  ASP's usual grab-bag of costumes and props only made the historical pageant aspect of the show seem even more scattered than it otherwise would.

Still, I was unable to catch Part I prior to Part II, and perhaps the performances of Walsh and Barclay, along with other decisions, will make more sense once I've seen the whole thing.  As it stands, this production does catch fire in its smaller performances (which generally align with Shakespeare's sharpest sketches).  There was strong work from Bobbie Steinbach as Mistress Quickly, and Allyn Burrows (the company's artistic director) made a hilariously gonzo Pistol, while Steve Barkhimer came up with a nicely addled Justice Shallow.  There were other good moments, in even smaller roles, from the reliable Obehi Janice and Michael Forden Walker.  The production could still come together, I think, and after I've seen the whole thing, I may offer some second thoughts.

There goes whinin' Timon

Allyn Burrows as Shakespeare's tragic fragment.

People are often shocked by Timon of Athens - because it usually turns out to be so playable. Shakespeare veterans are less surprised - indeed, as I often comment, in performance the verities of middlebrow Shakespearean assumption are often up-ended; in my experience, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth almost never work on stage. Meanwhile some of the best productions of the Bard I've ever seen have been of obscurities like Timon and King John.

I think just about everything Shakespeare wrote is worth doing, of course - even plays like this one, which is partly by Thomas Middleton (or so goes the current scholarly vogue). The great strength of Timon is the stream of eloquent invective in its second half, when its eponymous hero has been reduced to penury. After years of living large - largely via parties and gifts to his BFFs - Timon falls hard, abandoned by said fair-weather Fs, and spends the rest of the play in rags, atop a hoard of gold he has stumbled upon, venting his spleen in curses so mysteriously riveting that they could only be by Shakespeare. And of course his situation - Timon was generous to a fault when he was bankrupt, but now that he's rich again he's only willing to fund mankind's self-destruction - resounds with the kind of deep ironies we associate with the Bard at his best.

Beyond that, however, I think that Timon of Athens must be regarded as more a fragment than a play. It's all the more fascinating therefore, to my mind - it's like seeing one of Shakespeare's first drafts, or perhaps his first version of someone else's scenario (not an uncommon occurrence, probably). He has sketched in some speeches of astonishing power and sophistication, and suggested a sense of the piece's thematic structure. No doubt if he'd worked on it longer, he would have begun to weave his usual web of secondary characters and begun to elaborate his themes through the interwoven strands of a double, or even triple, plot. Slowly, methinks, the traces of Middleton (or whoever wrote most of the first half) would have vanished beneath the same dramatic embroidery that transformed, say, the "Ur-Hamlet" into Hamlet.

But Shakespeare gave up on Timon of Athens. Perhaps, as some have suggested, he saw that Timon was a dead end in tragic terms - or perhaps he couldn't conjure a proper Iago-like antagonist for him. What's clearly missing from the first half, it's true, is a sense of Timon's motivation - what's driving his folly? Shakespeare never tells us.

And neither does the Actors' Shakespeare Project's new version of the play, which, like the script itself, feels split in two: the first act is done in the company's standard style, with lots of self-conscious collegiate clowning, which doesn't really get us anywhere emotionally, even though it's structured via several very clever conceits. All the pratfalls fall away, however, in the starker, second half, when star Allyn Burrows often has the stage to himself, or shares it with another naturally fluent Shakespearean, Will Lyman. Their exchanges probably count as the strongest stuff ASP has done in some time, and may be the most unaffectedly mature work I've seen them do ever.

Of course there simply isn't the rhetorical material for that kind of acting in the first half - but the best productions of Timon compensate by creating a mise-en-scène which allows us to identify with his delusions without questioning them. A famous Stratford, Canada production located the play in an elegant 20's milieu, complete with an original score by Duke Ellington. An even better version at the same theatre plunked the play down in Steven Spielberg's and Steve Jobs's charity set, in which everyone was dedicated to fighting AIDS in Africa while nibbling hors d'oeuvres from Wolfgang Puck. This kind of staging elides the lack of character development in Timon, while making new to us the play's cold, central insight: that almost all fellow feeling is greased with a healthy dose of lucre. Some have argued from this premise that the play is an indictment of hedge funds and late capitalism. But it's not, not really; Timon's not an investment banker, and it's quite obvious that the sources of his wealth in both the first and second acts are utterly mysterious, and merely pretexts for his ruminations on mankind's moral character. The play, in short, is concerned with a flaw in the human heart that was manifest long before Bernie Madoff set up shop.


The ASP version of Timon's high-class milieu.

