Reviewed by Susan Miron

Women of Will. Written and performed by Tina Packer. Directed by Eric Tucker. Featuring Tina Packer and Nigel Gore. At Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, MA, September 11 and 12.

“If you want to know what Shakespeare thought, listen to his women,” was Tina Packer’s oft repeated mantra over a 3 day, 5 performance marathon of her portrayal of the most important of Shakespeare’s female characters. A quite condensed version of this 15 hour-long Shakespeare-a-thon, Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays was performed earlier in the summer to great acclaim.

So what is the result of stretching this theatrical exploration/meditation into 31 scenes? Sometimes exhilarating, often thrilling, never pedestrian. I was not the only one (of about 140 people) sitting glued to her seat, hour after hour, day after day, but I might have been the only one with as scant a knowledge of Shakespeare. I was engaged throughout, but, of course, I love a marathon (as long as I’m sitting). I found the Wagner Ring in the Chicago Lyric Opera so compelling I wanted to go back and see it the next week.

So length doesn’t bother me or the several luminaries in the audience who were on hugging terms with each other and with Tina. I confess my power to sit had its limits: I loved every scene until a serious headache did me in on Part Four.

This was perhaps not every guy’s idea of Shakespeare, but the 15 or so mostly elderly men, most dragged there by their wives, stayed awake and didn’t look unhappy at this ardently feminist presentation of Shakespeare’s progress from callow youth to wise man.

Each time a few new spectators would join the Tin-a-thon the actress would explain the three meanings of will, as in Women of Will. There are, she says, 177 women and 770 men in his plays. Women are always Other, separate, outside of the power structure most of the time. There is, needless to say, the Will of the playwright’s name itself. Then there is the will to power and how power is wielded against his women. Finally there is the archaic meaning of sexual desire and “parts as well”—how the women use their sexuality and how it’s used against them.

The 23 scenes were held in a large rehearsal room: the configuration of the seats were rejiggered as the scenes changed. The young director Eric Tucker was actively involved; this was still a work-in-progress much of the time. But no one cared. The performances—31 scenes—of Packer and her frequent acting partner, Nigel Gore, were dazzling. Gore brought an element of danger, raw energy, and anger—like a tiger let loose—and he was never less than enthralling, if terrifying. He is a superb foil for Packer, as anyone who saw them last fall in Boston performing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? can attest.

Tina has clearly been passionate about this material for decades, and she seemed to be bursting with well-prepared, provocative thoughts of all historical and literary sorts. Much of the time I felt like as if I were enjoying an elite graduate seminar—lots of heady Tina Talk, lots of note taking because it was all so interesting, interrupted by her seamlessly moving,as an actor, into a scene that would illustrate exactly what she meant. It was enormously illuminating.

At lunch people kept talking about what they had just seen. It was okay for this to happen at lunch, but when we were—horrors!—asked by Tina for feedback, I thought this deeply detracted from the extraordinary mood created in this magical example of makeshift theater.

Actor Nigel Gore: Nothing if not Dangerous

Packer, founding artistic director (for 25 years) of Shakespeare & Company, has been working on this expansive interpretation of the feminine principle in the Bard for a long time, and the result was often exhilarating, sometimes thrilling. Packer subdivided her Shakespearean odyssey into five parts, each about three hours long.

“Act I: Warrior Women—from Violence to Negotiation” features (among others) “Warrior Women—From Violence to Negotiation,” which included Kate and Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew, three scenes from Henry VI and Romeo and Juliet, which was deeply moving and quite credible although this Juliet hasn’t been young for quite some while.

“Act II: New Knowledge—The Sexual Merges with the Spiritual” was simply stunning, featuring more of Juliet and Romeo, Desdemona and Othello (Othello), Beatrice and Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing), and an unforgettable Cleopatra and Antony, played on a velvet flooring of quilts, his head between her legs. As Packer sees it, Shakespeare writes from “within” Juliet who falls “equally in love and drives the language, actually suggesting marriage.”

In “Act III: Living Underground—Or, Dying to Tell the Truth,” Packer believes Shakespeare was using women now more and more to “tell the truth.” Says Packer, “If they stay in their frocks they end up dead.” This act featured a large cast—Hamlet; Desdemona and Othello again; Rosalind and Orlando from As You Like It; and, among others, Viola, Olivia, and Orsino from Twelfth Night.

When the Shakepeare-a-thon continued on Thursday morning, it was “Act IV: Chaos is Come Gain—The Lion Eats the Wolf.” The windows of the rehearsal studio were blackout out, and junk and papers covered the floor. No one was allowed in late to break the mood. It was the hand-washing scene with a spooky Lady Macbeth and the crazed Macbeth. This was surely one of the great scenes from any of the five acts, performed to perfection. The rest of this act included Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Lear, and Gloucester, while Act V included characters from Pericles and The Winter’s Tale.

No doubt those who sat through all the 23 scenes wished for more. It was an exhausting adventure, led by a manically enthused and deeply generous tour director who happened to be a fabulous actor, as is her male co-star.

Jeffrey Kazin and Deborah Lohse in Fraulein Maria. Photo by Christopher Duggan.

By Bill Marx

The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Diego Arciniegas. Staged by Publick Theater Boston at the Boston Center for the Arts, September 2–25. Stoppard’s early (1968) exploration of illusion and reality, done mainly for laughs, tosses a couple of dim-witted theater critics into a confusing murder mystery. The cast includes Barlow Adamson and William Gardiner.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Music and Lyrics by William Finn. Book by Rachel Sheinkin. Conceived by Rebecca Feldman. Directed and choreographed by Stephen Terrell. Musical Direction by Jonathan Goldberg. Presented by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston at the YMCA Building, Clarendon Street, Boston, MA, September 2 through October 2. The Tony award-winning musical comedy about the agonies and ecstasies of spelling among the adolescent set. The show will gain by being presented in the Lyric Stage’s intimate stage environment. The cast features Will McGarrahan.

Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage by Banana Bag & Bodice. Presented by Oberon, 2 Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA, September 5 and 6. The chic approach to finding an audience in uncertain times appears to be creative deconstructions/reconstructions, with eclectic musical support, of classics or popular works. “Digging into the roots of the original epic poem, this club-style SongPlay hearkens back to the raw and rowdy style of storytelling in the old Scandinavian mead halls – with a passion for fierce poetry and a pint of thick beer.”

Perfect Harmony. Conceived and directed by Andrew Grosso. Written by Grosso and The Essentials. Presented by the Stoneham Theatre, Stoneham, MA, September 9 through October 3. The New England premiere of a musical comedy about “the greatest a cappella group in high school singing history, seventeen-time national champions, The Acafellas. It is also about their classmates and female counterpart, perennial runners up, The Ladies in Red.

This good-hearted look at the “cut-throat competition of glee clubs and the even more cut-throat competition of high school” is going places: after Stoneham, the production will settle in for an open ended Off-Broadway engagement at 45 Bleecker.

Hard Headed Heart. Created and performed by Blair Thomas & Co. At the Charlestown Working Theater, Charlestown, MA, September 11 and 12. Company, “A rare Boston appearance by legendary puppeteer Blair Thomas, Chicago’s most acclaimed puppet master.” He will present a “trio of interconnected solo shows”: The Puppet Show of Don Cristobal, St. James Infirmary, and The Blackbird.. Any performer who combines the poetry of Wallace Stevens and puppets is my kind of artist.

Blair Thomas and his puppet friends in Hard Headed Heart. Photo by Kipling Swehla

Boston Marriage by David Mamet. Directed by David Zoffoli. Presented by the New Repertory Theatre in the Charles Mosesian Theater at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA, September 12 through October 3. I must admit I found this Mamet script to be more of a colorless curiosity than a “biting comedy,” but Zoffoli and a talented cast, which includes Debra Wise and Jennie Israel, may be able to juice it up. The plot deal with “two women of fashion” who plot and scheme to obtain their heart’s desires.

Bus Stop by William Inge. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Staged by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, Boston, MA, September 17 through October 17. The HTC opens its season with this broad, very 1950s romantic comedy about a cowboy who needs some civilizin’ before he can hook up with the vivacious gal of his dreams. The cast includes local stalwarts Will LeBow and Karen MacDonald.

In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Scott Edminston. Staged by the SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, September 17 through October 16. Fashionable dramatist Ruhl sees her provocatively titled play as “hovering at the dawn of electricity.” According to the Washington Post, the “current runs through the playwright’s meticulously factual fantasy, in which Edison’s invention has allowed one particularly dedicated physician to create an electrical device sure to cure the litany of ailments — malaise, crying fits, you name it — plaguing his female patients.”

Alice vs. Wonderland Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Remixed by Brendan Shea. Directed by János Szász. Presented by the A.R.T. /MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training in association with the Loeb Drama Center, at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, MA, September 18 through October 9. A tag-team match that pits, according to the A.R.T publicity mavens, Lewis Carroll versus Lady Gaga. My money is on Gaga in this “psychedelic” adaptation of life “though the rabbit hole” that “seamlessly blends the lyrical whimsy of Alice with pop culture, high-octane physical theater, and the dynamic vision of acclaimed Hungarian director János Szász.”

Perfect Harmony: Clayton Apgar, David Barlow, Kobi Libii, Jarid Faubel, and Robbie Collier Sublett Photo: Carol Rosegg

Fraulein Maria by Doug Elkins. Presented by ArtsEmerson: The World on Stage at the Paramount Theatre, 559 Washington Street, Boston, MA, September 23 though October 3. More deconstruction. The target this time around is Sound of Music: “Set to the Julie Andrews soundtrack, Elkins’s affectionate humor shines through his seamless merging of modern and popular dance forms including hip-hop and ‘vogueing,’ as he reinvents this beloved 1965 standard into an edgy yet fun-loving sing-along cabaret romp.” The New York Times thinks it is a “mini-masterpiece.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. The Actors from the London Stage presented by The Arts At Wellesley College at Diana Chapman Walsh Alumnae Hall, Wellesley, MA, September 23 through 25. “Formed 35 years ago, AFTLS is one of the oldest and most respected touring Shakespeare companies in the world. Coming from such prestigious venues as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, these classically trained actors devote a large part of their time to working with students.” This time around five performers — Nicola Alexis, Devon Black, Matthew Douglas, Paul O’Mahony and Julian Rivett — take on Shakespeare’s romance.

