Here’s my first official report from last weekend’s voyage to the outskirts of hell, a review of Shakespeare & Company published in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. As you can see, I didn’t let my manifold travails interfere with the pleasure I took in what I saw on stage:
Western Massachusetts has long been a center of classy summer theater. In the past two seasons I’ve seen Barrington Stage Company and the Berkshire and Williamstown Theatre Festivals, and last week I made it to Shakespeare & Company, where I saw back-to-back performances of “Hamlet” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” two Shakespeare plays that have about as much in common as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nor were the productions alike save for their excellence–a sign of the adventurousness of the 29-year-old Lenox-based company, which more than lived up to its reputation.
I admit to having had my doubts about Eleanor Holdridge’s staging of “Hamlet.” To begin with, Jason Asprey, who is playing the title role in Shakespeare & Company’s first-ever production of that most familiar and formidable of tragedies, just happens to be the son of Tina Packer, the company’s founder and artistic director, who in turn is playing Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. As if that weren’t suspicious enough, Ms. Packer’s husband, Dennis Krausnick, is playing Polonius. Having digested all this information, I opened my program and found a note explaining that the production “centers the play in the electrical synapse impulses of Hamlet’s dying brain.” This is a family newspaper, so I won’t tell you what I muttered to myself as I read those words, but it wasn’t optimistic.
All at once the theater went dark, followed by an explosion of chilly fluorescent light and a mega-decibel electric-chair zzzzap! Young Hamlet started reciting “To be or not to be.” Then the rest of the cast appeared, bedecked in stylized modern dress with mod touches