All's Fair in Love and War

Review of Troilus and Cressida, The Public, Free Shakespeare in the Park

There’s testosterone aplenty in The Public’s very successful Troilus and Cressida, directed by Daniel Sullivan with a keen sense of how to make the play timely while keeping its tone, rather quizzical and scurrilous for a tragedy, intact.

Mind you, you’d expect much manliness in a play about the siege of Troy at the hands of the Greeks, as Shakespeare revisits the ground so well developed by Homer. Here, it’s not about taking sides and we’re very much aware—how could we not be?—how self-serving reasons for invading another country or kingdom might be, and how ill-conceived. From the outset, war is for the purpose of vanquishing one’s enemies; any other settlement means giving up on the collective fantasy of victory. More to the point, and the play brings this out abundantly, none of the combatants are fighting precisely for the same thing or with the same will. And much of the drama here concerns things soldiers get up to when not engaged in battle, and plotting and partying and looking for an advantage in status is very much the business at hand.

We all know the basic set-up, but where the Iliad centers on Achilles and Agamemnon’s stand-off over a slave-girl, Shakespeare’s play takes up a love affair on the Trojan side fated to fare badly due to war and its obligations. In other words, a love interest and, importantly, jealousy, infuses all the talk of valor and honor and kills and conquests. Troilus (Andrew Burnap), a Trojan, is emphatically his own man, and that’s important since he’s apt to be further down on a list of famed heroes that includes his brothers Hector (Bill Heck) and Paris (Maurice Jones), and warrior Aeneas (Sanjit de Silva), and, on the Greek side, Achilles (Louis Cancelmi), Agamemnon (John Douglas Thompson), Ulysses (Corey Stoll), Nestor (Edward James Hyland) and Menelaus (Forrest Malloy). Burnap has romantic-lead good-looks, can play passion well, and makes Troilus’s story—which isn’t so central as you might expect—matter to us. He’s a human hero among a bunch of guys who seem to believe their own Homeric PR.

Brothers-in-arms: Troilus (Andrew Burnap), Hector (Bill Heck)

All the many characters here are in supporting roles, which means ensemble play is key, and also that the show is an embarrassment of riches in actors playing somewhat minor important roles, such as John Douglas Thompson as Agamemnon, a part that mainly requires being stuffy and, eventually, a bit drunk. As Ulysses, who is key to much of the plot, Corey Stoll plays it shrewd and aloof, except when the commander’s will to power gets the better of him and he gets worked up. He stalks about in a civilian suit with combat boots and makes us generally uneasy the way any sighting of Dick Cheney always did, back in the lamented reign of W. et al. He’s not above any skullduggery to get things to go as he would like. Along the way, nobler souls will fall—the play might be considered more properly the tragedy of the duty-bound Trojan hero Hector, but for the fact that we feel his fate is so—well—fated.

A key role well-cast is John Glover as Pandarus, the character here who, somewhat comparable to Shylock in Merchant, is both a figure of fun and a figure of surprising pathos. His every effort is to bring together Troilus and his niece, Cressida (Ismenia Mendes), and they do get a wonderfully entertaining courtship scene that Mendes plays with beguiling grace in a very self-aware and contemporary manner. But Pandarus’ thanks is to see it all go to hell because such satisfactions mean nothing in the time of war. Leaning heavily on a cane in his white flannels, Glover’s Pandarus lights up the stage with the tones of a jaded bon vivante, a man entirely out of step with the times. He gets the first and last lines of a play he frames, his hopes turned to rancor.

War-tossed lovers: Cressida (Ismenia Mendes), Troilus (Andrew Burnap) with Pandarus (John Glover)

Other very capable turns include Edward James Hyland’s diplomatic Nestor, Nneka Okafor’s distraught Cassandra, and Zach Appelman strutting his fit form as Diomedes, Troilus’s Greek rival. The scene where Cressida sort of cleaves to Diomedes is fraught with a prowling alley cat ambience that makes the level of arousal very high indeed. It’s a key moment where feminine agency within the stories men tell is seen for what it is: a strategy. Tactics are very much the lesson of the day in this play, and this seduction scene, witnessed by Troilus and Ulysses, is among the best touches Sullivan sets up for us, along with Ulysses as an assassin, and those assault rifles and explosions realistically loud and jarring.

Court gossip: foreground: Paris (Maurice Jones), Helen (Tala Ashe), Pandarus (John Glover)

As Paris and Helen, the other couple we might expect to offer some interest, Maurice Jones plays Paris as princely and rather lacking in soldierly demeanor, while Tala Ashe’s Helen, wineglass in hand, is a treat in her brief scene. Never was the status of trophy mistress more apt to a heroine’s condition, and Helen seems bored by the fatal hullabaloo these heroes are sustaining in her name. It’s as if a personification of “freedom” had to step onto the stage during the Iraq invasion.

