Cymbeline, or, Imogen and the False Reports: Summer in Central Park

Cymbeline is a late play by William Shakespeare, meaning he’d done with the histories, the straight comedies and romances, and was ready for riskier works to be produced indoors in more intimate venues than the Globe.  I decided, as I was ruminating on this production, that this play’s theme has to do with false reports and betrayal. May I assure you, no one onstage or in the audience noticed.

The play has its “problems,” but no one cares, for if it is approached from askew, hilarity ensues.  Daniel Sullivan’s production for The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park (that is, at the Delacorte in Central Park) fits the bill.

Director Sullivan did judicious cutting in his production and incorporated delightful doubling and imaginative additions.  The program lists 14 characters and assorted gentlemen, lords, ladies, soldiers, messengers and captains, all played by nine actors (seven men, two women).

Let’s consider the main character and her love:  Imogen and Posthumous Leonatus.  She the heiress to a kingdom in Wales, he an orphan raised by Imogen’s father, King Cymbeline, the two married in secret.  Also vying for Imogen’s love is Cloten, the cloddish son of the present Queen — who is not mother to any child of Cymbeline.  In comparison to Cloten, Posthumous is a catch. However, judged on his own, Posthumous is a cipher until he becomes an ass.

Lily Rabe as Imogen, Hamish Linklater as Posthumous.  Photo credit (c) 2015 Carol Rosegg.

Thanks to the bravura performance of a problematic role by Hamish Linklater, once in Rome we see the shallow, rudderless fool Posthumous is, and from being a cipher he becomes a fool then turns into an ass.  The utterly charming Mr. Linklater makes him almost pitiable, had he not attempted to pervert his good servant Pisanio (played to perfection by Steven Skybell) to kill his wife Imogen based upon false evidence (from Iachimo, more on him anon) and his own lack of faith.  Not to mention intelligence.

Once her father banishes her husband, Imogen’s only ally at court is Posthumous’ servant Pisanio.  Steven Skybell is punctiliously if oddly dressed, adores his master and his mistress, abhors the Queen and Cloten, and fears the King. 

The wonderful Lily Rabe is Imogen, feisty and foolish, faithful and fierce — she has a temper which delights us as she physically punishes Iachimo for his lascivious behavior in Cymbeline’s court…. In Wales or in Rome, Iachimo lies like a dog on a rug.  But the traditional servant, smarter than his “betters,” saves the day by judicious misleading and lying as any good servant must.   

Banished from Wales, Posthumous does not appear to be suffering overmuch. Among his playmates in Rome is Iachimo, a viscous Italian with money but no work, except perhaps as a nightclub warbler. Daniel Sullivan made a rather tedious scene of male braggadocio into a musical number using Raúl Esparza perfectly.  In a suit a little too shiny, with song stylings a little too slick, this Iachimo crooned like a cross between Sinatra and Dean Martin. He was sleazy, he was oily, he was brilliant. Then a woman dressed like a flapper in a slinky dress and short black wig joined him, and they danced sensuously together. One does not expect a show-stopping number a third of the way through a Shakespeare play, but we got one.

Imogen with Iachimo played by Raúl Esparza.  Photo credit (c) 2015 Carol Rosegg.

Meanwhile back in Wales, the other fool, the loutish Cloten (also played by the brilliant Linklater with a pageboy blond wig that brings to mind a series of dumb movies) attempts to crudely and tunelessly woo his stepsister, since both his mother the queen and his stepfather (clearly on drugs) want the two to marry.

Cymbeline, King of Britain, is a grumpy old pill-popping monarch played gruffly by Patrick Page, who also lends his voice to Posthumous’ patron in Rome, Philario.  Cymbeline’s second wife, the present unnamed Queen and mother of Cloten, is joyously played by Kate Burton, who has a marvelous time with the traditional wicked stepmother.  She also slips into a male identity (alas not a powerful performance), Morgan, who is actually Belarius, long banished from Cymbeline’s court due to false report. 

