What Fools These Players Be

Review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hartford Stage

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has much to delight. With three stories that dovetail into one, the play offers at the heart of each story comic elements that have kept audiences entertained for generations. In one story, four Athenian youths—Hermia (Jenny Leona), Lysander (Tom Pecinka), Demetrius (Damian Jermaine Thompson), Helena (Fedna Laure Jacquet)—are caught up in a love triangle, overruled by Hermia’s father Egeus (Robert Hannon Davis) in a dispute brought to the attention of King Theseus (Esau Pritchett). Meanwhile in the forest, the fairy rulers Oberon (Pritchett) and Titania (Scarlett Strallen) are sparring over who should get custody of a changeling child. And a troupe of Athenian workmen, rehearsing in the forest, are putting together a play for the nuptials of Theseus and his bride Hippolyta (Strallen). Mistaken identity, love potions, metamorphosis, fits of jealousy, and ham-fisted theatrics combine to make the play a celebration of the different worlds theater can manifest.

Last year at Hartford Stage, director Darko Tresnjak gave us a silly, effervescent Comedy of Errors and seems determined to do the same with Midsummer. The problem, though, is that the latter play doesn’t lend itself as well to over-the-top hamming. That doesn’t mean the game cast doesn’t do all it can to provide belly laughs at almost every turn, but somewhere amidst all the preening and posturing, the pointing hands and waving arms, the crotch-grabbing and air-humping, the lampoons of American method actors by a showboat Bottom (John Lavelle) and the gauche ardors of lovers in school uniforms, a wise, witty, and sumptuously lyrical text goes missing.

The cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hartford Stage (photos: T. Charles Erickson)

That might not matter to everyone, and there is method in the director’s decision to rein in the set while unleashing the actors. This strategy gives us an English country estate, particularly its gatehouse, for Athens, complete with an ordered park as environs. When Lysander and Hermia, supposedly at large in the wilds, lie a little further off amidst trim hedges and park benches, something seems awry. It’s that kind of disjunction that may keep a viewer waiting for a moment when something like the playwright’s vision might occur. One supposes it’s to be found in an obscene prop that accompanies Brent Bateman’s eager turn as Snout as Wall.

Titania (Scarlett Strallen), Oberon (Esau Pritchett)

Theseus, as everyone knows, is kind of a killjoy. Here, I found myself taking his side. It helps that Esau Pritchett gives the king much dignity, though he doesn’t seem much different when he becomes Oberon, but for his very becoming tunic. As Hippolyta, Scarlett Strallen looks good in a riding habit, with dark hair, and as Titania, she’s a begowned blonde who has the intonation to make the verse, and sometimes song as well, come alive. Her doting upon the “translated” Bottom is quite the set-piece it’s meant to be and the attendant fairy-maids (Melody Atkinson, Gabrielle Filloux, Anne O’Sullivan, Madison Vice) may be commended for actually downplaying what are often flamboyant parts, though the notion of an otherworldly fairy realm is lessened to nothingness. The lack of feyness in the fairy world is compounded by Will Apicella’s vigorous Puck, the least beguiling version I’ve ever seen.

Titania (Scarlett Strallen), above, Bottom (John Lavelle), below

One imagines the lovers would fare better if differently presented. In their school uniforms, they look immature and, suitably, act petulant rather than passionate. That tone, once established, helps to make their plight comic from the first, and then it’s just a matter of who will run farthest with it. I would single out Fedna Laure Jacquet for highest praise—as Helena, petulance suits her, and since she’s able to fawn like a dog and coquette like an awkward doll, she inspires the most laughter. Tom Pecinka’s Lysander and Damian Jermaine Thompson’s Demetrius get in some fun as boyish rivals à la “Our Gang,” while Jenny Leona makes Hermia’s turn at jealousy very vivid.