The Shipment. Written and directed by Young Jean Lee. Performed by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company. Presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, Boston, MA, September 24–26. The New England premiere of a show that claims to challenge audiences to confront their own preconceived notions of race. “Ranging from minstrel-like song and dance to stand-up comedy in the spirit of Richard Pryor” the script “skewers African-American stereotypes.” How do we know that Young Jean Lee means business? Recommended for mature audiences.

Five Down One Across by Michael Towers. Staged at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Boston, MA, September 30 through October 24. A dramedy that promises to be about “coming out” in more ways than one. The empowering plot: “Betty relocates her 85-year-old mother to her not-so-ordinary Brookline home, but now she’s got to tell the truth about her failed marriage, her mysterious pet, her prestigious career and her sixteen-year relationship with her ‘roommate’ Sharon.”

John Douglas Thompson as Richard III: Every Inch an Evil King. Photo: Kevin Sprague

I saw Shakespeare & Company’s excellent production of Richard III in Lenox, MA last weekend (through September 5 at Founders’ Theatre), with an exceptionally strong ensemble that was kicked into high gear by a high-energy performance from John Douglas Thompson in the title role.

It’s an unusual production, highlighting comedic elements whenever possible and often bordering on farce. As Ben Brantley pointed out in today’s Times, “the usual perplexing concerns of motive and Freudian pathology . . . are not at issue in this production.” Richard III is who he is: irresistibly, seductively evil, the Devil incarnate. He’s equally manic. In fact towards the end of the play, Thompson plays him as so unhinged by paranoia that I thought of Forest Whitaker’s portrayal of Idi Amin in the film The Last King of Scotland.

I attended the play’s first read-through, where Artistic Director Tony Simotes—just out of chemo for cancer treatment—presided with quiet authority. But he proved unable to continue directing, so it’s difficult to know in the end exactly whose sensibility has shaped the production. According to the program notes, Tony Simotes “conceived and adapted” it. Jonathan Croy directed with assistance from Malcolm Ingram. Since they all trained together at Shakespeare & Company and have enjoyed a long collegiality, their ideas blend seamlessly, abetted by the expert execution of a first-rate design team.

Simotes, Croy, and Ingram have been actors at Shakespeare & Company since the early 1980s. I’ve relished their work in multiple productions over the years, often together. Simotes, a former fight director, made such an indelible Puck in 1984 that I still remember his entry swinging on a rope onto the stage of the amphitheater of The Mount in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Croy’s tall, sardonic presence and Ingram’s more stately one have also left clear imprints on my memory.

Those decades of working together pay off in Richard III, as does the fact that several more charismatic Shakespeare & Company veterans—Jason Asprey, Elizabeth Ingram, Rocco Sisto, Tod Randolph, Johnny Lee Davenport, and Annette Miller—constitute the cast. These are artists who take turns as actors, writers, teachers, and directors in Shakespeare and in contemporary works. They are daring, flexible, and, each in his or her own way, charismatic.

Of course, because they are all graduates of Shakespeare & Company’s training program (the Ingrams have been teaching it for nearly 30 years) the text is, as always, unusually accessible. And these veterans are joined by the excellent Nigel Gore, who has become a company regular, and Lela Espericueta, one of the talented newcomers whom Simotes brought in from the University of Wisconsin where he taught.

I’ve grown to expect excellence from the company and have raved about John Douglas Thompson, Tod Randolph, and Jason Asprey before, so here I’ll focus on the sensibility of Jonathan Croy (pictured at left wearing a top hat), a tall, sardonic presence whose onstage antics have kept me laughing for years. Croy has done some 50 shows with Shakespeare & Company playing mostly comic roles but also Buckingham in an earlier production of Richard III and Sherlock Holmes in last year’s Hound of the Baskervilles and working with young actors.

In this Richard, Croy plays the irrational and the comic for all it is worth, focusing not on exploring layers of character or meaning but accepting what the characters say of themselves at face value. This production feels historically accurate, pre-psychoanalytical, and the pace is commensurately fast. Even the monologues whiz by. All the curses in the play as well as Richard’s hunchback made me think of Verdi’s Rigoletto at first, but soon thoughts of opera segued to operetta.

The Simotes-Croy production comes very close to undercutting Shakespeare’s mediation on evil, but it’s a fresh new look at a classic and well worth seeing more than once.
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Helen Epstein will be speaking on Memoir at the Lenox Library at 18 Main Street, Lenox, Massachusetts on Tuesday, August 31.

Allison McLemore, Susanne Marley, Carole Monferdini, Sandra Blaney and Joel Ripka in the CTC production of Culf View Drive. Photo credit: Rick Teller

Gulf View Drive by Arlene Hutton. The third play in the Nibroc Trilogy. Directed by Daniel Elihu Kramer. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through August 22.

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

Gulf View Drive, the third play of the trilogy, is set in 1953. The historical context has shifted from Appalachia in the 1940s to Florida in the Eisenhower years; the set has changed from a wooden farmhouse in the hills to a screened-in, cinder block house on the water. Anthropology came to mind as I registered this change in locale, and I found myself thinking about how rarely American plays convey so vivid a sense of place and local culture as these three that seem to work well as stand-alones or in sequence.

Ms. Hutton has said that she didn’t set out to write a trilogy but got so involved with her characters that she wrote a second play for them and then a third. I got involved with the couple too. Everybody loves a romance, and I was hooked from the moment Raleigh Brummett, the wise-cracking, young soldier just discharged from the military, talked his way into schoolteacher May Gill’s heart on a train from California heading east in Last Train to Nibroc. I reflected on their relationship at odd moments in my day, noting how they did and did not resemble people I know in my very different secular and urban New England culture.

Hutton’s solitary male protagonist, as performed by the engaging Joel Ripka, is one of the quirkiest and most sympathetic male characters I’ve recently seen onstage. An aspiring writer saddled with an illiterate, ill-tempered, widowed mother; an irresponsible and pregnant younger sister; and epilepsy, he manages to be even-tempered, even-handed, supportive, and preternaturally kind.

His schoolteacher bride, as performed by Allison McLemore, radiates intelligence as well as inner tension and impatience. She’s the kind of woman who would have had a far easier life had she been born a generation later and brings to mind—if you’re of a certain age—the smart, demanding female teachers of the 1950s.

A lens of second wave feminism, in fact, accounts for some of the novelty of Hutton’s Gulf View Drive. The play includes three more roles for women, two of whom could easily have been written as caricatures of “white trash” but who, in excellent performances, come alive as multi-dimensional people.

There is the self-pitying, devout Southern Baptist widow Mrs. Brummett who, in Susanne Marley’s performance, sustains our interest as we witness the effects of her bad mothering. There is her daughter Treva, performed by a sprightly Sandra Blaney, a pony-tailed, pregnant, young mother who has abandoned her young children and her abusive husband. There is the endlessly patient, middle-class, denominational-tolerant Mrs. Gill, a widow whose son has been killed in the war. Carole Monferdini brings a groundedness and common sense to this role that is utterly convincing and helps account for her daughter May’s independence and high mindedness.

When, outside of an Almodovar movie, had I recently seen so many plum roles for women?

The relationships between the four women and the one man left in their intimate lives would be enough material for a play, but Hutton takes on much more. One of my companions at Gulf View Drive felt overwhelmed by the many themes and subjects ricocheting through the play, but I felt they were invigorating. They include the great changes set in motion on the home front by the second world war, including the employment and then unemployment of women and the opening up of a remote and parochial Christian society to the world; the post-war passage of the GI Bill and its effect on education; demographic change such as the emigration of Kentuckians to industrial centers in the Midwest as well as south to Florida; technological change as print and radio give way to the new mass medium of television; the first glimmerings of new thinking about race.

Sandra Blaney, Susanne Marley and Carole Monderdini in Gulf View Drive. Photo credit: Rick Teller

Our writer hero Raleigh lands a lucrative publishing gig; our heroine May Gill is fired from her job because she has let the African-American janitor’s son audit her English classes; “no-good,” pregnant daughter Treva applies to and gets accepted to Berea College, a college dedicated to giving young Appalachian adults a higher education, and, more surprising, her mother agrees to accompany her and take care of the new baby. Saintly Mrs. Gill recovers from her double losses and turns down a marriage proposal and a comfy future in Ohio.

Hutton’s script rarely lets its actors or audience down. It’s fun, witty, moving, and poetic. The Nibroc Trilogy builds from a chance encounter on a train between two passengers to a full portrait of a society in the grip of major changes. This production, ably directed by Daniel Elihu Kramer, with dead-on costumes by Charles Concoran and the evocative sound design of Tom Shread, deserves to be seen by a wider audience.

Helen Epstein’s book on Tina Packer is now available on Kindle. She has also written a biography of Joe Papp. Order through the link below and The Arts Fuse receives a percentage of the sale.

Jonathan Epstein (Leontes) embraces Josh Aaron McCabe (Camillo) in Shakespeare & Company's The Winter's Tale

The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. Directed by Kevin G. Coleman. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre, Lenox, MA, through September 5.

Reviewed by Susan Miron

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s late plays, often called a romance (along with The Tempest, Pericles, and Cymbeline). It also qualifies as a family tragedy, a comedy of mistaken identities, and, by the end, a Disney-like, family fairy tale.

I had gone to see this play to see the remarkable actor Jonathan Epstein, back at Shakespeare & Company after a 6 year absence. Director Kevin Coleman insisted on Mr. Epstein for the lead role of Leontes, king of Sicilia, and what moments of theatrical brilliance there were in this production largely belong to Epstein, who finds myriad compelling ways to show both jealous fury and bottomless grief on his face.

Like Othello, The Winter’s Tale begins with a scene of marital harmony, quickly followed by psychopathic jealousy, leading inexorably the death of a beloved spouse. All of this happens in the opening act when Leontes sees his very pregnant wife, Queen Hermione (Elizabeth Aspenlieder) in conversation with his boyhood friend, Polixenes, King of Bohemia (played by the scene-stealing Johnny Lee Davenport).

