Shakespeare & Company's Tina Packer
has restaged her
much admired production of "Coriolanus" for the
opening of the company's
exciting new Founder's Theatre, which is the
first performance space
to be readied for use at their recently purchased new
complex in Lenox.
Packer's Bare Bard version of the last of
Shakespeare's Roman
tragedies fits beautifully on a stage resembling that
of the inn courtyard
theatres that were precursors to the Globe. It is a
stage large enough
to impress, but small enough so that 8 or 10 actors can
give the impression
of a crowd or a platoon. In its present Elizabethan
configuration
the audience is very much a part of the scene. As you
look at the
actors from your seat -- all the seats are good seats--
you can see other
spectators beyond them, watching and listening just as
you are. This
sort of theatre encourages the actors to acknowledge
the presence of the
audience: to address political harangues to us as if we
are citizens with
a vote or soldiers about to go into battle, to confide
asides or share
jokes with one of us in a near seat as if we were a
dear friend; and to
turn their soliloquies into dialogue, with the audience
taking on the role
of the gods, or of the other self of a character's
divided soul.
I love this, I cherish the implicit assumption that we
are all working
through the matter of the play together-- actors,
author, audience, investigating
characters and codes through a complex action in order
to see the matter
multidimensionally, . This appeal to the community for
active understanding
is what thrills me most about live performance.
Shakespeare
& Company's "Coriolanus", like the 1992 Bare Bard
"Julius Caesar",
is thrilling. It is a cold hard intellectual thrill,
however: in
spite of Shakespear & Company's humane approach
that invigorates even
the meanest of roles and ignites every spark of humor
from the ironic clash
of mighty opposites, "Coriolanus" remains a play more
to be appreciated
than enjoyed.
Caius Marcius Coriolanus is a general of Rome, in his youth one of the patriots who threw out the Tarquin kings and reestablished the Roman Republic. In the first act Marcius earns the title Coriolanus by defeating the Volscians at Corioli, taking the city single-handedly in an act of astounding personal bravery, and for this he is nominated for the state's highest office, the Consulship, in act two. His mother, Volumnia, is overjoyed: fame and honors for her son is her life's ambition. Tradition decrees that the man standing for Consul must be confirmed by the common citizens' vote, their "voices". Coriolanus is to request this humbly, showing them the wounds he took in their service. Packer's designer, Rachel Nemec, has supplied a set of short column plinths to elevate nobles leaders or heroes above the common mob and form stage pictures. The actors step up and pose when they orate, or become living statues at some appropriate time, such as when a scene in which their characters do not take part is in fact about those characters, and the idea of that hero or enemy leader looms over the scene. Coriolanus walks modestly with his fellow officers, but it is with the greatest reluctance that he comes down from his pedestal to meet the commoners and get their approval. They have recently gained-- or had restored-- a bit of influence on the patrician government through the appointment of People's Tribunes, and Coriolanus is utterly opposed. The Tribunes tell the people that Coriolanus only feigned respect and service -- once in power he will take away their rights and refuse bread to the starving. The fickle mob rushes off to rescind their confirmation, and instead of flattering and calming them Coriolanus calls them measles, minnows, rabble, and tells the nobles they are fools to encourage the mob to meddle in government. They will destroy the City. The tribunes cry "Treason", and within two scenes Coriolanus has gone from the pinnacle of honor to banishment. By the following act he has joined his old enemy Aufidius and his Volscians and is marching to destroy Rome. The single minded ferocity with which the hero cut down his City's enemies with no more regard for his own pain than theirs is now turned against the land of his birth, and threatens even his own wife, son and mother.
That wise old theatre pro Arthur Miller put the problem very well in his essay "Politics and the art of Acting" in the June 2001 issue of Harper's: "The play without a character we can really root for is in trouble. Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" is an example. It is not often produced, powerful as it is as playwrighting and poetry, no doubt because, as a totally honest picture of ambition in a frightening human being, the closest the play ever gets to love is Coriolanus's subservience to his mother. In short, it is a truthful play without sentimentality, and truthfulness, I'm afraid, doesn't sell a whole lot of tickets or draw votes." That's the only reference to Coriolanus in Miller's examination of the process by which Americans currently select our political leaders. But the playwright certainly implies that a public able to appreciate Shakespeare's play would be a public better equipped to exercise citizenship in a Republic than our TV addicted electorate is today.