Man in the Gap: Ajax (Alex Breaux), Ulysses (Corey Stoll), Diomedes (Zach Appelman), Nestor (Edward James Hyland)

As Ajax, the proud dullard who wants to prove himself, Alex Breaux gets some of the best laughs, at least those that don’t come by way of Max Casella’s Thersites, who seems to have dropped in from one of the boroughs to add a jaundiced touch of hero-puncturing. His irritation at his betters is the perfect foil for Louis Cancelmi’s Achilles, a shrewd sort of lout who knows his worth and cares little for what others think or say; his playfellow Patroclus—Tom Pecinka, a feckless boy-toy—gets some flak for distracting the Greek hero from the battlefield, but at the end of the day it’s Achilles’ lack of interest in the cause that makes him mope. His eventual showdown with Hector undermines the Greeks’ hero to such an extent it’s as if viewed through the eyes of a Trojan news report.

A rogue's war: Thersites (Max Casella)

David Zinn‘s inventive and intriguing set serves well, adapting to the very different spaces quickly, and opening up for action sequences, but also containing enclosed spaces for Achilles’ barracks and for Cressida’s residence among the Greeks. There’s furniture to fling about and manly props and fight sequences, and interesting choices—again by Zinn—of modern costuming.

Sullivan’s cast does justice to the play’s changing focus without letting any segment overstay its welcome. Most importantly, this Troilus and Cressida reveals the play to be Shakespeare at his most proto-modern in eschewing grand tragedy for situations in which characters stick to the roles expected of them and how things turn out has to do with the shifts in emphasis among a collective. There’s no “all for one, one for all,” in this war, and yet the dedication to carnage and the acceptance of wasted life seems to be the price of admission for the kinds of heroics Shakespeare and Sullivan are subtly skewering. So seldom done and here done so well, The Public's Troilus and Cressida should be seen and celebrated.

Troilus and Cressida
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Daniel Sullivan

Scenic and Costume Design: David Zinn; Lighting Design: Robert Wierzel; Sound Design: Mark Menard; Hair and Makeup Design: Cookie Jordan; Original Music: Dan Moses Schreier; Co-Fight Directors: Micheal Rossmy and Rick Sordelet; Voice Coach: Alithea Phillips; Production Stage Manager: James Latus; Photos: Joan Marcus

Cast: Zach Appelman, Tala Ashe, Connor Bond, Alex Breaux, Andrew Burnap, Louis Cancelmi, Max Casella, Andrew Chaffee, Michael Bradley Cohen, Sanjit de Silva, Paul Deo Jr., John Glover, Jin Ha, Bill Heck, Hunter Hoffman, Nicholas Hoge, Edward James Hyland, Keilyn Durrel Jones, Maurice Jones, Forrest Malloy, Ismenia Mendes, Nneka Okafor, Tom Pecinka, Kario Pereira-Bailey, Miguel Perez, Grace Rao, Corey Stoll, John Douglas Thompson

The Public Theater
Free Shakespeare in the Park
Delacorte Theater

July 19-August 14, 2016

Satchmo at the Long Wharf

The open door, upstage right, sends raking light into a backstage dressing-room, revealing an oxygen tank with mask, situated beside a small couch downstage left. He enters through the door, horn in hand, stooped, shaky, and hurries to the tank and inhales deeply. When he has caught his breath, he addresses the audience, telling us that he shit his pants earlier that day while in an elevator with his wife—here, at the Waldorf Astoria of all places! “He” is Louis Armstrong, a performing legend, an icon for jazz music and of successful blacks in show-biz, and he has just played a concert. Now, with a tape machine and microphone nearby, he sets out to describe his career, and to get on record his dealings with his lifelong manager, the deceased Joe Glaser. It’s a relationship that has all the classic traits of benevolence and betrayal, of closeness and crassness, of a shared passion for success and a regretful sense of not sharing enough.

He is John Douglas Thompson giving a bravura performance as both Armstrong and Glaser—with a couple notable asides in the voice and manner of a priggish Miles Davis—negotiating, with nimble shifts, the very different styles of speech and personal mannerisms of both characters. There’s no doubt, of course, that we will sympathize with Louis—his manner is so forthright, his humor so ingratiating, his sense of himself both humble and proud; what’s more remarkable is that we sympathize with Glaser too—which Louis might accept but which would also provoke him—because Glaser, a fast-talking Jew with a firm grasp of his place in the universe, is also a pawn of gangsters, of men who find the weak point in one’s armor and use it to their advantage. In other words, there is a major grievance that Louis lobs at Joe and it does stick, but there are extenuating circumstances.

Armstrong is no emotional weakling. He has gotten old, but he has also gotten rich, or way richer than he began, in any case, and he knows he’s had a great deal of luck on his side, and a great good fortune in choosing his manager wisely. He also knows that he owes a lot to Glaser, but that can’t distract him from what he owes Louis Armstrong, the famous name who, he believes, deserves better, deserves to be Glaser’s equal.

