Millman's Shakesblog

A good rule for art and life is: do what you love. Other people may appreciate or not appreciate what you do, but at least you’ll know why you did it.

It’s a rule Des McAnuff clearly followed in his music-stuffed production of Twelfth Night. And, speaking for myself, he was playing my tune.

The production reconceives Twelfth Night as a jukebox musical. Feste, the jester (played by Ben Carlson), spends much of the play singing, and usually these songs are, if not tossed off, treated as bits of business, with the exception of the lovely “Wind and the Rain” that closes the play. But McAnuff turns them into full-fledged production numbers, backed by a complete rock ensemble with guitars, bass, piano, rhythm, horns and everything. Some songs get extended, and one gets added - Act II begins with the power chords that open the Velvet Underground’s song, “Sweet Jane,” but these turn out to be the opening chords to a rocking setting of Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd To His Love” and an abbreviated “Nymph’s Reply.” The tunes, written by McAnuff and composer Michael Roth, are uniformly singable and in some cases downright beautiful - I’d highlight in particular “O Mistress Mine” and “Come Away Death,” though my son’s favorites were the mad Beach Boys-referencing version of “Hold Thy Peace” and the Motown-inflected “Jolly Robin.”

But they aren’t just good songs - they structure an entirely new thread of narrative that I’ve never seen explored before. One of the key conceits of McAnuff’s production is that Feste, the jester, is also in love with Olivia (played by Sara Topham). Now, a sincere and mutual affection between the two is a necessity, but I’ve always understood her affection for Feste to be related to the fact that he was a favorite of her father’s - he’s a living connection to the recently-dead men of her life who so haunt her that she’s driven to seclusion. I’ve never seen their relationship interpreted in a romantic fashion, but upon reflection it makes perfect sense. Every available man in the drama, after all, is in love with Olivia: Orsino (Mike Shara), Aguecheek (Stephen Ouimette), Malvolio (Tom Rooney), and when he finally shows up, Sebastian (Trent Pardy). Why wouldn’t Feste be under her spell as well?

And if he loves her (unrequitedly, of course; her plain affection for him never crosses over into actual love), then there’s a whole other dimension to their interactions, to his songs, even to his involvement in Malvolio’s torment.

When he returns to Olivia’s court, she has him dismissed. Why? Well, she’s annoyed that he left in the first place. Why? Well, because he brings her comfort. But why did he leave? Well, to earn a bit more money at Orsino’s court. Or perhaps because he can’t bear to be around her mourning all the time. But these are shallow reasons compared with a need to take himself away from a woman who will not be comforted by him the way he wants to comfort her. Not to mention that hanging around Orsino might actually comfort him; here’s a rich, powerful, young, handsome Duke, and he’s in no better shape love-wise than Feste. Feste’s antipathy to Cesario (Viola, played by Andrea Runge, in disguise) is sharpened as well if he understands “him” not as a woman in disguise (that’s one way to play it) but as a successful rival suitor. And Malvolio’s contempt for him is offensive enough without the dimension of romantic rivalry, but that additional motive for revenge certainly doesn’t hurt.

More interesting, though, is what that additional dimension does to the song Feste sings as he approaches Malvolio in prison:

Hey, Robin, jolly Robin,
Tell me how thy lady does.
My lady is unkind, perdy.
Alas, why is she so?
She loves another —

The song is intercut in the text by Malvolio’s cries of “Fool!” and “Fool, I say!” - and one way to understand the song is that it is more torture of Malvolio, because, of course, he’s the jolly Robin, whose lady is unkind (unkind enough to throw him in prison). But if Feste is in the same position as Malvolio - if she’s unkind to him as well, inasmuch as she loves another - then his treatment of Malvolio is more poignant. On the one hand, he’s meting out a punishment to him that he wishes he could visit upon Olivia for not recognizing that his love, Feste’s love, is the deepest of all; on the other hand, he sympathizes with poor Malvolio even as he torments him, because the worst of Malvolio’s torment isn’t being shut in darkness and taken for a madman but in knowing that his lady loves another, and that’s a torment the two share. The staging of this scene in McAnuff’s production emphasizes this point of solidarity, as Malvolio shifts from interrupting - “Fool! Fool, I say!” - to, resignedly, singing along with Feste.

It’s a very fecund conceit. And the use of popular music also harmonizes well with the way love works in this play. Twelfth Night, along with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is one of Shakespeare’s great paeans to love’s shallowness. Taming of the Shrew is a great love story because it’s a tale of two people who discover, to their mutual surprise, that they are a perfect match for one another. Ditto with Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. In both plays, the well-matched lovers who bicker are contrasted with shallow lovers who appear more conventional but for whose unions we have much more misgivings. As You Like It might well be called, “School for Lovers” - at the multiple wedding at the close Rosalind gives us a whole typology. The romances in Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of Venice leave us very nervous about the possibility of a successful marriage, and the title of Love’s Labour’s Lost says it all about that play.

But Dream and Twelfth Night portray love as absurd and shallow, but still something to be treasured. The lovers in Dream are rearranged by mischievous spirits. We can hardly believe in the constancy of affection after that, but we don’t really wish it otherwise, because those same spirits give us to remarkable romance of Titania and the ass-headed Bottom, and we wouldn’t give that up for anything. It’s killing yourself for love, as Pyramus and Thisbe do, that’s laughably absurd. The lovers in Twelfth Night, meanwhile, love for the shallowest reasons possible. Olivia loves Cesario, so far as we can tell, because he’s the first man she’s ever met who doesn’t fawn over her. This lets her open up enough to actually look at him (actually, her) - and she falls so in love with his visage (which is all anyone ever talks about Olivia as having - no one praises her character; they all talk about her face) that, when she finds out she has actually wed Cesario/Viola’s twin brother, he seems perfectly satisfied with the outcome. Orsino hasn’t even had the opportunity to see Olivia’s face since she went into seclusion, and still he’s besotted with it - he’s in love with the report of her beauty. And Viola herself loves Orsino pretty much at first sight, and again, talks entirely about his face and complexion. We’re very far from Rosalind and Celia’s loves in As You Like It, both of which are plainly shaped by an imaginative sympathy with their beloveds as well as an instant physical attraction. We’re not even in the world of Romeo and Juliet where two young people make an instant and electric personal connection, and then try to live their brief lives in such a way as to justify that moment. The symbol of love in Twelfth Night would seem to be those divers schedules Olivia promises to make of her beauty.

But it’s not: it’s the song, the popular love song that is one of the shallowest and deepest art forms around, the song that makes you feel deep emotions by setting  words we all know to tunes we can all sing. The songs we associate with moments of love are never the most complex or interesting. That should tell us something. It certainly seems to have told McAnuff.

* * *

That’s the big conceit of the show, the popular love song as emblem of how love confuses the categories of depth and shallowness. But the show is stuffed with little conceits, many of them highly successful but not all of them winning critical favor.

McAnuff gets knocked sometimes for being the kind of director who lets his own notions obscure the text, and I’ve found that sometimes to be true, but not in last year’s As You Like It and not in this year’s Twelfth Night. Rather, what I felt was sometimes the case in this production was that he had notions that made extremely clever visual connections with the text, but whose execution made it harder for the text to be heard. If what you’re trying to do is communicate certain emotions, tell the story effectively, I think McAnuff’s antics were, on the whole extremely successful. But if your goal is to have the text do that communicating, and tell the story primarily that way, then not so much.

Contrast, for example, the way McAnuff handles Act II Scene 3 (“Hold Thy Peace”) versus how he handles Act II Scene 5 (Malvolio finds the letter).

The former takes place in a kitchen where Sir Toby Belch (Brian Dennehy) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek have retired after a night of carousing. Our visual field is dominated by an open refrigerator hovering over the center of the stage. The scene is full of business - “Hold Thy Piece” becoming a full fledged rock number being one bit, but also a bit of comic business with a toaster, and the arrival of a pizza in the middle of a conversation (delivered, it appears, by John Lennon - I should mention that the band, which doubles as much of Orsino’s court, are dressed like figures out of popular music from the 1960s and 1970s). All of this works wonderfully to establish the world we’re in; when you get back from a late night of carousing, why, you would order a pizza, wouldn’t you? And interrupting Malvolio’s tirades with the delivery of said pizza is funny - and appropriately funny; it’s a synecdoche for the entire scene. But while it supports the scene, it does take our ear away from the text.

Act II Scene 5, on the other hand, has almost no set. Just a letter, on pink paper, downstage. There’s physical comedy as Toby, Aguecheek and Fabian (the always-elegant Juan Chioran) maneuver to avoid being seen by Malvolio, and of course Tom Rooney plays his own body in perfect time (his slow-spreading smile, as he reads the letter’s instruction to do so always in his beloved’s presence, alone is worth the price of a ticket). But none of this distracts us from the words themselves.

Now, if you’re a purist, the second scene is the better scene. You don’t do Shakespeare unless you want the text to speak. But I’m not a purist. There will, I trust, be many more Twelfth Nights in years to come, and they will each take a different approach to these two scenes. What I note is that both scenes worked: both were hilariously funny, and both were true to what was going on in the scene. One worked primarily through the text; the other used the text as a prop, and focused on communicating the scene through a variety of means. And that’s just fine with me.

McAnuff can get away with doing so many different things with his play because he’s got such a capable cast to work with, a cast that really is at home with the text, and can work with it even when all kinds of madness is swirling around them. There’s not a member of the cast who doesn’t do excellent work, but I want to highlight a few performances in particular.