Perhaps director Bill Barclay knows this, but he doesn't let us sympathize with it. Barclay has cut the play well (if more conventionally than I think he realizes), and clearly understands it deeply, but he also gives us a first act that's styled as an epic-theatre clown show; Timon's friends are obviously double dealing, and his ship is obviously sinking - the production sees through the rich-and-famous lifestyle so completely, in fact, that we wonder why our hero can't. And in the meantime, Barclay has served up the piece as something like "Brecht does Everyman" (or maybe Ben Jonson) rather than Shakespeare-by-way-of-Middleton.

Which isn't to say that Barclay isn't full of good ideas. He is - I kept admiring what he was doing purely in intellectual terms, in fact, and the moment when the set came crashing down just as Timon's world did was an undeniable coup. Still, the broad playing gets repetitious - even if the cast is capable - and the crude hijinx sometimes seem to go wrong in tone. The giant surreal canvas that Barclay signals is to be taken as parody, for instance, looks a lot like de Chirico and Miró, with maybe some Kandinsky and Noland mixed in - does Barclay really think these people were charlatans? I don't.

As I said, however, these missteps are forgiven in the second act (the "Shakespeare part") particularly when Will Lyman's Apemantus is onstage. There were also solid turns from Daniel Berger-Jones and Bobbie Steinbach - although once again I missed a bit the sense of masculine camaraderie that is central to Shakespeare (he's often concerned with love between heterosexual men), and which ASP's cross-gender casting always seems to compromise. Meanwhile I felt star Allyn Burrows wasn't quite as rawly compelling as he could have been, as he never penetrated to the heart of Timon's agony; but he does coast beautifully across the surface of his speeches, and occasionally conjures some truly haunting moments. The finale was particularly effective - the exhausted Timon simply expires at the close of the play (just as he's about to achieve some measure of vengeance), which Burrows conveyed by burying his own head in the earth: a simple but devastatingly pregnant image. For a moment, you could feel Shakespeare pushing beyond the tragic and into the sadly absurd - before he abandoned this particular form forever (Timon is the last play before the romances). And it struck me that if the Actors' Shakespeare Project, which has a new artistic director in Burrows, can hew to the standard of its best work here (and in its last production, Othello), it may be about to embark on a new phase of its career, too.

Such tweet sorrow, indeed

Yes, Romeo and Juliet - or rather R & J - have joined twitter. The Royal Shakespeare Company has launched a five-week "adventure" called "Such Tweet Sorrow" (props for the title, btw) in which Romeo and Juliet will unfold on twitter, Youtube, and other digital media. Charlotte Wakefield, this production's Juliet, or rather @julietcap16, has already begun tweeting, but Romeo is still apparently "too busy on his Xbox." Michael Boyd, artistic director of the RSC, says that the Diane-Paulus-like experiment "Allows our actors to use mobiles to tell their stories in real time and reach people wherever they are in a global theater." Oooo, he said global. That's so 2004! But I'm afraid the effort reminds me, as The Donkey Show does, of that 70's porn movie where the actress reads Joyce's Ulysses while she's being pounded. . . with Shakespeare himself in the role of that actress . . .

Girl fight

Ken Cheeseman and Jason Bowen look to the Goddess in Othello. Photo by Stratton McCrady.

These days the Actors' Shakespeare Project finds itself in the rather unusual position of having disproved its own founding thesis. The group coalesced around a sensible reaction to the pretentious, director-driven theatre of the A.R.T. (from which its founder, Benjamin Evett, was downsized); the idea was to emulate the conditions of Shakespeare's own troupe, which somehow did pretty well all on its own without the likes of Peter Sellars, et. al., swooping in, kimono aflutter, to teach us all about ecology. Let "regietheater" rage on in Europe and New York, went the ASP mantra - Shakespeare is sourced in the actor, so us actors will just burrow down with the texts and do it our way. We'll even do it without our own theatre (ASP wanders gypsy-like through various impromptu theatre spaces across the city; Mike Daisey would no doubt approve).

A great deal of grant money went chasing after this proposition (ASP raised something like $300,000 its first year), and the troupe has certainly found an audience among the crunchier collegiate types. But steady artistic success has eluded them, and most acute Shakespeare fans secretly consider them something of a noble failure.