Struck by a fit of paranoia, Leontes imagines the two are having an affair and that Hermiones’s baby is Polixenes’. The latter understandably flees, aided by Camillo, who had been ordered to poison him. Leontes, still insane with jealousy, has his wife imprisoned on grounds of adultery and treason (yes, treason). The baby, a girl, is born and handed to Leontes, who orders what he considers an illegitimate child banished to a faraway kingdom.

A trial ensues, with Leontes the sole judge. Rejecting the Oracle of Apollo, which had declared his wife guiltless, Leontes idiotically declares his wife guilty. After hearing their son has just died, Hermione collapses—what are her other options?—and we hear from her close friend that she has died. Leontes is horror-stricken by what he has done and he promises to spend the rest of his life in mourning. And who can blame him?

Elizabeth Aspenlieder as Hermione is a quiet-spoken beauty, who radiates sincerity and loyalty. Her only fault, as far as I could tell, is a bad, strawy wig. We don’t see Leontes again until the last scene, when the lovely Hermione is, for all the audience knows, a recently chiseled statue, looking just fabulous in a clinging white satin gown (a new wig would have been nice.)

When the scene changes to the seacoast of Bohemia, the minimalist set of the first half of the play has been replaced by a very colorful mural befitting the bucolic harvest scene, where a festival/bacchanalia is underway. This gives Shakespeare & Company a chance to strut their stuff—there’s plenty of dancing and music both recorded (and very well chosen) and plucked by talented players on stage. In his role as an ebullient, larceny-minded peddler, the terrific Jason Asprey steals the show, singing and charming all onstage and in the audience.

Elizabeth Aspenlieder (Hermione) and Johnny Lee Davenport (Polixenes) in Shakespeare & Company's The Winter's Tale

If you showed up after intermission, you could probably not imagine the fury and wrenching sorrow that colored the first half. For those still traumatized by the first half of this play, all this merriment is quite jarring. What ensues are the obligatory cases of mistaken identity in a comedy—16 years have elapsed since the first act when the Hermiones’s and Leontes’ baby girl, now 16, was banished. In the ensuing years, she has fallen in love with Polixenes’ son Florizel and is about to be married when lots of shenanigans ensue and eventually everyone ends up back at the Sicilian Court, where, of course, all the troubles began.

Here our happy endings begin. Leontes gets his daughter back, and Hermione appears as a statue, looking, he notices, quite a bit older than he remembers her. I always like a statue scene—think Don Giovanni, Don Carlo. Here we witness the radiant (statue of) Hermione coming (”back”?) to life to restore her family. The fairy tale continues.

It’s a bit much, unless you read Mr. Coleman’s explanation in the Berkshire Eagle. Shakespeare’s romances, Mr. Coleman notes, have to do with family ties and forgiveness and redemption and have some sort of fantastic magical scene. “They’re tragedies gone right,” he asserts.

I guess I like a tragedy gone wrong. And I like it undiluted. Mix it with an hour of comedy and I get disoriented. But if you like saccharine endings after horrible beginnings, this might be the play for you, forever after.

Marianna Bassham (Desdemona), Seth Gilliam (Othello) in the CSC production of Othello. © Photo by Andrew Brilliant/Brilliantpictures Inc

Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Staged by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at the Boston Common, through August 15.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Iago a tragic figure? W. H. Auden’s vision of Othello invites that kind of arch speculation, fed by the poet’s claim that Shakespeare began the play by focusing on Othello’s lethal case of jealousy but eventually became more “interested in why people like evil, not for their own advantage but for its own sake. The effect of this shift in interest is that Othello becomes a secondary character and Iago dominates the whole play, which finally raises difficult problems for Shakespeare.”

Dilemmas not so much for the Bard as for productions of Othello, which attempt to match the fascinatingly nihilistic drive (the gleeful emptiness?) of Iago with the fated sexual attraction of Desdemona and the Moor. A successful production has to generate plenty of passion, erotic as well as diabolic. Eros wrestling with Thanatos.

Thus the devilish irony of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC) production of Othello on the Boston Common. The night I saw the show the weather was balmy and cool, a slice of sheer comfort after the heat wave of a day, the audience’s sweat and cares evaporating away while listening to the poetry of the Bard echo off the walls of the towering buildings on Tremont Street. It was a pleasant experience, and free exposure to Shakespeare is a mitzvah.

But the CSC staging, serviceable but stolid, could have badly used some of the overwhelming heat of the day. In this Othello Iago goes through his malignant motions as if they were business-as-usual—the emotional temperature of the staging remains disappointingly mild throughout, even with Othello first drowning poor Desdemona and then throttling her to death via a sleeper hold. The only extreme was the shrill volume of the sound system (perhaps because some of the actors shout into their mics?) that left your (or at least my) ears ringing. In the case of the decibel level, more restraint would have been valuable.

Even if you don’t agree with Auden that Iago is at the center of Othello, the vacuum-souled figure is hauntingly contemporary: he should be strangely compelling, crazily enigmatic. Auden thinks that Iago would best be played as “plain and inconspicuous, absolutely ordinary, someone who would be chosen as a Secret Service man . . . yet he must dominate the play by his will.” A difficult paradox to pull off. Why would we go to the theater to see Iago as the guy-next-door?

I must admit that I like my Iagos to connive with subtle style, to be connoisseurs of self-satisfaction. Memorable Iagos for me range from Ian McKellan’s ramrod-repressed military marionette and Christopher Plummer’s wily cogitator-in-chief to David Patrick Kelly’s sex fiend, addicted to sniffing Desdemona’s panties. If nothing else, a performer has to pull us into the villain’s plots—inviting our complicity or at least our admiration as he pulls off his schemes with deadly deftness. I have seen impressive stagings of Othello with problematic Moors, but none without a charismatic Iago.

Alas, James Waterston (pictured at left) provides an Iago who fits Auden’s demand for “plain and inconspicuous” all too well. The actor goes about his character’s nasty business with a loud but dutiful nonchalance, neither monstrous nor momentous. Waterston’s voice, reedy at times, lends some of the lines a comic touch, a kvetchy punch of complaint that undercuts the horror. The audience giggles at lines that should exude some cold fear, a sense of the inhumanly sinister. Director Steven Maler appears to be aware of the lack of the threat in Waterston’s straightforward performance—he brings in some standard uggah-buggah music at times to help make the actor sound diabolical. It doesn’t help much.

Overall, Maler’s staging comes off as distanced to a fault, smoothly moving the action along but kindling few genuinely dramatic sparks. There is a forward march rhythm to the scenes that emphasize the fuzzy mechanics of the plot. For example, the brilliant episodes in which Iago methodically teases and taunts Othello into a jealous frenzy invite a relaxed caricature of caring intimacy—Iago shamelessly moves into (violates?) Othello’s space, his body flitting around around his prey, his eyes studying every reaction for a cue for what damaging innuendo to say next. Here Iago stands well away from Seth Gilliam’s Othello, an aloof puppet master who figures that pulling the strings of Shakespeare’s language is enough to snare his victim.

As Othello, Gilliam brings welcome vocal variety to his delivery, and he explodes into insane rages with convincing fervor, but there’s simply not enough poetic shock in his fall from command or electricity in his romantic fission with Desdemona, played by Marianna Bassham. Like Cordelia, Desdemona is an innocent soul who believes that goodness serves as its own defense in a wicked world—a cardinal sin in Shakespeare. Bassham comes off as knowing (or at least suspecting), a woman wise to the ways of the world. Adrianne Krstansky’s solid Emilia is not pleading about the “wayward” ways of men to clueless ears.

Dan Roach’s Cassio provides a blunt portrait of blind loyalty, while the supporting performers, Fred Sullivan Jr.and Grayson Powell among them, sometimes become strident, perhaps to play up the racist underpinnings of the society, the motive for Othello’s need to marry Desdemona as a means to “fit in.”

Dutiful rather than inventive (except for the waterlogged dispatch of Desdemona), the CSC production of Othello delivers a faint touch of evil.

After the Revolution by Amy Herzog. Directed by Carolyn Cantor. Staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA, July 21 through August 1 (closed).

Katherine Powell (Emma) and David Margulies (Morty) raise their glasses in After the Revolution at the WTF. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Long before the invention of psychotherapy, long before writer William Faulkner wrote “The past is never dead. It is not even past,” the Greeks mined family history for its dramatic possibilities. The consequences of an event or choice made by one generation that steers the course of lives long after is a staple of dramatic literature, all the more potent when the event is politically or personally traumatic.

Amy Herzog’s intelligent, incisive, and multi-layered After the Revolution, which had its world premiere at The Williamstown Theatre Festival last month, left me thinking not only about the extraordinary family of contemporary characters she brings to life but about how many groups and generations have confronted a history of massive trauma.

In many cases a period of self-imposed silence—if not an outright secretiveness—follows victimization, as in many survivor families from the Armenian and Cambodian genocides and the Holocaust. Sometimes, political repression enforces this silence, as for the families of dissidents in the parts of Europe formerly controlled by the Soviets.

In the United States, there is a large sub-culture of families of American Communists black-listed during the McCarthy years. I’ve long wondered when some Red Diaper baby or a member of the third-generation will produce a significant work about this. Now Amy Herzog has.

Her two-act family drama is set in 1999. Bill Clinton is still President as Emma, a grand-daughter of the beloved and black-listed Joe Joseph, graduates from law school and arrives at her parents’ home to celebrate the occasion with her family. Grandpa Joe is dead, but grandmother Vera Joseph is a sometimes befuddled, still feisty, no-nonsense matriarch with thick gray hair, clunky Birkenstocks, and a commanding presence. She refuses to budge from her Marxist principles or give in to the indignity of wearing a hearing aid. She also keeps abreast of her grand-daughter’s (Latino) boyfriends and complains, “I never understood your prejudice against Jewish men.”

Emma’s father, Ben Joseph, is a familiar figure: an idealistic, overworked high school teacher, passionate about educating his “under-privileged” students and driven by left-wing politics. His ideology imbues his being and spills over into his relationships with his two daughters, whom he was left to raise alone after his first wife left him.

