Dave Read

June 26, 2009 performance reviewed by Ed McDonnell

Shakespeare and Company schedule 2009 season

There are people who see Hamlet as a victim of paralysis, and have considered the play as a study of corruption, or as the standard for tragedy; they have been discouraged by their first experience of Shakespeare at the hands of a tenth grade teacher with no sense of rhythm.

The production of Hamlet, directed by Eleanor Holdridge and running through August 29th at the Shakespeare and Co. in Lenox, MA, is new again, and may lead anyone who sees it to encourage their friends to give the Bard a second chance.

Holdridge’s direction presents a closer look inside the very brain of Hamlet; it is a consideration of the organism under the pressures of his human experience: betrayal, grief, hate, frustration, impotence, any one of them potentially is lethal.

Jason Asprey’s performance is relentlessly powerful, sustained in focus, and true to the director’s idea of a raw, over-stimulated organism

Everyone knows paralysis is central to this story. But for this Hamlet, and for this audience, it is not numbing. There is no drowning. He does not succumb to these forces. The audience stays with him because Jason Asprey’s performance is relentlessly powerful, sustained in focus, and true to the director’s idea of a raw, over-stimulated organism.

We can imagine the actor’s pupils hugely dilated with painful sparks of current running up his spinal cord. It also works in part, because, true to form, Shakespeare and Company’s approach is to carve away anything extraneous in the text, in movement, and trappings.

The overall stark imagery is supported by the use of sound: director Holdridge intended the grating metallic blasts which “cleave the general ear” at intervals to signal the neurological events in the prince’s brain.

This seems to work. Their effect is to generate an apprehension like that of being on a lake in a lightning storm or locked in a close space with a paranoid, or with a fourteen year old boy. It also scares some viewers out of their clothes momentarily, which only contributes to the feeling of involvement.

This Hamlet is not frozen but moves forward with each development. Here, too, nothing is extraneous, nothing is wasted. He is moving forward, but is thwarted and diverted again and again. The building frustration is, well, maddening.

Even some of the immortal speeches are thrown away or not exploited in this headlong angry drive to at least try to justify his life. (This is odd, because for Shakespeare and Company, the language, above all, has always been sacred.)

Pulling together the set of innovations and the general quality of the production are the prodigious talents on the stage.

Claudius (Nigel Gore) is a suave cobra with a nice smile. It has been said that Evil is not aware of itself, and this Claudius wears it well. He is bland as a poisoner should be, and the result is icy horror.

Tina Packer is Gertrude and her special awfulness is to be at ease in the presence of the monster and still to be all that a mother should be. And all of it a lie because her motives are filthy.

Asprey, as the runaway prince, feels like the friend, intoxicated, become a tornado, whom we wish we could embrace. But he is gone. Our friend is dead already, and it is for us, on autopsy, to search for flaws.

July 7, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Berkshire Theatre Festival’s production of The Einstein Project, by playwrights Paul D’Andrea and John Klein, directed by Eric Hill, is a soul-shattering play with many scenes of beauty and poignancy, dynamically presented by a talented and dedicated cast.

And in our present tense political world, with rogue nations playing with uranium, it is a frightening play, one even more timely than it was when I first saw it at the BTF’s Unicorn in 2000.

However, in the intervening years much has changed in the play as well as in the world in which we are living, and the current production gains and loses by additions to the script (which lengthens the original one-act play to two acts, adding about a half hour of new material.)

Intensity has been gained but lyricism has been lost, which was there in the Unicorn production, despite the grim material. Isadora Wolfe’s lovely “ensemble” of slow-moving, oriental-like dancers still weave the script together, but in a less-lyrical manner.

Lost also is the acknowledgment that in a play covering so much time, from the first decade of the 20th century and on through two world wars, audiences would benefit from program notes of key dates in both Einstein’s life and in that of his world, as well as information about the man himself in relation to his pacifism and to the unhealthy relationships he had with his family. These were included in the program notes of the earlier play, and I remember urging my readers to arrive early and have time to read them.

Audiences of the current production are helped along by announcements by the broadcast voice of a news announcer who clues us in to dates and who calls attention often to the quirky side of Einstein as a clown-like innocent gambles through his pacifistic life as a scientist. Unfortunately, I found them not as effective as program notes would be.

These caveats aside, be assured that the current production is a challenging and fascinating one, and one well worth seeing.

