His Play's The Thing

By Richard Zoglin

Why do we keep coming back to Shakespeare? The hard truth is that most modern theatergoers can fully grasp only a fraction of his dense Elizabethan dialogue. Critics, moreover, seem intent on making the experience even more intimidating: they become stern schoolmasters when judging those who dare tackle the iambic pentameter. Alec Baldwin's brawny, quite watchable Macbeth at New York City's Public Theatre last winter drew testy reviews. Still the show was a sellout.

Indeed, Shakespeare is enjoying a good season. The Royal Shakespeare Company is finishing up its most extensive U.S. visit to date, a six-week run that began at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is now at Washington's Kennedy Center--where its no-star production of Hamlet just set a house record. Helen Hunt, fresh from her Oscar, will star as Viola in Twelfth Night, opening in mid-July at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. R&J, a quirky, all-male version of Romeo and Juliet, is creating buzz off-Broadway. And just arrived in New York, following a nationwide tour and a stint in London, is Love's Fire, an evening of seven short plays inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets.

"Shakespeare's insight into human nature cuts like a straight razor," says Eric Bogosian, one of the well-known playwrights commissioned to write sketches for Love's Fire. To be sure, the great plays still connect with us because they distill and dramatize great emotions, the kind that don't date. The best new productions of Shakespeare succeed by shocking us into thinking we're seeing something new--while convincing us, in the end, that we're not.

Tampering with Shakespeare is a venerable tradition, even by the world's most respected guardian of the canon. For the RSC's new version of Cymbeline, the Bard's little-performed romance, artistic director Adrian Noble has lopped off nearly a third of the play and seasoned it with Japanese costumes and mannerisms. If the production doesn't quite soar, it's probably because the plot remains one of Shakespeare's messiest, with everything from a headless corpse to a guest appearance by the god Jupiter. Matthew Warchus' sleek, modern-dress version of Hamlet toys with the play as well, dropping entire characters (no Fortinbras), tossing in home movies of Hamlet and his father, and setting the early scenes at a swank big-band dance party. The conceit soon loses steam, however, leaving us with a fairly straightforward reading, sparked by the high-strung Hamlet of Alex Jennings.

Shakespeare gets a more radical shakeup in R&J, adapted and directed by Joe Calarco. The setting is a regimented boys' school, where four students march onstage, recite their Latin and math lessons and then embark on an impromptu performance of Romeo and Juliet. They play all the parts, provide the sound effects (pounding fists, stomping feet, a slow hiss when a character dies), and manipulate the show's single prop: a red silken fabric that serves as, among other things, a shawl, a sword and a vial of poison.

It is a clever, speedy but dead serious reading of the play. As Juliet, Daniel J. Shore softens his features and gestures, but doesn't camp it up, and when he kisses Romeo (Greg Shamie) full on the lips, you are forced to see their love not as the linking of two particular people, or even two particular genders, but as love in the abstract, the essence of all-consuming passion.

Love's Fire does something quite the opposite: it converts the universal sentiments of Shakespeare's love poetry into mundane modern anecdotes. The sonnet that ends "Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds" is the pretext for a familiar Wendy Wasserstein cartoon of bitchy guests at a snooty Manhattan dinner party. "So are you to my thoughts as food to life," prompts Tony Kushner to concoct a labored sitcom about a gay man infatuated with his lesbian shrink.

The evening is redeemed by the final playlet, from John Guare, who dives headfirst into the why-Shakespeare question and comes out, refreshed, on the other side. A group of college students is wrestling, footnote by footnote, with two sonnets. Seeking to justify the enterprise, they sprint through a fanciful history of the world, from Adam and Eve on. Their conclusion: works of art like the sonnets are mankind's feeble attempt to recapture paradise, "a hazy reminder of what we had in that garden when the Tree of Knowledge still grew alongside forests of mercy." A little poetry, a little fantasy, a frisson of universal truth--Shakespeare would have liked that.