Emma has responded by identifying with her father and internalizing his beliefs; her sister Jess has rebelled and spent her adolescent and young adult life in and out of rehab. Ben’s second wife, Mel, provides a cool, competent, Midwestern balance to the family, but at a crucial moment confides in Emma her own struggles as an outsider in a left-wing family. Like Ben’s college-professor brother Leo and his sports-loving kids, she tries to keep her life separate from ideology.

There is also Miguel, Emma’s boyfriend and law school classmate, a refreshingly smart and irreverent son of Latin American immigrants and Morty, an old friend of Emma’s grandparents, who identifies himself as a former “fellow traveler” and holds a torch for Grandma Vera.

Mare Winningham (Mel) comforts Peter Friedman (Ben) in After the Revolution. Photo: Sam Hough

Emma and Miguel work together (much to Vera and Ben’s satisfaction) on the Joseph Fund, a foundation Emma has established in memory of her grandfather that is currently engaged in the long fight to appeal a death sentence for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia is the real-life former Philadelphia radio personality and activist convicted of murder, now on death row. Things would be perfect on Emma’s graduation day, aside from the news that a new book has come out based on newly-opened, Soviet-era archives that irrefutably names Grandpa Joe as a Russian spy.

The brothers Ben and Leo at first keep the news to themselves, but soon are compelled to share it with an angry and confused Emma, who wonders how it will impact both the meaning and the financial underpinnings of her foundation. The ripple effect broadens out to include Morty, Miguel, her parents, uncle, sister, and grandmother.

Emma refuses to speak to her father, whom she views as having kept a crucial secret from her; Miguel wants her to drop the family psychodrama and focus on Mumia; sister Jess is relieved that, for a change, the spotlight is off her; Grandma asks “Which side are you on?” The kindly, world-weary Morty concludes: “You’re disappointed in your family but that’s not an uncommon predicament.”

Playwright Amy Herzog: An insider familiar with the complications generated by a progressive American family.

This is clearly a play written by an insider, familiar with the lingo, dynamics, and endless complications of politics in a progressive, American family. Playwright Herzog, a graduate of Yale as well as the Yale School of Drama, has said, “My extended family is largely Marxist,” and “One of the things that spurred me directly to write the play was Morton Sobell’s confession in 2008 that he, along with Julius Rosenberg, had spied.”

She has bolstered her personal memories with extensive research as a Williamstown Theatre Fellow: the breadth and depth of her reading has paid off in spades.

The production and cast of After the Revolution have been well-reviewed elsewhere, and the play ended its too-brief Wiliamstown run last weekend. Still, while it is too late to see this play in the Berkshires, here’s a valuable heads-up for the fall in New York, where the play will be presented at Playwrights Horizons. Herzog is an emerging dramatist of unusual gifts; this is a play that will last.

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Helen Epstein has written a biography of Joe Papp. Her translation of Heda Kovaly’s memoir of Stalinism, Under A Cruel Star, is also available on amazon.com. Order though the link below and The Arts Fuse receives a small percentage of the sale.

London whoops it up for the 80th birthday of Stephen Sondheim.

Stephen Sondheim, the greatest genius in the history of musicals, has turned 80 this year, and there have been celebrations of all sorts to mark this milestone. London joined the hoopla by devoting its BBC Prom 19 on July 31 to a full evening drawn from Sondheim’s achievements and presented in the mammoth Royal Albert Hall, which sold out in hours after tickets went on sale.

I had hoped to be on hand for the occasion, but it didn’t work out. Friends long active in London theater reported that the event was “overwhelming—among the highest of highlights.” Conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra was David Charles Abell, who put together an admirable batch of selections. The items were staged by Martin Duncan, with choreography by Nick Winston.

A stellar roster of vocal soloists was assembled: Simon Russell Beale, Dame Judi Dench, Daniel Evans, Marya Friedman, Caroline O’Connor, Julian Ovenden, Jenna Russell, and Bryn Terfel.

The live telecast was not available here, but the radio broadcast was offered, so that one could at least hear the 20 or so numbers that constituted the program.

The tribute began with the least familiar material: the Fanfare and “Instructions to the Audience” from the music that Sondheim provided for a 1974 production of Aristophanes’ The Frogs, staged in the Yale University swimming pool. This was performed by Russell Beale and Evans. The former is one of the world’s supreme actors, but many are unaware that he began as a chorister at eight and won the 2000 Olivier Award for best musical performance on the strength of his work in Bernstein’s Candide.

We next heard the overture to Follies (1971), followed by O’Connor singing “Broadway Baby,” and Friedman and Ovenden as Sally Durant and Ben Stone, who realize they have married the wrong people in “Too Many Mornings.” From the Pulitzer-winning Sunday in the Park With George (1984), Evans and Russell did a lengthy scene as George (he won an Olivier Award for this) and Dot and a shorter “Move On” from Act 2.

Conductor David Charles Abell does Sondheim justice.

From Into the Woods (1987), Evans and Ovenden complained of the princes’ amorous difficulties in “Agony,” and Friedman warned that “Children Will Listen.” A Little Night Music (1973) furnished the “Night Waltz” for the orchestra and then choral ensemble, followed by Dame Judi movingly singing “Send in the Clowns”—Sondheim’s most famous song, recorded by more than 400 artists. The first part ended with six vocalists and the chorus looking forward to “A Weekend in the Country.”

During the intermission, the radio feed presented a portion of an interview with the composer held earlier in the day at the Royal College of Music. Sondheim said he had been an anglophile since he was 20. He stated that A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Assassins have been particularly popular with amateur productions because “everyone has a chance to shine” at some point.

The second half brought us to Sweeney Todd (1979), which Sondheim labeled a “musical thriller.” A pipe organ prelude (the Albert Hall’s organ is the second-largest in England) led to a series of soloists singing “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” followed by the vengeance-seeking “Epiphany” and the amusing “A Little Priest” performed by Terfel and Friedman as Todd and Mrs. Lovett.

Ovenden then sang the concluding number from Company (1970), “Being Alive.” His singing was quite beautiful, but it lacked the shattering intensity that Adrian Lester brought to his Olivier-winning performance in the 1995 London production. Luckily a cast recording has preserved this feat for posterity.

The mood lightened when the four male soloists turned to “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). In most full productions, this number is likely to elicit an encore or two. Merrily We Roll Along (1981), which originally flopped after two weeks, has a topnotch score, including the lovely “Our Time,” sung by a choral group.

Returning to Sunday in the Park, Evans, Russell, and an ensemble performed the tears-inducing Act 1 finale. And the evening concluded with the full company singing “Side by Side by Side” from Company with what the announcer said was a “high-kicking chorus line.” Sondheim, making his first appearance at a Prom, received a tumultuous ovation.

Those who wish to hear the audio portion of this event may do so throughout the remainder of this week.

Allison McLemore and Joel Ripka in See Rock City at the Chester Theater Company. Photo: Rick Teller

See Rock City by Arlene Hutton. The second play in the Nibroc Trilogy. Directed by Jay Stratton. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through August 8.

Reviewed By Helen Epstein

Arlene Hutton’s absorbing Nibroc Trilogy, produced by the Chester Theater Company (CTC), is now in its second phase with See Rock City. Although the three plays are each meant to stand alone, CTC is producing them all this summer and on the final two Saturdays of the season (August 14 and 21) will present the complete cycle in one day.

If Last Train to Nibroc, a romantic two-hander of a young soldier and a young schoolteacher who begin a romance on a train, sometimes evoked Scenes from a Marriage, See Rock City is in the tradition of American family drama with two mothers-in-law onstage and a brother, a sister, and a father hovering in the wings.

The play takes places on the one-set porch of the Gill home as, far away on the beaches of Normandy, American forces are about to launch their invasion of France. The war front and the home front are juxtaposed as music and radio broadcasts of the time are heard in the background and a merry Raleigh Brummett and May Gill return from their honeymoon.

Like enthusiasts of television series, we’re happy to see this pair of oddly-matched but sympathetic lovers again. After several weeks of playing May Gill and Raleigh Brummett, Allison McLemore and Joel Ripka have settled fully into their roles of high-strung schoolteacher and laid-back aspiring writer. Both actors bring their quirky, strong-willed characters to stirring life. Their chemistry is palpable, and we believe their love can withstand the marital trials ahead. They are joined by the equally persuasive Carole Monferdini as the saintly Mrs. Gill and Susanne Marley as “Mean as a snake” Mrs. Brummett.

Inter-generational family dynamics and class and religious divisions in small town society now enrich and contextualize the struggles of the young couple. As more and more boys from Kentucky, including May’s brother, are drafted to fight in the Second World War, local opinion begins to impinge on their lives. May is promoted to principal of her school and becomes the breadwinner of the family, supporting her husband, father, and mother. Raleigh, who receives a stream of rejection letters from magazine editors after an initial flush of success with his first short stories, is relegated to the role of lay-about.

Although he initially volunteered for the military, he was discharged because of epilepsy. Mrs. Brummett, an uneducated woman who still believes that her son’s fits are a personality issue, laments that mothers of soldiers who have died spit at her in town. She’s ashamed of a son who is home in wartime, doesn’t support his wife, and lives in her family’s home. The saintly Mrs. Gill, on the other hand, defends her son-in-law and worries about her own son Charlie who’s in the military. Although the time frame is mid-twentieth century, the characters are timeless.

The design team is the same for all three plays of the trilogy and set, costume, lighting, and sound work seamlessly together. I found the use of news dispatches from New York and Paris particularly effective, as well as the evocative lyrics of the pop music of the time.

This is the story of how the Second World War played out in the backwater regions of the American home front as well as the story of a marriage. We are fully with Arlene Hutton’s people as “the lights go on again all over the world” and look forward to finding out how she will conclude her impressive trilogy.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp and a profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro available on Kindle/Amazon.

If you want a country theater experience, complete with magical valley and stream and a freight train in the distance, go to Chester, MA this month. Chester Theater Company’s The Nibroc Trilogy is a winner and will culminate on the final two Saturdays of the season (August 14 and 21) with the presentation of the complete cycle in one day. Special event tickets for those days will include an afternoon ice cream social and a country-style dinner.