Because it turned out that sourcing things in the actor had its downsides, too. ASP seems to make most of its decisions via insider consensus - and I mean all its decisions: play choice, director choice, even casting. And unsurprisingly, this mindset of art-by-committee (or clique) has led to a mushy convergence of attitudes, stances, and political trade-offs that never seems to quite cohere into a vision. Bizarre casting is by now a staple of the troupe (because, you know, actors want to grow - somehow always into lead roles that are wrong for them), and issues of contemporary identity politics tend to obscure the deeper meanings of the plays. Most troubling is the obvious fact that the ASP actors aren't, actually, growing, at least not technically; nobody could argue that their verse-speaking is top-notch (to be fair, it's been announced they'll be working on that next season), and few of them have really learned how to handle a foil or sword (even though they're heavy on fight choreography); nobody seems to know how to dance (and almost all the comedies, and, incredibly, perhaps even the tragedies, "should" end with a dance); and as for singing, or general musicianship - again, fuhgeddaboudit, and listen to the recorded soundscape instead. In short, even though ASP is supposedly devoted to Shakespearean acting, they've pretty much off-loaded all the technical accomplishments that used to justify the prestige of that endeavor.

What we get instead is something people like to call "edge," or "intensity," but which usually means gonzo identity politics - which usually, for ASP, means feminism. Of course Shakespeare is both catnip and poison to feminists, because while he's pretty much the source template in our culture for women's rights, he also flouts those rights repeatedly in the surface of his plays. Thus women are relentlessly drawn to him, because, let's face it, most of the greatest roles ever written for them are to be found in his work, but then they're driven crazy by the subsidiary political roles he forces those great characters into.

I myself long ago made peace with the fact that Shakespeare wasn't only not a "progressive," but may have actually been a monarchist, so I don't look to him for specific advice on whom to vote for, or what to think about this or that public policy. What I look to him for are his thoughts on what it means to be human, and on that score he never fails me. That the overarching message of his work is about freedom and dignity for everyone seems too obvious to require comment. That his plays were the popular art of his day, and thus operated within the sexist and racist conventions of his era, and likewise reflect his own masculine flaws and foibles, also seems too obvious for words.

And yet that second issue seems to obsess many of his modern interpreters. At the ASP, for instance, there's almost a mania for powerful women stomping about (usually in literal boots) making a great show of the fact that they're essentially flailing away at a text that, in the end, they cannot change (or improve). In this Othello, even Desdemona prefers boots, or at least booties, and she's surrounded by female power-brokers: her father "Brabantio" has been transformed into her mother, "Brabantia," who appeals not to the Duke of Venice but the Duchess, whose honor guard seems to be largely women, and whose ambassador is not Ludovico but Ludovica. Who knew Venice was actually run by Hillary and a squad of Amazons? You'd think, given the preponderance of estrogen at the top of the pecking order, that Desdemona might stand more of a chance against her masculine accusers, but no such luck; the power grrls of Venice and Cyprus seem to be down with doing it old-boy as well as old-school. And the fact that Desdemona seems somehow content within her subjection - indeed, that she trades a father's dominance for a husband's - is a troubling facet of her character that doesn't seem to have entered anybody's head.

But then director Judy Braha doesn't really try to put together an interpretation to explain her production's ass-backward gender politics; the girls are just there, dressed in "near future" duds that hint at African sources, but sometimes seem to have drifted in from an old Star Trek episode on some arid, styrofoam planet. Just to confuse things further, the set looks vaguely Islamic, and features a set of guide-wires stretching from its center that might be a symbol for Iago's tangled web, but then again - might not. Add to this unwieldy mix the unlikely casting of Ken Cheeseman as Iago, and what you have, at least for the production's first half, is a recipe for a slowly-unfolding artistic disaster.

I was seriously considering bailing at intermission, in fact, when suddenly something in the show turned around. I could pinpoint the line, in fact (Othello's "All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven,") and the following Lady-Macbeth-like incantation, in which the Moor attempts to convert all his love for Desdemona into hate. Up until then, Jason Bowen had seemed too young, and too inexperienced, for the role of the Moor; his exotic accent had intrigued, but he had neither constructed the weary carapace of the professional soldier, nor the hints of hidden psychological fissures beneath it, that mark a truly great Othello. What's more, he didn't seem to understand that that was what he was supposed to be doing (Othello is one of the few jealous males in Shakespeare who is not a portrait of callowness).

Nevertheless, once Bowen threw himself headlong into the Moor's fits of misogyny, the entire production became compelling. It's true that Othello's appalling behavior toward Desdemona almost always gives productions a creepy, Act-Four kick, but this time the presence of a powerless white-female power structure - along with Bowen's weird confidence in his abuse, and Braha's emphasis on Iago's own jealous delusions - turned the piece into a strange meditation on the oft-commented-on "emasculation" of the "gangsta" ethos, with its insistence that women are either "bitches" or "ho's."

