Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Butterfly Monarch

photo by Alexis Furseth

by Jeff Grygny

He holds out his hand, perfectly confident that a glass of wine will instantly be there. His royal purple suit is set off by a glittering yet tasteful crown.He’s vain, preening, and he knows that he’s God’s chosen regent on Earth. He’s Richard II, the King of England: he really does wield absolute power. And he’s fine with that. Unfortunately, his self-esteem is inversely proportional to his governing skills.

It’s understandable why Shakespeare’s history plays, like Richard II, should be so seldom performed (first time in my memory for this one!). They’re full of wordy politics that generally  boil down to squabbles between hereditary rich guys: not exactly themes that raise the modern pulse. But in this honest, stylish, and highly entertaining production by Voices Found Repertory, the play comes alive, and even seems weirdly pertinent for a time when tech billionaires challenge each other to fistfights, and a grifter would-be dictator commands the loyalty of great swaths of a supposed democracy.

Director Hannah Kubiak’s frothy interpretation owes as much to Noel Coward as to Holingshead’s Chronicles. Her choice of a Roaring 20’s setting is inspired: with skillful extra-textual actions and vocalizations, you can feel the “anything goes” giddiness—just before things get all too real. Even Richard’s throne is painted with an art deco peacock. And you’ve probably never seen an over-the-top fight scene set to the Charleston before!

As customary in Voices Found shows, there’s no performance below journeyman level, and every player is crystal clear, in diction as well as in character and motivation. We might not grasp every detail of the feudal machinations, but we always know what’s going on in the relationships. This gives us a precious opportunity to see Shakespeare exploring themes and tropes we know from his more famous plays.

In the title role, Kyle Connor is at the center of it all and  at the top of his game. His Richard foreshadows Lear’s grandiosity, Richard III’s compulsive oversharing, and Hamlet’s self-conscious ponderings, in a high-wire act between comedy of manners and vertiginous political peril. Connor’s Richard winks, glowers and swans about the stage hilariously, often winning laughs just with a well-timed vocal coo. This fabulously histrionic monarch hogs every scene: when learning of a wronged lord’s rebellion, he calls on England’s wildlife and very earth to defend his anointed right (it doesn’t go well); when abdicating to his rival, he stages a little tug of war with the literal crown; then calls for a mirror and shatters his own reflection This is all great stuff: it probably came right out of the Chronicles, but it could just as easily be a Monty Python routine.

photo by Alexis Furseth

While Richard is sucking the oxygen out of every room, Connor is supported by a sturdy cast who do the heavy narrative lifting as his sycophants, rivals, and enemies. Scott Oehme-Sorensen and Stefan Kent do another Pythonesque turn as a pair of gardeners opining about the doings of the high and mighty. Faith Klick gives Richard’s nameless queen a poignant presence, not least in their surprisingly touching farewell. But overall, this is history as farce, and we just can’t look away from the wreckage.

Reportedly, when the Earl of Essex was plotting to depose Queen Elizabeth, he paid Shakespeare’s company to play Richard II to warm the people to the idea of a coup (it didn’t work). Now, in a time when coups and attention-hogging leaders are in the daily headlines, it’s oddly comforting to know that England got itself into such massive messes and managed to come through. But as Richard’s deposal led to the bloody violence of the Wars of the Roses, it’s also a sobering reminder that coups are always a nasty business— and that rule by drama is seriously overrated.

In Richard II, Voices Found gives us the precious opportunity to appreciate the timeliness of a rarely-seen classic, with a fresh and respectful, but not reverential, take that reveals the play as a minor  tragicomic masterpiece and a fascinating peek into the mind of a great playwright.

 Voices Found Repertory presents

Richard II

by William Shakespeare

Playing through September 3

https://www.voicesfoundrep.com/richard-ii.html

The Wicked King and the Witches of Doom

photo by Jeff Grygny

by Jeff Grygny

On a tree-shaded lawn, families and friends are claiming their little domains with lawn chairs and blankets. Some young actors are leading a group of smaller kids in some vigorous activity, including enthusiastically chanting “double double toil and trouble!” Remembering the old theater superstition of never quoting Macbeth n a theater, I’m glad we’re outside, but I knock on a tree trunk just in case. Vendors under canopies sell hot dogs and snacks. If it’s Monday, this must be Havenwoods State Park, and Summit Player’s touring production of the infamous “Scottish Play.”