First, Sara Topham as Olivia. She is, without question, the best Olivia I’ve seen. I really do think that last year’s turn as Tourvel was a breakthrough for her; both as Olivia and as Celiménè in The Misanthrope, but also in the recent Earnest remount in New York, she communicated a depth and sincerity that I haven’t experienced before with her. She’s doing less and delivering more than she ever has. I really hope she continues on this path.

I’ve already praised Tom Rooney’s performance in the letter-discovery scene, but I want to make that praise more general. Rooney delivers a Malvolio that I haven’t quite ever seen before, and that’s a Malvolio who remains firmly in possession of his dignity while in prison, who never gives in to despair - who never completely becomes a figure of fun. I’ve seen a number of fine Malvolios - Peter Donaldson’s in particular - but none of them have kept me with the man all the way through the play.

I feel like excellent Aguecheeks are almost to be expected at Stratford; the role is just so naturally funny. But I still feel Stephen Ouimette needs to be called out for perfect comic timing. Trent Pardy, meanwhile, makes a whole play out of a role - Sebastian - that I’m not sure I’ve really even noticed before. And Mike Shara makes a forceful Orsino who retains just enough of the actor’s trademark goofiness for us to believe that Viola’s love for him just might be based on something more than his pretty face.

Andrea Runge, meanwhile, had the unfortunate experience of having to bow out of the show not long before opening for health reasons. She was back in by the time I saw the show, and I certainly couldn’t find any rough edges from the late insertion of a new Viola. But this is not one of those Twelfth Nights where Viola dominates the production. Precisely because of the musical conceit, Olivia - the woman all these songs are about, after all - rises in stature in this production, and that rise is at Viola’s expense. It’s not the star turn that her Rosalind was last year, but it’s a solid performance - at least when she’s in trousers. (I continue to wonder whether she can perform as well in a dress - both in As You Like It and this year in Twelfth Night her game rose noticeably as soon as she shed her woman’s weeds. We’ll see whether we get another instance next year; they haven’t yet cast Imogen, so far as I know.)

Finally, Ben Carlson. His Feste is a very interesting specimen: a ham and a scene-stealer who also harbors a kind of contempt of his audience. I’m talking about Feste here, not Carlson; the audience I’m referring to is people like Orsino and Sir Toby, not us folks out in the darkened seats. We’re drawn to Carlson’s Feste - we can’t not be; he’s the lead singer on all the numbers - but we don’t exactly like what we find when we get there. This isn’t a criticism - I thought this was the most interesting and nuanced Feste I’ve seen since William Hutt’s. But it is unusual, if nothing else, for Feste to seem colder, and frankly less sympathetic, than Malvolio - at the start of the play, not at the end - which was the case with this production.

* * *

And, with this post, I finally finish my roundup of the current Stratford season. Which means I can get on to writing about the amazing theatre I saw this past weekend in Chicago!

I am generally averse to works of theatre that revolve around ideas about science or mathematics. I liked, but didn’t love Proof. I liked, but didn’t love Arcadia. Scientific metaphors that some authors find fecund - and obviously many audiences agree - seem sterile to me. I suspect it’s because, to my mind, scientific ideas can’t really serve as metaphors - rather, we use metaphors to understand scientific ideas because those ideas can’t really be grasped directly. When we say “light is a wave” we’re using our common experience understanding of waves to explain, by analogy, something about light. But that’s all the metaphor is. It doesn’t mean that light “is” a wave - and that, for example, there therefore must be some kind of medium (the ether, say) through which said waves propagate. The math - the ability to predict how light will actually behave - is all that’s real, and the metaphor’s truth derives from its utility in enabling us to pursue the math correctly.

So if a playwright or novelist runs the metaphor backward - says, for example, that life is like quantum mechanics because you can’t really observe it without participating in it - what I hear is a scientific idea is being reduced or misused. It doesn’t seem possible that somebody would understand quantum mechanics more intuitively than life, so what’s really happening is a metaphor to help somebody understand quantum mechanics is being repurposed, and transformed into something else, to say something about life; and as a consequence of the transformation, the metaphor becomes a poorer guide to the science, and may actually misinform.

So it was with trepidation that I approached The Little Years, a contemporary Canadian play by a mathematician (John Mighton) that, as I understood, used modern ideas about the physics of time to illuminate the tragic life of a girl, later a woman, who never quite “got” life. But my trepidation turned out to be somewhat misplaced. This isn’t really a play that uses these ideas about time as a metaphor. It’s a play about a person for whom those ideas about time become a powerful metaphor. And, whether the playwright intended this or not, to my mind becomes something of a victim of her own ideas.

The person in question is Kate, a bright if odd teenage girl in the 1950s at the start of the play (played with authentic innocence by Bethany Jillard), who has an interest in science of which her mother, Alice (a progressive revelation in the hands of Chick Reid), disapproves. Kate doesn’t really have friends - doesn’t really get people at all, in fact. She’s the kind of girl who is most comfortable alone with her journal, into which she writes not only the usual bookish girl wonderings but her speculations about the nature of time.

The play follows Kate from this point to late middle age, but by the time we see her next, a college dropout in her twenties (now and for the remainder of the drama played by Irene Poole in one of the best performances I’ve seen from her), it’s already all gone wrong, and nobody - or, at any rate, not her mother - can figure out what went wrong. She’s angry, bitter, actively working to alienate everyone around her. She’s bitter, in particular, about the preference everybody - especially her mother - shows for her exceptionally accomplished poet of a brother, William. But, interestingly, there’s never any suggestion that William doesn’t “deserve” that preference. He’s bright, accomplished, sociable - and, moreover, he doesn’t have any antipathy for his younger sister.

William doesn’t ever appear on stage - not living, anyway; his ashes appear in an urn in the second act - but his presence is felt in every scene. His mother glories in his accomplishments, initially, but as we see later, when she’s old and in a nursing home, living her life through her son has left her as bitter as her daughter. (It’s a triumph of performance as well as a sign of the strength of the writing that Ms. Reid, so perky and upbeat in her early scenes, yet so bitter and angry decades later, is very clearly the same woman.) William’s wife, Grace (there’s a pointed name choice for you - and Yanna McIntosh plays the role as a very human embodiment thereof) herself seems vaguely oppressed by her husband’s success; she reacts, on the one hand, by trying to take her troubled sister-in-law under her wing (Kate lets her spend her time, but shows her no affection or gratitude in return) and, on the other, seeking solace in an on-again, off-again love affair with a painter friend, Roger (played very finely by Evan Buliung - it can’t be easy to project both interiority and shallowness, which is precisely what is called for in the role).

Mighton seems to be saying something about the nature of fame and glory, and the pursuit thereof. There’s a pointed scene on this theme relatively early in the play, when Grace brings Kate to a party, and introduces her to Roger (this is before the two have started their affair). Kate is belligerently hostile to Roger, but she doesn’t simply avoid him - she sets out to take him and his pretensions to significance down a number of pegs (one senses she’s really taking aim at her absent brother, or her mother, through him). She lectures him about time, how it could just as well run backwards as forwards, how we can’t actually experience it - all of this by way of mocking his desire to achieve some kind of permanence, something that lasts beyond his own life, through his art. Roger leaves her to get a drink, and to continue on the path of life he planned, but decades later he tells Kate that he never forgot what she said, that, in fact, she got him exactly right: his art was hollow, propelled by ambition rather than anything authentic, and as a consequence his whole career has been meaningless for him. (And even his fame was fleeting; he’s now known as the “Barry Manilow of painting.”)

But what struck me about the scene was the destructiveness of the metaphors that Kate had latched onto. What was truly important in what she was saying wasn’t anything about the nature of time, but about the nature of experience. She was cautioning Roger against living through imagined experience - ambition, she sensed, was a variety of just that, living through the imagined experience of achievement as from the outside, as her mother lived through the imagined experience of her famous son. If one isn’t to live through imaginary experience, one must live through reality. But this is one thing Kate never does - her whole life is a rejection of reality, out of anger and hurt that reality seemed to have rejected her. And she consoles herself by saying that, understanding the nature of time as she (thinks she) does, she is the only one who understands the folly of everyone else’s engagement with reality.

Now, I don’t actually think Kate’s life is ruined by her adolescent meditations on time. But I also don’t think her life is ruined by her mother’s preference for her brother, or by the casual discrimination against women that was just part of the 1950s landscape. As Ms. Poole plays her, Kate is a profoundly disordered person, someone who, on a very basic level, doesn’t understand how to relate to people. I’ve known a few people like that - some more functional than others. What they have in common is that they have always been “off.” They were born that way. Now, there’s still the question of how you - and your parents, your school, etc. - respond, all of which has bearing on the varied outcomes I’ve observed in these people. But I couldn’t quite tell whether the author recognized that Kate was one of these people. That while her anger and bitterness may be primarily due to the way she was treated (though not necessarily; I do know people who I’ve known from early childhood and who, for all I can tell, were just born angry and hostile), her strangeness is not. That’s just part of her, from the beginning.

Some years ago, I saw a production of The Glass Menagerie in which Laura was played as one of these people. Not as a very shy girl who narrowly misses the opportunity to break out of her self-imposed shell, but a woman who was fundamentally “off” - who may have briefly, even profoundly, connected with the gentleman caller, but who could never have sustained that connection no matter what he did. That’s not the only way to play the role, but I didn’t think it was an unrealistic choice - as I say, there are plenty of people like that. But the main consequence of that choice was to take the focus of the drama off of Laura, and put it more on Amanda and Tom, and how they are affected by her, and having to live with her. Similarly, in The Light in the Piazza - a very moving contemporary musical, about a young woman who, as a consequence of an accident, has been trapped, mentally, at around age ten, never to fully mature (other than physically, where her development is entirely normal) - the focus of the drama isn’t so much on the woman as on her mother, and what living with - and devoting herself to - this child has done to her life.