Now I suppose you can't really argue with a contemporary sexual-racial gambit like this one, particularly one that rivets an audience - and Bowen was memorably intense until the terrible finale. Still, I think you can quibble. I wished, for instance, that Bowen could have suggested what Shakespeare intended - that Othello was not a factotum for frustrated gangsta attitude, but rather a deeply flawed soul in torment, suffering himself even as he abused the woman he loved most. I mean how, really, can you connect "bitches and ho's" with the brooding, insane depth of lines like "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!" You can't. Because what rapper could have written that? None; it comes to us from springs and sources that pop culture no longer can tap.

And beyond the question of the interpretation of Othello, there was the problem of Ken Cheeseman's Iago. As noted, actor and director seemed to have settled on Iago's own jealous delusion (that his wife Emilia had betrayed him with the Moor) as the "explanation" of his malice, which is certainly a telling point about the character, and sets up a neat parallel between villain and victim. But at the same time, it reduces one of Shakespeare's greatest villains, who by now, after centuries of critical exegesis, looms as a kind of totem of inexplicable evil. There is simply so much more to reveal about Iago than seems to be dream't of in this production's philosophy. Likewise Paula Langton made rather a weepy stick-figure of the usually protean Emilia (to be fair, she was far better as the pant-suited "Duchess" of Venice). Other ASP stalwarts like Michael Forden Walker and Doug Lockwood did rather indifferent work, I thought, and newcomer Brooke Hardman seemed a bit lost as Desdemona - although she's certainly an appealing and resourceful actress, whom I hope to see in other roles (she's a natural Beatrice or Rosaline). There was one sudden burst of acting interest late in the production, in Denise Marie's passionate turn as Bianca. Ms. Marie, who somehow survived training at the A.R.T., has been little seen on local stages (she's been on Broadway instead, in The Lion King). Let's hope that changes soon.

The Dream is over, we'll have to carry on . . .

Good-bye to all that - Henry Fuseli's vision of Midsummer.

I suppose no Shakespearean text has been as brutally raped by the academy as A Midsummer Night's Dream. Once a cherished vision of the commingled absurdity and transcendence of romantic love, it's now basically a kind of longform video on some pop-academic version of Pornhub - bound and shackled by the likes of Jan Kott, with a rubber ball in its mouth courtesy of Michel Foucault. Once, it inspired Mendelssohn; now, it's a career vehicle for Diane Paulus, our reverse-incarnation of the Puritanical Nahum Tate. Oh, what a falling off was there!

Still, I suppose that's life - but if you want some sense of how the professoriat is poisoning the springs of our culture, look no further than the bizarre level of approval accorded The Donkey Show. One expects, of course, the press to praise the latest from Harvard, whatever it may be - that's the memo the editors don't even have to send; and I'm well aware our cash-strapped "greatest university" needs a new revenue stream, so I have no problem with it opening a topless bar. Desperate times, desperate measures, etc.; and hey, I've spent Saturday night in Providence, too. But when Harvard pretends its topless bar is presenting "Shakespeare" - well, that's where I draw the line.

Not that anyone else does. Consider the reviews for the Actors' Shakespeare Project's A Midsummer Night's Dream (which is actually pretty tame by the standards of the postmodern syllabus). It moves the Globe's Don Aucoin to opine, for instance, that Diane Paulus "does not hold a monopoly on creative interpretations of the Bard," and that the ASP production is "another fun and creative interpretation." Well, good for them! But notice the stupidity creep latent in those lines: The Donkey Show is now the standard by which other productions are judged. Harvard has just succeeded in dumbing us down another notch.

But back to the Actors' Shakespeare Project, whose Midsummer is fairly harmless, but not really . . . all that . . . good. It's a little slow and very broad and pretty declamatory (albeit in a postmodern mode), plus its "urban environment" concept feels rote (the DeGrassi kids go to the inner city yet again) and is anyway just an excuse to fill "the woods outside Athens" with various figures from pop culture: Oberon is Keith Richards/Johnny Depp, Titania is Courtney Love (or maybe our local knock-off, Amanda Palmer), her bower is of course a bombed-out car, while Bottom is Donnie Wahlberg . . . sigh. It would have been nice to have been surprised at least once by the production's choices - but then again, how precisely could pop culture be bent to Shakespeare's purposes anyhow? His fairyland provides a psychological odyssey for both his audience and his characters - his lovers emerge from the forest transformed and shaken, their assumptions undermined but their faith confirmed. And how, exactly, could pop, which amplifies the ego but never questions it, ever do that?