This Girl Bends: Art and Feminism Since 1960
June 26–December 12, 2010

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) in Williamstown, MA, which almost always has well-curated exhibits, includes in its summer offerings This Girl Bends: Art and Feminism Since 1960, which looks at the connections between art and feminism since 1960 with over 20 artworks from the museum’s permanent collection.

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The new edition of Helen Epstein’s Music Talks is available online and through Kindle/Amazon. She is also the author of Joe Papp. Order these books through Kindle or through the links below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

Rocco Sisto, Tom O'Keefe and Maureen O'Flynn in the Shakespeare & Company production of The Taster. Photo: Kevin Sprague

By Bill Marx

The Taster by Joan Ackermann. Directed by Tina Packer. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre, Lenox, MA, through September 4. The world premiere of a play that promises to be “a sumptuous feast of language” that “introduces audiences to a world where the powers of literature and imagination co-mingle in the affairs of a contemporary couple at a crossroads.” The cast features Rocco Sisto (OBIE Award winner), Maureen O’Flynn (acclaimed soprano), Tom O’Keefe, and Robert Biggs.

Othello by William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Staged by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at the Boston Common, Boston, MA, through August 15. The “green-eyed monster” makes an outdoor appearance in the annual presentation of free Shakespeare in the Parkman Bandstand at the heart of Boston. The cast includes Seth Gilliam, James Waterson, and Marianna Bassham.

The Last Goodbye: A Musical Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Conceived, adapted, and directed by Michael Kimmel. Music and lyrics by Jeff Buckley. Staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival at the Nikos Stage, Williamstown, MA, August 5–20. Another version of the doomed romance set to music: “An ensemble of 14 singer/actors bring to life the lyrical beauty of two great poets set in a world of youthful angst, grandeur, and grit. Fall for Romeo and Juliet all over again in this incendiary new musical.”

The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Directed by Michael Duncan Smith. Staged by the Gurnet Theatre Project at the Miles Standish Monument State Reservation, Duxbury, MA, August 6–15. An outdoor production of Prospero and Company that is posited to be “perfect for family audiences of all ages.”

FeverFest 2010: Left Off Dreaming. The Small Theatre Alliance of Boston presents the fifth annual celebration of emerging artists in the Boston area at The Factory Theatre, Boston, MA, August 11–14. FeverFest began as a day-long event exhibiting a whirlwind of theatrical styles and artists sharing one stage. The mission: “to connect exploratory artists with adventurous audiences by creating an outlet for creative contemporary performance in the Greater Boston area.”

Here is the line-up of stage events: A Womb with a View by Rich Orloff (Bad Habit Productions). A young girl, minutes away from being born, has second thoughts about leaving the comfort of her current home; Your Dream of MeHeads or Tales? by Silvia Graziano (Fort Point Theatre Channel). In a disturbing game of domestic bliss, we learn that people are not always what they seem to be; Lucy Dreaming by Stacey Lane (GAN-e-meed Theatre Project). An insomniac tries to lull herself to sleep, while her subconscious desperately tries to stay awake to avoid the beasts waiting in her dreams; A Good Cup of Tea by M. Lynda Robinson. The time when the belief in your infinite potential runs headlong into the limits of your finite life , and the reflections of that life become the life.

Amanda Palmer of Dresden Doll fame plays the Emcee in the ART production of Cabaret.

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. Adapted by Daniel Morris. Directed by Karen MacDonald. Presented by the Gloucester Stage Company, East Main Street, Gloucester, MA, August 12–29. An interesting way to revamp a stage warhorse: Four actors portray nine characters, adding a gender-bending layer to Wilde’s classic comedy about friendship, political corruption, blackmail, and redemption—as timely today as when first presented in 1895. Acclaimed actress and director Karen MacDonald returns to direct this novel adaptation, developed by one of Boston’s exciting new companies, Bad Habit Productions.”

As Bees in Honey Drown by Douglas Carter Beane. Directed by Jake Scaltreto. Staged by Flat Earth Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA, August 13–21. This “dark comedy” proffers “a droll indictment of celebrity culture, weaving a modern picture of life, art, love, and betrayal.”

A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee. Directed by David Auburn. Staged by the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, MA, August 17 through September 4. My personal favorite among Edward Albee’s plays, an acidic fable of what happens with non-being comes a knockin’ at a suburban home. The cast includes Keir Dullea, Mia Barron, and Maureen Anderman.

The Memory Show. Book and Lyrics by Sara Cooper. Music by Zach Redler. Directed by Joe Calarco. At the Barrington Stage Company, Barrington, MA, August 18–29. The world premiere of a musical, a product of The Musical Theatre Lab, that is billed as “a two-person comic tragedy about the complicated relationship between a woman who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and her estranged daughter who moves back home to Brighton Beach to care for her.”

Cabaret by Kander and Ebb. Directed by Steven Bogart. Staged by the American Repertory Theater at Oberon, 2 Arrow Street, Cambridge, August 31 through October 29. “Singer and songwriter Amanda Palmer of Dresden Doll fame stars as the Kit Kat Klub’s magnetic Emcee, presiding over the debauched party where nothing is as it seems, with A.R.T. regulars Remo Airaldi, Thomas Derrah, and Jeremy Geidt.”

The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Steven Canny and John Nicholson. Directed by Thomas Derrah. Presented by Central Square Theater, at Central Square Theater, Cambridge, MA, through August 22.

Trent Mills (Sir Henry Baskerville), Remo Airaldi (Sherlock Holmes), and Bill Mootos (Dr. Watson) are on the case in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Photo: Elizabeth Stewart

Reviewed By Alyssa Machado

Steven Canny and John Nicholson’s spoof of Hound of the Baskervilles, the classic Sherlock Holmes novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, distills the characters and plot to their most basic humorous qualities, exaggerates those qualities tenfold, and tasks three actors to tackle 16 roles at breakneck speed to tell the tale of the murderous hellhound of the great Grimpen Mire. The methods are familiar comedy and farce standards (crossdressing, physical gags, gay innuendo), but the execution, timing, and silly self-awareness of Central Square Theater’s production make the Devonshire moor an amusing place to visit for the evening . . . if you dare.

Canny and Nicholson pack this version with physical humor and visual gags while retaining the basic storyline of the complex original version. The action proceeds so pell-mell that those who aren’t familiar with the tale might find the plot confusing at times, but events serve mostly as opportunities for antics anyway. Those antics are ably and energetically executed by the three-person cast, Remo Airaldi (Sherlock Holmes), Bill Mootos (Dr. Watson), and Trent Mills (Sir Henry Baskerville).

Dr. Watson features more prominently in the story than Sherlock Holmes. As a result, Bill Mootos, an endearing, earnest, and eager puppy of a Watson, plays the least amount of other characters and anchors the action. Much as as Watson serves as Holmes’s “torch,” inspiring his brilliant deductions, Mootos partners the other two actors adeptly, inspiring hilarity as their comic foil as well as with his own well-timed, exaggerated facial expressions.

Remo Airaldi, a member of the American Repertory Theatre’s Resident Acting Company, handles quick costume changes with ease, but occasionally he doesn’t enunciate. His Sherlock Holmes, although appropriately calm and deadpan, leaves less of an impression than the more exaggerated minor characters he plays, especially Miss Stapleton, the Peruvian woman who falls for Baskerville. In a dress and braided pigtails, Airaldi remains straight-faced and fully committed to everything from babbling gibberish language to a hilarious romantic tango dream sequence, wisely allowing the full effect of the visual incongruity to undulate for itself.

The third member of the trio, Trent Mills, portrays Baskerville and most of the incidental characters. Few differences exist between his minor characters except for costumes and accents, but he isn’t afraid to be silly, which makes him fun to watch. His charming and frequently oblivious, “gee whiz,” Yankee-boy version of Henry matches well with Mootos’s similarly unaware Watson.

The silly self-awareness of the show adds to its appeal, and it includes the audience in the joke by delighting in its deliberately low-tech staging. During scenes, actors frequently break the fourth wall to jest about fake-looking props (plastic food glued to a plate) or their set changing responsibilities (“as soon as I’ve taken down the bed”).

The designers also embrace the self-aware, light-hearted mood while keeping everything functional. Carlos Aguilar, the scenic designer, created an adaptable set with only a few set pieces, two-dimensional rocks and a moveable, framed (with a mini proscenium arch), room-sized platform with rotating, vertical scenic panels on each side. These pieces make transitions as easily and quickly as the actors do and transform into everything from the spooky moor to Baskerville’s estate.

Aguilar facilitates the fast pace of the show by enabling the actors to make changes as the action proceeds by flipping the side panels, hiding behind and moving the rocks, and adding creative set pieces like curved shower rod with bedsheets that hangs on a panel to make a vertical bed. Similarly, Nathan Leigh, the sound designer, chose a wonderful mix of ominous, creepy effects and music (such as the chilling hound howl) to set the mood and more cartoony noises (like the sucking and popping sound when characters are pulled out of mud) to amplify the comedy.

Unfortunately, the playwrights take the self-awareness too far by inserting an awkward subplot where the actors stop the show and portray themselves as the actors, threatened by mysterious events in the theater. This jarring interruption at the end of the first act throttles the building momentum, doesn’t add anything to the main tale, and isn’t particularly funny. Thankfully, although inexplicably for anyone wanting a resolution to the subplot, the play sticks to the much funnier Holmes story for the rest of the performance.

Hound of the Baskervilles appears deceptively simple at first glance, a typical spoof with standard theater gags. But the demands of this kind of buffoonery are stringent — without actor chemistry, perfectly timed and blocked hectic scenes, and inventive costume changes the proceedings could easily degenerate into an unfunny mess. Luckily for fans of broad comedy, the talented team at Central Square Theater make the difficult task of pulling off this frenetic farce look, as Sherlock Holmes would say, elementary.

John Douglas Thompson (Richard III) and Leia Espericueta (Lady Anne) share a romantic moment in the Shakespeare & Company production of Richard III. Photo: Kevin Sprague

The Life and Death of King Richard III by William Shakespeare. Directed by Jonathan Croy. Conceived and adapted by Tony Simotes. Staged by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre through September 2.