The Little Years is another drama about an “off” character, but we are with her for so much of the play that there is no way the drama can recenter on somebody else. And I appreciated how uncomfortable that made me. I didn’t want to identify with this woman, with someone I could see was in constant psychic pain, and who plainly could not understand the nature of that pain any better than could the people around her.

And I wonder how comfortable Mighton was with it either, because he concludes with the only unconvincing scene in the play. Kate comes to her niece, Tanya’s, graduation, and, meeting her, learns that Tanya has worshiped her for years, ever since she discovered Kate’s old notebooks where she wrote down her adolescent musings on time. These notebooks, it turns out, changed Tanya’s life - protected her, in some fashion, from the trials of adolescence. Kate finally makes a connection with another human being. And she weeps, her first and happiest tears of the play.

I say this was an unconvincing scene, and the reason is that Tanya is not a character; she’s a vehicle for the author to give a gift he wants to give to his protagonist. Tanya seems completely oblivious to how odd her aunt is. It’s not that she looks past it, much less that she seems drawn to it - she just doesn’t seem to notice. And that is just not how you would react if you worshiped someone for her writing, and then finally met her, and she was, well, really strange and off-putting. Tanya, moreover, was played by Ms. Jillard, the same actress as played the young Kate; the suggestion, plainly, is that Tanya is who Kate might have been were she born into a more accepting family and a more accepting time. And I just don’t believe that. Indeed, I think it reduces all the pain we’ve been through to a “message” about love or tolerance that isn’t even supported by the rest of the play - Grace, most obviously, does everything anyone could hope and more to welcome and accept Kate, over the course of decades, and it makes no apparent difference to Kate’s state of mental and emotional isolation.

Notwithstanding my objections to that last scene, I was impressed by this play. It was exquisitely realized - beyond the excellent work from every member of the cast who, on top of everything else, have to age forty years over the course of the play (and they do so), every piece of furniture in the set, every accessory in the costumes, is a perfectly chosen signifier for period and character. And, though I can’t exactly say I enjoyed it, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Whether I wanted it to or not, it made a connection with me, a connection that lasted well beyond the time I spent in the theatre. Which, notwithstanding that I don’t even know what time is, seems to me to indicate that it was well-spent.

That’s the title of the Billy Wilder film, starring James Cagney, based on the Ferenc Molnar play The President. The film is one of my personal favorites; when I heard the play (in an adaptation by Morwyn Brebner), which was a huge hit at Shaw in 2008, was being revived, I had to see it.

The play is basically the climactic action that concludes the movie. The premise is: Mr. Norrison, the president of an unnamed conglomerate has been tending to an important investor’s daughter as a long-term houseguest. The investor in question is coming to pick her up, and will arrive in an hour. At this point, Norrison discovers that his charge has married in secret, to a comprehensively inappropriate man, and that she is pregnant by him. So Norrison has one hour to turn an uncouth, slovenly, Communist oaf into the perfect son-in-law for an American multi-millionaire. He does it, needless to say.

The movie complicates this story in a variety of ways - the story starts earlier, with the arrival of the girl on Cagney’s doorstep, so there’s time for a number of twists and turns in the plot before the climax; Cagney isn’t the president, he’s one of many vice presidents, still trying to climb the greasy corporate pole; his charge isn’t the daughter of an investor, she’s the daughter of his boss, the president of the company; Cagney’s relationship with his wife is on as shaky ground as his control of the president’s daughter; and the whole thing is playing out in Berlin just before the wall goes up. But the play is really that simple: the first few lines lay out the scenario, and then we simply watch, agog, as Norrison, unleashing a blizzard of verbiage from a whirlwind of energy, achieves the impossible.

Molnar may have thought that he was writing something profound about the nature of human relations under capitalism, but that’s not what principally comes across. (The Wilder film does a better job of bringing that out, precisely because it complicates what Molnar was trying to communicate.) Rather, what we see is that Norrison really is kind of amazing. None of us could think that fast, to say nothing of talking that fast. And of course it’s not just Norrison we’re amazed by; we’re more amazed by the actor - Lorne Kennedy, in this case - who has to play him, who cannot stop talking - talking faster than an auctioneer without the slightest loss of clarity and comprehensibility - for an hour straight. It’s just astonishing to watch.

And astonishing as well to watch the excellent supporting cast keeping up - not just with the speech, but with the plot, as the various players have to change costumes repeatedly and rapidly as a vast cast of characters tromps through Norrison’s office, summoned to participate in different aspects of the makeover. The physical comedy of this production, directed by Blair Williams, fully matches the virtuosity of the text. I think my favorite bit of business involved a bottle of aspirin, which Norrison orders and repeatedly refuses to give to a lawyer in his employ who has a 108 degree fever, telling him the aspirin is designated for another purpose. Then, late in the play, a bunch of flowers come in, designated for the investor’s wife, and Norrison dumps the bottle of aspirin in - to keep them fresh. At which point the lawyer, desperate, grabs the flower and tries to drink the water. And before we’ve finished laughing at that, the next gag - actually, collection of gags - is off and running. (About the only opportunity for physical comedy that was missed was: there’s a barber hiding in a closet, and a variety of men in extravagant beards come through the office, but not one of them is accidentally shaved.)

It’s not really a complete play - as I say, we get the premise and the climactic action, that’s about it. But it’s a perfectly delightful amuse. And it’s over just in time for lunch.

Geraint Wyn Davies’s other starring role this year is as Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This is, let’s not beat around the bush, not a very good play. I don’t merely mean that it’s not first-rate Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida is a structurally problematic play. Two Gentlemen of Verona is a hodge-podge with a weird and unsatisfying ending. Timon of Athens has a weak story and a lot of writing that still feels like a rough draft. Richard II is beautiful to read, but its formal nature and lack of dramatic incident makes it a real challenge to stage.

Merry Wives isn’t a problematic play. It works just fine. It just isn’t very good. It is a considerably shallower comedy than A Comedy of Errors - actually, that suggest that A Comedy of Errors is shallow, which it appears to be but really isn’t - to say nothing of comparisons to the sublime comedy that runs through the Henry IV plays where Falstaff originated. The center of Merry Wives isn’t actually Falstaff at all, but Master Francis Ford, the jealous husband. He’s the one with a character arc, and precisely because there’s some emotional depth to his character he’s also quite a bit funnier than Falstaff is.

But there’s still a lot of comic potential in the play. And the most important parts are realized in this production. I would highlight in particular Lucy Peacock’s Mistress Ford and Tom Rooney’s Francis Ford. Ms. Peacock is entirely convincing when she cracks up while trying to trick Falstaff into hiding in the laundry basket - I wasn’t the only one in the theatre who wondered for a moment whether she wasn’t actually cracking herself up, rather than acting. But she’s also entirely convincing in her offended reaction to her husband’s distrust. And Rooney, well, if he did nothing but stand there in the ridiculous feminine wig and overcoat that he wears as a disguise to meet Falstaff, I would still be rolling in the aisles. But he does so much more than this. To this delightful pair, I’d add Laura Condlln as Mistress Page, who is the perfect best-friend and partner-in-crime with Ms. Peacock’s Mistress Ford (though she’s less distinct in the Anne Page subplot).

Wyn Davies himself is at his best when he lets his inner goat romp freely. “Am I a woodman, ha?” he asks lasciviously with both Mistresses on his lap, and the house very nearly comes down. But he seems to be channeling his impersonation of Dylan Thomas rather than playing Falstaff, and I don’t just mean the incongruous thick Welsh accent (especially confusing because there is another character who’s actually identified as Welsh, who does not have such an accent, and who Falstaff mocks for being Welsh). Falstaff is, whatever else he may be, a knight. He’s aware of his rank, proud of it, and disdainful of his inferiors - among whom he most certainly includes Master Ford, the man he intends to cuckold. And that sense of social position and pretension - absurd, to be sure, but still an element in his character - is something I never got from Wyn Davies.

The real problem with the production is that nether the director, Frank Galati, nor the actors adequately mined the peripheral characters for comic potential. Chris Prentice gives good line readings as the idiot Slender, but we don’t see that he’s a fool; he isn’t given anything to do. Janet Wright is inadequate as the mercenary Mistress Quickly; I really wondered what kind of discussions she and Galati had had about the character, if any - I can’t even tell you what her interpretation of the character was. Nigel Bennett does a charmingly awful French accent, and is appropriately stiff and pop-eyed as Doctor Caius, but neither set nor costume gives us any hint that he is, in fact, a doctor (and the low comic potential to be exploited from his profession should be obvious). Finally, the Anne Page subplot, which badly needs help to be made interesting, doesn’t get the help it needs. I don’t know whether Trent Pardy’s Fenton - the man who she intends to marry - is actually a fortune-hunter or a decent guy; I don’t know whether Anne (played by Andre Runge) is a fool for loving him or sees that he’s the real thing; I don’t know whether her mother and father (the latter played by Tom McCamus) are appalled by her choice or merely disappointed (and I don’t know why Master Ford objects to his wife’s preferred suitor, Doctor Caius, nor why she favors him, apart from the fact that he’s not a fool like Slender). This is a fault in the text - the plot and characters are tossed off rather than developed - but that calls for creative choice on the part of the director and cast that make things more distinct, so that we care about what’s going on when Falstaff and the Fords aren’t on stage.