But what I mourn most about our current approach to Midsummer is that we've lost all sense of the play's stunningly grand design. This is the play in which Shakespeare truly became Shakespeare - or at least it's the play in which his horizons suddenly exploded, and he realized he could bend just about all of past Western culture to his will, and at the same time produce a template for its future. The Midsummer cast list comes closer to the universal than that of perhaps any other play; it stretches from the mythological (Theseus and Hippolyta) to the fantastic (Puck and Oberon) to the quotidian (the carpenters and weavers of Stratford-on-Avon). The play's social vision is penetratingly astute; its action is one of the most perfectly modeled farces ever constructed. And at the same time it's one of the greatest flights of poetry and one of the deepest meditations on love ever conceived.

But please, before you say it, can we let go of our childish attachment to the supposed sexual sadomasochism latent in the play? Today's Shakespeareans often seem like kids trawling the Internet for the dirty stuff - they know it's in the canon, if only they surf hard enough! Sure, Oberon wants to humiliate Titania - and his reason, her guardianship of her "changeling" boy, is one of those endlessly-suggestive Shakespearean motifs (like Hamlet's madness, or Shylock's pound of flesh) that will defy forever complete analysis. Likewise Egeus wants to control his daughter's sex life (the motivation here is not so hard to parse). But do either of these supposed representatives of the masculine id succeed in their aims? No, they do not, and they certainly don't represent Shakespeare's POV.

The whole play is of course obviously opposed to Egeus, and Oberon's jealous designs are completely undone by Bottom, one of Shakespeare's true innocents and certainly one of his great gallants. Yes, the sweet-natured weaver is translated into an ass, as befits one who lacks all self-awareness - but that very lack allows him to all but ignore his alarming transmogrification, and his confident gap in self-consciousness makes him dazzled but clear-eyed about the fairies (and by extension love itself). And when it comes to sex, this perfect, if furry, gentleman hardly takes advantage of the besotted Titania - indeed, he seems to assume she's some kind of mental patient, and delights in the charming Cobweb and Peaseblossom instead (needless to say, in the Diane Paulus version, he mounts her from behind - probably the greatest crime against Shakespeare the A.R.T. has yet committed). Oberon undoes Bottom's enchantment not because he has succeeded in humiliating Titania (he hasn't), and not even because he has won back his changeling boy, but because her idyll with Bottom forces him to see his own vanity.

Or at least these are the deep, humane lessons that we used to allow the Bard to teach us. Now, however, we insist on cutting him down to our own size; we know better than he does; we don't want to watch his work "grow to something of great constancy." Thus the fairies in the ASP Dream are just urchins from the 'hood, and the play's rhythms are reduced to rap, which of course delights the crunchy Cantabridgians in the audience, but I'm afraid leaves me cold. Bottom and the "mechanicals" are likewise patronized into excuses for parodies of ballet (which actually, via Balanchine, is the only place you can get a glimpse of the real Midsummer anymore), or the A.R.T., or - oh, who knows, and who cares. I mean what can you say when Theseus is styled as Donald Trump and Hippolyta is Pocahontas? There is one lovely idea in the show - the broken TV that fitfully shows images of Titania's lost votress, the mother of her changeling. For a brief moment, something like romance flickers through the theatre. More, please.


Michael Kaye and Maurice Parent toy with "love in idleness."

The surprise is that a few actors do make some headway despite the ongoing car crash of bad ideas. The "young" lovers, although they all look to be about 45, are played by pretty funny and resourceful actors, and their antics in the wood do prove amusing. So hooray for Mara Sidmore, Shelley Bolman, Jennie Israel, and Christopher James Webb! Alas, I didn't particularly care for Michael Kaye's pallid Oberon or Marianna Bassham's rock-chick Titania, but Maurice Parent did make a menacing (perhaps too-menacing) Puck. And Trent Mills occasionally had a good idea as a broader-than-broad Thisbe in what must have been the longest fifth act of this play I've ever seen. But then the final word on this production is that it's utterly self-indulgent - you could drive a semi through half the cues, and Robert Walsh and John Kuntz in particular are prone to stretches of schtick that seem to last for hours.

And I must say these performances almost seemed to me to blur into performances I remember from other shows - because frankly, one A.S.P. show is so much like another. I'm not sure, in fact, that any other local company operates in quite as tight a stylistic straitjacket - and isn't that a bit odd, given the supposed breadth and depth of the playwright in question, and the fact that they're constantly inviting new directors to work with them? Clearly a particularly virulent form of groupthink has set in. So how about it, A.S.P.? How about no more halter tops or cowboy boots for the women, no more 70's-rummage-sale costumes, and no more self-conscious fuss over interracial or cross-gender casting? How about you lose the air quotes, stop trying to be hip, and don't think about "the other," or feminism, or the color bar for just one production? Just try it. See what happens. You might be surprised. And you can count on one thing - the results would be like no Shakespeare production Boston has seen in years.