Reviewed By Susan Miron

For 35 summers spent in the Berkshires, I, like many summer residents, blithely took for granted the Berkshires’ embarrassment of artistic riches as if they were some kind of inalienable right attached to Berkshires house ownership or rental.

Last summer, knowing my time in this paradise was up, experiencing theater took on a metaphysical urgency. I opted for total immersion in Shakespeare & Company productions, attempting to see all of them. Two plays have haunted me ever since: Othello, a tour de force featuring the brilliant actor John Douglas Thompson (who had spent the year before playing Othello first at Shakespeare & Company and then in New York City winning a host of awards) and The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, also featuring Thompson and directed by the wonderful actress Tod Randolph.

Reader, I was hooked. I made two theater pilgrimages to New York just to see John Douglas Thompson in the Irish Repertory Theater’s mesmerizing production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in November and The Forest with Dianne Wiest in May. It became clear that Thompson, although pegged a Shakespeare specialist (by the New York Times) can captivate, seduce, and thrill any audience in any play, which is exactly what he did, once again, in Shakespeare and Company’s enthralling new production of The Life and Death of King Richard III.

Seeing this excellent three hour production, with the glorious Mr. Thompson as the emotionally stunted and physically damaged Richard III was an extraordinary experience partly because its large cast featured so many of my favorite Shakespeare & Company actors. Annette Miller, here fiery and emotionally withering as Richard’s mother, I had enjoyed in GoldaRichard III’s Lord Hasting and Lord Chamberlain, was last year’s terrific Hamlet.

Those who witnessed Nigel Gore in his searing performance in last fall’s Boston production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Tina Packer are still probably recovering from the shock of his transformation from henpecked nebbish to Fury itself. Featured as a small army of men in the five play marathon (Aug. 25-27) Women of Will with Tina Packer, Mr. Gore was a great Duke of Buckingham here.

Finally, Queen Elizabeth was brought to smoldering life by the extraordinary Tod Randolph, who gave such exquisite pleasure over the years (in Shakespeare & Company) as Lady Macbeth, Tatiana (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own), Desdemona (Othello), Virginia (Vita and Virginia), Portia (The Merchant of Venice), Rose (Enchanted April), and Stephanie (Duet for One), to name a few roles which, to me, she simply owns. To have Tod Randolph in important scenes with Mr. Thompson was, for this theatergoer, simply as good as theater gets.

Leia Espericueta, a new actress to the company, was a very compelling Lady Ann, and Johnny Lee Davenport as King Edward/Blunt brought some unexpected humor to the proceedings. As he put it after the show, “The levity is there. You can’t find tragedy without the humor.”

John Douglas Thompson: Knocking at the door of the words in Shakespeare

While the direction (by Jonathan Croy based on a concept by Tony Simotes, sidelined for health reasons), the gorgeous costumes, and fight scene were all excellent, the evening’s success nevertheless fell on the humped shoulders of its Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Wearing a large hump (which Thompson insisted upon) on his shoulder, with his arm in a leather sling, Richard III/Thompson surprisingly opens the play lying on the floor as he recites the famous monologue “Now is the winter of our discontent.”

Mr. Thompson explained in the question and answer period after the play that for him, Richard III—and all Shakespeare—is all about mining the text. “It all starts in my head, and then it happens in my body,” he remarked in a recent interview. Someone asked how long it took him to learn his over 1,000 lines, to which he laughed that he was still learning them, still “knocking at the door of the words” to reveal the soul of his character.

“I want to know why he does what he does. It’s all there in the language, and I know I will find it.” One of Mr. Thompson’s gifts is his beautiful elocution; Shakespeare has rarely sounded so clear or so immediate. Thompson believes Richard’s toxic relationship with his mother to be the root of his difficulties (to be kind) with other women, and his physical deformities—the famous hump, a bad leg and arm—to have shaped or misshaped his psyche. To Thompson, Richard III is “a megalomaniacal psychopath whose villainy outstrips Iago. And before he can develop a soul or a conscience, he dies.” But while he lives and is played by John Douglas Thompson, Richard III is a character no one will soon forget.

GRIMM: The Brothers’ Tales Remixed & Re-imagined . . . Written by Gregory Maguire, Kristen Greenidge, Melinda Lopez, Marcus Gardley, Lydia R. Diamond, John Kuntz, and John ADEkoje. Directed by Summer L. Williams and Shawn LaCount. Staged by Company One at the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston, MA, through August 14.

Becca A. Lewis (Red) and Raymond J. Ramirez (Victor) in Company One's Grimm

Reviewed By Bill Marx

The nineteenth-century fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm go far beyond the forlorn, though you wouldn’t know it from the bowdlerized, sanitized, and moralized versions offered by the likes of Walt Disney and others, who think bedtime stories should offer lessons in good citizenship.

Violent, dark, and at times downright absurd, the Teutonic magic realism of the Brothers Grimm is peculiarly modern in its embrace of anarchistic violence, random manipulation of the fantastic for the sake of revenge and sexual conquest, and use of fantastical effects for shock and/or inspirational value. The fairy tales are also inherently dramatic—their archetypal conflicts between good and evil compressed into short spells for rapt listening audiences of all ages.

Company One had the enterprising idea of asking seven accomplished, local playwrights to take up the challenge of remixing or re-imagining a selection of the stories. The resulting world premiere production suffers from the inevitable unevenness of multiple author exercises (though only one of the Grimm reboots really overstays its welcome), but the varied round-up of playlets and sketches offer plenty of vaudevillesque humor and imagination.

The writers approach the material in a spirit of mischievous fun, which is understandable, but that generally leaves the nastier, more unruly elements in the stories untouched—the overall impression left by GRIMM is of artists playfully teasing an old friend. A more radical deconstruction of the standard and/or obscure fables would have been fascinating, but the Company One show succeeds as light and enjoyable summer entertainment.

Keith Mascoll (Cry Baby Jones)

GRIMM also has the merit of spotlighting Company One’s commitment to new plays and local dramatists— serving as a convenient “sampler” of the work of John Kuntz, Melinda Lopez, Lydia R. Diamond, and others. The personal touch of having the playwrights, via taped comments, introduce his or her play underlines the company’s intent to connect directly with the audience. Directors Summer L. Williams and Shawn LaCount emphasize the point-blank in their staging, which focuses on keeping the proceedings direct and efficient—not much subtlety here, but the job gets done.

The hardworking Company One cast of 12 race though their GRIMM tasks with skill and enthusiasm, though more modulation would be helpful; At times the comic turns wallow in SNL overkill, threatening to slather the same clownish patina over all the pieces.

The seven playlets break down into four essential tones:

Sentimental: The Seven Stage a Comeback by Gregory Maguire proffers an intriguing premise: the Seven Dwarfs awaken from their slumber and decide for various reasons—unrequited love, abandonment issues, envy, homicidal anger—to track down the rescued Snow White. The glass coffin is brought along as some sort of creepy ritual offering. Maguire generates some wry amusement out of the dwarfs’ chatter and internal debates about their quest to the bright side but not enough to do justice to the idea, which is dunked into mush at the end.

Cry Baby Jones, based on “The Frog King,” comes off as an urban “fractured fairy tale” that chronicles the coming-of-age of a literal big baby who sells healing talcum power out of his home, a dumpster in Plastic City. Dramatist John ADEoje garners some laughs as he fires off at a melange of targets (ham acting, TV news, the Peter Pan syndrome), but the piece nosedives into the silly and juvenile well before its predictably cuddly end.

Victoria Marsh as Hazel, the take-no-prisoners museum guide

Satiric: Half Handsome & Regrettable is an ultra-broad, comic update of “Hansel and Gretel” set in a German museum that has the fabled Gingerbread House on display. Two rich American brats challenge the imperious German guide and all Hell breaks loose. Playwright Marcus Gardley has lots of fun sending up horror films, snooty cell phone wielding kids, and the cult of innocence. Victoria Marsh’s dictatorial guide threatens her adolescent charges with hilarious panache.

Dramatist Lydia R. Diamond’s giggly The White Bride and the Black Bride features three actresses reading the off-the-beaten-track Grimm tale “The White Bride & The Black One.” Along the way they toss pop culture references and deflating sarcastic barbs at the yarn’s hideous racial politics, surreal narrative, and over-the-top violence. It is a one-joke sketch, but handled with sweet and sardonic aplomb.

Earnest: Thankgiving, Kristen Greenidge’s soap opera-ish response to the Brothers Grimm tale “Clever Else,” is a vivid talkathon featuring three New England housewives, schoolmates and friends, waiting to pick up their kids. Nothing new here—the usual regrets for taking the sedate domestic way out, with the downward mobility of one of the wives (her janitor husband was caught stealing and is out of a job) serving as the panicked focal point—the vision of living in a lighthouse stands as a dreamy rebuke to suburban servitude.

Playwright Melinda Lopez supplies the most serious, least gag-filled play of the evening, taking three different looks at “Stories about Snakes” in Stories About Snakes.The spiritual significance of the serpent, played with insinuating cunning by Lonnie McAdoo, morphs through each of the stories: He’s an innocent seducer in one, a victimized dupe aiding female liberation in another, and finally takes on the traditional role of purveyor of evil. It’s a provocative view of fairy tales as invitations for multiple-choice reinvention.

Diabolical: Red by John Kuntz is the kinkiest of the plays making it, ironically, the closest to the sordid spirit of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. “Little Red Cap” inspires a sadomasochistic game played between girl and hunter, with both superb performers, Raymond J. Ramirez and Becca A. Lewis, reveling in the theatrical salaciousness of it all. The topsy-turvy role changing feels a bit by the numbers, but the play adds the necessary note of sick, illicit pleasure to the evening.

First Lady Michelle Obama watches students from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and the Joy of Motion Dance perform in a special dress rehearsal in the East Room of the White House, July 19, 2010. The President and First Lady hosted an event that day saluting Broadway, a continuation of the White House music series celebrating the arts and demonstrating the importance of arts education. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton)

By Caldwell Titcomb

Musical talent from Broadway came to the White House on Monday, July 19, to offer a concert for President Obama, his wife and daughters, and an invited audience in the East Room. The event was streamed live on the White House website.

This was the sixth in a series of concerts hosted by the President, who, in introductory remarks, saluted “the power and passion of Broadway.” He spoke especially of the roster of immigrants who had come to our country “with songs in their heart.” He then said, “Let’s put on a show.”

