Playgoing in Manhattan

The 2007–8 Broadway season was framed by Lincoln Center’s productions of two of the least familiar plays by two of the world’s most famous dramatists. Early fall brought us Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and early summer a brief engagement of the National Theater of Scotland’s confrontation with The Bacchae by Euripides (a play so rarely performed that my computer thinks I don’t know how to spell it). As is true of most Lincoln Center offerings, no apparent expense had been spared in the mounting of Cymbeline. And yet the highly professional direction, casting, acting, sets, and costumes combined to blur the identity of the play further. Although it is most often referred to as a romance, unmistakable elements of comedy, tragedy, history, and myth crop up all over the place. On the basis of this version (and a prior rereading), I would think that almost any producer/director trying to come to conceptual terms with the play would be sorely tempted to do it as farce. I cannot easily imagine any other way to keep it from riding off in all directions. Cymbeline comes late in the canon, at a time when Shakespeare was less governed by traditional forms and perhaps less intent on limpidity of style. I have no complaint about American actors doing Shakespeare in (phonologically) American English; but the fact remains that British actors, for whatever reason—education, training—tend to be more accomplished at making accessible the syntactic sophistications of the late style. In Lincoln Center’s almost exclusively American cast, John Cullum (in the smallish title role) achieved notably greater mastery of the language than most of his fellows—hence greater presence and credibility.

Although excessive reverence for the Bard may have been a contributing factor in the limitations of Cymbeline as staged in 2007, neither reverence nor tradition nor theatrical horse sense got in the way of the mishmashing of The Bacchae. Here Dionysus has become a sort of rock (or rap or hip-hop) idol given to self-indulgent flirting with the audience; and the mænads are his backup group of girl singers in bright red dresses of assorted styles. While it may be true that celebrities have become our contemporary gods, they do not as a rule collude in the dismemberment of even their fiercest critics; they may be given to trashing hotel rooms now and then—but not whole cities, so far as I know. Nor can one readily envision even the most frenzied of girl singers “suckling the wild-wolf’s cub” or making cosmetic use of serpents or ripping open with her bare hands a live calf or heifer (at least not in public, at what was supposed to be a picnic). Still, if the music and choreography had been less conventional and less insistent; if every dramatic scene had not been immediately undercut by musical commentary, reprise, or irrelevance; if the main set had looked less like a passageway on a cruise ship—then one might have felt something other than profound sympathy for the actors, several of whom were admirable. Even Alan Cumming, woefully miscast as Dionysus, has a strong voice; and in the penultimate scene Paola Dionisotti as Agave and Ewan Hooper as Cadmus delivered their stunning and heartbreaking lines with the authority and devotion often in abeyance in this rendering of a brilliantly dramatic and brutally dark play.

So the season began with a king and ended with a god; and in between famous names not ordinarily or primarily associated with the theater appeared in the ads and on the bills around Manhattan’s rialto and its far-flung outposts: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Spinoza, Darwin, Seurat, Gauguin, Hemingway. Unfortunately none of these large reputations was enhanced as a result of theatrical recruitment; on the other hand none suffered irreparable damage either. From the first moments of Tolstoy’s unaccountably neglected play The Power of Darkness, I felt myself immersed in the bleak and desperate lives of the Russian peasants helplessly trapped by their lots in life and by their own passions. Similarly Hemingway’s rarely seen play The Fifth Column...