Over the course of his roughly five-decade career as a
playwright, George Bernard Shaw pushed against the boundaries of
contemporary thought and the conventions of drama. A pioneer who widened the
scope of what could be mounted onstage, he survives—barely—in this age hard-put
to tackle his large-scale plays featuring multiple characters who circle,
flirt, debate, wound, and charm over and over and over again, with the whole as
impervious to production costs as to modern audiences’ attention spans.
At New York City’s Off-Broadway venue, Theater Row,
the Gingold Theatrical Group (GTG) offered a seminar in how to handle
“G.B.S.,” as he liked to sign himself. Caesar and Cleopatra, which
concluded its run a week ago, is itself less the story of an education of a
young queen. Forget about the conqueror-and-seductress saga familiar from film
and TV: the young Cleo we first see here is little better than a child, so any
notion of sex between the two is—well, creepy.
I started reading Shaw in my tweens, and I fairly
raced through his collected works. It took some time before I saw them
performed, and I doubt I could now abide a literal translation of this material
from page to stage.
Produced in 1898, Caesar and Cleopatra illustrates
why: the original Prologue, featuring Cleopatra’s loyal but domineering nurse Ftatateeta,
goes on for several pages with the character alone on stage. The playwright’s
“alternate” first scene is only slightly better: slightly shorter, but with
characters secondary to the main action.
In contrast, the GTG highlights Ftatateeta (embodied,
in all her haughtiness and formidability, by the marvelous Brenda Braxton) as a
kind of Greek chorus framing the action, but whisking playgoers far more
quickly into the action. It was emblematic of what would follow: not a
leisurely trip down the Nile, but a two-hour hurtle through invasion, civil
unrest, assassinations, and a change of regime.
Shaw’s detailed instructions for elaborate sets and
inclusion of common soldiers and aides may have inadvertently encouraged
earlier productions to treat this as a costume drama rather than a comedy of
ideas.
The GTG’s David Staller would have none of that. The director
pruned spear carriers and landscape alike. (For instance, the Ptolemy of the
original conception—a boy-king who rails against sister Cleopatra as he repeats
the instructions of his eunuch adviser—becomes an amusing Charlie McCarthy-like
dummy). In the end, Staller brought into sharper focus the Nobel Prize
laureate’s concern with male-female relations, colonialism, war, and the proper
use of power.
Never unafraid to claim that Shaw was superior to
Shakespeare, the Victorian playwright was unafraid to revise the Bard’s
strongman-in-the-making into a ruler who won men to his side by the judicious
use of mercy as by force of arms. It’s a conceit, to be sure, but an object
lesson he thought his countrymen could use as they puzzled over how to
administer a worldwide empire.
Robert Cuccioli
wore this rhetorical tunic lightly, exuding all the irony of a politician and
man of the world who has seen it all and is now unillusioned by the spectacle
that continues to pass before him. (“Taxes are the chief business of a
conqueror of the world,” he tells the fuming Egyptians who meet with him.”) He was
as amused by Cleopatra’s crush on his handsome young officer Mark Antony as he
is exasperated by her thoughtless and violent abuses of her new-found power.
He was at his best teaching the girl not just the
stagecraft of power (how to carry oneself, how to command), but also the philosophy
behind it (why vengeance just sparks an endless cycle of dangerous
recrimination).
As Cleopatra, Teresa Avia Lim masterfully executed
the crucial character arc of the play: from a girl searching for her cat and
terrified of Roman soldiers to a young woman who assiduously (if ambivalently)
absorbed all Caesar’s lessons in governing.
Shaw is not performed with anything close to the regularity
that he should be, so I jump on any production when I have a chance. I had not
been previously aware of the GTG, whose programs include a Shaw New York annual
festival and a related monthly reading series. I will have to catch their
offerings in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment