A Varied Tempest

A thickly hot night at the Delacorte Theater vaguely threatened to storm all evening, with the occasional stiff breeze suddenly ceasing as thunder rumbled.  Or was it thunder? A tumble of instruments sat stage right, a great many of them shouting and singing at the touch of percussionist Arthur Solari.  His finely tuned playing accompanied a tempest of a different sort in The Public Theater’s first production of Shakespeare in the Park’s 2015 season: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  The flashing lights (designed by David Lander) and booming drums of the plays’ opening storm were startling and grumbled sporadically throughout the evening leaving the weather and the story on edge.  Riccardo Hernandez’s set was functional in iron, hemp, and wood, bare catwalks with steps and ropes, augmented by a spiral staircase adding to illusions of airborne characters in the play. 

Prospero and Ariel.  Photo Credit 2015 Joan Marcus.

This summer’s production is the second time Sam Waterston has played Prospero — the first was almost 40 years ago.  He is clear, engaged, and irascible.  His skilled phrasing presents us with the poetry of the play at its best.  On occasion he seemed to strain to push the words out, while some sections ran together in my ears. Mr. Waterston is a crotchety Prospero until he takes the noble step to not only make peace with those who usurped his dukedom 12 years before, but to forgive them, a totally believable transformation in a man whose anger is spent and who now knows his daughter is safe and loved.

The Tempest at the Delacorte.  Photo credit Joan Marcus.

Francesca Carpanini plays Prospero’s daughter Miranda with sweet innocence, rendering the character’s most famous lines quite well.  Only the love scenes came off as dully as they are written (sorry, Will) opposite a competent but uninteresting Rodney Richardson as Ferdinand, son of the king of Naples.  Charles Parnell played the kingly co-conspirator Alonso sternly and well.  Cotter Smith did solid work as Antonio, the brother who betrayed Prospero and now encourages Sebastian (Frank Harts), the brother of King Alonso, to repeat history and augment it with murder.  Bernard White was an engaging Gonzalo although he appeared, 12 years after Prospero last saw him, to be much too young for Prospero to refer to him as “the good old man.”  Louis Cancelmi as Caliban was anything but deformed except in his odd speech.

Michael Greif directed a smoothly building production with good performances from his cast, with particularly memorable work by:

• Chris Perfetti as other-worldly Ariel, whose oddly echoing vocal delivery and off-balance stance served well;
• the sweet and funny Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Trinculo, who was well paired with
• the scruffily hilarious Danny Mastrogiorgio as Stephano.

Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano.  Photo Credit:  (C) 2015 Joan Marcus

The oft-dreaded (by me) supernatural ceremonials called for by Prospero were some of the best I’ve ever seen.  The dancing and singing of melodious music by Michael Friedman blessed the ceremony of union orchestrated by spirits — Tamika Sonja Lawrence’s Ceres introduced the exceptional Olga Karmensky and Laura Shoop singing as Iris and Juno respectively.  The choreography by Denis Jones was lilting and adventurous and allowed the Ensemble to shine as sprites of the island.  These fantastical rites were so magically beautiful I was rapt and happy in them.

Michael Greif’s production was a touch uneven, leading me to wonder if it would have been as pleasurable an evening had this production been done indoors, absent the atmosphere of Central Park, the breeze through the trees, the view of Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle beyond the set ….we will never know. The play filled the Delacorte Theatre, running about two hours forty minutes with nary a drop of rain.  A fine night out in Central Park at the Delacorte celebrating Shakespeare. 

~ Molly Matera, signing off to re-read the enchanting verse of this oh so quotable script.

A Creaky Heiress

My friend Matthew said it best after a torturous first act: “Creaky, isn’t it?”  The play The Heiress is as rusty as the Tin Man, and that’s not just because it takes place (allegedly) in 1850.  The more I think about what went wrong and what went reasonably well in this production of The Heiress, the more it seems I must take the director Moisés Kaufman to task. 

By the end of the second act we were admiring of the play’s structure, in which the daughter becomes her father.  It unfortunately takes a long time for this production to get there.  The play (as well as the Oscar-winning screenplay based on it back in 1949, and a Burt Lancaster film I’m fond of, Trapeze) was written by the husband and wife playwriting team of Ruth and Augustus Goetz, and based on the 1880 novel Washington Square by Henry James.  Not a bad pedigree.  

The scenic design by Derek McLane created a performance space that can be appreciated from the steeply raked mezzanine as well as the orchestra, and it’s gorgeous as well as functional. The tastefully appointed living room of the Washington Square townhouse was lush, and atmospherically lit by David Lander with a discreet sound design by Leon Rothenberg.  Albert Wolsky’s costumes are period, and the actors wear them with grace and naturalness.  In fact one of the problems of the production may be the naturalistic style in which it’s played, when it’s clearly a creaky old melodrama.  Mr. Kaufman staged the play well, but his direction of his actors and the styles of the play were questionable.