A lineup of singers, celebrated and little known, presented a program of 13 selections. Backing them up was a quartet of instrumentalists: pianist, bassist, guitarist, and drummer.

Starting things off was the formidable Elaine Stritch, now 84, in black garb. She sang “Broadway Baby” from the musical Follies. The rest of the program was hosted by black-suited Nathan Lane, who praised Obama for his skill with words. He proceeded to introduce 12-year-old Assata Alston, wearing a pink and white dress, who sang “Gimme Gimme” from Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Brian d’Arcy James, appropriately sporting a blue tie, sang the 1926 Irving Berlin standard “Blue Skies.” Later he and Lane teamed up for a duet from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And Chad Kimball sang a number from this year’s Tony winner for Best Musical, “Memphis.” Karen Olivo and three women—in red, orange, yellow, and purple—sang and danced their way through “America” from West Side Story.

Four-time Tony winner Audra McDonald offered Frank Loesser’s tongue-twisting “Can’t Stop Talking About Him” from the 1950 movie Let’s Dance. She returned later with a highly contrasting piece, Vernon Duke’s slow and lyrical “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe” from Cabin in the Sky (1940).

Tonya Pinkins sang “Gonna Pass Me a Law” from Caroline, or Change. Idina Menzel gave us “Defying Gravity” from the current hit Wicked and came back later to sing the popular “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line. For this number she was accompanied at the piano by its composer, Marvin Hamlisch.

Stritch returned and commented that it’s ridiculous for a 40-year-old to sing “I’m Still Here” from Sondheim’s Follies (1971). But when you reach 80 or 81 or 82, it’s quite acceptable, she said. She admitted that the singers were nervous about performing this night, but she plunged into this hymn to longevity and was treated to a standing ovation and loud cheering—the biggest tribute of the evening.

To end the concert about 20 teenagers from the Joy of Motion Dance Center and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts performed “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from Hairspray. All the concert participants—nervous or not—were fully up to their tasks.

The event will be aired on PBS television at 9 p.m. on October 20.

CTC performers Allison McLemore and Joel Ripka ride the Last Train to Nibroc. Photo: Rick Teller

Last Train to Nibroc by Arlene Hutton. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through July 25.

I drove back to Chester Theater Company(CTC) last night expecting another engrossing evening and got it. I love making the trip to the village (pop. 1000) and the makeshift theater in its small Town Hall with its inexpensive but ingenious and effective sets, costumes, and light and sound design. I’m always interested in the work selected by Artistic Director Byam Stevens, who makes plain his commitment to a writer’s theater.

“There are companies that celebrate the magic of the actor’s craft,” he writes, “that propound the primacy of the director, that espouse particular artistic or ethnic identities. These are all fine things . . . But if there has been a craft that has left its imprint on my seasons here, it is the craft of the writer . . . deep insight into the human condition, rich characterizations, first rate dialogue, and a deep and abiding faith in the essential poetry of common people.”

Words to warm any writer’s heart.

I had never heard of Last Train to Nibroc or playwright Arlene Hutton, author of more than a dozen plays and self-described “daughter of hillbillies,” whose work draws on her Appalachian family background. In fact, Last Train To Nibroc received a 2000 NY Drama League nomination for Best Play and more than 50 regional productions. CTC is producing it this summer as part of a trilogy as well as a marathon.

All performances are followed by a Talkback, which in the CTC’s case means the director gets to talk as much or even more than the audience. Given the subject, we preceded it with a visit to Chester’s Railway Station, a place staffed by railway buffs and local historians who seem to know everything there is to know about railroads in the U.S.

But, back to the play. Set in the early 1940s, Last Train to Nibroc is a romance between May, a young woman planning on becoming a missionary and Raleigh, a young man planning to become a writer. Relaxed and lanky, Raleigh takes the empty seat beside May on an eastbound train from California bearing the coffins of Nathaniel West and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He has been discharged from the Air Force for medical reasons; she has gone to California to visit her fiance and is returning home to Kentucky disappointed. In a first scene that sparkles with humor and charm, the two get acquainted, sparring in the tradition of the finest plays and movies of the 1940s.

The stop-and-start relationship that evolves over the next two scenes (separated by two brief pauses in which a soundtrack of contemporary radio broadcasts and music of the time sustains the historic mood) is both engaging on its own terms and evocative of theater history. I thought of characters from plays as different as Major Barbara and Same Time Next Year, to name just two. The characters are fun to watch, their relational misunderstandings both familiar and specific to their time and place.

As I’ve come to expect at CTC, the actors are very good, as is the direction. Joel Ripka makes a convincing and sympathetic suitor and Allison McLemore a tart and intelligent May. But thinking about the director’s credo, I found some of Hutton’s dialogue (or perhaps it was his direction of her “poetry of common people”) a tad labored. Our culture has made “the Journey” into a cliche. Heavy declamatory emphasis on images such as “The tree” or “The train” undermines their metaphoric power. We get it.

With that small caveat, I’m recommending that you go to Chester very soon.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp and a profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro available on Kindle/Amazon.

Performers Walton Wilson and Kristin Wold are wonderful in Sea Marks at Shakespeare & Company.

By Helen Epstein

Perhaps a director’s most important choice is sifting through the great backlist of dramatic literature and choosing a play whose sensibility she not only wishes to explore and inhabit, but that she can cast and direct well. When the play, the director and design team, the actors, and historical moment all line up, the result can be as magical as Daniela Varon’s production of Sea Marks by the late Gardner McKay at Shakespeare & Company running through September 4.

Gardner McKay was an unusual playwright: he’s best known, among boomers, as a heart-throb Hollywood and television actor. From an early age, he took serious interest in writing and sailing—two passions he pursued for most of his adult life. Sea Marks is a partly epistolary romance between Colm Primrose, an Irish fisherman who lives by the sea, and Timothea Stiles, an assistant in a British publishing company. McKay wrote it in 1971, when it enjoyed a modest success. Director Daniela Varon saw it some 20 years ago, and it remained so alive in her memory that she chose to direct it in 2010.

Varon says that the dizzying pace of contemporary life was one of the factors that drew her to this two-character play in which “the hand-written and hand-carried word has the power to bridge oceans and change lives.” With set and costumes by Kiki Smith and two wonderful performances by Shakespeare & Company veterans Walton Wilson and Kristin Wold, this is theater you’ll be sorry to miss.

Helen Epstein is the author of Joe Papp and two pieces about Shakespeare & Company that you can download from the Kindle by clicking here Helen recently spoke to the Lexington Minuteman about the art of the memoir.

London Assurance: Sir Harcourt Courtly (Simon Russell Beale) tickles the nose of his intended, Grace Harkaway (Michelle Terry)

London Assurance by Dion Boucicault. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. The National Theatre production presented by NTLive at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, Boston, MA, July 14.

A bonus simulcast has been added to the NTLive lineup; on July 14th Coolidge Corner Cinema will, once again, simulcast Dion Boucicault’s comedy London Assurance starring Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

In an interview during the June 28th live broadcast of the National Theatre’s hit production of London Assurance screened at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, NT director Nicholas Hytner referred to Dion Boucicault’s 1841 comedy as “inspired hackwork” that only aims to please. The Boston audience members murmured with warm if ironic appreciation: it is refreshing, even surprising, to hear a director for once speak the depreciating truth. But in this case it really didn’t matter—we were all in on the joke from pretty much the beginning.

The punch line, and the reason that the show has been sold out in London for months, is that Boucicault’s 19th century hackery provides a robustly nonsensical opportunity for two superb performers, Fiona Shaw and Simon Russell Beale, to let loose their comic wiles and whimsy. And run wild they do, with a hilarious range of absurd laughs, bizarre vocal tics, and silly walks. In the old days, you would have said Shaw and Beale chew up the scenery, but in this new technological age, the more appropriate description would be that they whip the broadcast waves into a frothy frenzy.

Hytner is right about London Assurance. It is not so much a play as a wind-up toy, the city swells/country bumpkin stereotypes steaming about the set like Energizer Bunnies, occasionally bumping into each other for the purposes of pitching woo or shooting off a musket. An ambitious eighteen-year-old desperate to come up with a hit, Boucicault revs up his gift for magpie cleverness: he recycles, rejiggers, and revamps giggly situations from Restoration comedy and whatever else he could xerox.

Some of the dated material and rough spots in the original have been smoothed over in this production by Richard Bean, but Boucicault’s “anything for a laugh” spirit remains, and it is that gut-bucket license to go over-the-top that gives Beale, Shaw, and other members of the cast permission to have the fun that they do.

At the center of Boucicault’s comic mechanism is Beale, who plays Sir Harcourt Courtly, would-be fashion plate, myopic popinjay, and hard-working narcissist. He is all set to marry Grace (Michelle Terry), a wealthy and attractive woman decades younger than he is who lives on a country estate. A wised-up modern female, Grace figures that she should just get marriage over with, even if it means marrying somebody she doesn’t love. Courtly thinks his son, Charles Courtly (Paul Ready), is a studious nerd, but he’s really a debt-ridden libertine who befriends the mischievous scalawag Richard Dazzle (Matt Cross) during a drunken romp. In effort to elude their creditors, the pair head for Sir Harcourt’s wedding at the rural manse.

Fiona Shaw's Lady Gay Spanker: Not so much a character as a one-woman stampede

But once there Charles falls for Grace and, in an effort to stop the marriage and assist his romance, he manages to convince his father that he is a man who only looks like his son. Meanwhile, Sir Harcourt falls for the more mature, and married, Lady Gay Spanker, a geyser of boisterous glee who sees existence through the prism of fox hunting. Various attempts at seduction, elopement, and dueling run riot. Festooned around the edges are dry-witted servants, servile lawyers, doddering husbands, and a big rat that skitters about at embarrassing points in the action.