Hamish Linklater as Cloten, Imogen's stepbrother. Photo credit (c) 2015 Carol Rosegg.

Belarius and Posthumous, both loyal to Cymbeline, are both banished from court doubtless due to the machinations of the comic book evil, poison-dabbling queen, whose little white dog doesn’t even like her — it spends its entire stage time trying to wriggle out of her arms.  Happily the dog is rescued by Cornelius the court doctor played by Teagle F. Bougere, except when he’s playing the Roman ambassador, Lucius.  Or at the same time….

In Rome, there are two layabouts who look rather like the two sycophantic gentlemen in Cymbeline’s Court, and the same two actors are those mountain folk whom Imogen-disguised-as-a-boy falls in with, who are also her long lost brothers.  These multiple characters are snidely, brutishly, and sweetly, respectively, played by David Furr and Jacob Ming-Trent.

Back in Rome, Iachimo finagles a foolish promise from the annoyingly naïve Posthumous that causes all the ruckus with Imogen, which causes her to disguise herself as a boy escaping the court and traveling to Milford Haven.  Whereupon she chances to meet old Belarius, a.k.a. Morgan, and his two sons, who are not his sons at all, but Cymbeline’s missing heirs whom Belarius kidnapped twenty years before when he was wrongly banished from Cymbeline’s court.  And then she mistakes a headless dead guy for her husband.

Got that?

It’s that kind of play.

And I left out a whole lot of stuff.

Back and forth and round and about, the cast members are doubling roles and watching each other as if it’s a play within a play.  And the scenic design by Riccardo Hernandez suggests it is. David Zinn’s costume design and Charles G. Lapointe’s hair and wig design help bring it all together.

All the absurdities of the plot upon plot intertwined with a trope and a meme make light of the heartbreak of Imogen and Posthumous.  The actors do not.  There is funny work done by all, and some heartbreaking work as well.  This production of Cymbeline most certainly works; just don’t think too hard, it tangles the brain.

As tradition happily has it, all the confusing plots and sub-plots are tied up by evening’s end, and celebrated with an antic and acrobatic dance choreographed by Mimi Lieber, making for a wholly delightful evening in Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre with a fine company of players.

~ Molly Matera, apologizing for taking so long to write this – there is a bit more than a week to go in the run of this summer production, so get yourself to the virtual or actual line for Shakespeare in the Park!

As We Like It

The Public Theatre’s 50^th season of Shakespeare in the Park has started off with a twang and a thrum and a heart-warming humdinger of a production of As You Like It.  Director Daniel Sullivan has taken the Forest of Arden and planted it in the American frontier leaning south.  A Lincoln Logs fort hides the Duke’s court up center, with a watchtower way up high.  A fellow in a vaguely Confederate uniform watches the audience amble in.  Another soldier joins him on a lower level.  Then four fabulous musicians, led by Tony Trischka, stroll on and joyously entertain us with bluegrass music written by Steve Martin (yes, walk-like-an-Egyptian Steve Martin).  Banjo, guitar, bass, and a fiddle, they picked and stroked and sang up a storm on a perfect evening in Central Park. 

Photo Credits Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A sign hangs from a tree advertising a challenge to Charles the Wrestler, and the scene is set.  One by one we meet Orlando and Adam, Celia and Rosalind, Shakespeare’s usurper Duke Frederick, his entourage -- I can just type out the list of characters in As You Like It and say they were all well cast, loving their work and sharing it with us.  Sometimes when I see a Shakespeare play I have read multiple times and seen performed as many, something amazing happens, and I hear lines suddenly clarified, suddenly new, the suddenness magical.  This was one of those evenings in the theatre.

AYLI includes so many elements:  two instances of internecine quarreling — severe to the point of banishment and attempted murder — cross dressing, disguises, romance (primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary), and a great deal of bawdy.  All these elements need to be blended together by a skilled director and, happily, Daniel Sullivan is a highly skilled, crafty, witty, and swell director. He tells the story of the play coherently, cohesively, and finds all the fun while retaining the verse and its rhythms.  Set designer John Lee Beatty integrated his clever set with Central Park’s trees so that it was tough to tell the landscape from the stage, while Jane Greenwood’s comfy period costumes made everyone easily shrug on their clothing to meet the day.

