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  • Antony and Cleopatra
  • Horacio Sierra
Antony and Cleopatra. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Tina Landau. The Hartford Stage, Hartford, CT. 13 October 2010.

Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is a spatially and temporally jarring drama as it skips across the Mediterranean and spans ten years with its unwieldy forty-two scenes. Productions of this tragedy can only benefit from the incorporation of as many unifying performance elements as possible. Ironically, what fused the Hartford Stage's production into a cohesive unit was crass cultural contrast. Director Tina Landau exploited Shakespeare's dichotomous presentation of a Roman-versus-Egyptian showdown to full effect, even if her approach risked playing into orientalist tropes. The payoff was a production that helped the audience comprehend the drama's geopolitical complexities, even as it reified stereotypes.

The production was a guilty pleasure due to its gratuitous accentuation of the text's superficial attractions: gender-defying characters, sexual provocations, and cultural otherness. The Hartford Stage's Antony and Cleopatra was thus in line with recent productions of Shakespeare's works that have laid bare what made and continues to make his dramas popular. For example, the Washington, D.C.-based Synetic Theater presented a wordless production of the play in February 2010, stripping down the most thrilling scenes to physically striking and sensually engaging dance movements. The Hartford production employed spartan though striking sets, obvious though bold costuming, and sexually charged though emotionally engaged acting. The combination of these elements allowed the audience to be drawn in by the play's visceral joys before being invited to contemplate its political and philosophical conundrums.

While the production exploited Shakespeare's othering and bawdiness, it did so in a progressive manner, with race-blind casting. Scholarship on the casting of Cleopatra has often discussed the appropriate race of the actress portraying the pharaoh. Because black actors performed the roles of Romans, from Antony (John Douglas Thompson) to Menas, the whiteness of Cleopatra (Kate Mulgrew) became a moot point.

The aesthetics of the production provided the audience with clear visual cues for how to interpret the dynamics between the two cultures. For example, Anita Yavich's costume design contrasted Rome's tight-fisted approach to world domination with Egypt's languorous and opulent carelessness. While the militant Romans were showcased in an austere [End Page 267] black-and-white mash-up of 1930s-era fascist-like uniforms and punk-grunge trench coats, the hedonistic Egyptians were decked out in free-flowing robes with earthy tones that displayed the men's muscular torsos and the women's ample cleavage.


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Tony Yazbeck (Alexas), Kate Mulgrew (Cleopatra), and John Douglas Thompson (Antony) in Antony and Cleopatra. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson.)

Cultural differences were also highlighted by Blythe R. D. Quinlan's deceptively stark set design. The upstage corners were devoted to separate bars for the Egyptian and Roman entourages. Landau shrewdly peopled these lounges with nonspeaking characters so that their presence could be felt when their allies and adversaries were engaged in dialogue downstage. Given the cataclysmic nature of the confluence of these two empires, continually reminding the audience of the impact each culture had on the other was one of this production's most invigorating decisions.

Buttressed by clichéd costumes, the Egyptian court that swirled around the title lovers' Lady Gaga-esque "bad romance" further emphasized the erotic decadence of the pair's decline. Cleopatra's Egyptian retinue of bare-chested men and scantily clad women delivered the sex factor promised by the Hartford Stage's hilariously tawdry "Too-Hot-for-TV!" online viral marketing. The titillation factor was introduced when Cleopatra's entourage burst onto the stage with kicks, caterwauls, and gyrations. The Egyptians immersed themselves in a freestyle mix of sensual dancing set to hypnotic, percussion-heavy music. Paralleling Rome's concern with Cleopatra's emasculation of Antony, the male members of her entourage were portrayed as passive boy-toys. In contrast, Roman eroticism was exposed as cold and calculated. Antony's arranged marriage to Caesar's sister Octavia (Kendra Underwood) was bereft of any passion. Underwood's somber facial expressions and slouched posture matched her role as a...

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