Theater Review: ‘Tempest’ and ‘Wharton Comedies’ at Shakespeare and Co., Lenox, MA

Not having been in the Berkshires since the early “Oughts,” I was eager to see some theater in this region of Western Massachusetts when I went on vacation in late August. Specifically, I wanted to see at least one production at Shakespeare and Co. in Lenox. 

From the company’s Website, I knew that it continued to stage productions even into the fall, well after other area troupes had wrapped up for the season. More important, past productions had greatly impressed me, and I was eager to see how it had changed since my last visit.

Shakespeare and Co. is in the home stretch of its 40^th season, in the last weekend of its current production, Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage. (Following the regular season banquet, a kind of holiday dessert, Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley - A Costumed Staged Reading, will be offered in mid-December.) Nearly a decade ago, as the Global Financial Crisis took hold, its willingness to take risks led the operation into financial shoals that looked too deep at times. Now, it is enjoying the benefit of a substantial physical plant to accompany its diverse artistic offerings.

It was appropriate that the two plays I saw while on vacation in the area at the end of summer, The Tempest and The Wharton Comedies, sprang from the writers who might be viewed as two guiding lights of the company: William Shakespeare and novelist Edith Wharton.
 
The company takes its name, of course, from The Bard. But, following its formation in 1978, it performed through its first 25 years in The Mount, the Berkshire summer home of Wharton (The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome). As programming evolved over the years, it staged plays in three different venues at the estate, located in Lenox.

In 2003, however, following a painfully public dispute with its landlord, Edith Wharton Restoration, Shakespeare and Co. moved to a new Lenox location, one mile down the road at 70 Kemble Street, in a 63-acre site once belonging to the National Music Foundation. 

Since then, the company has built an administrative building as well as new theaters: Tina Packer Playhouse (named for the organization’s founder and longtime artistic director), the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, The Roman Garden Theatre, and the Rose Footprint Theatre. Its year-round activities include not only a half-dozen or so productions, but also scores of workshops, multiple lectures and demonstrations, and literally classes for professional and aspiring actors, teachers, and directors.

Throughout its reinvention, the company continued to dare mightily, day in and day out, year after year. Audiences have grown accustomed to seeing it assign major Shakespearean roles to the opposite sex; to dispensing with familiar Elizabethan costumes and places in favor of the unconventional, such as staging The Merry Wives of Windsor in the Wild West; and even to premiering unusual comedies or dramas, such as Wit, Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a cancer patient.

In many ways, the organization drew on the dynamism of Packer, who not only oversaw the organization but also acted in and directed many of its productions herself. Not merely a theatrical whirling dervish, she was also a promotional wunderkind. (At one point, she led a professional development workshop for business/arts professionals and co-wrote Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons on Leadership and Management.)

None of the productions I saw before its move and reinvention, however, had ever involved Shakespeare, until my latest visit. Staged in the new open Roman Garden Theatre, The Tempest was a brisk, imaginative production of a work that, for clear reasons, is classified among Shakespeare’s late-phase “Problem Plays.” 

Director Allyn Burrows, named Artistic Director of Shakespeare and Company last year after nearly two decades with the organization, exhibited just about all the traits you can think to maintain its high reputation in this production: an ability to take actors through credible, well-motivated performances; a sense of imagination yoked to solid stagecraft; and a coherent vision for what theater should mean in this age.

In the Roman Garden, it seemed natural that the performers would appear out of nowhere from the heavy shrubbery surrounding the audience. With a performance set in the last few hours before dusk on an unseasonably cool late summer day, a viewer could understand better how the shipwrecked characters might feel at the mercy of their unaccustomed surroundings. (Writing amid the age of exploration of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Shakespeare evoked, in this play, Europeans’ sense of wonder with his line about a “brave new world/That has such people in 't!”) Clotheslines above the action helped simulate ship sails—and, very helpfully, shielded the audience from the glare of the fading sunset. 

Nigel Gore thundered in righteous fury as the exiled magician Prospero. Gifted with truly ugly makeup, Jason Asprey embodied Calaban, the son of the witch Sycorax, now serving as Prospero’s servant, with all the quirks and fury that a misbegotten, misshaped soul could be expected to have. Ella Loudon  brought beauty and fire to the role of Prospero's daughter Miranda, and Tamara Hickey depicted, with considerable sympathy, the plight of Ariel, Prospero’s sprite, who tries to balance devotion to her master and her restless search for freedom.

The Tempest, with its exotic setting and unusual characters in extremis, would probably have been strongly considered by the company again sooner or later. But its parallels to current events must have made it irresistible to Shakespeare and Company. 

For instance: How does a man, after suddenly gaining unusual power in a realm he’s never known before, react when his enemies are at his mercy? Can his lovely blond daughter soften his seemingly bottomless rage? What is the proper role of science in this “brave new world” and the one left behind? And, when all is said and done, will there be any role for forgiveness, or will the world controlled by power still be subject to personal caprice, storm and disruption?

Weighty questions all, but wrapped up with all the wonderworking magic displayed by Ariel. In fact, it was the most vivid and coherent version of this comedy that I can remember.

Equally breathtaking theatrical conjuring was effected in The Wharton Comedies. One of these two one-acters was an adaptation of “Roman Fever,” one of Wharton’s most anthologized short stories. Its power derives from its final line, a surprise that leads readers to search through all that has come before that would explain this moment. 

Even though I’d read the story years ago and had even seen it performed in the Parlor at The Mount in the 1990s, that moment had lost none of its delicious power all these years later. Ostensibly set in a Roman restaurant, it felt like an Edwardian drawing-room comedy in the company’s intimate 200-seat Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre.

Corinna May and Diane Prusha played to perfection two longtime American friends traveling in Italy. With their grown daughters out to visit the sights in the Eternal City, these two not-so-merry widows linger at lunch on a languid afternoon that grows unexpectedly, tenser.

May’s Alida Slade, the more svelte of the two, was also the more unfiltered, eyeing her young Italian waiter (played by David Joseph) with almost cougarish delight. Finally, she determines, after a couple of glass of wine, to have it out once and for all with her friend about unaddressed, unsettled business from their youth. 

Prusha’s Grace Ansley appeared passive and self-contained, continuing to knit as Alida launched an increasingly heavy series of verbal assaults about what may or may not have happened to her one particular night at the Coliseum decades ago. But Grace’s positioning was deceiving: when the time came, she was ready with a line that left Alida—and the audience—gasping.

Playwright Dennis Krausnick found another channel for Wharton’s arch wit in the second half of these “comedies,” an adaptation of the short story “The Fullness of Life.” Like “Roman Fever,” it dealt in rueful memories of past desire, only this time Wharton (and, of course, Krausnick) took this notion to its logical conclusion: the waiting room of the Hereafter. It is an almost literal example of what Lawrence Selden was seeking in The House of Mirth: a “republic of the spirit,” where it was possible to meet one’s soul mate.

The soul mate for “The Woman,” a middle-aged matron burdened with a dullard of a husband in life, is beyond anything she could ever hope for in life: a thoughtful romantic who is also astonishingly handsome. Once again, Prusha brought forth, with great economy, a woman coming to uneasy terms with the choices she made long ago. Again, she interacted with two actors who brought out the best in her: May, this time playing the figure known as Fullness of Life as a serene goddess, and Joseph, as the heavenly mate who may well be too  perfect

It had been a long time since I had last seen a Shakespeare & Company show. Based on what I saw this past season, it hasn't lost its touch. I hope to see the company again, much sooner than I had this past time.