Archives for September 5, 2008

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I give the good word on the two shows I saw last week at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin, Widowers’ Houses and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s an excerpt.
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George Bernard Shaw called “Widowers’ Houses” one of his “unpleasant” plays, by which he meant that it dealt in what he believed to be unpalatable truths about the world. But Shaw, like Mary Poppins, knew that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, and so his first play, written in 1892, is a bubbly boulevard comedy about the causes of poverty, a dramatized debate strewn with sly epigrams: “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad. It is not precisely what one goes to the expense for.” Think Karl Marx rewritten by Oscar Wilde and you’ll get the idea. Shaw didn’t care much for “Widowers’ Houses” in later years, but he was, as usual, wrong: It’s one of the most startlingly effective debuts ever made by a modern playwright, and Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre has revived it with splashy élan. Economics 101 was never this much fun….
American Players Theatre is a classical repertory company that performs in an outdoor amphitheater built high atop a wooded hill in Spring Green, the tiny rural town (pop. 1,444) best known as the home of Frank Lloyd Wright. (Taliesin, the house Wright built for himself in 1911, is just up the road.) Many of the company’s actors, directors and production staffers come from Chicago, which is three hours away by car. This helps to explain the quality of its productions–Chicago is one of the two best theater towns in America–but the unpretentiously inviting atmosphere of its rustic hilltop theater is something you won’t find in any big city. From the smell of the pines to the sound of the crickets, APT has a festive, near-Edenic feel. When you go there, you know you’re not at home.
Like most summer festivals, APT does a lot of Shakespeare, sometimes straight and sometimes fancy. This season William Brown, who is best known for his work with Chicago’s Writers’ Theatre, has staged “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” more or less in the manner of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” and to say that it comes off is to greatly understate the case. The members of Mr. Brown’s excellent cast dip their toes into a variety of other contemporary cinematic genres along the way–Oberon, the king of the fairies, is dressed up like Conan the Barbarian, while the young lovers could have come straight out of a high-school romcom…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.”
Max Beerbohm, quoted in S.N. Behrman, Portrait of Max (courtesy of John Pancake)