 |
| Hot
(and funny) stuff: (l-r) Dillahunt and Hamilton in The
Night of the Iguana. |
Sex
on the Beach
By
James Yeara
The
Night of the Iguana
By
Tennessee Williams, directed by Anders Cato
Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, Mass., through Aug.
12
‘You
look like you had it,” Maxine says.
“You
look like you’ve been having it, too.” Rev. Shannon replies.
This initial exchange between the recently defrocked Rev.
Lawrence Shannon (Garret Dillahunt) and the recently dehusbanded
Maxine Faulk (Linda Hamilton) get the first laughs in Berkshire
Theatre Festival’s excellent production of Tennessee Williams’
1961 play The Night of the Iguana and sets the scene
for the rest of performance. Dillahunt’s Shannon is one step
away from the gutter, and Hamilton’s deliciously named Faulk
just rolled out of it. What exhausts Shannon is what enflames
Maxi Faulk, and she eyes the handsome on-the-edge ex-minister
like a devout communicant awaiting the Host. Unlike Williams’
other great plays, under Anders Cato’s sensitive direction,
BTF’s Iguana finds the surprising laughter at the heart
of the play, and the surprising hopeful ending. Threats of
death, abandonment, betrayal, and madness circle Williams’
Iguana, but they ultimately stay out of the illumination
thrown off by Maxi Faulk’s fire for brittle Rev. Shannon.
Iguana
tells the story of the newly widowed Faulk and her healthy
“swimming boys” Pancho (Ricky Fromeyer) and Pedro (Joshua
Gunn) as the three act as caretakers for the Costa Verde Hotel
in Puerto Barrio on the west coast of Mexico in 1940. Plopped
into their sweaty midst are Shannon, an Episcopalian minister-turned-tour
guide who was “locked out of his parish for fornication and
heresy in the same week.” Shannon has a love-hate relationship
with teenage girls—he loves them and then immediately hates
himself for the act. As the action begins, he brings a tour
of teenage girls from a Baptist College under the watchful
eyes of brass-lunged chaperone Miss Judith Fellows (an excellent
Charlotte Maier) which brings new definition to “living hell,”
and Nantucket spinster Hannah Jelkes (Amelia Campbell) with
her grandfather Jonathan Coffin (expertly played by BTF veteran
William Swan), at 97 the “oldest living and practicing poet.”
The game playing, revelations, humiliations, and ultimate
redemption play out with a heady mirth as intoxicating as
the “rum cocos” Maxi continually drinks. Dillahunt (who has
appeared on HBO’s Deadwood ) is riveting as a man whose
sexual prowess and proclivity are at odds with his intelligence
and soul. Only Hamlet would be a match for Rev. Shannon’s
tortured mirth. Campbell makes a fitting foil for Dillahunt,
matching his sweating sexual contradictions with a cool, almost
clinical acceptance and observations of all things human.
But it’s Hamilton who’s a revelation here. Her Maxine Faulk
embodies lust. Her blue shirt tied up to expose her midriff,
the buttons undone to leave her heaving cleavage to the sun,
you can taste the salt of her sweat and smell the rum coco
on her tongue. Her continual bantering with Shannon—“Maxine,
my girl, you’re bigger than life and twice as unnatural” Shannon
tells her; “a man and a woman have got to challenge each other”
Maxine tells him—is like watching Lauren Bacall in her prime
stalk Humphrey Bogart. Hamilton defines “acting integrity”
when she straddles Shannon tied in a cotton canvas hammock,
her back to the audience, yowling her anger and frustration,
her buttocks bouncing up and down. While the scene creates
a lot of squirming in the audience, Hamilton keeps her focus
as Dillahunt’s whetstone. Hamilton never allows her celebrity
to terminate her acting, and that is a refreshing revelation.
Stink,
Stank, Stunk The Pilgrim Papers
By
Stephen Temperley, directed by Vivian Matalon
Berkshire Theater Festival, Stockbridge, Mass., through Aug.
28
At its worst, last week’s heat was preferable to the cool
air conditioning of BTF’s Unicorn Theatre, where Stephen Temperley’s
The Pilgrim Papers is having its world premiere. Temperley
and Matalon did a splendid job last season with Souvenir,
but this time the experience is like watching a series of
unrefined freshman skits linked together by a desire to parody
an entity more complex than their ken.
