Dramatis Personae

I'm on my annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Festival of Canada in Stratford, Ontario, where I will be seeing five plays in four days. This, along with my trip to the William Inge Festival each April, is how I spend most of my vacation time. It's not really a surprise; in my other life, when I'm not crunching numbers for the school district in Miami, I am a recovering theatre teacher and playwright.

I've seen three productions so far; My One and Only, A Delicate Balance, and The Merchant of Venice, and I've jotted down a few thoughts about them. As saying goes: Read on, Macduff.


My One and Only: Sheer Joy

The Stratford Festival started out as a three-play bill of Shakespeare plays under a tent on the banks of the Avon River in the small town 60 miles (100 km) west of Toronto in 1953. Since then it has grown to an eight-month event that includes standard musicals like Oklahoma!, avant-garde experimental pieces (La Guerre, Yes Sir!), British 18th century and Restoration comedies (The School for Scandal and The London Merchant), French farce (Moliere's Tartuffe) and modern classics like Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It's entirely possible to spend a week at Stratford and not see something written by Shakespeare.

The reasons are simple: economics. There are a lot of people who love theatre, but they also like seeing something beyond what the Bard wrote, and the festival recognized this early on. (My first trip to Stratford in 1970 included only one Shakespearean play out of three.) And the people who run the festival also know that their audience includes a lot of people, usually the elderly, who come from Ohio, New York, and as far away as Chicago for the weekend and they want to see something that will gladden their hearts (if not their pacemakers) with reminders of theatre from their own time period done with polish and energy by attractive and brilliant young dancers and singers. Something like A Delicate Balance (see below) can only go so far.

My One and Only certainly fills the bill. It is nothing but pure joy and confection, a jewel box of Gershwin songs put together in juke box fashion -- a trend among modern musicals (vide Mama Mia! and Jersey Boys) wrapped around a simple plot of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-marries-girl with tons of toe-tapping (literally) thrown in. Tommy Tune, who created this piece in 1983, knew the heart and soul of this kind of theatre, and it works like a charm at the Avon Theatre in Stratford, a restored movie palace from the 1920's. Laird Mackintosh and Cynthia Dale are perfect as the two lovers destined to be each other's one and only, and the rest of the supporting cast is as perfect as a Busby Berkeley chorus line. And if it takes this kind of show to make the money so that the festival can undertake the plays that draw a smaller crowd but advance the art form, then so be it; let the gaffers and gammers nibble on the sweets while those of us with more adventurous tastes check out the boys in leather in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II in the Studio Theatre.

Next year, the artistic directorship will pass from the capable hands of Richard Monette, who has guided the festival since 1994 into a shared directorship that includes Des McAnuff, who directed, among other things, Jersey Boys on Broadway. The festival also plans to restore its old name, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and include more of the Bard's plays, including Hamlet. But they're also planning productions of The Music Man and Cabaret. The more things change...

A Delicate Balance: On the Edge

There are two rules in the WASP culture: 1. Never do anything that would embarrass the family, and 2. Have another drink. Anything that disturbs the delicate balance of going to the club, having lunch with the girls, the cocktail hour with polite conversation, or trips to the City must be dealt with by ignoring the problem, sweeping it under the rug, and not talking about it. We must go on; is your martini dry enough, dear?

As a product of the upper middle class culture that includes prep schools, summer homes, the Ivy League, and the country club, seeing the Stratford production of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance hit home for me and my parents. At the first intermission we looked at each other and said, "Remind you of anyone we know?"

The comfortable lives of Tobias and Agnes in their comfortable home in Darien or Greenwich or Winnetka or Perrysburg have only a few minor disturbances; Agnes's alcoholic sister Claire is living with them, and the more she drinks the more she serves as the truth-teller, the Fool to King Lear. Their daughter Julia is returning home to the safe haven of her room after her fourth marriage has failed, but this is nothing new; children like this must return to the nest because they never grow up. All is well, sort of.

But into this come Harry and Edna, dear friends of Tobias and Agnes, who are driven out of the their home by a nameless terror. As they sat in their living room enjoying their evening drink they were both suddenly seized with this overwhelming fear, so they seek refuge with Tobias and Agnes, moving in without asking and in the process bringing along the pathogen of this terror with them, passing it off to each one in turn until everyone has faced it, dealt with it in their own way, and -- true to the culture -- subsumed it with booze.

If the only play you know by Mr. Albee is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, then this play may seem like a kinder, gentler version of the same idea. Yet in spite of the fact that there is far less violence and far less outward brutality, in its own way this play cuts far deeper and with far more surgical precision than the bludgeon of the first play. And in this play the characters give you the chance to not just identify with them -- as seemingly the audience did; as I was leaving the theatre I overheard one other audience member say to her companion, "They're just like us except not as mean" -- you get to know them and care about them, and this is done not through long speeches of exposition but by their little tics and quirks that reveal so much in so many small ways.