But my son loved it. Falstaff hides in a basket! He gets beaten while wearing a dress! And Wyn Davies, to his credit, finds ample other opportunities for comic business (I’m thinking in particular of the business with his foot bath water) to lard on top of the big set pieces. So: it may not be a great play. It may not exploit all the comic potential in the peripheral characters. But if it’s funny enough for my kid, it’s funny enough.

As it happens, Lerner and Loewe’s two most celebrated musicals - My Fair Lady and Camelot - are being staged right now at rival Canadian theatre festivals, the first at Shaw and the second at Stratford. Taking in the two shows on successive nights, I was struck by how similar the two shows are:

- Both feature male protagonists with pretensions to culture (Higgins) or civilization (Arthur) who can’t figure out how to handle the women in their lives.

- Both feature women who are tempted away from the men the audience knows they belong with by the lure of pretty faces (Eliza for Freddie and Guinevere for Launcelot).

- Both feature older “sidekick” characters whose names begin with “P” (Pickering and Pellinore) who are encountered fairly at random and who have no real plot function but who provide a degree of comic relief and serve as gentle foils for the male lead.

- Both run into trouble in the second act, as the male lead refuses to take decisive action to resolve the drama (Arthur will neither forgive Guinevere nor take vengeance on Launcelot, nor can he bring himself to extirpate Mordred; Higgins will neither admit he loves Eliza nor will he simply let her go).

- Both even feature equestrian contests that take place off-stage while we observe the observers.

My Fair Lady is by far the better show - it has livelier songs (which do more to advance the plot than those in Camelot), and sharper-drawn characters - but it didn’t need to be. It has, in fact, the weaker underlying plot. The whole Pygmalion story climaxes with the ball at which Eliza triumphs. After that, Higgins behaves like a jerk, Eliza throws her fit, and … well, then they sort of dance around each other for the rest of the play declaring their independence from each other and refusing to let each other go. This isn’t really Lerner and Loewe’s fault; Shaw’s to blame for refusing to accept that he’d written a romantic comedy, and therefore leaving his drama unresolved in an unsatisfying way, and bringing the slippers back at the end doesn’t fix the problem that for the twenty minutes before that Higgins and Eliza are just arguing with each other in a fruitless and unsatisfying manner. The source material for Camelot, meanwhile, is a story of truly epic sweep, but the show neuters it. Camelot is a musical with a message, and the message is: civilization is tough to maintain, because people have messy emotions. Arthur wants to be civilized, to improve the world, but his principles leave him passive in the face of Guinevere’s straying and Mordred’s provocations. This isn’t just dramatically unsatisfying (passive heroes are the big no-no in any dramatic medium) - it’s not even intellectually interesting.

Indeed, Camelot takes pains to make every major character less-interesting than he or she might have been. Mordred is, in the musical as in the legend, Arthur’s illegitimate son. But his appearance causes no particular consternation to either Arthur or, even more surprisingly, to Guinevere; Arthur’s not the first king to have one of these lying around. Now, think about that. Guinevere is tortured by her love for Launcelot, guilty in part because she knows Arthur is so good, to her and to her lover and just in general, but also because she knows her dissatisfaction is in part related to that very goodness. And yet: this revelation that Arthur has a somewhat more sordid past has no impact on her at all! Mordred himself is a thoroughly inadequate villain. He doesn’t really get under Arthur’s skin. He doesn’t trick Arthur into destroying himself, nor does he manipulate the other major characters. All he does is whisper nasty things in hallways, and bribe his aunt to keep Arthur captive for a little while. Richard III he ain’t. Then there’s that aunt, the infamous Morgan le Fay. In Camelot, she’s reduced to performing parlor tricks in exchange for candy! Camelot’s Launcelot is kind of a hybrid of White’s Launcelot and his perfect son, Galahad, and has the potential to be quite interesting, an Angelo-like figure of virtue betrayed by the most inappropriate of loves. But, again, the show declines to seize the opportunity. We don’t really see Launcelot tortured by his passion, by lying to his best friend; we barely notice that Launcelot has betrayed everything he supposedly stood for. And, indeed, it’s not that clear he has - it appears, based on what we see, that this grand affair is entirely unconsummated. How terribly, boringly civilized.

The two equestrian scenes actually encapsulate very well the difference between the two shows, how much My Fair Lady makes out of what is really very little, and how little Camelot makes out of what is really very much. In My Fair Lady, we watch the upper class as they watch the opening race at Ascot. It’s a one-joke number, but it’s a great joke, setting us up perfectly for the hilarious introduction of Eliza into this society - revealing, in fact, that while language and dress are key indicators of class, they are not, contra Higgins, class itself. Eliza is simply more alive than these stuffed shirts, and that’s due in part to her own class origins but more distinctly to her own exceptional character, something Freddie cottons on to immediately, Eliza herself somewhat later, and Higgins only near the end of the play. In any event, the fact that the race happens off-stage serves the scene: we’re not supposed to be thrilled by the race itself; the action is in the reaction of the spectators.

Now consider the jousting number in Camelot. Unlike the My Fair Lady scene, there is nothing actually happening in the stands that is important to the story. We already know nobody at court likes Launcelot. There’s no drama in watching them get disappointed three times as Launcelot bests his three challengers, and listening to them sing (tunelessly) about the exciting jousts they are watching isn’t a substitute for watching the actual jousts. In this case, putting the race off-stage weakens the scene, and makes us aware of the limitations of the stage. The muse of fire is nowhere to be found.

I don’t mean to be too harsh. But there is a tendency to forget that other things went wrong with the American musical in the 1960s besides a change in the character of popular music. The American musical in that decade became self-important, losing track of character and story and becoming top-heavy with theme. It’s a problem that afflicts even theatrically powerful works like Cabaret, to say nothing of something like Man of La Mancha. Or, for that matter, Camelot.

* * *

But enough of my throwing stones at houses I couldn’t build myself if my life depended on it. What about the productions?

The great strength of the Shaw’s production of My Fair Lady is Deborah Hay’s exceptional Eliza Doolittle. She’s exceptional in being a rare Eliza who doesn’t seem like an obvious candidate for a makeover when we first meet her in the gutter. Her comic delivery is impeccable (she really shines in the Ascot scene). And the father-fixation aspect of her relationship with Higgins is extremely clear without ever being obvious, if you know what I mean. Eliza’s visit to the old neighborhood just before her father’s lamented wedding was especially poignant this time, because this Eliza hadn’t just outgrown her old class. She had outgrown her need for a father. And, therefore, she’d outgrown Higgins as well. And if, when she finally comes out in society, she wasn’t quite the princess that Audrey Hepburn was, well, who is?

Unfortunately, Benedict Campbell’s Higgins doesn’t quite measure up as a romantic opposite for Ms. Hay. Campbell has a baseline geniality about him that undermines the drama of his scenes with Eliza. For the show to really work, we have to want Eliza to be able to tame this particular tiger. But this Higgins is pretty tame to begin with. He’s rude and pompous of course, but he isn’t ever genuinely scary. And, for that reason, he isn’t terribly sexy either. Patrick Galligan’s Pickering compounds the problem by being utterly unconvincing as a British army officer. His excitability kills the humor in many of his best lines, underlining where he would get better effect from underplaying.

Neil Barclay makes for a jolly fat rogue as Alfred P. Doolittle, at his best in his pivotal scene with Higgins and Pickering in the first act. (Covered though he is in soot and grime, before taking a seat in Higgins’s parlor he dusts off - the divan! Priceless.) And the rest of the cast are all full of game. But they are undermined by the direction in three ways.

First, the design is starkly linear, which makes for a series of scenes where characters march from one end of the stage to the other and back. (This is particularly obvious in the number, “Married in the Morning,” which ought to be a show-stopper.)

Second, the costumes are downright bizarre. Higgins and his household appear to exist in something resembling the real world. The rest of London, however, is stylized, but it’s not clear what style the designer is aiming for. This is particularly evident in the Ascot scene, in which the aristocracy are got up in such garish outfits they are indistinguishable from the cockneys in Covent Garden. And those cockneys, far from being authentically dirty, are so obviously smeared with stage grime that I had to wonder whether the director was trying to telegraph: this is a play; these people are pretending to be working-class cockneys, but they really aren’t. That’s an approach that might work well for, say Guys and Dolls, whose gangsters are supposed to be stylized fictions rather than “real” thugs. But My Fair Lady is a story of transformation. If we don’t believe in the reality of the world from which Eliza emerges, then her transformation is drained of meaning.

Finally, that underlining that I talked about with Pickering is a more general problem with the direction. Too many times, the actors are busy doing something rather than being their characters - doing things that are unnatural but that telegraph something loudly, whether it’s Freddie fussing with his papers as Eliza sings to him or Higgins’s servants lolling about extravagantly as they await the master’s return from the ball. All this business does is undermine the reality of the world. If we take Freddie’s fussing seriously, then he’s a genuinely bizarre person; so we don’t take it seriously, but read it as so much “stage” behavior - and we disconnect, emotionally, from the scene; if he’s just “acting” then nothing’s really at stake between him and Eliza, is there? Similarly with the servants: if one flops head-downward on an easy chair, she gets an easy laugh - but what’s also been telegraphed is that we’re in sitcom world, which means that Eliza’s discomfiture at being ignored by Higgins and Pickering when they come home is also something taking place in sitcom world. Which means it doesn’t matter that much.