In fact, there have always been some people who do
root for Coriolanus,
believing him a true hero, a superior being too noble
to be judged according
to the debased standards of commoners . They find him
principled
as well as brave, a truth teller who simply cannot
stoop to lies or flattery,
and see in his determination to destroy the city in
order to save it from
democracy a lesson in leadership. There have been
heroic actors who
played the part so -- though not Laurence Olivier, who
described Coriolanus
as "a very straightforward reactionary son of a so and
and so" and his
own celebrated performance as the product of a good
strong voice and tip
top physical conditioning. Dan McCleary's
Coriolanus
is in that line: a splendid brute, with leather lungs
and a hide tough
enough to not give a damn what lesser beings think of
him -- the courage
of the actor facing down the audience standing for the
character's courage
facing down his enemies in battle. McCleary sketches
his Coriolanus with
broad strokes-- a heavily muscled man who is energetic
and nearly joyous
when working at his specialty of hand to hand combat,
--- the spectacular
combat is under the dirction of Ty Skelton-- who
is eloquent when
defending patrician superiority, testy when out of his
field of expertise,
vicious when his values are challenged, and tongue
tied, almost stupefied,
when forced to consider another point of view than the
warrior's, which
he has been condition to regard as self evident and
absolute.
Elizabeth Ingram's Volumnia is the ferociously
ambitious mother who
has created this single minded monster-- Miller's
"picture of ambition
in a frightening human being" label goes double for
Volumnia-- and because
she has built the boundaries of her son's mind and set
the terms for his
love, she can pinpoint his defenses and reduce his
assumptions to rubble.
She hits every weak point with a mortal blow, and her
son is helpless,
bereft of honor. Is there a crueler scene anywhere than
the one in
which Volumnia is welcomed in triumph as Rome's savior,
"worth of consuls,
senators, patricians, a city full" because she has
defeated the greatest
enemy, her own son? Ingram's Volumnia towers. What she
has
done is beyond human, and she is become a monument.
Dennis Krausnick brings out the less
pleasant traits in old
Menenius, making him a much less sympathetic character
than I am used to.
Tene Carter, too, plays a Virgilia who baffles
our hope of finding
somebody we can warm up to. What does this woman feel
for her bullheaded
husband? With Volumnia eying her every move, does she
dare to feel
anything? Mark Woolet's Cominius, Samuel
Gates' Titus Lartius,
Jonathan Epstein's Aufidius, Ty Skelton's
Roman Soldier, Michael
Toomey's Junius Brutus and Lisa Wolpe's
Sicinius Velutus are
all excellent characterizations, Wolpe's Sicinius being
remarkable during
the first two seconds of each of his appearances when
one notices that
the actor playing him is female. After those two
seconds the actor disappears
behind the character. It is the same with the other
actors transforming
into new characters. Costumers Kiki Smith and
Gina Loiodice
have designed costumes that are distinctive and
classifying and that can
be whipped on and off in the wink of an eye. One does
register the
change: actor a who was playing a Roman officer a
moment ago is now a Volscian
servant. Actor b is now a guard. Packer has the actors
set
this up from the beginning, announcing their names and
roles, and donning
the first costume-- the rags of the Roman plebes-- in
full view.
But whether the change is made on stage or behind, it
is designed to enlist
the audience's imagination, not to fool us. When actors
double, it can
mean that instead of a few excellent actors in the
leads grabbing all the
attention and lesser talents filling in support and
background, major talent
and charisma may be wrapped in a beggar's rags and
speak a two line role
as if it were a star part. "Coriolanus" benefits
greatly from this
equal distribution of strength. The actors portraying
the ragged
starving citizens are as vivid as the toga draped
patrician warriors--
of course they are, they are the same actors-- and the
lower class characters'
vitality makes the dramatic case for their right to
consideration and empowerment.
The common people aren't presented sympathetically,
that would defy Shakespeare's
text. The rabble practically beg to be lied to and
manipulated.
However, they are as alive as their betters, and it is
easier on this stage
than it is on the page to see the plebes as having
needs and rights
as citizens which Coriolanus refuses to recognize. The
heroic
deeds Coriolanus has done in battle saved them from the
threat of death
or slavery. But if as Consul he doesn't care whether or
not they
starve and would deny them their freedoms as a matter
of principle, their
consent to his rule would be idiocy. When we see them
vividly, see them
the same way we see the rich and powerful, we are not
satisfied that they
deserve to be beneath the notice of the Entitled.
In spite of the recent round of rote adulation of
the W.W.II Greatest
Generation, soldiers are not the the Entitled class in
America today.
Businessmen are. They are ones credited with general
wisdom based on their
success in one specialized and aggressive activity, the
ones entitled to
set the agenda for the people's elected
representatives, and fund or starve
the nation's art. Presumably they or their heirs are
the among Founders
who have given Shakespeare & Company the
wherewithal to build this
beautiful new theatre in which, when the actors hold a
mirror up to nature,
we may compare the way Shakespeare pictures patricians
and plebeians relating
in ancient to the way rulers and ruled relate now, and
take from that comparison
what lessons we can as well as what pleasure we may.
The Founders
Theatre itself is a triumph, a lean but not mean
machine for dreams.
An ugly cinder block building that was a cross between
a quonset hut and
a garage has been wrapped round with an elegant portico
and filled with
a sort of darkly gleaming crimson canvas circus tent of
scaffolding.
The scaffolding can be reconfigured into different
sorts of stage-audience
shapes, but the space as it is now seems almost
perfect-- all it lacks
is an entranced and participating patron in every one
of its 428 comfortable
seats.