I must admit that I have a soft spot for plays like this and emphasis of character interaction over the melodramas of action and emotional extremism. It is far more revealing that someone deals with a crisis by making minute adjustments to the throw pillows and knick-knacks on the coffee table than it is by someone pulling a gun, and sometimes a single word or a phrase can do more than anything to drive home a point that terrifies the audience than all the heroes suffering a heart attack and tumbling to the bottom of the stairs.

The cast includes Martha Henry as Agnes; Ms. Henry has been a part of the Stratford experience in some form or another since 1962, and here she is the perfect hostess. David Fox, taking the place of the late William Hutt, has all the right moves as Tobias, the genial patriarch/bartender, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Poppy Bush. The role of Harry is played by James Blendick, who often plays character roles, but here he brings a touch of nuance and preppie charm to the role of the gentle but imposing friend. Fiona Reid plays Claire the truth-teller without a hint of malice or stereotyping, and Michelle Giroux as Julia, the wounded child, touched me deeply because I know her and have been in her place at least once in my life. But then, in this play, as in all good plays, we will all find someone who reminds us of us.

The Merchant of Venice: The Cost of Doing Business

One of the more intriguing characters that William Shakespeare used in his canon is that of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice. Drawing from a stock character -- or more correctly, a caricature -- of the stereotypical Jew of Elizabethan times, Shakespeare embellished him with the dimensions of humanity that makes it hard to decide if Shylock is the villain, demanding his literal pound of flesh in payment of a forfeited loan, or the victim of cruel antisemitism and driven to his actions in revenge for the treatment he's received at the hands of the Christians who spit on him as they take their loans from him. What makes it all the more intriguing is that over the centuries our view of Shylock and his portrayal in the play has changed because of outside circumstances and enlightenment on the part of the audience. Treating Shylock and his faith as "alien" in Venice -- the city he calls as much home as any of the other characters -- paints him as the perpetual outsider, and his odd religion is unwelcome, condemned and feared by the Christians, a practice that continues to this day, if not so much against the Jews as it is against, say, perhaps the Muslims.

To be fair, there's no lack of stereotyping by Shakespeare of other ethnic cultures and nationalities in the play. He pokes fun at the French, the Germans, the Scottish, the Arabs, and even the English, but he does them in comic relief as Portia reviews her choices of the men who have come to ask for her hand in marriage. (And Shakespeare has no problem in stereotyping women, either, even as he creates one of the more independent women in his repertoire in Portia, but the only way she can get ahead in a man's world is by pretending to be one.) But the portrait of Shylock is the only one where Shakespeare not only uses the stereotypes of the time, he also gives us the view of the world through the eyes of Shylock and lets us see how he is treated, and lets him explain why he feels compelled to strike back at his tormentors.

...if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgrac'd me and hind'red me half a million; laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies. And what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Shakespeare is rare among playwrights of his time in that he allows his protagonist to explain his reasons for his motivations; certainly he does not give equal time to Iago in Othello as to why he "hates the Moor;" when given the chance to justify his actions at the end of the play, Iago proclaims his perpetual silence. But Shylock appeals to the human frailties and failings by raising up the Jew out of the "subhuman" category to which he's been subjected, and demanding that his persecutors see him as just as human as they are is certainly an element that makes him more than just a stereotype. While it may not engender sympathy for him -- he is as unlikeable a character as you will meet regardless of his faith -- it does give him the dimensions that make him worth paying attention to.

The production here at Stratford stars Graham Greene as Shylock. You might remember Mr. Greene from his role as Kicking Bird in Dances with Wolves and other roles. Here he portrays Shylock as a Wall Street businessman, foregoing the stereotypical costume of the yarmulke, beard, and prayer shawl as is often seen in productions of the play. He is making a business deal here with Antonio, the eponymous merchant of the play, and when the loan can't be paid, he demands his payment without religious fervor but cold and hard demand, lacking, as Portia notes in her famous monologue (which is read, oddly, as a legal brief), "the quality of mercy." When Shylock is defeated by his own demands for the exact rule of law -- a lesson not to be lost on certain political parties -- he accepts the defeat and the punishment, not to mention the hypocrisy of the Christians who show the same lack of mercy in demanding that he convert -- with shrug and a chuckle as if the whole episode is the risk you take when you do business with people in Venice.

The rest of the cast was admirable, including Severn Thompson, who played Portia, and Raquel Duffy as Narissa, her friend and co-conspirator at the trial. The set, on the Stratford Festival thrust stage, was minimal and unintrusive, as it should be. The only thing that seemed out of place was the costuming, which seemed to combine Renaissance and modern times and made you wonder what exactly the designer was trying to say. If it was an attempt at making a link between that time and now, it was done in a way with voluminous skirts (one worn by Portia made me think it was inspired by Shelob the spider from The Lord of the Rings) and the men's clothes, with the exception of Shylock, looked like they had been bought at a Goth-type Renaissance Fair. Fortunately, in this case, it was the only discordant note in what was otherwise an interesting and well-directed production.

I still have yet to see An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde and The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare. I'll report in on them later, but now it's time for intermission.

Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.