The Surprising TFANA Tamburlaine — Still Running Red!

Theatre for a New Audience continues to use its new space at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center well.  This time they’ve provided the opportunity to see Marlowe’s Tamburlaine for the first — and presumably last — time.

For some gladsome reason Michael Boyd decided to cut the two 3-4 hour plays that comprise Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2, into one play that runs about 2 ½ hours with 30 minutes in the middle to give the stage crew time to mop up all the blood during intermission.  The play may not be so bloody as Evil Dead the Musical nor The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and yet it holds its own.

The play follows a chronological and geographical structure as Tamburlaine (a Scythian shepherd who has turned to raiding and marauding and gathering followers along the way), goes from territory to territory in Africa and Asia to conquer and control. While this pointless continuation of killing for titles appears illogical to a modern audience, that doesn’t keep the playwright from moving from one place on a map (he loves place names!) to the next, so Tamburlaine can kill one king, regent, prince after another.  It’s mad.  And it’s bold.  The battle between religious groups is nothing new — Marlowe has some Christian king breaking his word to Muslims, Muslims betray one another, and the only one who wins is the Scythian marauder Tamburlaine, who claims the title of every man he kills — King of Persia, Emperor of Turkey, Kings of Fez, Morocco, Argier, the map expands as the play continues.  It certainly sounds like nothing much has changed since Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine around 1587 and the present.  The maps have merely expanded to more land and changed some names.

I offer immense kudos to director/editor Michael Boyd as well as gratitude since I’m not likely to sit through two nights of four hours of bloodletting however heightened the language.  The theatricality of the blood-letting is admirable, the effects horrifying — although the gallons of blood did not compare to the tossing of a single cut-off tongue, which left us all aghast.  Tamburlaine goes beyond beyond, and even the come-uppance of dis-likable characters goes too far.  Mind you, there are a lot of laughs in this production of Tamburlaine, particularly from the ever off-kilter Saxon Palmer.  Add to him the delightful Steven Skybell, Matthew Amendt, Chukwudi Iwuji in an extraordinary performance going from the heights to the pits... really the whole cast is marvelous.

John Douglas Thompson and Chukwudi Iwuji (Photo Credit Gerry Goodstein)

The brilliant, amazing, lovably terrifying John Douglas Thompson as Tamburlaine the Great is a requirement for a play like this, and Mr. Thompson can carry it.  Although I cannot understand quite how his (or anyone’s) rhetoric could lead Theridamas (Andrew Hovelson) to betray his country or king (etc.), nor to persuade his captive to happily become a wife, Thompson’s Tamburlaine was magical and funny and oddly down-to-earth.  And quite mad, of course.  No resting on his laurels, no matter how many he conquered — he just liked the conquering.  Merritt Janson did fine work as Tamburlaine’s other conquest, the unlikely wife, Zenocrate (daughter of the Soldan of Egypt).  Nilanjana Bose was more than convincing as Olympia, the conquered woman still loyal to her husband even in death. 

Of all the wonderful actors in this play, I think my favorite was Paul Lazar, who set us up to laugh from the opening, so we knew it would be OK to laugh through the bloodletting as he played the doomed King of Persia, later the Soldan of Egypt, and finally Almeda the Jailor. 

Finally, the choreography by Sam Pinkleton, music by Arthur Solari, fight direction by J. Allen Suddeth all worked together to bring us this remarkable piece edited and directed by Mr. Boyd with dramaturgy by Jonathan Kalb.  Rather than rolling over in his grave at the massive cuts to his scripts, I suspect Mr. Marlowe is grinning ear to ear at this modern re-telling.  After all, everyone but writers know that less is more.

Alas, I saw this play near the end of its run so recommending it is practically a pointless exercise — EXCEPT that run has been extended through January 4^th.  http://www.tfana.org/season-2015/tamburlaine/overview  Do your darnedest to make it there — otherwise, just keep an eye out for anything edited or directed by Michael Boyd, and anything in which John Douglas Thompson appears.  Well done, TFANA.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, probably for the last post this year….or maybe not….

On the Birth of the Bard

Last year I wrote a reasonably well-prepared post about William Shakespeare and his plays in celebration of his birthday on this very blog. Alas, this year, well, I’ve been a bit lax in gathering data and thoughts and such, so I may be a bit doddery (Lear creeps in already) in these scribblings.  I will now stop procrastinating, for as Will said, “In delay there lies no plenty.”  Or Good’n’Plenty.  Off we go.

The thing about Shakespeare is that we go to hear the words.  We see the same plays over and over again because the same play can take a different path when someone new directs it or acts in it or designs it or thinks about it and puts it all together to communicate their interpretation to us, the willing audience.  And if we disagree, we get to argue about it.  Who could ask for anything more.

We will see their spiffy production values and costumes and themes and such, but still we go to hear.  Hear the same sentence sound remarkably different because a different actor is saying it to yet another actor.  Let’s take King Lear, for example; it’s a year for Lears.  There’s your Lear, and there’s your Lear talking to your Regan.  Or your Goneril.  Or your Cordelia.  And your Lear has different feelings about each of these daughters depending on the actor playing Lear, the actor playing Goneril, the actor playing Regan, the actor playing Cordelia.  So many dynamics to play with, so many possibilities.  And each time we hear this Lear we haven’t seen before speak the same lines another Lear did to his daughters, the words are new and fresh.

Everyone wants to do Lear — the play has very fine male roles, of course, but also two excellent female roles and one possibly impossible female role — so there’ll be plenty more to come and to compare.  All of this applies to many of the plays, of course.  Lear is an easy example this year. 

