THE CHANGLING: Rare Production of Jacobean Drama Tries to Capture Grand Style of Blood and Lust -- With Mixed Results

Red Bull Theater Presents THE CHANGLING

Red Bull Theater and its founding artistic director Jesse Berger are well known for their over-the-top productions of blood soaked Jacobean dramas. So it surprises me to have to say that its current presentation of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 17^th Century play The Changeling is rather tame in its staging and rocky in its embrace of heightened language. 

Oh, there is plenty of stage blood, and even a severed finger in the mix, but this is a play that is drenched in secrets, lies, treachery, and unbridled lust along with the gore, and it needs to engulf us in a tale of a pair of hell-bound souls who are beyond redemption.

The Changeling begins almost as if it were going to be a romantic comedy.  Beatrice-Joanna (Sara Topham) is betrothed to Alonzo (John Skelley), but is smitten at the very first sight of Alsemero (Christian Coulson), a handsome stranger who crosses her path. How will she dump the fiancé in order to get her heart’s desire? 

This could be the lead off into a madcap romp, perhaps one involving wily servants, that ends happily with the lovers united.  But things quickly veer in another direction altogether when Beatrice-Joanna concludes that the only way to rid herself of Alonzo is to have him killed.  

Without giving a thought to possible consequences, she enlists the aid of De Flores (Manoel Felciano), a servant in her father’s household, a man she despises but who has long lusted after her and is primed to do her bidding.  When the deed is done (the severed finger is the proof he offers to her), De Flores declines the gold she throws at him and insists that she give herself to him instead. Before you know it, the two are mutually bound together in their shared guilt, while Beatrice-Joanna tries to figure out how to hide what she is doing from Alsemero, whom she is now free to wed.

There is also a comic subplot that takes place in a madhouse and a clever bit of chicanery (involving another servant) by which Beatrice-Joanna contrives to hide her loss of virginity. But for all intent, this is still a moral tragedy, and tragedy steeped in utter corruption is what should be at the core of the production. 

Instead, what we get is more like melodrama, with an underplayed sense of sexual madness (we hear quite a bit about it, but see very little of it). Even the play’s dark humor has been mined for laughs rather than for the way its sardonic quality reflects the overall tone.  And while the cast generally performs, projects, and enunciates the unfamiliar dialog well enough for the audience to understand, there is an unfortunate mix of elocution styles.  Some of the actors (Sam Tsoutsouvas as Beatrice-Joanna’s father is a prime example) manage to make the 17^th Century language seem most naturalistic, with the words falling “trippingly off the tongue,” as the playwrights’ contemporary William Shakespeare put it in Hamlet. Others, however, speak with unfortunately modern cadences, so that, once more, the production lacks consistency.

Admittedly, it does feel as if there are two different plays that were cobbled together long, long ago.  (Presumably, Middleton was responsible for the traditional Jacobean tragic scenes, while Rowley tackled the comic elements.) What is missing here is a clear enough vision to bring the two sides together. 

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

'Loot:'' Joe Orton's Anarchic Comedy In Madcap Revival By Red Bull Theater

Inspector Truscott of Scotland Yard is keeper of the keys in the land of Topsy-Turvydom in Red Bull Theater’s madcap revival of Joe Orton’s Loot.

Loot was one of three full-length plays (the others were Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and What The Butler Saw) that Orton penned between 1964 and the time of his brutal death three years later at the hands of his long-time lover Kenneth Halliwell. 

With his death, Orton’s quick-fire output solidified his legacy and his reputation as an iconoclastic writer who used dark humor to skewer the Church and persons in positions of authority. 

Although Orton provided Loot with a wafer thin plot and occasional swerves in tone, the play is anarchically comical, like the best of the Marx Brothers movies (e.g. Duck Soup). 

The “Groucho” of the play is Inspector Truscott, performed here to the very edge of manic madness by Rocco Sisto. Truscott has invaded the home of the McLeavy family just as they are about to hold funeral services for the recently deceased Mrs. McLeavy. He is ostensibly investigating the theft of a large sum of money (of which the McLeavys’ son Hal and Hal’s undertaker buddy Dennis are, indeed, guilty).

In order to conceal their crime, the miscreants have pulled the corpse out of the coffin and replaced it with the “loot.” Thereon hangs the plot.  But all of this is merely an excuse for Orton’s quite funny dialog, in which it is possible to find echoes of Oscar Wilde, W. S. Gilbert, Lewis Carroll, and the aforementioned Marx Brothers. 