And that’s where this play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, by Terry Teachout, author of Pops, a biography of Louis Armstrong, now playing at the Long Wharf Stage II, really delivers the goods. Ultimately, this is a searching play, not simply about loyalties and the inevitable dissatisfaction at the end of the day, aired by two men who have been more than associates and less than bosom buddies, but also about a career that stepped over the “color barrier,” though not as a fully respected achievement. That’s where Davis’ jibes about Satchmo as an “Uncle Tom” come in, and are necessary to triangulate the story a bit. Armstrong relied on a Jew to smooth his way into the Big Time, and it worked, but, by Louis’s own admission, he allowed himself to become Glaser’s “nigger.” It’s to Teachout’s credit that he is able—without becoming didactic—to give the audience some sense of the dimensions of that term. Not simply a word of disdain, it becomes, in Satchmo’s mouth, a recognition of himself as a certain kind of creation: a black person who will be acceptable to, indeed loved by, devoted white audiences—a great aside on this theme occurs when Louis gestures to the mostly white audience at the Long Wharf to underscore his view that “white folks” never tire of him, while his “own people” lost interest in him long ago.

The difficulty of a black performer “crossing-over” to a white audience on his own terms—in the times Louis Armstrong lived through—gives the play much of its punch, and it also shows up the callousness of Miles Davis’s privileged sneer. Davis was too cool to kowtow to white tastes, but then, he didn’t have to. Times had changed, and, indeed, Armstrong’s comments show him to be not only knowledgeable about race in America but also about class amongst blacks.

In Teachout’s Armstrong we see a cursing, earthy, funny, human, likeable, approachable star—a man who made his way by making people feel good. If some of what makes white folks feel good is being excited about a black man, well, Louis was willing to be that black man—as he says, almost every white person has one black person “they crazy about.” The play sees Armstrong for what he is—a crowd-pleaser in a time when the crowd that mattered was mostly white—but also shows what he sees: that his own race’s condescension toward him implies a denial of their own history, and of the importance of figures like himself in being ambassadors of race in the special world of show-biz: a person with enough clout to give President Eisenhower a dressing-down over Little Rock that stuck.

Satchmo at the Waldorf is also quite adept at making us feel the presence of the many special interests outside the cozy dressing-room where Louis decompresses between performing and going to his supportive and cherished wife, Lucille. Those interests include mob bosses, and it’s no negative reflection upon Armstrong that he rose to prominence upon such associations—rather, it’s to Teachout’s credit that he keeps that aspect of early twentieth-century show-biz in play. Hearing Glaser’s voice adds immeasurably to our grasp of not only the dynamic between these two men, but of the world Glaser inhabited and, mostly, conquered. We’re looking at two of the winners, and the fact that there are real compromises, real costs, and real conviction behind their mutual affection for and dissatisfaction with each other shows us, by implication, the harsh realities that underlie “making it.”

John Douglas Thompson seems ideal for the part: more athletic-looking than Armstrong in real life, he is yet able to inhabit the man, giving us a compelling sense of a great performer who is confiding in us, and who is dropping his guard, at times, for the sake of clarifying his own raw emotions. It is a performance full of energy and reflection, pleasure and pathos—it gives depth to a man who, on stage, was willing to seem as untroubled as a ray of sunshine. And to see Thompson become a calculating, calculated Jew is a transformation that goes beyond comic relief—by having Glaser play “straight man” to Armstrong’s monologue, Thompson and director Gordon Edelstein avoid caricature and let Glaser be the voice of reality, of the smarts necessary to make the deals that make the duo prosper.

If you’re thinking this one man show might have the bare stage and stream-of-conscious styling of some one-person shows, guess again. This is a play you can settle into as Louis settles into his reminiscences on a stage set that feels so authentic, you fully believe he will be spending the night in another room in the famed hotel, and that we are simply privy to the largesse of a personal reception between the public performance onstage and the private life he exits to join. Satchmo at the Waldorf may well set a new standard for the character-driven celebrity monologue. One begins to imagine many other backstage passes to an audience with a garrulous great we might hope to be given by future playwrights. It certainly helps to know your star well before he starts talking. Teachout certainly does and he compresses much of what he knows into drama that is forthright and effective, never bogged down with exposition or too elliptical to be entertaining. Teachout, Thompson, Edelstein and Long Wharf give us a star setting us straight, an uncensored charmer who’s got what it takes to tell it like it is.

John Douglas Thompson in Satchmo at the Waldorf By Terry Teachout Directed by Gordon Edelstein

Set Design: Lee Savage; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: John Gromada; Production Stage Manager: Hope Rose Kelly

Oct 3-Nov 4, 2012

Long Wharf Theatre, Stage II

Photos by T. Charles Erickson