It\u2019s a joyful thing when a great play that seemed to be lost is found. How much more so when its greatness is confirmed and the play takes root in the soil of a new time.<\/p>\n
That was my experience seeing Alice Childress\u2019s \u201cWedding Band\u201d this summer at the Stratford Festival, in Ontario. Written in 1962, and first produced in New York by the Public Theater, in 1972, it had all but disappeared for 50 years when Theater for a New Audience, in Brooklyn, revived it last spring. A revelation then, it is even more so now, not because Stratford\u2019s production is better but because, by being excellent in a different way, it confirms the play\u2019s vitality.<\/p>\n
Second comings are crucial to the restocking and refreshing of the dramatic repertoire; a work may 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. Helping new and rediscovered work through that bottleneck is one of the things the noncommercial theater does best.<\/p>\n
During the week I spent at Stratford last month I saw four plays (and two musicals, which I\u2019ve written about already) that encompass the idea in various ways and to various ends. Two of the plays \u2014 \u201cWedding Band\u201d and a rollicking \u201cMuch Ado About Nothing\u201d \u2014 were revelations. Another, a \u201cRichard II\u201d set in the disco era, was a mixed-metaphor mess. And one, \u201cGrand Magic,\u201d a 1948 morsel of the Italian absurd, was a stylish mystification.<\/p>\n
At the same time, returning to the festival for my fifth visit in seven years \u2014 it and I were mostly shut down for the two worst Covid seasons \u2014 I was heartened by the second coming of the festival itself, and of its recently rebuilt theater, the Tom Patterson.<\/p>\n
\u201cWedding Band,\u201d \u201cRichard II\u201d and \u201cGrand Magic\u201d all played at the Patterson, the only one of Stratford\u2019s four theaters with a thrust stage. That made it ideal for the claustrophobic intimacy of Childress\u2019s 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 in which they can share their lives shrinking, eventually to nothing.<\/p>\n
It was always a tragedy for the couple and, by implication, the country, whose attempts to encompass all races in a loving union have been notably fitful and remain unfinished. But the director Sam White\u2019s production unexpectedly adds another layer of tragedy. Her staging emphasizes the hard-won pleasures of the central relationship, so that something valuable is felt to be lost when the world intervenes. But distinctively it also suggests the tragedy of the white characters \u2014 especially the man\u2019s mother and sister \u2014 who are nominally the villains.<\/p>\n
When I saw the play in Brooklyn, those women were brilliantly rendered 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 makes victims of everyone.<\/p>\n
It is a pleasure of the repertory system, nearly extinct elsewhere in North America, that Beaty, so twisted and tortured in \u201cWedding Band,\u201d was a witty and emotional Beatrice in \u201cMuch Ado\u201d the night before. To my mind the best of Shakespeare\u2019s comedies in balancing insight with laughs, \u201cMuch Ado\u201d is frequently 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.<\/p>\n
At Stratford, the director Chris Abraham has left the original setting pretty much alone, though his version of 16th-century Sicily has a stronger than usual commedia dell\u2019arte accent. (The pratfalls never stop.) Beaty\u2019s Beatrice is notably more heartful than most, not so guarded about the love she feels for Benedick (Graham Abbey) despite their professed mutual disaffection. And Abbey\u2019s Benedick, though sharp-tongued, is a superbly rendered goofball, an overgrown bro who doesn\u2019t know how to get serious about what he wants.<\/p>\n
Purists shouldn\u2019t mind any of that, but they will surely yelp about the addition of material, by the Canadian playwright Erin Shields, that puts the play in an overtly feminist frame. A new prologue, spoken by Beatrice in a reasonably supple pentameter, tells us, among other things, that in Elizabethan London, \u201cnothing\u201d was slang for \u201cvagina,\u201d thus altering the thrust of the play\u2019s title. And in a revamped final scene, Shields bears down on the harm done to women by male paranoia, the cure for which must be liberation.<\/p>\n
Since that theme already underlies the play, it hardly needs the underlining; Abraham\u2019s production gets to the same point quite handily on its own. Still, I found Shields\u2019s additions droll, and possibly useful as a kind of welcome, for those not expecting such rutting from Shakespeare, to the three hours of frank sex talk, or at least sex puns, that have always been hiding there in plain sight.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s hiding in Stratford\u2019s \u201cRichard II\u201d is, alas, the play itself, so baroquely reframed you can no longer see it. As conceived and directed by Jillian Keiley \u2014 with interpolations from \u201cTroilus and Cressida,\u201d \u201cCoriolanus,\u201d \u201cMuch Ado\u201d and the sonnets \u2014 the tragedy of the 14th-century English king has been phantasmagorically transported to Studio 54-era New York as a celebration of what a program note calls queer Black \u201cdivinity.\u201d So Hotspur is a coked-up club kid and, yes, there\u2019s oral sex in a hot tub. AIDS gets what seems to me to be a gratuitous cameo.<\/p>\n
The problem certainly isn\u2019t the queer 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\u2019s downfall in a court that would have seen that relationship as a sign of his unfitness. And surely in the age of \u201cBridgerton\u201d we\u2019re excited rather than scandalized by the casting of Black actors in roles previously played only by white ones.<\/p>\n
The problem is the cultural metaphor that Keiley and Brad Fraser, who did the adaptation, have chosen to superimpose on a history play. The first of a tetralogy telling the \u201csad stories of the death of kings,\u201d \u201cRichard II\u201d is fundamentally about personal flaws that become political disasters. Celebrating those flaws as fabulousness confuses the issue whichever way you look at it. Was Richard a martyr to a movement in the future? Does the ecstasy of gayness make for bad governance?<\/p>\n
It did not help, on the Patterson\u2019s extraordinarily long and narrow thrust, with audiences banked closely on three sides, that the actors were staged so densely and busily you often could not grasp what was going on.<\/p>\n
That wasn\u2019t a problem for Antoni Cimolino, the festival\u2019s artistic director and a primary force behind the building of the new theater. His production of Eduardo de Filippo\u2019s \u201cGrand Magic,\u201d on the same stage as \u201cRichard II,\u201d is flat-out gorgeous \u2014 sets, costumes, music, everything \u2014 and always legible.<\/p>\n
If only the play itself were. The world premiere translation (by John Murrell and Donato Santeramo) is clean and colloquial, but the story of a washed-up magician (Geraint Wyn Davies) working scams on customers at a Neapolitan resort is nevertheless as hard to follow as one of his tricks. Like \u201cMuch Ado,\u201d it turns on a husband\u2019s overweening jealousy, and his wife\u2019s need to liberate herself, in this case with the help of a disappearing act.<\/p>\n
Yet the play finally isn\u2019t very interested in its story or even its characters except as vehicles for big ideas about identity and illusion. Playgoers drawn in by the captivating mise-en-sc\u00e8ne may soon feel hoodwinked by the flood of abstractions. As a play, it\u2019s its own disappearing act.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know what will happen to \u201cGrand Magic\u201d next; I barely know what happened during it. But sorting work for the future can sometimes mean letting it go. Re-creation is a constant winnowing, but also, more happily, a constant expansion. \u201cWedding Band\u201d \u2014 and Stratford itself, nearly back to its prepandemic capacity \u2014 will both be part of that.<\/p>\n