Helena (Fedna Laure Jacquet), Demetrius (Damian Jermaine Thompson)

Vivid too are those mechanicals, with John Lavelle as a Bottom whose well of mugging and vocal mannerisms hath no bottom, abetted by Matthew Macca as a lollipop-licking Flute. The point of the play within a play seems to be to show that, once upon a stage, a player will strut for all he can.

left to right: Flute (Matthew Macca), Starveling (Alexander Sovronsky), Bottom (John Lavelle), Snout (Brent Bateman), Snug (Louis Tuccci), Peter Quince (Robert Hannon Davis)

The critic G. K. Chesterton is quoted in the playbill as proclaiming that “the supreme literary merit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a merit of design.” By “design,” he means of course what we would mean by structure, the way the different worlds of the play impinge on one another to create a world in which magic—whether of love, fairies, or inspired clods—triumphs. Hartford Stage’s production gets demerits for design, as an unusually static take on this fluid play. Its failings help to show how much a play may be the creature of its appearance. The supreme merit this production aims for, and sometimes hits, is a merit of display.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Darko Tresnjak

Scenic Design: Alexander Dodge; Costume Design: Joshua Pearson; Lighting Design: York Kennedy; Sound Design: Broken Chord; Projection Design: Lucas Clopton & Darron Alley; Wig Design: Jodi Stone; Composer & Music Director: Alexander Sovronsky; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Fight Choreographer: Thomas Schall; Voice & Text Coach: Claudia Hill-Sparks; Casting: Laura Stanczyk, CSA; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy; Associate Artistic Director: Elizabeth Williamson

Cast: Will Apicella, Melody Atkinson, Brent Bateman, Robert Hannon Davis, Gabrielle Filloux, Fedna Laure Jacquet, John Lavelle, Jenny Leona, Matthew Macca, Anne O’Sullivan, Tom Pecinka, Esau Pritchett, Alexander Sovronsky, Scarlett Strallen, Damian Jermaine Thompson, Louis Tucci, Madison Vice

Hartford Stage
September 7-October 8, 2017

Death of a Garbageman

August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning Fences, directed by Phylicia Rashad and playing at the Long Wharf Theatre, is a winner all the way. Wilson’s script has the resonance and depth one finds in great novels and in the landmark works of naturalist theater. Character-driven and language-based, it’s a play that is larger than life only in the sense that it might feel, while you’re watching it, more real than your own life. For this is slice-of-life drama with no expressionistic extremes of behavior, no tragic inflation or comic exaggeration. Wilson’s command of his characters and Rashad’s command of her actors combine to create great drama—involving, entertaining, full of wisdom and the true contradictions found in real life. Start with that set by John Iacovelli. Even before the play opens, we sit looking at the backyard of the home of Troy and Rose Maxson, located in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson hailed from, in the 1950s. It’s homey, inviting even. No, it’s not a grand structure, nor is it ramshackle. It’s not poor, nor is it middle-class. The house, the porch, the tree in the yard—it all feels lived in and unapologetic. Folks can drop in, no problem.

Troy, the master of this home, is a big man with well-defined, even classical features. He’s the kind of barely educated workingman who exudes amazing amounts of charisma. There’s nothing phoney about him in the least, no effort to be something he’s not. What he is is a good friend to his old army—and drinking—buddy, Jim Bono, and a doting husband to his wife, though his doting takes the form of the condescension to women common among breadwinning males in that day and age. He rules the roost, but generally strives to stay in her good graces. And, when we first meet them, Troy and Rose seem as happy as any two people married for over seventeen years could expect to be.

And yet. The dramatic conflicts in the play all come from Troy’s own nature. Wilson provides a character study that is relentless in revealing—simply through speech with others—everything we need to know about Troy Maxson; indeed we learn everything the man knows about himself. For Troy was a gifted baseball player before blacks were allowed in the professional leagues, and the chip he carries on his shoulder from that fact poisons his relation to Cory, the teenaged son he fathered with Rose. We also learn, from his attitude to Lyons, his elder son from a previous relationship, that his past is full of things he’d rather not be reminded of, but which he reveals to Lyons in a gripping speech about his life as a thief. Later, a larger confession materializes that serves to poison his relationship with his supportive wife. Along the way, we hear about how some decisions Troy made affect his brother Gabriel, a vet damaged by the war, whose relief money is the basis of Troy’s financial well-being.