With the cheeky motto “Junk in your trunk, Shakespeare in ours,” Summit Players have honed their mission—bringing fast-paced, family-friendly summer Shakespeare to Wisconsin public parks— to a fine art. They know what works, and they do it very well. It seems odd at first that the players are wearing shorts and sneakers under their tabards and crowns, but this is Shakespeare with training wheels: art and practicality are inseparable. The actors shout to be heard outside: they don’t use electronic amplification, just like actors in the olde days. With weather and a hundred other distractions to contend with they have to distill their characters down to essences.

photo by Jeff Grygny

As adapted and directed by Maureen Kilmurry, the weird sisters are bouncier than you might expect—but they don’t scare the little ones. The toddlers get a little restless during the interludes about politics and morality. And yet they see the actual play, edited down to a brisk 75 minutes, with it’s rhythms and emotions intact. Everyone else can easily appreciate the themes of ambition, corruption, conspiracy, regret, and just retribution, and apply it to our times, just as Jacobean audiences would in the aftermath of the infamous gunpowder plot.

photo by Jeff Grygny

Monday’s performance gave the oft-unsung understudies a chance to challenge the lead roles. Dylan Thomas played the title role as a small-minded, wavering schemer; quite insecure, as tyrants tend to be. As Lady M, Vivian Romano brought a sense of vulnerability with a hidden edge of steel. In the regular cast, Matthew Torkilsen lends a fine comic aptitude to the role of the drunken porter, while Kaylene Howard as Lady Macduff gives us the most rounded character, with intelligence, tenderness, and pathos. In his dual roles as King Duncan and Macduff, George Lorimer delivers dignity and honesty, and like the other players, the dynamic Caroline Norton deftly draws all of them distinctly. The swordplay, choreographed by Chris Elst with skimpy little daggers, provides audience-safe action, if not spectacle.

The midnight hues and existential poetry of Macbeth don’t readily lend themselves to summer in the park. But Summit Player’s production doesn’t pull it’s punches where it counts: the grown-ups can appreciate the nuances of the play while the kids won’t be bored out of their minds. Both will come away pretty happy, even if they sense there might me more to this Shakespeare stuff. Training wheels might be just the right thing.

Summit Players present

Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

playing through August 19

for a complete list of remaining performances, go to:

https://www.summitplayerstheatre.com/calendar

Kids These Days

photo by Alexis Furseth

by Jeff Grygny

Voices Found Repertory gives young theater artists the precious opportunity to challenge, and be challenged by, the great works of the past. In their earnest, no-frills production of Romeo and Juliet, currently playing at the Interchange Theater Co-Op, we can see this pas de deux of old and new in action, and it’s the tension that makes the performance engaging.

It’s like a TV show set in a theatrical universe where the social norms are patriarchal, but the Prince is a stern woman in a ball gown, the street toughs crack Elizabethan puns and duel with knives, but everyone displays the body language and emotional registers of 21st Century Americans. First-time director Phillip Steenbekkers has coached his actors to understand exactly what they’re saying and why they’re saying it; to discover the human hearts beating within the 400 year old words, and translate them into characters contemporary audiences will understand. This is how theater should work, isn’t it?  Aside from occasional whisperiness, the casts’ diction is good; Shakespeare’s lines aren’t naturalistic, but they make them sound natural, while creating characters that we can easily relate with. Most impressively, the artists ask deep questions about this most famous of love stories. Plain vanilla boy-girl romance isn’t much in vogue these days: this production looks hard at its two young lovers and comes up with its own answers.