The good things about the show - Hay’s and Barclay’s performances and the wonderful songs that never get old - are still, to my mind, worth a ticket. But I don’t think this is the best showcase for Lerner and Loewe’s best work.

* * *

My feelings about Camelot are almost exactly the opposite of my feelings about My Fair Lady - also mixed, but the opposite mixture. The strongest things about this Camelot are the male lead and his sidekick. Geraint Wyn Davies is an exceptionally appealing Arthur; the conflicted emotions he feels as he observes Guinevere and Launcelot, which the book does its best to dull, Wyn Davies strives to sharpen again. One of the many troubles with Arthur as a character is that, even as he ages, he’s still always looking for his old teacher, Merlin, still behaving like a schoolboy trying to get a good report. But this is another aspect of the character that Wyn Davies makes more of than I thought would be there - while his young Arthur at the beginning doesn’t seem as physically young as he ought, his older Arthur seems appealingly juvenile; the playfulness of a little boy comes out in his smile, his twinkling eyes, his eager fidgeting with his fingers.

Brent Carver, meanwhile, does a marvelous job with King Pellinore (he doubles as Merlin, but that’s not much of a role - another weakness in the adaptation), fully exploiting the comic potential of what is, really, a very thin character. It’s interesting watching Wyn Davies and Carver together; Pellinore is something of a substitute for Merlin (who, in turn, is a surrogate father for Arthur), an older man Arthur can lean on, but he’s also an emblem of Arthur’s own premature maturation. There’s something very suggestive about the fact that Arthur prefers the company of this old fossil to that of the younger knights at court, something that probably informs the fact that Guinevere falls for Launcelot, and I think the fine chemistry between Wyn Davies and Carver brought this suggestion out, not so much in the theatre as in reflection thereafter.

Jonathan Winsby is appropriately beautiful and cluelessly self-involved as Launcelot, and he’s got a voice for the role (which Wyn Davies doesn’t quite have for his, to be fair). But the weak link in the production is Kaylee Harwood’s Guinevere. In her very first song, she fails to connect with the vanity and cruelty of the character, both manifest in the words she’s singing. If a whole range of emotions pass across Wyn Davies’s face when he observes the first meeting between Guinevere and Launcelot, Harwood’s betrays little expression. Guinevere should be a force of nature; Harwood is, not to put too fine a point on it, far too civilized.

What was missing was brought home with force in the second act number, “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” On its surface, this is a song about the dissatisfactions of wealth and position: surely the simple folk find it easier to enjoy themselves than we do at court. But the subtext is her love for Launcelot, and her dissatisfaction with her husband. When they first met, he presented himself as precisely one of these simple folk. And she fell in love with him. And she still loves him, but she isn’t, well, in love with him. What she’s singing about is: how can we get that spark back - before it’s too late? And he’s supposed to understand what she’s singing about. With all that subtext in the performance, an at-best-clever song that doesn’t seem to advance the story becomes a pivotal moment in the drama - the moment that Arthur fails to win his wife back. Unfortunately, at least in the performance I saw, Ms. Harwood didn’t bring any of that subtext out. And so it was merely a song about how boring it is at court.

As for the production design, if Shaw’s My Fair Lady suffers from some strange choices, Stratford’s Camelot suffers from overly traditional ones. The production consciously invokes the design preferences of the 1950s and early 1960s. Rent “The Court Jester” and you’ll get a pretty good idea of the look of this production. It all has a certain camp charm, but it’s also rather bloodless, and this isn’t a show that needs to be made more anemic than it already is. May has rarely seemed less lusty.

The director also made some strange alterations in the second act. Most notably, by starting the second act with “Fie on Goodness,” he further undermines Mordred as an antagonist (and he’s not much of one to begin with). If the knights are discontented before Mordred even shows up, then his arrival on the scene doesn’t actually change much. The whole episode with Morgan Le Fay, meanwhile, is downright embarrassing - candy? candy?!? - if I were in Gary Griffin’s shoes, I’ve have been inclined to cut the whole thing, and make Arthur’s imprisonment a surprise to the audience as well as to him.

* * *

One final word about political context, for both shows. Our world is, not to put to fine a point on it, a rather different one from the world of 1960. And both of these shows are just a bit too comfortable with themselves and their world, which is symptomatic of the times in which they were written. I think both would benefit from productions that actively tried to connect fruitfully with the current political context.

My Fair Lady tells a story about class difference. But it was written at a time when class differences were smaller than they had been in recent memory before, or than they have become since. Compared to either 1910 or 2010, 1960 was the summit of economic and social equality, at least in white America. My Fair Lady alludes to great social differences between upper and lower class - Eliza’s father never married her mother; she suspects her aunt was murdered for a hat; etc. - but these are played for laughs, because those differences didn’t resonate importantly at the time the show was created. But they would now. I would like to see a My Fair Lady where Eliza is a chavette from a benighted council estate, where the world of Covent Garden has just a bit less Mary Poppins-ish charm and a bit more Little Britain-ish edge.

The bid idea Arthur has in Camelot, meanwhile, is “might for right.” Well, in the ninth year of America’s military presence in Iraq (actually, that should probably be the twentieth - we were militarily engaged, at least in enforcing the no-fly-zone, from the end of the Gulf War in 1991 through to the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003), I think there are reasons to question that idea beyond “won’t the knights get discontented being good all the time?” I’m less clear on how you would bring the contemporary political context successfully to bear on this show, but I do feel like it’s a problem that needs to be solved for us to really care about that one, brief, shining moment. And I feel like other elements are there - Launcelot’s extravagant conviction in his own rightness, for example - that could be harnessed to make this dated show relevant again to our time. They did call him the once and future king, right? Well, the future is now.

Antoni Cimolino is an interesting figure in the history of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. He began his career there as an actor in the late 1980s, before shifting to a combination of administration and stage direction. He’s now the General Director of the Festival. He is, like his mentor, the late Richard Monette, a home-grown leader, someone who has spent his career at the Festival. But Monette left the Festival to establish himself as an artist elsewhere - around and outside of Canada. He returned to become a stage director and then Artistic Director only after that career.

It is widely assumed that Cimolino would like to be Artistic Director one day, and he has much to recommend him - ample administrative experience, a good relationship with the donor community, intimate knowledge of the Stratford stages and the artistic operation of the Festival. His close partnership with current Artistic Director Des McAnuff hopefully has enabled him to establish his own connections with McAnuff’s far-flung collection of contacts in the theatre world.

I’m not terribly concerned about the fact that Cimolino has spent basically his whole career at Stratford. I worry a bit about what that means for the breadth of his contacts, but the guy’s got hustle. He’s not going to let the place stagnate.

But what I’ve noticed, thinking back on his career, is that, as an artist, I don’t really know who he is. That is to say: I don’t know his vision.

I’ve seen, if I recall correctly, five productions directed by Antoni Cimolino over the years: a Twelfth Night from a decade ago, an As You Like It, Coriolanus, Bartholomew Fair. Every production has been solid. Every one showed an understanding of what keeps an audience with the play. (Even his Bartholomew Fair did what it could with an impossible text.) He works well with actors (he was an actor himself, after all). And he’s got some clever directorial tricks up his sleeve - I recall his decision, in his Coriolanus, not to have new scenes begin as the prior ones were still ending by having new people coming on-stage talking - the traditional way to keep the action moving through scene changes in Shakespeare - but by having the players for the next scene come onstage and take their places literally right behind the actors of the previous scene, so that the action can shift in an instant from one scene to another. It was effectively the theatrical equivalent of a cinematic “cut” and it did a great deal to make those scenes more immediate.

But I was still waiting for the play that feels like something he absolutely had to direct. Something bursting with passion, with a fire to tell a particular story, now, in this way; a note of inwardly-driven urgency. I want to know what he’s passionate about.

Richard Monette’s directorial debut at Stratford, his 1988 Taming of the Shrew, which I have seen on film but was unfortunately unable to see in person (since I hadn’t heard of Stratford yet) showed me his passion. I saw a real commitment to comedy, to earning the laugh - but also a director who had the text thoroughly embedded in his fingertips, so that every joke sprang from a deep understanding of the line, sight gags and brilliant line readings fruitfully interpenetrating each other. But more than that, I saw a love story, and a director who believed in telling a love story. (And Shrew is arguably Shakespeare’s best love story, deeply moving if properly executed, as it was in this production.) It felt like a story he passionately wanted to tell. And he told it beautifully.

The first few Shakespeare productions Des McAnuff directed at Stratford didn’t make a similarly grand impression. There were certainly things I liked about his Romeo and Juliet, but I didn’t love the production or feel like he had something compelling to say about the play. I thought the central performances in his Macbeth were strong and unusual, but the directorial concept left me cold. His Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum was very enjoyable, but not transforming (I wouldn’t expect that show to be), and his production of Caesar and Cleopatra was thrilling, but I felt less that this was a story he needed to tell than that he wanted to create an amazing theatrical space for Christopher Plummer to, well, be Christopher Plummer in. (I felt somewhat similarly about his Tempest last year.) It wasn’t until I saw his As You Like It that I understood where his true passions lay. The fusion of music and theatre - not in the form of a traditional musical comedy, but more in the sense of creating a whole world suffused with music - that’s one aspect of the passion. The other is his affinity for Shakespeare’s mature comedies, love stories in which the relations between the principals are soaked in melancholy, and the delights of the world are a kind of fruitful distraction from the sad truth of ultimate loneliness, even in love. This came out very strongly in his As You Like It, and again in this year’s marvelous Twelfth Night, which I still need to review. (And his Jesus Christ Superstar and Caesar and Cleopatra can be understood as inversions of his favorite theme: stories about men who will not let themselves be loved, or really known, because they need to protect their uniqueness, rather than stories about women who long to be loved, and known, but kind of know that the love they will get won’t quite measure up to that desire. So perhaps Caesar was a story he needed to tell after all, and I just didn’t understand it yet at the time.)

