It is a joyful thing when a great piece that seemed lost is found. How much more if its greatness is confirmed and the piece takes root in the soil of a new age.
That was my experience when I saw Alice Childress’ ‘Wedding Band’ at the Stratford Festival in Ontario this summer. Written in 1962 and first produced in New York by the Public Theater in 1972, it had been gone for nearly fifty years when Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn revived last spring. A revelation then, but even more so now, not because Stratford’s production is better, but because, by being excellent in another way, it confirms the vitality of the piece.
Second comings are crucial to replenishing and renewing the dramatic repertoire; a work can be praised at its premiere or when unearthed as a novelty, but must be produced a second time before it can be produced 100 times. Getting new and rediscovered work through that bottleneck is one of the things noncommercial theater does best.
During the week I spent in Stratford last month, I saw four plays (and two musicals, which I’ve already written about) that encompass the idea in different ways and for different purposes. Two of the plays – ‘Wedding Band’ and the riveting ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ – were revelations. Another, a “Richard II” set in the disco era, was a mess of mixed metaphors. And one, ‘Grand Magic’, a piece of Italian absurdism from 1948, was a stylish mystification.
At the same time, when I returned to the festival for my fifth visit in seven years – it and I were largely closed due to the two worst Covid seasons – I was encouraged by the second arrival of the festival itself, and of the recently rebuilt theatre, the Tom Patterson.
‘Wedding Band’, ‘Richard II’ and ‘Grand Magic’ all played at the Patterson, the only one of Stratford’s four theaters with a weir stage. That made it ideal for the claustrophobic intimacy of Childress’ play, in which a black woman in South Carolina in 1918 (Antonette Rudder) and the white man who is her husband in all but the law (Cyrus Lane) find the world they can live in. . share their lives that shrink and eventually lead to nothing.
It was always a tragedy for the couple and, implicitly, for the country, whose efforts to include all races in a loving union have been particularly capricious and remain unfinished. But director Sam White’s production unexpectedly adds another layer of tragedy. Her staging emphasizes the hard-won pleasures of the central relationship, so that the feeling becomes that something valuable is lost when the world intervenes. But it clearly also suggests the tragedy of the white characters — especially the man’s mother and sister — who are nominally the villains.
When I saw the play in Brooklyn, those women were brilliantly portrayed as grotesques. As played here by Lucy Peacock and Maev Beaty, they are no longer monsters, though their behavior remains monstrous; we see how the tragedy of racism victimizes everyone.
It’s a delight of the repertory system, nearly extinct elsewhere in North America, that Beaty, so twisted and tortured in “Wedding Band,” was a witty and emotional Beatrice the night before in “Much Ado.” In my opinion, “Much Ado” is Shakespeare’s best comedy when it comes to balancing insight and laughter and is regularly updated in various ways. Most recently in New York City, Kenny Leon set it in an upper-class black suburb of Atlanta, during a hypothetical Stacey Abrams campaign for president.
In Stratford, director Chris Abraham has largely left the original setting untouched, although his version of 16th-century Sicily has a stronger-than-usual commedia dell’arte accent. (The quarrels never end.) Beaty’s Beatrice is remarkably more cordial than most, and not so wary of the love she feels for Benedick (Graham Abbey), despite their professed mutual dissatisfaction. And Abbey’s Benedick, though sharp-tongued, is a beautifully rendered goofball, an overgrown brother who doesn’t know how to get serious about what he wants.
Purists shouldn’t care, but they’ll certainly clamor for the inclusion of material by Canadian playwright Erin Shields that puts the play in an overtly feminist frame. A new prologue, spoken by Beatrice in a fairly smooth pentameter, tells us, among other things, that ‘nothing’ was slang for ‘vagina’ in Elizabethan London, thus changing the tenor of the play’s title. And in a revamped final scene, Shields emphasizes the harm done to women by male paranoia, for which liberation must be the cure.
Since that theme already underpins the piece, it hardly needs underlining; Abraham’s production, in itself, quite conveniently lands on the same point. Still, I found Shields’s additions amusing, and possibly useful as a kind of welcome, to those who didn’t expect such ruts from Shakespeare, after the three hours of candid sex talk, or at least sex puns, that have always lain there hidden in plain sight. . .
Unfortunately, what hides in Stratford’s “Richard II” is the piece itself, so baroquely remodeled you can no longer see it. As conceived and directed by Jillian Keiley – with interpolations from ‘Troilus and Cressida’, ‘Coriolanus’, ‘Much Ado’ and the sonnets – the tragedy of the 14th century English king is phantasmagorically transported to New York from the Studio 54 era. a celebration of what one program note calls the queer Black “divinity.” So Hotspur is a drunken club boy and yes there is oral sex in a hot tub. AIDS gets an unnecessary cameo in my opinion.
The problem is certainly not the odd part of the mission statement. Many productions have explored the suggestion in the text that Richard (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) and his cousin Aumerle (Emilio Vieira) were lovers, and that their connection helped lead to the King’s downfall in a court that regarded that relationship as a sign would have seen. of his incapacity. And certainly in the era of “Bridgerton,” we are more excited than shocked by the cast of black actors in roles previously played only by white actors.
The problem is the cultural metaphor that Keiley and Brad Fraser, who did the edit, chose to superimpose on a history game. The first of a tetralogy telling the “sad tales of the deaths of kings,” “Richard II” is fundamentally about personal failings turning into political disasters. Celebrating these shortcomings as greatness confuses the issue, whichever way you look at it. Was Richard a martyr for a movement in the future? Does the ecstasy of homosexuality lead to bad governance?
It didn’t help that the actors were so dense and busy that you often couldn’t comprehend what was going on.
That was no problem for Antoni Cimolino, artistic director of the festival and driving force behind the construction of the new theater. His production of Eduardo de Filippo’s ‘Grand Magic’, on the same stage as ‘Richard II’, is nothing short of stunning – sets, costumes, music, everything – and always readable.
If only the play itself was. The world premiere translation (by John Murrell and Donato Santeramo) is lucid and informal, but the story of a washed-up magician (Geraint Wyn Davies) who scams customers at a Neapolitan resort is nonetheless as hard to follow as one of his tricks. . Like “Much Ado,” it deals with a man’s excessive jealousy and his wife’s need to free herself, in this case using an act of disappearance.
Yet the play is ultimately not very interested in the story or even the characters, except as carriers of grand ideas of identity and illusion. Players drawn to the captivating mise-en-scene may soon feel cheated by the deluge of abstractions. As a play, it’s its own vanishing act.
I don’t know what will happen to “Grand Magic” next; I hardly know what happened during that period. But sorting work for the future can sometimes mean letting go. Re-creation is a constant winnowing, but also, luckily, a constant expansion. ‘Wedding Band’ – and Stratford himself, almost back to his pre-pandemic capacity – will both be part of that.
Stratford Festival
In repertoire, with staggered closing dates up to and including October 27 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca.