The two leading actors Tommy Schrider as Einstein and James Barry as his protégé, scientist Werner Heisenberg, who nine years later stride again into roles they played well years ago, have developed the characters with even greater depth and work well together as BTF audiences found out in last year’s The Caretaker.

As German scientists they are joined by fascinating cohorts played by Walter Hudson, David Chandler, Kyle Fabel, each with a distinct personality, but all as Jews, later in England must hear with dismay for science, that one of their number, a leader, Einstein, living and working in America as a confirmed pacifist, has sent the letter to Roosevelt that results in the dropping of the bomb.

Miranda Hope Shea, a local young actress, is deeply moving in her role as Edward, the son whom Einstein humiliates and taunts. He appears first in a scene in Switzerland in a boat ride in which his father taunts him with a mathematical challenge of the counting of his own fingers: and in small scenes with his father he weaves in and out of the action until he is finally reduced to a strait-jacket in a sanitarium. His role in the play illustrates the non-sympathetic side of the scientific genius and pacifist.

The setting, lights and sound are fine and the production itself moving, even if one at times is confused as to sequence.

Although this reviewer was more comfortable with the simpler production, the current one is rewarding, challenging and timely. And being theatrically challenging is something that the BTF does well.

• Berkshire Theatre Festival schedule 2009 season

July 2, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

• Williamstown Theatre Festival 2009 schedule.

Children is the title of the early A. R. Gurney play that has opened the season at Williamstown Theatre Festival, but the play is dominated, not by the children and grandchildren (off-stage and on) but by the character the program lists only as Mother.

Judith Light is outstanding as the lead character, taking quiet command from her first entrance on, and, as the play continues, developing and enhancing it until its conclusion, in which she resoundingly dominates.

The 90 minute play, without intermission, is set on the terrace of a large old two-story summer home on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Obviously it has been in the family for years, a place returned to every summer, as it is returned to this 1970s 4th of July.

The setting, designed by James Noone, is an idyllic one with a weather-beaten house and flower-bedecked terrace. Great bushes and trees hide the tennis courts (decaying) and the beach beyond where the father of the family always swam naked, leaving his bathrobe on the beach.

The returning children bring much baggage with them, spouses, and many grandchildren who populate the off-stage areas and far outnumber the persons we see on the stage.

Those we do see include Barbara (Katie Finneran), a daughter whose marriage has ended in divorce and who admits that every summer since she was a young girl she has carried on an affair with the (originally) Italian gardener, who now is a big real estate developer. At the moment she seems to have interest only in slipping off for quick clutches in his parked van.

More importantly, we also see Randy (James Waterston), the eldest son, who probably loves the site itself more than any of the other children. He has arrived this summer to bewail the erosion of the tennis court, which has faltered as much as his marriage to Jane (Mary Bacon) seems to have. She is the mother of some of the unseen upstairs children. Most importantly, all his life Randy has vied with his un-seen brother Pokey, baby of the family. Their rivalry is a second vital thread in the plot.

Pokey (though an off-stage character) figures largely in the plot. He has gone further from the nest, become a successful Washington lawyer, has a Jewish wife, and fathered a batch of children who, when they arrive, shock with their offensive language and drinking of coke to say nothing of setting off the fire-crackers early.

For Pokey, absent from the scene since the father’s death, is a dominator, and when the seemingly quiet contained mother calmly announced her intention to marry “Uncle Bill” in September, Pokey is on the scene to prove that by doing so, she will forfeit the estate to the children. He, after all, has written the will and has held on to it. He has also possessively held onto his father’s “day books” that recorded competitions in grades and sports. He is a scary character, at best.

King Lear threads suddenly emerge in a script too full of Chekhovian characters (each with off-stage lives) as well as ones from Cheever short stories, with Gurney’s additions.

It is a tribute to Gurney that the on-stage characters, and very especially the dynamically and skillfully acted role of the mother, and to a lesser extent by Randy, (whose final exit in the play says much in terms of his lack of attire) make all this work. And it does work, witnessed by the repeated curtain calls for Judith Light and then cast as a whole.

As a reviewer I found this play hard to describe with almost too much plot in so short a time. Gurney has gone on to write more significant plays; indeed he has had nine productions at the Williamtown Theatre Festival. This is a rewarding play, if not Gurney’s greatest one. And it is well worth seeing in this splendid production, under the fine direction of John Tillinger who has directed other Gurney scripts over the years and is sensitive to his nuances.

The ending I have deliberately avoided describing, leaving future audiences to be delighted with it for themselves.