Amber Weissert plays Juliet as a fourteen-year-old, a choice accentuated by her little girl outfit. She accents her frustrations with very relatable adolescent roars. At  the same time, she’s sensitive enough to deliver some of the greatest poetry ever written, and seems enchanted by the words coming to her as she paces on that balcony. Similarly, Max Pink’s Romeo seems to enjoy just being Romeo: he’s an affable presence, perhaps more British cool than Italian fire, but with a fevered imagination that impels him to reckless deeds. The overall effect is to present these two kids as driven more by the idea of being in love than by actual passion, or god forbid, horniness. Instead, this play’s emotional core is in its platonic relationships: Romeos’ friendship with his bros Benvolio and Mercutio; the mutual affection between Juliet and her nurse.

photo by Alexis Furseth

As Juliet’s father, Kyle Conner presents a high-strung control freak prone to rage, but hardly a villain. Liv Mauseth’s Nurse is a fabulous American take on a timeless character: the kind of woman who can go teary with sentiment and then bellow off an order in the next breath; Josh Decker has a great time bringing high goofball energy to the role of  Mercutio, playing with out-there vocal dynamics and antic gesticulations. As the Prince, Faith Klick’s soft voice carries more authority than any angry shouting. And in the role of the classic Shakespearean clown, Hannah Kubiak runs off with many a scene as a buffoonish servant to house Capulet.

In his classic study of courtly love, the scholar Denis De Rougemont suggested that modern attitudes toward romance were forged in a literary cult of medieval troubadours who found mystical transcendence in an overheated (and frankly, not very healthy) tango between sex and death. This isn’t a mood we entertain much today: pop psychology and the zeitgeist warn us not to invest too much emotional energy in just one person. Voices Found’s Romeo and Juliet shows us this modern view of romance. Rather than a passion for the ages, it shows us two self-dramatizing kids whose tragedy amounts to a spontaneous lark gone south. Poetry is gorgeous, but dangerously seductive. Not as grand a vision, perhaps, but certainly in tune with our current mood of reduced expectations.

Voices Found Repertory  presents

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare

playing through May 28

https://www.voicesfoundrep.com/romeo–juliet1.html

The Bard in Lockdown

Thomas Dekker 1625 credit: Sheila Terry//Science Photo Library

And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies

King Lear

by Jeff Grygny

Who are the invisible people? They’re the ones we never see because we never look at them. The housekeepers, the janitors, the panhandlers. Invisibility is one of the many themes in Bill Cain’s lively Elizabethan fantasy Gods Spies, which is currently receiving its world premiere at Next Act Theater as part of the World Premiere Wisconsin initiative.

Cain seems obsessed with Shakespeare’s later plays. His Equivocation dealt with the complex political intrigue behind the writing of Macbeth. The Last White Man scrutinized Hamlet through the lens of identity politics. Now, in God’ Spies, Cain processes the complex feelings around our recent collective experience of pandemic and loss, along with a few other things, including: the patriarchy, fundamentalist hypocrisy, inequality, dispossession, and the creative process— all in the setting of a London brothel. And he takes time to fill it with good-natured gags about Scottish accents, Shakespeare’s terrible penmanship, male cluelessness, and a certain village with a very long name.

King Lear has often been considered the greatest play ever written. The product of a master dramatist at the height of his powers, it takes on an even longer list of interwoven themes, in a story that might be a fairy tale but has also been adapted into modern settings, and, in Shakespeare’s way, remains surprising, even shocking, and unfathomably rich to this day. In God’s Spies, we meet the playwright in the middle of his work, suddenly trapped in a house where doxies bring their clients after their theater “dates.” He enters in full plague gear, as the town has just broken out, interrupting an argument between  local strumpet Ruth, and her reluctant patron, a Scots lawyer named Edgar, who curses the hour he set foot in a theater and lost his soul to the lusts of the flesh. As none of them are allowed to leave, Shakespeare (“Shax,” as he’s called here, because of the odd way he writes his name), continues his project. It turns out the Ruth is very canny about the theater, having seen every play multiple times whilst on the job, while Edgar has beautiful handwriting, and the three shut-ins gradually become collaborators.

