The Country Wife (review)

Although named for the historic London playhouse rather than the energy drink, Red Bull Theater is among New York City’s most invigorating classical theater companies. Instead of assuming that early modern drama begins and ends with Shakespeare, Red Bull is committed to mining what it calls the “heightened language plays” of his contemporaries—John Webster, Ben Jonson, and John Ford, to name a few—with a look ahead to their lurid and experimental twentieth-century descendents like Jean Genet and Charles Ludlum (Mission Statement). In addition to its full-dress productions, Red Bull has also, since its founding in 2003, mounted a series of one-off staged readings featuring both regular cast members and a long roster of local talent. These are casual affairs; actors perform in street clothes, usually without props, and sit kibitzing among themselves in view of the audience as they await their cues. Rehearsal time is usually tight, so the occasional flubbed line is to be expected. But as anyone can attest who has seen Louis Malle’s spellbinding 2004 Chekhov rehearsal film, Vanya on 42 ^nd Street, this kind of raw workshop environment can foster a heightened sense of intimacy with both the text and the performers, and may also be closer to early modern theatrical practice than the Red Bull’s more polished main stage productions. At times the series even lives up to its name, “Revelation Readings.”

As these are one-night stands requiring comparatively limited commitment from the cast and the ticket-buying public, the series allows Red Bull to make what are, even by its own standards, brave curatorial decisions. The repertoire centers on offbeat Jacobean and Caroline fare (this season included Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s frequently-taught-but-rarely-acted The Roaring Girl), with occasional incursions into other regions and eras, including—hence this review—Restoration and eighteenth-century Britain. The Man of Mode, The Rover, Love for Love, The Beaux’ Stratagem, and She Stoops to Conquerhave all gotten the Red Bull treatment, although George Farquhar’s comedy came—regrettably to purists—by way of Thornton Wilder’s lightly Americanized reworking. Red Bull has also experimented with less familiar Georgian titles like John O’Keefe’s Wild Oats, as well as contemporary playwright Amy Freed’s raunchy mash-up of John Vanbrugh and Colley Cibber, Restoration Comedy. This season even saw a noble effort to embody two ungainly chamber dramas of the long eighteenth century: John Milton’s Samson Agonistesand Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Although the readings inevitably vary in quality, the local academic community should be grateful for the opportunity to see professional actors, many of them classically trained, breath life into material that rarely gets read aloud outside of the classroom.

The series is at its best when the performers feel at ease with the playwright’s idiom, have had enough time in rehearsal to establish some simple blocking, and are genuinely enjoying themselves on stage as they and the audience excavate the forgotten pleasures of these texts; this was the case with the finest reading I saw this season, of the anonymous Elizabethan true-crime saga Arden of Faversham, which emerged as a grimly farcical romp—a kind of Coen Brothers film circa 1592. The reading of William Wycherley’s The Country-Wifethat took place on May 5 was not at this same high level, although it had moments of insight and genuine hilarity. At fifteen performers, this was a large cast for Red Bull, requiring almost no doubling of characters. A young actor, Kyle Cherry, delivered the stage directions in a deadpan manner from a desk at the side of the forestage, as well as supplying diegetic sound effects (wooshing swords, creaking doors, some disconcertingly plausible flatulence for Sir Jasper Fidget) and whimsical noises (chimes, bells, and a slide whistle) to signal when characters were having asides or “speaking apart.” All of this radio-comedy tomfoolery quickly came to feel like a distraction, interrupting the rhythms of...