This year, Cimolino’s contribution to the Festival program is The Grapes of Wrath as adapted from the Steinbeck novel by Frank Galati. And while the production doesn’t answer every question I had about who, theatrically, Antoni Cimolino is, I think I’m starting to get an inkling.

* * *

I admit, I am not a huge fan of Steinbeck. I find him preachy and dull. I couldn’t bring myself to tackle the book before the show, and I feared that I might be in for an evening of socialist realist posturing dressed up with country tunes and an expensive bathtub.

But I have to give credit to Cimolino, to Galati, and to the entire cast of the show, because what I got was an evening of compelling theatrical spectacle.

The primary star of the show is the set, a set dominated by three key components. First, the backdrop. Essentially featureless, its dark blues and reds invoke a fiery dust-bowl sunset. The blankness of the canvas is on one level realistic - these folks come from flat country; what you’d see behind them isn’t much more than sky - but on another level imparts a kind of Beckettian starkness to their situation. Their drama is playing out in a kind of no-place.

Second, water. Water appears first of all as the Colorado River that Pa’s various sons frolic in on their one real break in the journey, the river that lures the weird son, Noah (played movingly by Steven Ross) on a mysterious journey of his own away from his family. And the water comes back late in the play, returning as a rainstorm that sparks a flood that nearly washes the family away just as Rose of Sharon is giving birth. Water always makes for a lively spectacle on stage, but here again something that could have simply been an effect develops a kind of totemic power.

Lastly, the car. A beat-up jalopy not big enough for six has to cart over a dozen of the Joads and their hangers-on and all their worldly possessions. The car, dominating the stage for much of the middle of the play, begins to evoke Mother Courage’s cart (though Janet Wright’s stoical Ma has precious little in common with Brecht’s force of nature).

This is a story told with pictures, more comparable to a Depression-era mural than to a novel or a play. And looking at it I realized: this is an important part of the way Cimolino works. His Coriolanus, also, was organized around creating a set of iconic images. The glory of his Bartholomew Fair was Lucy Peacock’s performance as the Pig Woman, but that performance was itself anchored by an outrageously over-the-top fat suit. His As You Like It was anchored, as much it was by the music (composed by Bare Naked Ladies for the production), by the arrangement of the bodies of the cast during the numbers, creating 60s nostalgia tableaux that were instantly recognizable. An image - not actually static, but a kind of frozen motion, more photographic than cinematic; that’s an important part of how Cimolino tells stories.

Now, in this case, for all that it was, as I say, a powerful theatrical spectacle, and emotionally affecting, I would argue that it is not, in fact, a compelling story. It’s a story about suffering and endurance, and it’s rather monotonous as such. There are some rudimentary character arcs, but two of the three main ones (ex-con Tom Joad’s and ex-preacher Jim Casy’s) are structurally conversion narratives - stories about how, after seeing or experiencing this or that, a person saw the light and got on the path to salvation. And maybe it’s my bias, but I don’t generally think that’s an effective storyline - or, rather, the storyline’s effectiveness depends on the observer’s preexisting commitment to the faith to which the conversion narrative attests. (A story about the experience of conversion is something different entirely - but that’s not what Grapes is about.)

The main exception is the story of Rose of Sharon. Rose’s narrative isn’t a conversion narrative; hers is a story of maturation, a spoiled girl becoming a life-giving woman. That’s a universal story that doesn’t really depend on anything but human experience. It’s also a gift to Chilina Kennedy, who plays the part beautifully. The journey from brat to madonna seems like one that means something to her, and as a consequence an urgency powers her performance from beginning to end. (That end being one of the great iconic images of the 20th century.)

This isn’t a complaint about the performances. The two principal male characters are played by exceptionally strong actors - Tom Joad by Evan Buliung and Jim Casy by Tom McCamus - who are perfectly cast in these roles. Buliung has been playing Tom Joad for years, and McCamus has just the right faded vulpine charm to make us see the lustful preacher he once was. I’m just saying that the journey from dissipated ex-preacher to “you know, I got to thinking, maybe I need to support this strike” or from “I can’t believe they’d actually foreclose on the farm, that makes me so mad,” to “you know, after what they did to Jim Casy I’m damned if I’m not going to take his place” - these aren’t journeys that reveal a lot about the interior of these characters. A political point is being made - effectively. But that’s about it - which is why Tom Joad’s big “I’ll be there” speech is actually one of the weaker moments for that character in the play.

And all the other characters pretty much are who they are. Grandpa (played by the puckish Ian Clark) is a randy old goat until he dies. Al (an energetic Paul Nolan) is the randy young goat, until he gets married. Noah is otherworldly, Ma is stoical, Connie is no-account, Uncle John is guilty - and so forth. The actors throw themselves into their characters, and make them jump off the stage into our hearts and our minds - they do. But these people don’t change. They suffer. And they endure. And some of them get a notion into their heads that could change the world, maybe. And they make speeches about it. But as characters, they are static. And as a plot, it’s just one damned misery after another. And so, as I say, it’s not a compelling story qua story.

But it’s a magnificent mural. Go take a look.

Titus Andronicus was one of the most popular plays in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but its longer-term critical reputation has been decidedly mixed. Sam Johnson thought it was so bad as to be unplayable. Tennessee Williams called it his favorite Shakespearean play, precisely because of the “blood and guts” literally and metaphorically on display; this is a story about furiously passionate people acting out their passions through their and upon each others’ bodies. Harold Bloom considered the play to be a parody of the revenge tragedies that were all the rage at the time of its composition - an opinion that, I should note, can be reconciled both with Williams and with Johnson.

Myself, I have never been able to love the play. I don’t think it’s because of the graphic violence. I live in awe of Lear, and the blinding of Gloucester is an exceptionally graphic and cruel bit of stage violence - and the more viscerally it is staged, the better it plays, in my opinion. I am quite fond of The Duchess of Malfi, which is as extravagant in its cruelties as anyone could wish. And I was powerfully moved by the movie, “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” another work of art of exceptionally graphic cruelty (beginning with the opening sequence of a cook being forced to eat excrement and continuing through to a climactic act of cannibalism).

But what all these works of art have, and what I fear Titus lacks, is a center of moral concern. Gloucester is a blind fool whose folly ends with his literal blindness, but this moves us to pity. The Duchess in Webster’s play is a deeply sympathetic quester for freedom, as Bosola is a pitiful example of moral servitude, a man who pathetically hopes for reward for placing his conscience in the hands of others. And every one of the principal characters in Peter Greenaway’s movie - even the abhorrent thief - moves us to pathos to some degree.

The center of moral concern in Titus should be the title character; he is the one who suffers so horribly, and he is the one who exacts his revenge. Yet I find it hard to feel anything for him, for two reasons: first, because he is so horribly cruel when first introduced, killing first Tamora’s son and then his own; and, second, because I don’t believe he learns anything at all from his experience. At the end, he murders his own daughter for the sake of honor, just as he killed his son at the outset, and he is as cruel in his revenges on Tamora and Saturninus as Tamora was in her revenges upon him. When I ask myself “what is this play about?” I have a hard time answering.

Hamlet is a clever deconstruction of revenge tragedies, something Hamlet himself realizes - as he says of Laertes, “by the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his,” and his dying voice for young Fortinbras suggests a similar recognition that the Norwegian’s cause is similarly reflected in another, older mirror (Hamlet’s father killed Fortinbras’s father before the play began). Macbeth is a fascinating and terrible inverted revenge tragedy that sets up the malefactor as the protagonist - the satisfactions of revenge tragedy are subverted by making us identify with the character who deserves to have vengeance visited upon him, and who knows it. The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, is a very straightforward - and effective - revenge tragedy, but it has a clear moral center in its protagonist, Hieronimo; we don’t end the play feeling upbeat (Kyd understands the limits of revenge as a principle better than our modern enthusiasts for revenge - Mel Gibson, say) but we do feel a sense of closure.

Titus is none of these. There is no sense of closure at the end of Titus - no sense that proper order has been restored, if at great cost, nor a sense that anybody onstage has achieved an epiphany like Hamlet’s. At the outset of the play, we are introduced to a collection of horrible people, who proceed to visit horrors upon each other, and by the end of the play they are mostly dead. If Titus is supposed to be a critique of the revenge tragedy in some fashion, I fear it is rather the way “Natural Born Killers” or “A Clockwork Orange” are supposed to be critiques of violence in entertainment. Which is to say: whatever they are supposed to be critiquing, they are actually indulging in. Violence shouldn’t be empty. And making a work of art full of empty violence and saying, well, I’m making the point that violence is empty, and thereby critiquing our acceptance of violence - well, to me, anyway, that never works. What you actually wind up with is an empty and violent work of art.