photo by Ross Zentner

Writing doesn’t generally make the most compelling theater, and Cain finds many ingenious ways to draw us in to scenes of a man sitting at a table with pen and paper. So we have dramatic enactments, arguments, revelations, an impromptu ear-piercing, and eroticism—including an incident of casual bisexuality that comes out of nowhere and quickly goes back there. Director David Cecsarini keeps the action moving with Ruth’s compulsive cleaning—a detail that’s quite familiar to us after our own recent plague. Mark Ulrich, obviously having great fun with the role of  Shax, lights up the stage with a full-bodied characterization, bringing good-natured intelligence, charisma, and an endearing quirkiness that reminds us of certain brilliant theater artists we have known, with the facial ticks and grimaces of a mind so quick that it can’t help but escape the body in little electric jolts.

photo by Ross Zentner

As Edgar, Zach Thomas Woods shows a vulnerable, confused young man behind a burr thick enough to stand a spoon up in. And Eva Nimmer brings grace and humanity to a role that’s heavily weighted with thematic importance: as a prostitute, she’s the lowest of the low, but like Virginia Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s sister,” she’s just as insightful and talented as Will, while also a practical genius at surviving; a resourceful provider, a healer, and the unrecognized hero who saves King Lear for posterity. But don’t expect her to play the games of the stereotypical trollop; she is very much a clear-headed businesswoman. Just as Lear recognizes the poor and destitute among his subjects, so Shax comes to understand the value of ” invisible” people like Ruth.

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend
you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. 

King Lear Act 3 scene 4

One figure conspicuously absent in the play is Lear himself. Kings are not in vogue these days, to put it mildly. While so many literary classics are being “interrogated” by contemporary critics, Bill Cain seems intent on making sure these plays remain fresh, alive, and relevant. He leans right into the controversy. Best of all, he’s not reverent: his meditations aren’t dour theses, but borderline farces with escalatingly improbable developments that veer close to campiness. And this is all for the better. God’s Spies is a feast for Shakespeare buffs, and greatly entertaining for everyone else.I can’t wait for him to venture into the ideological mine field that is The Tempest next.  

Next Act Theater presents

God’s Spies

by Bill Cain

playing through May 21

https://nextact.org/show/gods-spies/#tickets

Big Mood: Reps “Much Ado” Brings the Fun Back To Theater

photo by Michael Brosilow

by Jeff Grygny

“I saw this amazing show! It was romantic, exciting, with great music and dancing, And it was SO funny! I even cried at the end! ” “Really? What was it?” “Shakespeare!” is something nobody says. Until recently that is, when we cracked the code for making Shakespeare work in the twenty-first century: substituting pop songs for the poetry that was the pop music of Shakespeare’s time. Turns out that switching out electric guitars and drum kits for lutes and tabors is the secret ingredient to bringing out all the rich umami goodness of Shakespeare’s plays for contemporary audiences. The Milwaukee Rep’s new production of Much Ado About Nothing reveals the play’s humanity and wit—and what’s more, makes it hip, smart, and tremendously fun to watch. It’s amazing what can happen with a fresh musical approach, some loving attention to the text, and an ensemble of brilliant actors, musicians, and comedians who clearly love what they’re doing. In the skilled hands of Director Laura Braza, the show simply rocks.

Setting the play in Seattle in the 1990s is an intriguing way to explore the play’s military culture: the men are just returning from a victorious war, as G.W. Bush’s Operation Desert Shield had successfully driven Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait (the time seems so innocent in this age of social media and MAGA, doesn’t it?). The historical juxtaposition generates both light and heat, highlighting the parallels between Elizabethan power and America’s boo-ya triumphalism. It’s impressive, too, how Music Director Dan Kazemi enlists the dirty chords of Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots to evoke a powerful mood, concocting a shiny, bombastic, happy-sad, fast-slow-fast theater bomb much befitting Much Ado’s high emotions and world-weary wisdom, that carries us along irresistibly for three hours (including a twenty-minute intermission). The presence of live musicians among the cast adds immeasurably, as always.