In other words, Troy is nothing if not imperfect. He is so deeply flawed and yet so fully alive that we have no choice but to see his point of view, primarily because his failings are obvious to himself even if he tries to talk his way to justifications. We might say he’s “all talk,” except that Esau Pritchett gives Troy such earnest soul, and a presence of mind that refuses to be glib simply for its own sake. Even when he tells facetious tall tales about meeting Death or finding the Devil at his door, offering him credit terms, his way with a story—placing himself always as the hero tried by external forces—carries with it a convincing moral resonance. Even when he’s fooling around, he’s not just fooling around.

And when he’s in deadly earnest, he can be truly scary, a father whose sense of his obligations and of his manhood are utterly unselfconscious about how overbearing he is and how—in refusing to let Cory play football, in never going to hear Lyons play jazz, in not doing more for his brother, in having a mistress—often he is wrong. Much of the play’s power derives from showing this man as he is—without irony or ridicule or sentimentality. Troy is no Lear and his bad decisions don’t destroy a kingdom or anyone’s life, ultimately—though they do cause pain—but he is just as much a figure for the self-delusions and insecurities and abundance of what can justifiably be called “the masculine principle.”

One of the wonders of the play is its language—it’s a natural-sounding speech that is yet very musical, full of rhythms that sound “easy” but are actually hard to get right. The cast does a splendid job with the text and everyone deserves credit for their work. From little Taylor Dior, the child who plays Raynell with artless sincerity, to Chris Myers as Cory, who struggles with his father without sounding petulant and who acquits himself well in the emotionally charged singing of his grand-dad’s song about a dog called Blue late in the play, to Jared McNeill as Lyons, a nuanced performance that conveys effectively the note of a different kind of male—the hepcat or hipster of the fifties—who condescends to his father but also wants his respect, to Phil McGlaston as Jim Bono, the neighborly crony who registers both genial acceptance of Troy as well as a distance that comes later, to G. Alvarez Reid as Gabriel, Troy’s wounded brother who stirs guilt (watch Troy’s face whenever he shows up), remorse, and brings with him visions of St. Peter’s gate and hellhounds, to Portia as Rose, who delivers two quite affecting arias—the first, to Troy, is a rhapsody of betrayed love and deep accusation that Portia does full justice to; the other, to Cory, a proud defense of her deceased husband that feels only slightly more mannered than it might; to Esau Pritchett as Troy, a commanding performance that lets us feel the fearsome self-possession of a man who can’t ever admit he’s wrong.

And is he? One of the interesting aspects of Fences is that Troy does have a vision of life that he intends as the best for all. It’s self-serving, but that doesn’t mean it’s misguided. Would Corey’s football-playing plans have panned out? We don’t know. Is it wrong to have children with three different women? Wrong to the women, certainly, but wrong to the children? The final scene makes us feel the purpose of the father, even in his absence. All are indebted to him, at some level, simply by being there. And that’s because Wilson wants to respect men like Troy—denied the chance to be their best because of racism, and yet able to rise up from the lowest job to the job of driver, normally reserved for white men, without even having a driver’s license. Like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, Troy is a man his sons find hard to love, but who is loved deeply by his author, flaws and all. Troy is the hero of his own life, and Wilson, in Rashad’s compassionate production, lets us see what a burden that can be.

This Fences is the real deal. Go!

August Wilson’s Fences Directed by Phylicia Rashad

Scenic Design: John Iacovelli; Costume Design: Esosa; Lighting Design: Xavier Pierce; Sound Design: John Gromada; Hair & Wig Design: J. Jared Janas & Rob Greene; Fight Diretor: Michael Rossmy; Production Stage Manager: David Blackwell; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting by Calleri Casting; Photographs by T. Charles Erickson

Long Wharf Theatre November 27-December 22, 2013