The plot, such as it is, is only an excuse to see Beale create a memorably roly-poly monster of brazen self-regard, a swishy, campy send-up of effeminate uppityness. The amusement is to be found in Beale’s lovingly inventive details, his slow burn double takes (he scrunches up his face in a dozen different ways), high pitched laugh, and nimble physical contortions, including some nifty dance steps. Fiona Shaw supplies similarly bright, cartoon bling as Lady Spanker, hooting and hollering her way though the play as if she was the Annie Oakley of the English countryside. She is not so much a character as a fun-loving stampede, the life force as mistress of the hunt. Shaw is the butch counterpart to Beale’s hyper-affected snob.

The cast provides ace support, especially the minimal clowning of Richard Biers as the fussy Adolphus Spanker and Nick Sampson as the appropriately named servant Cool, the character’s impeccable sangfroid dedicated to maintaining the self-delusions of his master to the bitter end.

The production is staged in the very large Olivier auditorium at the National Theatre, so Hytner understandably directs the performances to reach up to the balcony. That raises an issue (aesthetic as well as technological) that I brought up about the hybrid live broadcast form in my review of the NT’s The Habit of Art earlier this year. Because the viewer is at the mercy of where the director chooses to point the camera, his or her eye can’t wander away from the action, especially during close-ups.

Beale and Shaw are wonderful, but sometimes you want some distance from their antics, a respite from the gusto or a chance to look at other performers to see how they are reacting. But that freedom clashes with our TV-ized sensibility, which dictates that our gaze always be directed at who is speaking. Also, at times the London audience began laughing at something on stage that it could see but we, in the movie theater, couldn’t, such as a rat running around the stage.

Still, we are witnessing the early and exciting evolution of a new way to watch theater, a form that that gives people around the world a chance to see first rate plays and performers. The NT’s live broadcasts have been a great success; an enticing new line-up of productions has been announced for next year, including Danny Boyle’s staging of a new version of Frankenstein, and Complicite’s A Disappearing Number. I have no doubt that other theater companies will take advantage of the electronic global outreach. A popular playwright to the tips of his toes (and wallet), Dion Boucicault would have been delighted at the prospect of a theater with thousands and thousands of virtual seats.

Chad Hoeppner, Rebecca Brooksher, and Kevin Hogan In the CTC production of Molly Sweeney Photo: Rick Teller

Reviewed By Helen Epstein

Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel. Directed by Michael Dowling. Staged by the Chester Theatre Company, Chester, MA, through July 11.

This summer Chester Theatre Company (CTC) Artistic Director Byam Stevens is exhorting theatergoers to “free the inner audience” within them. Theatergoers, he says, have become like critics, losing a sense of honest engagement with drama. The critic, he argues, is a character invented by modern journalism, a charlatan uneducated in theater history and practice, rating cultural productions like a Consumer Reports evaluator, making judgments from a (superior) distance rather than partaking of the theatrical experience.

Audiences, he argued, in an introduction to the company’s first production of the season, Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney, should become theater colleagues rather than “voyeurs”; they should join actors, designers, and directors in engaging directly with the playwright’s work, “eschewing the soul deadening thumbs up/thumbs down shortcut,” experiencing, actively trying to understand, rather than just looking.

Just looking is the subject of Molly Sweeney, which is the opening production of the season at Stevens’s wonderful theater in the Town Hall of Chester, Massachusetts, a tiny valley town in western Massachusetts so isolated that it’s a wonder he can fill the auditorium’s 128 seats. Chester is located on Route 20, a few miles east of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, a half hour’s drive from the Berkshire hub of Lenox-Stockbridge and an hour from Northampton. Nevertheless, theater cognoscenti regularly make the drive, and some precede the show with dinner at the Pioneer Grill and Pizzeria, an unassuming, little restaurant where the fruits and vegetables come right out of the garden.

A similar freshness imbues the productions of the CTC, this week Molly Sweeney by accomplished Irish playwright Brian Friel. This is a play about engagement at its most basic level: through what senses do each of us perceive the world we live in? What happens when we try to improve on that arrangement?

Rebecca Brooksher in CTC's Molly Sweeney Photo: Rick Teller

Friel based the play on an early New Yorker article by neurologist Oliver Sacks. In October of 1991, Sacks received a telephone call about a 50-year-old man he called Virgil, who had been virtually blind since childhood. Virgil had been offered a miracle cure, a chance to see the world. “There was nothing to lose,” Sacks wrote, “and there might be much to gain.” But, in fact, it was a miracle that misfired and wound up with Virgil losing his job, his house, his health, and independence, “leaving him a gravely sick man, unable to fend for himself.”

Friel transforms 50-year-old American Virgil into 34-year-old Irish Molly Sweeney, creates a ne’er-do-well husband named Frank, and an opthomologist identified as Mr. Rice. The play is performed as a set of intertwined monologues that the three actors deliver directly to the audience from three chairs: a stool for the callow, impulsive, but loving husband; a comfortable easy chair for the physician whose professional and personal life has been arrested by his wife’s desertion to one of his medical colleagues; a plain hospital chair for the spunky and sensual Molly, first blind, then sighted, then blind again.

The directness of their speeches to the audience are reminiscent of a psychotherapeutic encounter; their isolation from and misunderstanding of one another is pronounced. The emotional intensity is sometimes broken by the distraction of Lara Dubin’s lighting design, which is meant to evoke Molly Sweeney’s changing visual field but, like some of the ultra-high-tech lighting I’ve seen lately, ends up being distracting.

Michael Dowling cast and directed the play well. All three actors—Rebecca Brooksher as Molly, Kevin Hogan as Mr. Rice, and Chad Hoeppner as Frank Sweeney—are accomplished and almost always interesting to watch and hear. They convincingly bring to life Friel’s meditation on this extraordinary true story, which combines fairy tale and Faustian bargain. “Beware of strangers bearing gifts” and “Be careful what you wish for” are only two phrases of folk wisdom that resonate through this deeply intriguing play. Like many such adaptations from real life, however, Friel had to choose and simplify in order to create a satisfying drama.

Afterwards, I looked up Sacks’s Anthropologist on Mars (where the New Yorker piece has been collected), to reread and reflect on the many complex issues the production brings to theatrical life.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp and a profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro available on Kindle/Amazon. She will be speaking about memoir on July 8 at Cary Library in Lexington, MA.

Mary Callanan is a red hot talent, but her Sophie Tucker doesn't sizzle. Photo by Andrew Brilliant/ Brilliant Pictures.

Sophie Tucker: The Last of the Red Hot Mamas, By Richard Hopkins, Jack Fournier, and Kathy Halenda. Directed by Kate Warner. Musical Direction by Todd C. Gordon. Staged by New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in the Charles Mosesian Theater, Watertown, MA, through July 11.

Reviewed by Alyssa Machado

Vaudeville star Sophie Tucker (1884–1966) earned the nickname “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas” by boldly titillating audiences with progressive songs and jokes celebrating female sexuality. One of her most popular songs, “Yiddishe Momme,” sung partially in Yiddish, caused an uproar between anti-Semites and other audience members during a performance in France in 1932 and was later banned by Hitler. Even her comic tunes like “Living Alone and I Like it” and “I Don’t Want to Get Thin” challenged social norms in a playful and frank manner.

Nothing about Tucker was bland or old-fashioned, which makes the dull and dated revue presented by the New Repertory Theatre particularly disappointing. Despite a valiant effort from Mary Callanan, who plays Tucker with an appropriately commanding presence, voice, and attitude, the show never manages to make the legendary entertainer appealing or relevant to a modern audience.

Perhaps Tucker can’t be transplanted successfully out of her historical context. After all, the risque lyrics about female sexual liberation that entranced people in the star’s own time are staid today. The jokes remain suggestive, but they hardly shock in a time when Lady Gaga rules, and explicit lyrics and overtly sexy costumes are the norm. Even in the more demure musical theater genre partially nude actors fake sex on stage (Spring Awakening) and sing brassy numbers about accepting women of any weight (Hairspray). Tucker’s routines no longer provide any illicit thrills.

More likely, however, the flaws reside in the show itself. The book, written by Richard Hopkins, Jack Fournier, and Kathy Halenda, is barely a book at all. Scattered haphazardly between and within songs, the script consists of a mix of anecdotes disparaging men, a peppering of famous Tucker quotes, and a few brief facts about her career and personal life. The latter are too meager to convey a solid chronological sense of Tucker’s life, let alone paint a cohesive and revealing portrait.

Sophie Tucker: The show doesn't give us a vivid enough sense of her life.

As for the jokes, when they aren’t suggestive, they are painfully corny and dated (“Why are Jewish marriages so expensive? Because they’re worth it.”). In fact, the playwrights were not responsible for the few truly smile-worthy moments: they sprang from improvisation between Callanan and some good-humored audience members.

Most of the 22 songs sport simple and repetitive lyrics on the same subjects: celebrating female sexual escapades and affairs, mocking men as unreliable, impotent, or cheaters (or all of the above), or recovering from a failed romance. Most of them require a confident, flirtatious, and bold delivery. Even though Callanan supplies the needed moxie with power and panache, the similarity of the numbers becomes repetitious, especially in the first act. The few songs that encourage Callanan to explore the softer and more vulnerable side of Tucker offer a compelling glimpse of the contemporary singer’s dramatic abilities. For example, the a capella beginning to “After You’ve Gone,” is sung softly, suggesting a quiet, internalized passion that hushed the somewhat chatty audience.

The scenic design by Joseph O’Dea and staging by director Kate Warner adds little sizzle to the proceedings. With only three small set pieces (a painted backdrop, apartment furniture on stage left, and the piano on stage right), much of the center and upstage space went unused. While historically appropriate, the pastel-colored, park scene backdrop didn’t coordinate with Callanan’s costumes (red and black evening gowns) or enhance the sensual and bold tone of the songs. Tucker’s apartment set, used for her softer and sentimental songs, lost its intended intimate feel because it is located too far upstage and stage left. Add some sparse blocking, which has Callanan standing or sitting still to sing far too often, and you have a production that feels static, ironically restrained given the size of Tucker’s personality.

Many older theater patrons at the production, perhaps more familiar with the vaudevillian tradition of Tucker’s classics, seemed to find the revue entertaining. For me, however, Sophie Tucker felt dull and behind the times, a wan wallow in nostalgia that does a disservice to a woman as daring, progressive, and funny as Sophie Tucker and a talent as red hot as Mary Callanan.