Best of all, the production shamelessly embraces the theatricality of Elizabethan theater, shifting from elevated realism to farce to musical theater without dropping a beat. The show opens with rebel girl Beatrice passing a joint with her friends and belting out a Nirvana-esque ballad to self-conscious anomie in a piercing voice that could shatter glass in the balcony. The lyrics were written by Louise Labé, an obscure cross-dressing French poet who died when Shakespeare was around two years old (Her story would have made an interesting note in the show’s play guide, but it’s oddly absent). Later, a delicious party scene, lit like a high-end nightclub, breaks into choreography that seems to burst from the sheer joy of victory, youth, and privilege, like the Platonic ideal of an impossibly cool frat party: many kudos to choreographer Jenn Rose. In an age when art is often supposed to be a vehicle for dispensing what’s good for us, this embrace of pure pleasure feels almost wicked.

photo by Michael Brosilow

So it is with the play’s comedy. Time and again the actors hit the sweet spot between credibility and clowning. Forget the 500 year old puns: Shakespeare is hilarious. Mark Corkins’ Don Pedro is on fire with mirth and camaraderie. The reliable Jonathan Girard Daly brings humanity to what could easily be a generic patriarch. Nate Burger lends pitch perfect sitcom energy to his role of Benedick, all bluster and insecurity: when he and Alex Keiper’s Beatrice meet, their verbal duels glitter. Meanwhile, Keiper fans the coals under a simmering cauldron of rage, no hotter than in her “O that I were a man” speech. As the incompetent marshal Dogberry and his factotum, Michael Doherty and Will Mobley leave no shtick unturned in their folie a deux of utterly unwarranted machismo,  with inspired silliness reminiscent of the old SCTV show. And as a cleric officiating a marriage gone south, Daydra Smith speaks with firm authority while the men are all running around with their bruised honor.

Every era remakes Shakespeare after it’s own concerns: The Victorians took out all the depressing bits; in the 60’s the plays were anti-establishment and existential. Director Braza’s rendering becomes a thorough and very effective feminist treatise. Even more impressively, she doesn’t turn the men into villains, but rather shows how the patriarchal structure of society itself is to blame. Of course, with such strong choices. there are inevitably trade-offs. The character of Benedick loses some of his appealing self-awareness: his line, probably my favorite in all of the plays, “man is a giddy thing,” seems to not have made the cut, as if to underscore that it’s institutional sexism, not human folly, that caused the troubles. Also notably absent is any reference to the most significant development of grunge culture (which, honestly, pretty much was a guy thing): the famous 1999 “Battle of Seattle,” when youth anti-globalization protests spread across the world. Granted, there’s little to do with class struggle in Much Ado. But the world historical event is even missing from the play guide’s 1990s timeline (though we do read there about the second Congo war for some reason). Not terribly shocking perhaps, for a theater beholden to corporate funding.

But peace: I’d happily attend a dozen feminist treatises if they were as fun and pleasurable as this show. And since Braza is the Rep’s current Associate Artistic Director, we can hope for many more good things from her in the future. Hey nonny nonny, everyone! You owe it to yourself to see this play!

Milwaukee Rep presents

Much Ado About Nothing

by William Shakespeare

playing through February 12, 2023

https://www.milwaukeerep.com/shows/show/much-ado-about-nothing/

The End of Hamlet?

photo by Ross Zentner

by Jeff Grygny

As the play opens, the lead actor in a prestigious production of Hamlet is throwing a hissy fit. Nothing out of the ordinary there! But in The Last White Man Bill Cain’s provocatively-titled puzzle box of themes and plot twists, which is currently in its world premiere at Next Act Theatre, irony turns on irony like the tormented self-consciousness of the Shakespearean hero. The actor—a Hollywood star with a brand-new Oscar—lays down Yorick’s skull because, just like Hamlet, he is terrified to perform his duty. Thus begins a theater story to top all theater stories, complete with artistic conflicts, backstage intrigue, hot-button politics, psychological suspense—and disco.