The opening scene of Shakespeare's AYLI is a weak one, providing exposition of Orlando’s family history and present estate.  Granted, in Shakespeare’s day people went to hear a play, not see it.  Nevertheless, it’s definitely telling instead of showing.  Showing comes soon enough, though, upon the entrance of Orlando’s elder brother Oliver.  The two men wrestle to the ground, Oliver emerging red-faced and furious, setting up a brother banished, and the possibility that Orlando’s decision to challenge Charles the Wrestler is not necessarily suicidal.  Knowing how to use one’s weight can be as important as having it.  This Orlando knows.

Most productions of AYLI begin to fail right there in the opening, with Orlando sounding petulant, hardly the stuff of a leading man.  Luckily the same words, under the more than capable guidance of Mr. Sullivan, sound different coming from David Furr’s Orlando, which is, bar none, the best Orlando I’ve ever seen.  Macintyre Dixon as Adam, the old manservant Oliver banishes along with his brother, is a good match for Furr, his new master.  And Omar Metwally does fine work as the elder brother with all the advantages, yet still feverish with jealousy of his younger brother’s natural graces.

Meanwhile, in the fort, Duke Frederick, the usurper of his brother Duke Senior, is an unstable fellow.  One moment he’s “hale fellow well met,” and the next he lashes out fiercely for no cause.  His exiled brother Duke Senior is of a much more even disposition, which the foolish might mistake for weakness.  The brother dukes are played by Andre Braugher, whose booming voice suits Shakespeare’s royalty and readily differentiates the dukes. He is kind and warm as Senior and changeable as Frederick.

Celia, daughter of the unstable Duke Frederick, is played with hearty relish by Renee Elise Goldsberry.  She is petite and pretty and powerful.  The connection between her and her cousin Rosalind, daughter of the exiled Duke Senior, is nearly palpable.  I’ve seen some good Celia’s, but never as clear a relationship as between these two women.  These cousins are like sisters, joking, arguing, teasing, loving, and defending one another against all comers – even if he’s a Duke.

The fights were all well staged by Rick Sordelet, performed well by Furr and Metwally and Brendan Averett, who played Charles the Wrestler. The important part of the wrestling scene, of course, is the magical moment when two sets of eyes meet, and Rosalind and Orlando are smitten, quite prepared to fall at one another’s feet.  Of course, neither can say so, and off we go.

Public Theatre Artistic Director Oskar Eustis’ Notes to the production state it clearly:  “You …do As You Like It when you’ve got a Rosalind.”  Has he got a Rosalind!  Lily Rabe is wondrous.  Articulate, witty, sharp, silly, she runs the gamut as Rosalind/Ganymede.  She was pitch perfect, gifting us with her beautiful use of verse, voice, heart and body.  Mischievously butch as she counterfeits a counterfeit of herself, witty beyond laughter in court or country.  Her Ganymede’s “You are not for all markets” admonition to Phoebe was fresh and new.

I can say with certainty that these were the best Rosalind-and-Celia and the best Rosalind-and-Orlando scenes I have ever seen.  Orlando’s not an easy role, so often appearing a doofus, but David Furr made him young and abused, young and brash, until he grew flowering into a courtier worthy of the daughter of a duke.  This was the first time I've really heard the scene between Orlando and Jaques, perhaps because it was the first time I believed Orlando was capable of the conversation. 

Stephen Spinella’s thrilling, ever looming, listening Jaques was drily funny and thoughtful and sad. The seven ages of man speech trotted along as Spinella simply told the story, without rushing, as if it had never been told before.  His opening lines just stop the show with laughter at his extraordinary tone.  He closes the first act with stillness.  I stood to stretch as others went off to the concession stand, and just watched him live those unscripted moments.  A wonderful performance.