Which is how Titus usually feels to me. If there is a moral center in Titus, it is Aaron the Moor, the only character who understands the nature of the world he lives in, and who responds rationally to that nature. He has nothing but contempt for everybody and everything - except the child of his own loins, for whom he declares a convincingly genuine love. He is, not coincidentally, the most compelling figure in any scene that he is in. And if Titus were a social satire, then Aaron’s success in leading one character after another down the path to horror would have a Marlovian zest to it, in the way that Richard III can (and that play considerably surpasses Marlowe, I think most would agree). But this is not a social satire; this is not recognizably our world. (Actually, one relatively compelling production of Titus that I saw set the play in fascist-era Italy, which brought the play home in a way that for me doesn’t usually happen - it became a sort of political fable, Titus himself a kind of exemplar of a certain set of martial virtues that fascism made an idol of, and that made fascism possible when not checked by other virtues.)

* * *

So how did the current Stratford production measure up to my expectations for this disfavored play?

On the one hand, this production boasted a series of very strong performances. John Vickery was an affecting Titus, helped considerably by that sonorous voice. Claire Lautier made a fierce and regal Tamora, completely believable as a woman who could, even in chains, charm the spoiled brat heir to the purple, Saturninus, who was played in turn with a perfect blend of petulance and cruelty by Sean Arbuckle (and, as an aside, it is such a pleasure to see Arbuckle play these kinds of roles; he does an excellent job as the Camillos and Theraménès, but he really shines when he gets a role that lets him do a bit of sneering - like this one, or Nick in Who’s Afraid). Dion Johnstone was a more convincing Aaron than he usually is in these villainous roles - I normally just don’t believe he has the darkness in him, but his strong chemistry with Bruce Godfree and Brendan Murray (as Tamora’s two surviving sons) carried me along; he was so obviously much more intelligent than these two numbskulls, or than anybody else on stage, and I believed in that frustrated intelligence as the ultimate motivation behind his murderous career. Paul Fauteux was an appealingly stolid Lucius, and Michael Spenser Davis and Roberta Maxwell lit up the stage in their brief turns as, respectively, a clown and Tamora’s nurse. The weakest links, to me, were Amanda Lisman as Lavinia and David Ferry as Titus’s brother Marcus. I’m afraid I’m always too aware that Lisman is acting, not just in this production but generally, but it’s fatal to a role like Lavinia where, if we are to remain in the play, and not titter at it from the outside, we have to believe that what is happening to her is actually happening. And while the role of Marcus is generally a thankless one, Ferry’s performance seemed to underscore that fact rather than find a reason for being on this bloody stage. But on the whole, the performances were quite strong.

And they were matched by a design concept that was visually engaging: a stage of white marble inlaid with monumental Roman lettering, backed by columns topped with life-sized human torsos in agony. I thought the production flinched from the most visceral moments of stage violence - the rape of Lavinia and the behanding of Titus were each somewhat muffled - but the aftermath of violence was appropriately visceral, particularly the gruesome display of the heads of Titus’s two falsely-accused sons, impaled on the horns of a white marble bull, and the Edward Scissorhands-like appendages that Lavinia sports in her last moments.

Yet, somehow, the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Each scene worked in its own right - but they didn’t build on one another. The Roman setting, while visually engaging and, obviously, appropriate to the material, was also distancing: I never thought that this play was relevant to my world, that these were people I could encounter. (Or perhaps I shouldn’t blame the setting - this year’s Richard III is set in period, and I recognized plenty of people on that stage; the Coriolanus Stratford staged several years ago was set in a vaguely middle eastern version of early Rome, and it also felt completely relevant. But Titus, as I’ve said, is all about being visceral - that’s all it’s got - and so it’s especially vital that the production bring the horror home, where we live, and not give us any excuses for distancing.) And I continued to be nagged by that central question: what is this play about? Why am I watching all this horror? What does it mean?

I think the director wondered that as well, and decided: it doesn’t mean anything, and that emptiness is what it means. At the end of the play, Lucius is offered the laurel crown, and is about to take it, when he thinks better of it, and hands it over to a member of the audience. You take the throne; I’m not going to get involved. And, with a chuckle-earning thumb’s-up, he leaves the stage.

It feels like this is intended to be a Brechtian move - something that pulls us out of the tragedy into reflection on what we’ve seen. Presumably, this is supposed to let us know that Lucius is the one who actually learned something, and that this “something” is that revenge tragedies don’t lead to closure; they lead to everyone dead on the stage. But first, declining the imperial title is precisely how the tragedy started two and a half hours earlier - Titus is offered the throne, and declines, in favor of Saturninus. So what has Lucius actually learned if he does the same thing at the end? And, second, his exit is staged so jokily that it robs the preceding tragedy of whatever reality, and hence whatever meaning, it may have had. If the whole play was a kind of joke, what, exactly, is the punchline?

Comedy springs from pain; satire and parody, from the anger that emerges as a response to pain. When Lavinia carries off her father’s hand in her mouth, like a faithful spaniel carrying home a downed waterfowl, it’s supposed to be funny - precisely because it’s supposed to be painful. If we mock it, so that it seems unreal, that might also work - if we are mocking it out of a genuine anger. But what are we supposed to be angry at? If Shakespeare was making a parody, then he must have been angry at his audience, that this was the kind of play they seemed to want (Titus as Shakespeare’s “Stardust Memories”). But if you want to bring that kind of joke home, we need to be implicated earlier on. If we supposed to see ourselves as like Saturninus - vicious, petty and easily led - then Lucius would be making a very mordant joke indeed in handing us the laurels. And that punchline would be powerful indeed. That it isn’t is the fault of the setup: we are not implicated earlier in the tragedy. “Natural Born Killers” and “A Clockwork Orange” go wrong in wanting to have it both ways - indulging us in our visceral lusts while maintaining plausible deniability by saying that they are critiquing us for those lusts. But you can’t have it both ways. And this production can’t, as it were, have its Brecht and Williams, too.

Speaking of plays where all relationships are a struggle for dominance, the week before last we went for the second time to see the current, extraordinary Stratford production of Pinter’s The Homecoming. Now, my knowledge of Pinter is exceedingly limited. The only Pinter I’d seen prior to this production were the two one-acts staged in New York this past fall - The Collection and A Kind of Alaska, and I’ve read nothing of his work. For no reason I can now justify, I had classified him early on as somebody I probably wouldn’t like. But I was very impressed with the one-acts - particularly The Collection - and absolutely floored by The Homecoming. I don’t know how much is the shock of the new (to me), and I recognize that he is not to all tastes. But for my money, this is the most interesting and powerful production on the Stratford stage this season - and this is, overall, a very strong season indeed.

The play is superficially quite simple. We are introduced to a North London working-class family: Max, a retired butcher, aging patriarch of the clan; his brother, Sam, a chauffeur, whom Max abuses mercilessly; Max’s son, Lenny, a sleazy, fast-talking character who postures as a pimp; and another, younger son, Joey, a dim-witted boxer. Missing are Max’s wife, Jessie, dead for many years but still the object of Max’s fond (and also bitter) reminiscences; and, we discover after a blackout, Teddy, Max’s eldest son, who returns from America in the middle of the night with his wife, Ruth, whom the clan back in Hackney not only have never met but don’t even know exists. The story, from then on, is of Teddy and Ruth’s reception by the clan, Ruth ultimately being absorbed (and taking a leadership position), and Teddy being expelled again.

Superficially simple, but complex enough that I had to see the show twice to follow its many threads - and I’m sure there was still much that I missed. On opening night, the first lines of the play - Max (played with ferocity by Brian Dennehy) looking for a scissors, berating his son, Lenny, about them until Lenny finally deigns to reply with “why don’t you shut up you daft prat” - grabbed me immediately by the throat and the production simply never let go. I saw a whole story there, Max the aging dictator whose thymos could never be satisfied by recognition from the likes of Lenny or Sam, but could certainly never tolerate to admit to an equality with them; but now he’s getting old, can’t figure out where the scissors are (perhaps I’d been seeing too much Shakespeare, but that immediately registered to me as a sexual pun in addition to being an intimation of violence); and his son, Lenny, coolly watching, waiting for his turn to stick in his own knife.

A whole play, as I say, which is precisely what any play’s opening lines ought to be. And aided immensely by perfect comic timing, particularly on the part of Aaron Krohn as Lenny. Once again, the tone for the evening was set: you couldn’t not laugh at Lenny’s first tension-breaking insult, and once that laugh was out the audience knew: this may be brutal, but it’ll be brutally funny.

Precisely because that introduction was so riveting, I wound up spending most of the evening watching a particular trio of characters: Max, Lenny and Sam. Their relations were almost painfully familiar to me. It is probably not a good sign that I recognized myself in Max, his mix of cruelty and sentimentality, the way he attacks everyone first, and then fairly begs for affection. I almost collapsed with painful laughter in the comic coup-de-grace of one of his tirades of abuse, when he tells Sam, gently, that he, Sam, if he wants to have a better time of it, really has to get rid of his feelings of resentment towards Max. (I call it his coup-de-grace, but the real coup was on Sam’s face, or rather Stephen Ouimette’s, simply taking all of this and holding it in with whatever dignity he can muster in his frilly apron, dishrag in hand.)

But focused as I was on this trio, I took too long to realize: this isn’t their play.

I forget who said that there are only two kinds of stories: a man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. And, of course, these are the same story told two different ways. But, though framed differently, in each case it’s the traveler’s story - and the traveler, the stranger who comes to town in The Homecoming is Ruth, Max’s unknown daughter-in-law. This is her play, and I didn’t realize that until most of the way through the first time around. And so the second time I saw it, I spent as much of the play as I could watching her.