It would be totally unfair to reveal any of the details of the Escher-like plot that Cain has constructed, but there’s still a lot to say about this play, which will undoubtedly ruffle a few feathers and start many lively conversations. Cain is a brave man, venturing into one of the culture war’s most radioactive regions: the issues of representation in the arts, and reading the classics through the lens of identity politics. He might incur some folks’ wrath for daring to write the part of Xandri, a Black woman director, though he treats the character respectfully. Then there’s the moment when the understudy, Rafe, asserts that Hamlet should never be played by a Black actor because he’s Danish. When his replacement, the actor named Tigg, protests, he retorts “Can a White actor play Othello?” It turns out (and this isn’t really a spoiler, since it’s in the publicity and program notes that Cain himself believes this) that Xandri’s goal is to direct a production of Hamlet so good that the play will never need to be performed ever again. Acknowledging that the play’s genius contains all of Western civilization, she adds. “And it leads to destruction and death. Always.”

Another risky move on Cain’s part is to require the actors perform at various levels of talent.. As the spoiled, troubled film star, Ken Miller brings the effortless grace that could anchor a blockbuster movie, but his character’s Shakespearean delivery is of the the hit-or-miss “know what you’re saying and talk fast” school that’s murder on the poetry. In the role of Rafe, the understudy who is called in after some unspecified incident takes Charlie out of the picture, Neil Brookshire didn’t have to imagine what the understudy feels like when suddenly thrust onstage: he is himself the understudy for JJ Gatesman, who was recovering from a mild bout with Covid. Brookshire stepped into the role seamlessly, showing both the character’s intense drive to succeed and the actor’s psychological insight—that just might be employed in manipulating the other characters.

As Xandri, Demetria Thomas renders a sympathetic, smart, and grounded persona. And as Tigg, the replacement Hamlet, Brian Gill has the job of playing a consummate artist, spelunking the famous role’s humanity buried in layers of centuries. No pressure! But he acquits himself admirably and honestly. Director David Cecsarini leads his cast of four with economy and a minimum of flash. I rather regretted, though, that the performers, perhaps out of caution to avoid offensive stereotyping, playing a Black woman and two gay men in the 80s, display little of the rich panache of their respective subcultures. The unintended effect of this restraint is to make them all sound more or less like the playwright’s mouthpieces.

So—let’s talk for a minute about Hamlet the play. Is it indeed a theatrical monster, a relic of patriarchal oppression like a Confederate monument, worthy only for the trash heap of history? First off, it’s a very weird play, full of twists and odd angles. Partly this is because Shakespeare adapted it from the Twelfth Century Scandinavian story of Prince Amleth, which is itself full of medieval weirdness, including the prince pretending to be an idiot so that nobody would suspect him of seeking revenge on his uncle. Similar tales appear in Roman literature, also in Finland, Ireland, France, India, and in Arabic sources. This ubiquity has led some scholars to theorize that the story originated in Indo-European culture, which is to say, the people who spread their language from the Early Bronze Age on all across the Western hemisphere. So the story is really really old—and associated with the people formerly known as the “Aryans,” whom we might remember as the Nazis’ so-called “master race.” So that’s a bit of baggage (is this why a cloaked figure in a Bronze Age helmet keeps stalking the stage?).

But there’s more! Hamlet was famously given as a textbook example of Freud’s Oedipus complex, a notorious structure of the masculine subconscious. (If you want to know how deep that rabbit hole goes, google Deleuze and Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus.) And for a cherry on top, some cognitive scientists have speculated that Hamlet represents an early expression of the emergence of modern consciousness, both as a self-reflective, autonomous self and as a highly conflicted and alienated one. Whew! Maybe the play does contain all of Western civilization. And maybe not in a good way!

One of Shakespeare’s innovations was to disrupt the conventional revenge plot by having the protagonist actually stop and question what he was doing, ultimately coming to the realization that, like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, or a Japanese samurai, he can only do what must be done in the situation he’s in, and be at peace with that. “The readiness is all. Let be.” It’s still the ethos of a warrior culture—but a self-aware one. In a world that’s “out of joint,” sometimes that’s all one can do.

Ross Zentner

The Last White Man is a brand new play, never before produced. So how does it do? It’s certainly not boring— I can’t speak for people less familiar with Hamlet, but for a Shakespeare nerd like me, it’s compelling from beginning to end. Cain’s back-and-forth chronology keeps the suspense going, but I for one left pretty fuzzy as to what exactly happened with Charlie, either because I was inattentive or because it was left ambiguous. Then there is the slight problem of all the characters sounding somewhat the same. And although the economics of theater today demand small casts, I’d have loved to have seen a full-out theater milieu, with Ophelia, Fortinbras, extras, crew, and all the rest. The play’s climactic scene loses credibility because some of the characters’ actions seem jarringly desperate. It might make more sense if we had more a feel of a grand production: restless audience, nervous patrons, critics waiting to pounce, and all that.