Diana Rigg as Regan

Last month I saw Theatre For a New Audience’s (“TFANA”) production of King Lear in which Michael Pennington undertook the role of Lear under the direction of Arin Arbus.  His Lear was a pretty angry fellow in full control of his faculties when he makes all the foolish assumptions and foolhardy decisions of his first scene.  Later he goes a bit dotty and becomes softer and more understanding.  He notices things then — things like there were subjects (people) to be cared for, to be protected, in his kingdom, and he hadn’t done his job well.  It was a very socially-aware Lear.  I’m told, although I didn’t see it myself, that Frank Langella’s Lear performed the month before at BAM, started off that same first scene practically doddering and then became clearer in his madness.  Utterly different men, utterly different choices, utterly different relationships.  In the TFANA Lear, my favorites were the Regan (a marvelously sharp and cynical Bianca Amato) and her husband Cornwall (a delightfully perverse Saxon Palmer).  I decided to re-view a Lear still in my memory from the 1980s for its fabulous Edmund and Edgar pairing of Robert Lindsay and David Threlfall.  The Lear was Olivier.  The Fool, oh the Fool, was John Hurt!  Next week I’ll be seeing a live broadcast from London of a production directed by Sam Mendes in which Simon Russell Beale takes on Lear.

But I digress. 

In the past year I saw some splendid productions of Shakespeare plays, including —

• London’s Donmar Warehouse’s production of Julius Caesar¹ set in a women’s prison transferred handily to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.  Directed by the fabulous Phyllida Lloyd, Dame Harriet Walter as Brutus and Frances Barber as Julius Caesar led an all-female cast to the heights and depths and yes it worked.  This was the perfect example of familiar lines carrying all new meaning based on the interpretations of different direction, actors, genders, and styles.

Harriet Walter as Brutus

• TFANA’s inaugural production in its new home in another part of Brooklyn was of A Midsummer Night’s Dream² directed by Julie Taymor.  It was as magical and delectable and high-flying as you might expect from Ms. Taymor.

Tina Benko as Titania

• In addition to more snow than we’re accustomed to, winter brought us two plays in repertory³ from Shakespeare’s Globe, not in its usual visiting venue in lower Manhattan.  Rather, these two gorgeous (costumes, set, music, everything), all-male Globe productions traveled to Broadway. 

-         Twelfe Night starred Mark Rylance as Olivia in what might be the most extraordinary performance I’ve seen him give yet, and he’s always remarkable.  Stephen Fry’s Malvolio was also delicious.

-         Richard III starred Mr. Rylance again in the title role, but the play showed itself as it is — so much about Richard that the other characters and the story are short-changed.  Not by the actors, however.  For just one example, Samuel Barnett (a fine Viola in the Twelfe Night) was a fabulous and powerful Queen Elizabeth in Richard III.

At a movie-house I saw the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Coriolanus⁴ broadcast live from Covent Garden, London, to Kew Gardens, Queens.  The live broadcast was almost as exciting as being there live to see Tom Hiddleston’s performance as a youthful and disdainful Coriolanus.  It was an interesting production of a problematical play.  And, to follow up, I also watched the Ralph Fiennes film version.  Two views of Coriolanus in one year is quite unusual.

The long-awaited Joss Whedon black-and-white modern day Much Ado About Nothing⁵ opened on a rainy night last summer.  It was fun, and there were some delightful performances, but the mores and manners of Much Ado do not lend themselves well to modern settings, in my opinion.  Viewing that film did, however, inspire me to re-view Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film of the same play, which was a polar opposite to the Whedon film.  It’s all a matter of interpretation, not to mention mood.

How far afield can one go in interpreting Shakespeare’s words?  From The Tempest played on an Elizabethan stage in which the sea and sand and cave are all artfully explained in poetry because they cannot be physically brought into the old Globe, all the way to a science fiction film that introduced Robby the Robot as a sort of Ariel and Dr. Morbius as Prospero, with Anne Francis — in remarkably skimpy outfits for 1956; there is clearly nothing new under the sun — as Miranda on the planet Altair IV instead of a desert island.  Shakespeare:  Passport to the Universe.

Among my theatre goings this year, I saw an interesting new play that echoed themes of A Doll’s House, which I also saw this year in an excellent production directed by Carrie Cracknell with Hattie Morahan as Nora. But I won’t be seeing either of those plays again.  It’s Shakespeare that bears repeating, that we go to year after year, wondering how will that director show it, that actor interpret it, what will it look like to an audience that can never get enough of Shakespeare.  How will it sound this time?

Right now, for mood music, I’ve got a DVD of “Theatre of Blood” playing in the background — the story of a Shakespearean actor who decides that first he must kill all the critics, all by methods found in the Bard’s plays.  Vincent Price, Diana Rigg — full of Shakespearean quotes and plots and a cavalcade of British actors of stage and screen.  Such fun.

By the way, Michael Graves, an old friend from my acting days, moved down to New Mexico, and he is right now rehearsing his first Lear for a reading at the Aux Dog Theatre.  Anyone anywhere near Albuquerque, please go see him on Thursday for me and continue this Lear year (http://www.auxdog.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=60&products_id=502 ).

Happy Birthday, Will.  Many exciting returns of the day.  And thank you for your never-ending gifts.

¹ http://www.mollyismusing.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-donmar-st-anns-warehouses-all.html

² http://www.mollyismusing.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-dream-opening-for-tfanas-new-home.html

³ http://www.mollyismusing.blogspot.com/2014/01/in-repertory-twelfe-night-and-winter-of.html

⁴ http://www.mollyismusing.blogspot.com/2014/02/coriolanus-at-donmar-or-live-theatre.html

⁵ http://www.mollyismusing.blogspot.com/search/label/Joss%20Whedon

~ Molly Matera, sending you off to another site where lots of people are wishing Shakespeare a happy 450^th Birthday:  http://birthday2014.bloggingshakespeare.com/