Temperley takes various pilgrims from the Mayflower party
(including Gov. Bradford and Miles Standish) and depicts their
relations with Squanto and American Indians as having parallels
with the present American political administration. Through
obvious jokes that are aimed in scattershot fashion, Temperley
attempts to address present-day concerns with religious intolerance,
political hypocrisy, xenophobia and terrorist paranoia. Gay
humor, caricature, adolescent wordplay. . . . None of it works
either in the writing or playing of the first act, which leaves
the Mayflower deflowered and one’s patience exhausted.
All that held me in thrall was R. Michael Miller’s circular
set, beautifully rendered by the BTF shop crew. At intermission
I made my escape, preferring the clean, acrid smell of a night-foraging
skunk to that on stage.
—Ralph
Hammann
Those
Crazy Kids Romeo and Juliet
By
William Shakespeare, directed by Will Fears
Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Mass., through
Aug. 13
Any director contemplating staging Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet immediately faces two huge problems. The first
is familiarity. Everyone knows Romeo and Juliet. It’s
one of the most taught pieces of literature in American high
schools, according to a Na-tional Endowment of the Humanities-sponsored
survey of what literary works are taught in American high
schools; there are popular film versions (Baz Luhr-man’s 1996
Romeo+ Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire
Danes, the most egregiously popularized); Shakespeare is the
most produced playwright in America, and R&J is
one of his most produced plays (right behind Hamlet and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, depending on the source).
Williamstown Theatre Festival tackles the familiarity problem
head on: Few productions of Romeo and Juliet start
out with a thumping and fuzzy-bassed four-piece band, Los
Mercedes del Fuego, and their full-volume lead temptress Evita
Estrella Mercedes (Lisa Birnbaum), set up on a raised platform
in the middle of Verona (Takeshi Kata’s two-story, plaster-and-wrought-iron
set is perfection) singing the prologue: “Two households both
alike in dignity/In fair Verona, where we lay our scene .
. .” Evita moans, and “lay” seems to be the operative verb
here. While Luhrman’s film opened with a prologue as newscast
from the fictional Verona Beach, Calif., director Will Fears’
Verona is as Italian as Tony Soprano’s New Jersey. While the
sung prologue and the opening Capulets vs. Montagues gangbangers
brawl seem at first blush gimmicky and over-the-top—I feared
that this would be an unhealthful, overly earnest ménage a
trois of The Bomb-bitty of Errors, Luhrman’s “audiences
are too dumb to get it otherwise” jump-cut of a film, and
Shakespearean tragedy—the concept succeeds and establishes
that this is a Romeo and Juliet of this earth and of
this time.
The second problem any director faces is the need for a Romeo
and a Juliet who are carnal enough, immediate enough, brave
enough, and beautiful enough not to be overwhelmed by Mercutio
(Benjamin Walker’s robust performance is part Eddie Izzard,
part Mick Jagger, part je ne sais quoi) and the Nurse
(Kristine Nielsen’s performance reminds people that “earthy”
means “worldly” as well as “crude”). Coupled with a fiery
Tybalt (a fuming, spitting Remy Auberjonois), these three
characters threaten to swamp any Romeo and Juliet,
and with the sprawling, multilevel rapier-and-sword-cane fight
between Tybalt and Mercutio in this Verona (Rick Sordelet’s
fight choreography of the Tybalt-Mercutio fight and the following
Romeo-Tybalt battery are examples of those too-rare instances
where the characters fight in distinct styles suited to their
temperaments, weapons, and the shifting intentions of the
scenes rather than the whims of directors and the limitations
of too- short rehearsal time), the title characters demand
actors, not merely pretty performers.
WTF offers up a Romeo (Austin Lysy) who believably loves the
fair Juliet (Met Opera and movie star Emmy Rossum; her opera
and film background may account for her looking over
the heads of the audience during her soliloquies to them and
over Romeo’s during their love scenes and seeming to be in
way over her head generally). They die a long time after the
play seems to end with Mercutio’s death, but they are beautiful
enough, and the concluding promise from their parents to raise
up golden statues seems very appropriate, if redundant.
—James
Yeara
|
Classifieds