But the questions the play raises are powerful. Are we beholden to the judgements of former generations, like old politicians clinging to power beyond their time? Or can we value the riches of the past while letting new generations see them afresh and make them anew? In the end, even Cain seems to show that new perspectives can bring insights to even this hoary classic. And he’ll start some lively discussions. In that regard, The Last White Man works just fine.

By all means, let’s hear new voices telling new stories. But I’m willing to wager that, somehow, Hamlet will survive.

Next Act Theatre presents

The Last White Man

by Bill Cain

Directed by David Cecsarini

playing through May 8

https://nextact.org/shows/the-last-white-man/

With bear hands and singing sheep, theater comes back to life

photo by A.J. Magoon

by Jeff Grygny

A stubborn monarch, a wronged queen, a lost princess, and a cunning rogue: these are among the dramatis personae of A Winter’s Tale, (which, curiously, debuts in midsummer) by the Summit Players Theatre, who tour all over the Wisconsin park system in the summertime. For many of us this was the first live theater in many a moon, and, to judge by the giddy enthusiasm of both the actors of last week’s performance at Havenwoods State park, and the  audience, sitting in lawn chairs under the trees, this show is like a tasty appetizer: it whets a ravenous hunger.

While A Winter’s Tale is often considered one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic and lyrical plays, the Summit ensemble, under the direction of Maureen Kilmurry, aims for family fun. They play this 75 minute edited version as what it really is: a fairy tale. In uniforms of jeans and tennis shoes, they’re all smiles as they whip costume pieces on and off to become lords or peasants as needed. The acting is broadly cartoonish, and the plentiful sight gags are well thought out with accessibility in mind: placards invite us to make sound effects like “bird song” and “commotion.” A couple of sheep puppets sing a ditty to the accompaniment of a ukulele (which seems the perfect instrument for this shoebox production). And the most infamous of all stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” is accomplished with a pair of furry mittens (the stuffed black bear in the Havenwoods nature center lobby likely never dreamed it would be in such literary company.)

photo by A. J. Magoon

This doesn’t in any way imply disrespect for the play; it works really well as a fractured fairy tale. The players invest their line-drawing characters with just enough emotional truth to summon the magic of story. True, the first act doesn’t seem much like a promising family show, with a king suspecting his pregnant wife of adultery, throwing her in prison, where she gives birth, and later collapses at her trial, apparently dead, then orders the infant princess to be exposed in the wild in a distant country. But we forget that fairy tales are often cruel in the beginning. And the plot soon turns to whimsy. True, someone does get eaten—bears will be bears—but he does get a decent burial at the hands of the shepherds who find and raise the abandoned baby. And between Texas-accented peasants, a pair of frustrated lovers, an elaborate sheep-shearing party, and the (finally) repentant king, everything comes through hilarity to a surprisingly touching resolution.

All the young players comport themselves with infectious charm. Michael Nicholas and Caroline Norton display dramatic and comic chemistry as fathers and sons, both royal and rustic. Maura Atwood brings winsome grace to her dual roles as the queen and the rogue, and the charismatic Kaylene Howard transcends the silliness when she speaks truth to power as a counselor scolding the king for his stupidity.

photo by A.J. Magoon

In some ways, A Winter’s Tale is strangely resonant to the difficult year we’ve just been through. We can easily see traits of a recent pigheaded leader in  King Leontes. And in Hermione, [Spoiler Alert] returning to her life at last after a long seclusion, we can not only recognize ourselves, but celebrate the return of theater into our lives. Let’s hope it lasts!

Summit Players Theatre presents

A Winter’s Tale
by William Shakespeare

returning to Havenwoods State Forest on August 9 at 7:00

for a full schedule visit

https://www.summitplayerstheatre.com/calendar