Stephen Spinella as Jaques.  (Photo by Jennifer Broski)

Oliver Platt, not surprisingly, knows how to play the bawdy as Touchstone.  He is hilarious slapstick, rhythmic, scandalous. The pairing of Platt with Donna Lynne Champlin as Audrey, an earthy dancing fool, did not appear to be a courtly fellow taking advantage of a simple country wench.  Perhaps the opposite.  Lusty is as lusty does with those two.  I felt for poor Audrey’s wooer William (a single scene by a singular player, Brendan Titley, was just marvelous), but this Audrey and Touchstone belong together.

The foolish Silvius, in love with the shepherdess Phoebe (played by Susanna Flood, who was not quite in same part of the forest), was well done by Will Rogers with traditional oafishness that turns to wit when he learns a thing or two. 

Robert Joy’s Le Beau is charmingly foolish, torn yet loyal.  Among the banished duke’s followers is Amiens, played by the golden-voiced Jesse Lenat who leads the exiles in song.  All the crackerjack musicians (including Tashina Clarridge, Jordan Tice, Skip Ward, Anna Phyllis Smith, and Tony Trischka) in this production were splendid, as was the nifty choreography by Mimi Lieber.

In short, the Public Theatre's As You Like It is the best all around production of the play I've ever seen. Daniel Sullivan directed beautifully, Lily Rabe’s Rosalind and David Furr’s Orlando were stunningly played, Stephen Spinella is a better Jaques than we could dream, and Oliver Platt is the ultimate Touchstone. Go if you possibly can. Go wait on line beneath the shady trees of Central Park, or at the downtown theatre, or go join the Virtual Line at  http://shakespeareinthepark.org/tickets/virtual-ticketing/, but go see this well-nigh perfect production of As You Like It at the Delacorte Theatre before it closes much too soon at the end of June.

~ Molly Matera, signing off with a question:  Why isn’t this running two more weeks at the Delacorte?!

To see a lot of nifty photographs, go here:  at http://broadwayworld.com/article/Photo-Coverage-AS-YOU-LIKE-IT-Opens-at-the-Delacorte-Theatre-Oliver-Platt-More-20120622

What's In A Name?

Oscar Wilde’s utterly delightful and perhaps most accessible play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” has been playing to great acclaim at the Roundabout Theatre Company, earnings its director/star Brian Bedford accolades of all sorts. Not having seen the live production, I went for what I thought would be the next best thing, a filming in HD of a live performance.


Let us bear in mind that I don’t know that a camera can capture “The Importance of Being Earnest” even when it’s staged for film. Despite what had seemed like a dream cast for the 2002 film – Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Dame Judi Dench – the final product was dreary and slow. Perhaps cameras just ain’t got rhythm, and Oscar Wilde’s words require, of all things, rhythm. As long as each actor individually and all the actors together are in synch, theatergoers will happily journey to the heights of absurdity with them.

To film live theatre is a challenge. In the past often there was a camera merely filming the two-dimensional rectangle that is a proscenium stage. Others zoom in and have a bunch of close-ups. The National Theatre took the filming of a live performance to a new level of artistry with their recent production of “Frankenstein” (http://mollyismusing.blogspot.com/2011/04/not-your-grandmothers-frankenstein.html) where the cameras gave the filmgoers a view from the auditorium, from the wings, from the flies. Viewers were intimately involved in the story, seeing things the live audience in the theatre could not see, perhaps as fair a trade off as can be had for those unable to be present in the theatre.

Spatial relations matter onstage and cannot be seen in a close shot. I can only state this was not a problem in the “Live HD” filming at the National, so I cannot be sure which partner in the tri-party effort dropped the ball with “Earnest.” The three companies that produced the “Live HD” film of the production -- Roundabout Theatre Company, LA Theatre Works and BY Experience – missed the mark, even though BY Experience also worked with the National. “Direction” of the filming is attributed to David Stern. I hope not to see his name again. Although the director allegedly filmed three performances of the play with seven cameras and picked the best, it appeared more like he had merely read the script with the blocking marked out, and set up his shots based on something other than an understanding and passion for the play and players. His choices and pacing of close ups to longer shots showed a complete lack of rhythm, and there were too many close-ups for a play. He clearly loved Brian Bedford’s Lady Bracknell – and who wouldn’t – but instead of getting the cast’s response to Lady B, he kept doing close-ups of her/his/her face. A boring camera director cannot do justice to the work of a stage director.