In the first act, Jessica Chastain played Catherine Sloper, in an early scene with her Aunt Penniman (the stalwart Judith Ivey), as a shy but sweet and fairly normal young woman.  For the rest of the first act, she played her as Temple Grandin.   Her voice was more in line with her intentions in the second act, but I felt she has vocal work to do to return to the theatre — while not grating on film, her voice is unnatural onstage.  On the other hand, Ms. Chastain’s physical choices made sense.  She could show grace in a practiced if old-fashioned movement like a deep curtsy; she was appropriately less than graceful in her shyness and bouncing about, and later despair.  But whenever she spoke, I wanted to just read the script and cut her out of it. Where Ms. Chastain’s Catherine ends up in the second act is fabulous, but where did that woman come from?  Intellectually she came from the images of her held by the most important men in her life, her father and Morris Townsend.  But I didn’t see that progression in her, I just know it because the play’s structure showed me.  

David Strathairn, whom I will see do anything, struck me as more of the decade before World War I than the decade before the Civil War, and was a rather soft variation on Dr. Austin Sloper.  He was well mannered while insensitive.  His daughter has minimal social skills because he hasn’t many.  He only knows how to be polite — his kindness is restricted to his medical practice. 

Judith Ivey is (Aunt) Lavinia Penniman.  Dr. Sloper’s widowed sister, married for many years to a Reverend, is an absurd romantic with a practical streak, and Ms. Ivey’s portrayal is an utter delight.  It is she, rather than Catherine, that Mr. Townsend romances so very well, and her scenes with Morris are a pleasure — she knows what he’s doing but enjoys him too much to be concerned.  After all, every man has some flaw.  The audience would know neither Catherine nor Austin Sloper were it not for Lavinia’s incessant chatter that annoys them enough for them to show us their true colors.

My favorite performance is a tie between Ms. Ivey and Caitlin O’Connell, who played the doctor’s other sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Almond.  We meet “Aunt” Liz at the same time as we meet her daughter — Catherine’s cousin — Marian Almond (played with a warm and lively manner by Molly Camp), who is engaged to marry Arthur Townsend (a dull fellow well played by Kieran Campion).  Ms. O’Connell’s Liz is warm, clever, practical, yet still shares some of her giggly sister Lavinia’s everlasting hope.  

The Almonds bring along Arthur’s cousin several times removed, Morris Townsend, just back from Europe where he learned to love fine things.  The Sloper house is fine in itself and filled with beautiful things, consumable and not.  This handsome young man was played by Dan Stevens, who sounded like good casting for the role.  However, he had better chemistry with Ms. Ivey than with Ms. Chastain, so at no time could the audience feel this was a romance thwarted.  We always knew Dr. Sloper was right about that fellow.  While Mr. Stevens’ work on Downton Abbey lead us to believe he could handle old-fashioned, formal language, Morris Townsend’s words sounded stiff.  

Virginia Kull did good work as Maria, the Slopers’ loyal maid, with true affection for the members of the household she serves.  We didn’t see Ben Livingston, we just heard him as the voice of the coachman from across the square; yet we appreciated his fine work as we heard his despair when his needs were not met.  

Dee Nelson brought hope onto the stage then left it behind as Morris’ widowed sister, Mrs. Montgomery.  Her affection for her brother is not blind, and while she starts the scene with anticipation of a good match for him, she sees the bleaker future when she meets Catherine.  

This scene in particular makes Dr. Sloper seem much crueler than Mr. Strathairn plays him.  Clearly Mr. Strathairn sees Dr. Sloper as a man who cannot be less than honest, although he is unfailingly polite.  What he sees as flaws in his daughter are the shields she has created to protect herself from his cold gaze.  

The problems of this production are fourfold. 

1. The play creaks with stiff language despite a solid structure.  Melodrama doesn’t play awfully well in this century, especially when more than half the cast are playing it naturalistically.
2. Dr. Sloper was rather too soft.
3. Ms. Chastain ‘s choices, while consistent, seemed to imply that Catherine Sloper’s personality issues were mental instead of emotional, so her transformation in the second act did not follow.
4. There was no chemistry between Ms. Chastain’s Catherine Sloper and Mr. Stevens’ Morris Townsend.  There can be no heartbreak — for Catherine alone, of course — without love.

This The Heiress had far more laughs and chuckles than I would have expected.  I enjoyed several performances and recognized the quality of the play, but wondered what the production with Cherry Jones several years ago might have looked like.

~ Molly Matera, signing off and sighing in disappointment.