Ruth is a bit of an enigma, but she is not, I would argue, a cypher. She’s the object on which all the men are projecting their desires, but she is not merely an object - there is, clearly, a person in there, aware of these projections and using them, responding to them. A great deal of credit for my view on this goes to Cara Rickets, who plays Ruth in this production. A beautiful and finely poised actress, this is unquestionably the finest work I’ve seen her do at Stratford. I’ve liked her in a number of classical roles, but never loved her, in large part because I was often too aware that she was speaking verse, as opposed to speaking naturally, and just happening to be a creature whose language often consists of verse. But Pinter’s exceptionally difficult language - with all its pauses and ambiguities - felt as natural to her as her beige herringbone coat and her gorgeous mid-60s hairdo. She was riveting the first time around, but I stayed on the surface - I wasn’t watching her. The second time, I began to plumb the depths.

I had assumed, when Ruth and her husband appeared after the first blackout, that the Homecoming of the title referred to the husband, Teddy - this is his childhood home, and he’s the one who left. But Ruth is from the same neighborhood. When she steps out for a walk immediately upon arrival, this is only partly to get away from her nervous and overprotective husband - it’s also just to take a stroll around the old neighborhood. At the end of the play, when she has taken Jessie’s old chair (an important decision by director Jennifer Tarver - usually she takes Max’s chair, dethroning the patriarch; in this production, she’s taking the role reserved for the feminine, a chair that has been empty), she is the one who has come home. Teddy is left out, to return to America without her. Indeed, I began to wonder about what happens before the play. Whose idea was it to visit the old homestead in the first place? I can’t think of a reason why Teddy would want to come back. He’s certainly not eager to show Ruth off. He has no discernable affection for his family - the line, “I’m ready for the cuddle” makes that abundantly clear. And as soon as he sees what’s happening, he’s eager to get out of there and get back home - with Ruth in tow. But she doesn’t want to leave. It makes much more sense to me that she was the one who wanted to stop off and finally meet her husband’s father and brothers on the way home from vacation in Italy. That this homecoming was her idea in the first place, something Teddy agreed to with trepidation rather than as a strategy to reclaim his inheritance or some such.

That would be consistent with Teddy’s own description of his approach to life. Pinter uses language primarily as a weapon in combat rather than a means of communication or connection. And that is certainly evident in this play. But each person uses language in a distinct manner, constituting a personal style of combat. Max is the man for the frontal assault - attack, attack again, never give quarter. Sam is a turtle, huddled in his shell, taking blows and hoping they don’t land anywhere vital. (When he finally does strike back, at the end of the play, letting out the wounding information he’s kept hidden the whole time, he immediately collapses with a stroke.) Lenny’s strategy is to throw his opponent off-balance so he has an opening for a counter-thrust. He does this over and over again with his father - the most interesting instance being when his father, raging at him for waking him up in the middle of the night, demands to know who he was shouting at (he’d been talking with Ruth, who Max doesn’t yet know about), and Lenny answers by asking Max about the night he, Lenny, was conceived. He’s very pointedly insinuating that he’s not Max’s son, and Max, thrown off-balance, is reduced to spitting at Lenny’s feet. And Joey, the professional fighter? As his father says:

What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to learn how to defend yourself, and you’ve got to learn how to attack. That’s your only trouble as a boxer. You don’t know how to defend yourself and you don’t know how to attack.

Pause

Once you’ve mastered those arts you can go straight to the top.

Joey (played expertly by Ian Lake - you have to be pretty clever to play dim this humorously, and this touchingly) may think he has a “pretty good idea … of how to do that,” but his father is right.

But Teddy doesn’t engage in this kind of combat. Mike Shara has his finest moment in the role when his family is quizzing him about his “critical works” (Teddy is a PhD philosopher). Teddy coldly informs them that they wouldn’t understand them - not because they aren’t smart enough, but because they have no critical distance from themselves.

You’re just objects. You just … move about. I can observe it. I can see what you do. It’s the same as I do. But you’re lost in it.

When Teddy does engage, it’s almost because he’s curious what the outcome will be. He takes Lenny’s cheese roll and asks, “what are you going to do about it?” As it turns out, what he’s going to do - whether it’s about the cheese roll or not - is proposition Ruth to become a prostitute in his employ. But by this point, Teddy has developed sang-froid on the subject of his wife as well. He is curious whether she’ll come home with him, or stay at his childhood home with his father and brothers. But he’s no longer anxious about it. No longer lost in it.

So, if this is how he plays the game, why would he ever have planned this homecoming?

He wouldn’t. It’s not his homecoming. And it’s not his play, either.

As I learned the second time through this production, the play is happening in Ruth’s eyes. In the sweet eyes she makes at Joey. The frustration in her eyes as she turns away from Teddy. The sharp eyes she uses on Lenny. The complicated politeness she shows Max. The haunted look as she described her America, a barren, arid wasteland crawling with insects. Ruth is the one who decided to come to Max’s house. When she and Teddy get there, it’s she, not Teddy, who must enter the lists of combat, first with Lenny, against whom she deftly turns the tables, then with Max, whose vicious verbal assaults she weathers, responding with a disarming grace. And she’s the one who makes the key decision of the play: the decision to stay. It’s her play.

That decision - to stay - has engendered a great deal of debate. The play shifts in the last twenty minutes or so, veering off from a kind of heightened reality to true absurdism, when Ruth makes out with Joey in full view of her husband and father-in-law. From here, it’s not a long trip to the point where Lenny and Max hatch the idea of Ruth paying her own way as a new member of the family by becoming one of Lenny’s prostitutes, a proposition she appears to accept (though she doesn’t actually clinch the deal - she’s still a bit of a tease). It’s this stuff more than anything that has led to feminist distaste for the play. But I think it’s worth taking a closer look at what is happening.

Ruth’s relations with the men recapitulate the relations that Jessie, the boys’ mother, had with three men in her life: Max, Sam and MacGregor, Max’s old friend from the neighborhood. In a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, it’s insinuated that Jessie was unfaithful to Max, and that not all of his sons are his own, biologically speaking. Given the special bond between Sam and Teddy, as well as Sam’s coyness about his lingering affection for Jessie’s memory, I’m inclined to see a suggestion that Teddy is actually Sam’s son, Lenny MacGregor’s son - who we know slept with Jessie in the back of Sam’s cab; that’s his stroke-inducing revelation - and only Joey, the youngest, the product of Max’s loins. But it doesn’t matter if this is literally true in the world of the play or only metaphorically true - in a prior generation, there was a trio of brothers (MacGregor isn’t literally a brother, but Max treats him as such) who shared the affections of a woman who was both wife and mother to them all. Now she’s gone, and the boys have been on their own all this time - all except for Teddy, who has actually done what Max taunts Sam and Joey about: found himself a wife and mother. (Ruth is repeatedly referred to as a mother, but though she has three children they don’t seem to be very important to this characterization; they are more the _proof_ that she is a mother than the _reason_ she is a mother, if that’s not too obscure.) Was Teddy’s betrayal that he left the family home? Or was his betrayal that he kept this woman, Ruth, to himself?

By the end of the second time around, I’d come to the conclusion that it’s the latter. It’s his husbanding of Ruth that is the betrayal, the most important expression of his abandonment of the family. Joey may not want to share her either, but sharing is what families do.

What Ruth is presented with is a choice between two different families, one in which she gets to play a variety of female roles opposite a variety of different men - with Lenny she gets a certain level of economic independence at the price of relations operating on a purely economic level; with Joey she gets to be both wife and mother to a sweet simpleton she can easily dominate; with Max … well, it’s not clear Max is going to live to be a part of this new family, much as he might wish to jump down to the next generation and take his own eldest son’s place in the triumvirate. In the other model, she is Teddy’s wife. She is defined, fixed, placed. And placed under and beside a patriarch who sees what everybody is doing as they move about, but doesn’t understand that the _fact that they move_ is more important than what they are saying (or doing).

It’s kind of a brutal choice, because this is a brutal world we’re presented with, but I understand why Ruth would choose it. I don’t think it’s a suggestion that women want to be whores or treated badly, but that living among people who _move_ is better than living among insects with a man who knows nothing about what she wants.

As such, it’s a prophecy about what happened to the ’50s family. But it’s also a living story for now, because the boundaries between the roles we play with each other are inevitably more fluid than we might tell ourselves they are, and these archetypes still walk among us, even if they are less supported by law or common prejudice than they once were, because they are a part of our essential character, our species inheritance. They move through us. And the great challenge is to see what we are doing, not get lost in it, but also see that the fact that we are moving is what is most important.

One final word. Cara Ricketts, who plays Ruth so superbly in this production, is a black Canadian actress. The difference in race makes Ruth’s outsider status obvious from the first, gives us an instant understanding of why Teddy might be nervous about introducing her, why Max might talk of Teddy marrying “beneath” him (remember, this is the mid-60s). But, if I understand correctly, in Pinter’s original conception, this is a working class Jewish family that Teddy returns to, and Ruth’s outsider status (her name notwithstanding) derives in part from her being a non-Jew. Having now seen this production twice, I am eager to see a production in which this original concept is brought out, where the family is Jewish and Ruth is a local English (or I suppose Irish) girl from the neighborhood.

The reason is that I think this play wants us to be maximally discomfited. And we are all very comfortable feeling superior to Max for assuming Ruth is a prostitute when he first meets her. Casting a black actress as Ruth works wonders for helping us understand part of what is going on - but at a price of making us, the theatre-going audience, too comfortable in thinking this is not a story about us. But it is about us, and I’d like to see that brought home in as many ways as possible.