Truscott, who despite having the best lines, represents what Orton saw as the stupidity, the oafishness, and the corruption of the police. There is, for example, a scene in which he smacks around one of the suspects—a bit of realism that does shock us out of the comic absurdity of most of the rest of the proceedings (as does a reference to Pakastani child prostitutes). With Orton, what you see is what you get.

Truly, though, Truscott is an inspired invention. All through Act I, he justifies his takeover of the McLeavy household by insisting he is a representative of the “Water Board,” there to inspect the plumbing. (Although Orton clearly was not referring to “waterboarding,” that does add an appropriately contemporary image he would undoubtedly appreciate as another opportunity to wag a finger at authority figures).

When Truscott is finally forced to confess his subterfuge, he brushes it off this way:  “Any deception I practiced was never intended to deceive you,” a line that Oscar Wilde would have been delighted to lay claim to.  

Another gem is Truscott’s boastful story of how he broke the case of “the limbless girl killer.”

            “Who would kill a limbless girl?” he is asked, as

            a picture out of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus 

            pops into mind. 

            “She was the killer!” he explains, though he 

            refuses to elucidate lest it trigger a run of 

            copycat crimes.   

Try wrapping your head around that image. 

Loot is full of these fantasmagorical twists of language that are constantly flying around the set—along with Mrs. McLeavy’s mummified body (Another Truscott-ism: “The theft of a pharaoh is something which had not crossed my mind”). 

Even though Orton undoubtedly planned the set pieces carefully so as to allow for the word play, most of these bon mots feel anything but forced; rather they seem a logical reflection of the crazed minds of Inspector Truscott and the other characters. These include Hal (Nick Westrate); Dennis (Ryan Garbayo); another member of the police force, Meadows (Eric Martin Brown); Mr. McLeavy (who, as played by Jarlath Conroy, equals Mr. Sisto as master of the requisite tone and timing of Orton’s twisted variation on farce); and Fay (Rebecca Brooksher), the homicidal nurse and devout Catholic who—having worked her way through seven husbands, all deceased—is eyeing the others in search of Number Eight. 

Red Bull Theater, helmed by its founding artistic director Jesse Berger, built its reputation over the past decade by offering rarely produced Jacobean dramas and other plays of “heightened language,” along with a well-regarded program of readings. It is good to see the company expanding into producing contemporary works like Loot. 

Coming up in the spring will be a revival of Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, another outlandish work that is right up Red Bull’s alley.  Should be fun!  Meanwhile, there’s Loot, which is set to run to February 9 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. 

Feel free to tell you friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.

The Witch of Edmonton: Red Bull's Best Work Yet

Let me begin by acknowledging that 17th Century Jacobean drama is not everyone’s cup of tea.

But I am a huge admirer both of the form and of the gutsy job of performing it for today’s audiences that has been the hallmark of Red Bull Theater and its resident artistic director Jesse Berger.

One thing I have been waiting for, however, while attending Red Bull’s productions over the last several years, is for Mr. Berger to display more trust in the original creators of these (usually) tales of sexual obsession and vengeance among the high and the mighty of royal society.

The outpouring of stage blood and sometimes outlandish directorial choices (I’m pretty sure that John Webster did not interpolate a Rodgers and Hart song into The Duchess of Malfi when he wrote it in 1612) that have accompanied Red Bull productions to date have tended to make things rather more off-kilter than perhaps they have needed to be.

Still, what I have particularly appreciated about Red Bull is that it has continued to improve with each new production: better staging, better sets, better costumes, better casting, better performances, and, most significantly, a sharper eye toward revealing the sometimes hidden treasures that abide within these 400-year-old dramas.

Indeed, I get a sense that Mr. Berger has become a true student of Jacobean theater, worrying less about how to bring the play to the audience and more about how to bring the audience to the play.

And so I am quite pleased to say that the company’s current production of The Witch of Edmonton, at the Theater of St. Clement’s, is its best yet—hitting the mark in almost every area, fully embracing the play in a highly engaging production without resorting to the old bag of stage tricks aimed at appeasing an imagined antsy audience.

