Volpone, or The Fox (review)

City Lit Theatre has been established for some time in a modest room on the second floor of the sprawling Edgewater Presbyterian Church at the north end of Lake Shore Drive, with a mission that is "literary" in the sense of taking on stagings of famous novels, and plays of a certain cerebral cast. This is not to be confused with the mission of New York's madly ambitious text "reading" crew, Elevator Repair Service, which stages whole novels, as in the recent Gatz. At any rate, that mission seems a strange fit with Jonson's Volpone, unless it is because the play is perceived as too verbose to be stageable, unworkable at a mainstream, non-"literary" theatre. There was no overt evidence of such a prejudice, but something like it must be preventing Chicagoland's larger stages from taking on Jonson instead of Shakespeare, making City Lit's production apparently the first in many years. It certainly doesn't seem to me that Volpone and The Alchemist are any more difficult, or less dramatically rewarding, than Shakespeare's comedies. Indeed, two recent productions showed off two widely divergent approaches that might have produced satisfying results with Jonson—The Comedy of Errors at the Court Theatre and The Merchant of Venice at the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival. The one gutted the play for comic effect, and got away with it; the other simply faced its play's considerable challenges and dealt with them theatrically.

One might have hoped, then, for a stripped-down insurgent, or even street-theatre, approach at City Lit. But instead there was an air of hesitation, over-prudence, and occasionally cutesiness hanging about the show, incessant winks and nudges indicating that, as I read it, we really didn't have to take any of this very seriously. This quality inhered most in the play's music and scenery. Despite the program's claim that the play was set in "Venice, whenever," it actually seemed America in the nineteen-twenties, though perhaps America in the twenties as motion pictures of the times depicted it. The set was a faded Art Deco—whether deliberately faded I couldn't tell—with golden hues and dirty marbles backing a U-shaped stage. The music was a somewhat better attempt at twenties pop verisimilitude, though its union with Jonson's poetry was uncomfortable. Volpone's entertaining companions also played the music, and were dressed in parti-colored fools' outfits. The setting and the music might have been envisioned ironically, as a dance upon the graves of the innocent and the suckers, but it ends up seeming simply out of sync, neither winking enough, nor, as during Volpone's seduction of Celia, grand enough to carry the play's appetites and ambitions.

Nothing better displayed the ambivalence in the production than its approach to violence, both verbal and physical. Most of David Yondorf 's choreography seemed to be attempting realism—Corvino dragging his wife on-stage by her hair after the mountebank scene, and threatening her with a switchblade, or Volpone wrestling her on top of his bed and hiking her dress in preparation for rape. And yet this failed to move; the actors did not seem quite committed to the violence as violence, while other staging seemed merely zany or slapstick—Celia running into Volpone's harlequin servants when she pulled back one of the stage's sliding doors to try to escape. In such moments it...