As for the play itself: Brian Bedford directed this production and played the luscious role of Lady Bracknell. When asked what he thought about playing an extraordinary female role, Bedford said it was someone else’s idea that he’d initially thought a silly one. But then he’d just done Lear, and what does an actor do when he’s done Lear? Happily Bedford chose not to go camp and rather to play it straight – if I may use the term.

It’s my belief that an actor (male or female) directing himself on film may accomplish both his directing and acting jobs efficiently without diminishing one or the other; but that same actor (male or female) directing him/herself on stage is likely to diminish the accomplishment of one or the other work. After all, if he’s up there onstage acting, he’s not giving 100% of himself to the directing, and if he’s onstage directing the others, he’s not giving 100% as an actor. A dilemma. Mr. Bedford’s performance is marvelous, but this production did not seem up to his level as an actor.

That Brian Bedford’s Lady Bracknell is a delicious delight deserves repeating any number of times. He is haughty, he is stern, he is ridiculous, a perfectly marvelous Lady Bracknell.

Opposite styles are played by the two gentlemen in the play, Jack Worthing (David Furr playing it straight and stolid) and Algernon Moncrief (Santino Fontana mugging and milking). For the first time, and I’m quite familiar with the play, I wondered why the two men were friends. The point is that no one should think while watching Oscar Wilde, so clearly their disparate styles did not work well together in Act I, although they were much better in the second half of the evening, when Jack had the opportunity to be a little nuttier and Algy pulled back a bit, having met his mad match in Cecily.

As Lady Bracknell’s daughter Gwendolen, Sara Topham is upright, uptight, and prissy and, as happens in this play, perhaps a little mad, not to mention magnificently dressed. The always interesting Dana Ivey opens the second act in a state of high dudgeon, but then her Miss Prism seems always to be in that state. She is rather too broad in relation to Paxton Whitehead’s more naturalistic Dr. Chasuble. Paxton’s reverend was not a stuffy or stern churchman, but a sweet, oddly dressed, kind and practically sane character. Charlotte Parry as Cecily Cardew is right on, walking that wiggly line between absurdity and madness, believing everything she does and says makes perfect sense. Which it does, of course, in her world. She graciously invites others to join her because she’s been brought up so well.

Act I did not open auspiciously. The set (by Desmond Heeley, who also designed the gorgeous costumes) was witty and swell, a play within a play, a jolly game of a stage set as a stage set. But manservant Lane and his employer Algernon Moncrief started off in a rather effete fashion, playing caricatures of old theatrical types. Then on came Jack Worthing playing it straight. Once Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen arrived, the actors caught up with themselves and the timing began to work, as if the director’s entrance was necessary to shake or stir the other actors into the same mixture. This is a matter of style, and the director must choose one universe for all to inhabit, even the crazy people. This was not evident in Act I, but Acts II and III were very much better.

Two extremely difficult scenes are very well played here – the young ladies’ tea scene and the young gentlemen’s muffin scene. This is Wilde at his most hilarious, making mountains of molehills, character revelations out of muffins and teacakes. Timing is everything, and each duo – Topham as Gwendolen and Parry as Cecily; Furr as Jack and Fontana as Algernon – performed a perfect pas de deux.

Without the distraction of camera choices, the play may have appeared more pulled together. As it was, there was one more problem with the results on film – the play was not acted naturalistically (for the most part), or in a low-key manner. It’s high farce, and on film that comes off as rather loud and overacted. Mr. Bedford’s production is lots of fun but far from perfect, yet doubtless much better than the “film” of it attests.

~ Molly Matera, signing off on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, with miles to go before I .... see another film!