The Witch of Edmonton itself is a much different play than others from that age. While revenge is a theme, it is not the all-encompassing driver as it is in The Duchess of Malfi or Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. For one thing, The Witch of Edmonton is not about the lusty lives of dukes and duchesses; rather it is what you might call a domestic drama, dealing with the foibles and follies of everyday foks—the good citizens of Edmonton.

The play itself, dating from 1621, near the end of the Jacobean era, is attributed to three collaborating authors, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, who based the work on a fairly well-known contemporary pamphlet that reported the story of one Elizabeth Sawyer, said to be a witch.

The witch's story is one of three plot threads to the play, making it likely that the three writers worked individually on their parts before combining them for production on stage.  Elizabeth is a poor, elderly, and justifiably cantankerous woman who, for no apparent reason, is hounded and bullied by her neighbors.  She wishes so fervently to be avenged on her tormentors that the devil arrives (in the form of a talking shaggy dog named Tom), with a proposition to help her get even in exchange for her soul.

By being summoned into existence by Elizabeth, Tom is also free to pull his demonic tricks on others. One of these is Frank, who, without the devil’s help, has entangled himself into a case of bigamy, which ends rather badly for the second of his wives when Frank murders her.  Tom hovers over Frank when he commits the crime, but it is unclear whether the devil is acting as a goad or merely as an observer. 

The other plot thread is about a young, rather simple-minded fellow named Cuddy, who also befriends Tom—with a surprising result.

Devil or not, the characters in this play have a psychological complexity that leads us to ask serious questions about the extent to which humans are responsible for their own actions.

While The Witch of Edmonton has its share of bloodletting, these moments are handled with far more restraint than anything that Mr. Berger and Red Bull have shown previously, and the play itself ends on an unexpected and heartfelt note of forgiveness and redemption—hardly the usual stuff of Jacobean drama.

The quality of the performances is somewhat mixed, but the key players requite themselves well, with particularly strong work by Adam Green as Cuddy, Charlayne Woodward as Elizabeth, and, especially,  Derek Smith, who is mesmerizing as Tom the Dog, bringing both his dog-like and devilish qualities to full and disturbing life.

Also worthy of note are the costumes by Cait O’Connor, and the set by Anka Lupes, who has taken full advantage of the small workspace afforded at the theater.

By the way, tickets to The Witch of Edmonton start at $20, and are widely available at discounted prices through the usual sources (BroadwayBox.com, TheaterMania.com, and Playbill.com to name three). You may have noticed that Red Bull is offering some of its lower priced tickets for seats that it calls “onstage.” This is actually misleading, as the audience is simply seated on two sides of the set. Don’t fear to purchase one of the “onstage” seats; you will not be dragged into the action, and, actually, you may have a better view than those sitting on the other side of the theater.

***********************************

Speaking of discounts, while you are shaking your piggy bank and deciding whether you are willing to shell out the big bucks to see Robin Williams in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo or Ben Stiller and Edie Falco in The House of Blue Leaves on Broadway, here are a couple of less expensive alternatives.

Danny and Sylvia: The Danny Kaye Musical has announced a cute promotion now through March 26th, 2011. If your name is either DANNY or SYLVIA, you can get two tickets for the price of one. Just bring your proof of ID to the St. Luke’s Box Office, 308 West 46th Street, at least 30 minutes prior to any performance beginning this Saturday, February 5th. (This offer is not valid for the February 12th performance.)

In addition, Playwrights Horizons is offering discounted tickets to its next production, the world premiere of a play called Kin, written by Bathsheba Doran and directed by Obie Award winner Sam Gold.

Playwrights Horizons describes the play thusly: Anna’s an Ivy League poetry scholar. Sean’s an Irish personal trainer. They hardly seem destined for one another. But as their web of disparate family and friends crosses great distances — both psychologically and geographically — an unlikely new family is forged. Bathsheba Doran’s play sheds a sharp light on the changing face of kinship in the expansive landscape of the modern world.

Purchase tickets by March 21 with code KINGR and you get a discount: $40 (reg. $70) for the first 16 performances  (Feb. 25 – March 10) or $55 (reg. $70) for all remaining performances March 11 – April 3. You can online at www.ticketcentral.com. Use code KINGR, or call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily), or present a printout of this blog post to the Ticket Central box office at 416 West 42nd Street (Noon-8pm daily). Do note that a limited number of $40 discounted tickets will be available for purchase. Subject to availability. Valid only in select rows.

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.