A Tale of Two Stratfords

By T.E. Kalem

Shakespeare did more for the Stratfords of this world than they sometimes do for him. The rites of summer are now upon us, and the Stratfords (Ontario and Connecticut) are presenting their offerings of the Bard with no little honor. Plays by George Bernard Shaw and Thornton Wilder round out the festivities.

ONTARIO

Twelfth Night. Every so often an actor retires a role the way a sports champion retires a trophy. He does not, of course, get permanent possession of the part, but he does get a lasting grip on playgoers' memories and critics' yardsticks. His successors must always suffer the ordeal of comparison. Even long-dead actors exert their possessive prerogatives. Praise a present Hamlet and some oldtimer will tell you that "Barrymore was the greatest." In Twelfth Night, Brian Bedford retkes the Malvolio Cup.

Malvolio is the primmest of puritans. He preens before the mirror of his self-approbation. "Holier than thou" drips from every syllable he speaks. He is thus terribly gullible when a trumped-up letter purports to disclose that the lady Olivia, whom he serves as a kind of steward, is desperately in love with him. Bedford purses his lips as if his mouth were pickled in brine. He walks with the gravity of a frozen penguin. His mien alternates between a mask of hauteur and a tickled-pink grin of uncontainable self-adulation. As an actor, he takes the treacherous gamble of playing directly to the audience and makes it pay off in total delight.

The play is as implausible as ever, but rarely has it been given a production of such marvelously sustained enchantment. Duke Orsino (Stephen Macht) is bewitched by the lovely Countess Olivia (Marti Maraden). She, in turn, falls madly in love with Cesario, who is really the shipwrecked Viola (Kathleen Widdoes) in male disguise. Before the plot is piloted to safe harbor, there are mistaken identities to be resolved, twin brother and sister to be reunited, true love's partners to be mated, and the lowbrow comic shenanigans of that Tweedledum-Tweedledee pair Sir Toby Belch (Leslie Yeo) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Frank Maraden) to beguile the time. The entke company is rich in skill and works with selfless unity to bring out the very best in the play.

As for Director David Jones and the newly appointed artistic director of the Stratford Festival, Robin Phillips, they have rubbed a theatrical Aladdin's lamp and produced effulgent magic.

Measure for Measure. A word may be the key to a play. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the key word is mendacity. In Measure for Measure, the key word is seem. Men seem to be what they are not. They delude themselves as to what they are. A form of the word appears in Act I, Scene 3, and it recurs like the tolling of a melancholy bell. Duke Vincentio (William Hutt) has decided to cede his authority for a while to his austere deputy, the rectitudinous Angelo (Brian Bedford). As the lordly duke dons monkish attire (he will seem to be a friar), he implies that he is testing Angelo: "Hence shall we see,/ If power change purpose, what our seemers be." Initially, Angelo acts as severely as we would expect. He condemns Claudio (Stephen Macht) to be executed for the crime of fornication. When Claudio's novitiate sister Isabella (Martha Henry) comes to plead for her brother's life in the white flowing garb of a nun, Angelo proves not to be what he seems.

He is consumed with lust, to his own shuddering surprise and chagrin, but he does not bridle his concupiscent deskes. He issues a quid pro quo: Isabella's virginity for her brother's life. She is appalled and rather loftily tells Claudio to be resigned to his death. She is not what she seems, for to a Christian no defiling of the body can remotely affect the integrity of the soul.

Claudio prepares to die, but as he ponders the horrors of death, he begs Isabella to yield herself to Angelo. Thus he, too, is not what he seems, for any man of honor would prefer death to his sister's disgrace. Duke Vincentio finally returns to square these various accounts, "measure for measure," and give this sourish play an ambiguously happy ending. Yet, in his actions, the duke conclusively proves "what these our seemers be," for he has not really been interested in the goodly governance of the state but in his tricksterish manipulation of his subjects, both high and low, according to his own regal whims.

Thanks to Director Robin Phillips and a cast that matches purity of speech with clarity of sense, this comedy from Shakespeare's "black period" glistens with troubling beauty.

Saint Joan. Saintliness, like beauty, exists in the eye of the beholder. There are as many Joans as there are actresses who play her and audiences who see her. But what was Shaw's personal notion of Joan? Using his own inflective emphases, he describes her as a "protestant" and a "nation-alist." She protests against the authority of the church represented by the Archbishop of Rheims (Max Helpmann) in favor of the individual conscience. She subverts the authority of the lords temporal and their feudal privileges by proclaiming the supremacy of the nation-state. Her real visions, then, are of the dawn of the age of democracy, and her real voice is the vox populi. She is, to Shaw, a saint of the downtrodden masses. And in the course of the play, she spouts enough demagogic cant about the rights of the individual to run for office herself.

But Joan escapes Shaw's didactic clutches, and that is why audiences love her. She is an imp of candor and a lioness in courage. She lacks all humor but makes up for it with backslapping bonhomie. Minutes after she has been ushered into the presence of the Dauphin, she is calling him "Charley."

CONNECTICUT

Pat Galloway's Joan is casually approachable in precisely this way. What Galloway does not project is any hint of spirituality or vulnerability. Perhaps the din of forensic rhetoric that dominates this production prevents her from hearing any inner voices. Tom Kneebone makes of the Dauphin a mixture of skittish cravenness and caustic venom, while William Needles' inquisitor is magisterially forbidding. The rest of the cast act like shrill contenders in a debating contest, but that may stem in part from George Bernard Shaw the street-corner agitator.

King Lear. This awesome drama sometimes seems to combine the four elements of the ancient world--earth, air, fire and water. The elements are not in their benign aspect, however, but viciously, terrifyingly distempered: earth as earthquake, air as hurricane, fire as holocaust and water as raging flood. What this production gives us is fallow earth, becalmed air, sputtering fire and stagnant water.

Though the cast is far from blameless, the graver error lies with Director Anthony Page. When Lear goes mad on the storm-blistered heath, it is not because his daughters Goneril and Regan have turned their backs on him but because God has. Shakespeare means us to know that the universe itself has reached its apocalyptic hour, and he asks his white-locked King to look upon the dethronement of all order, a grotesque, absurd, horrifying realm of meaninglessness. Instead, Page has encouraged Morris Carnovsky to stress the "foolish fond old man" in Lear, petulant, bewildered and sorely vexed by his daughters' heartless ingratitude. At 77, Carnovsky is a figure of biblical gravity and delivers the lines beautifully in a voice that retains the dark timbre of a cello. But he can no longer vault to Lear's blind splenetic rages.

The daughters scarcely help. Goneril (Jane White) spits out her lines like a fishwife. As Regan, Maria Tucci seems to be tapping an unseen toe in overwrought pique, and Michele Shay's Cordelia might have strayed onstage from an elocution class. Only Lee Richardson's loyal Kent seems equally loyal to Shakespeare. The rest outshine the dark with unlit candles.

Our Town. One does not so much attend this play as visit it the way one would Williamsburg. Grover's Corners is a turn-of-the-century New Hampshire town with its simple verities and its Godfearing townsfolk perfectly restored.

Wilder's is essentially an airbrushed vision of life. The closest Our Town comes to the problem of evil is a tipsy choirmaster-organist. Insofar as Wilder sought to suggest the sublime in the commonplace, he failed; but in placing the stamp of value and continuity on everyday life, he succeeded. He celebrates the cycle of growing up, falling in love, marrying, giving birth and suffering death with all its attendant joys and sorrows.

It is difficult to see how the play could have been revived with more sensitivity and tenderness than Director Michael Kahn has brought to this production. In the key role of the Stage Manager, Fred Gwynne is a standout--tangy, folksy, gossipy, with just the right sprinkling of dry New England skepticism.

Ruled by clocks, children, husbands and housewifely chores, the neighboring friends, Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb, are portrayed with affectionate valor by Eileen Heckart and Geraldine Fitzgerald. Their husbands, played by William Larsen and Lee Richardson, are not slaves but soldiers of duty.

William Bachus is particularly fine as young George Gibbs, discovering life and love with fumbling boyish ardor. Only Kate Mulgrew falters as Emily Webb, the girl George marries. She brings a stiff self-conscious staginess to the third act graveyard sequence, where poignance is what is needed. Otherwise, all is well in Grover's Corners, and the stars are still "doing their old crisscross journeys in the skies."

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