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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 13, 2010

TT: Eat love die

August 13, 2010 by Terry Teachout

Shakespeare & Company, the summer theater festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, has become one of my most eagerly awaited annual out-of-town reviewing stops. To see why, take a look at my drama column in today’s Wall Street Journal, in which I report on three of the company’s ten summer shows, a new play by Joan Ackermann called The Taster and a pair of Shakespeare productions, Richard III and The Winter’s Tale. Here’s an excerpt.
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“The Taster” is one of those plays in which the members of the cast double as characters from the past and present. Tom O’Keefe and Maureen O’Flynn play Gregorio, a 16th-century Basque king, and his unhappy Queen Mariana (he longs to sire a son but has fallen out of love with his wife). They also play Henry and Claudia, a modern-day New York couple whose marriage is on the rocks (he’s a depressed ex-banker who is living off his wife’s modest income as an opera singer while attempting to translate a forgotten play about the plight of King Gregorio and Queen Mariana). Rocco Sisto is the title character, one of Gregorio’s food tasters–he specializes in the detection of slow-acting poisons–whom Mariana seduces in the hope of passing off their bastard child as the king’s heir.
If all this sounds impossibly tangled, don’t despair. Not only has Ms. Ackermann woven her two plots together so adroitly as to recall Jorge Luis Borges at his most virtuosic, but Tina Packer, the director, has staged “The Taster” with such scrupulous attentiveness to period detail that you always know where you are and what time (so to speak) it is. The dialogue blends quiet, uncloying lyricism (“The back of her neck smells like my childhood”) with comic flashes that crackle like summer lightning…
richardiiisco10kspra_263-sized_.jpgJohn Douglas Thompson, who took New York by storm last year in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of “The Emperor Jones,” is very much the star of “Richard III,” in which he gives yet another timber-shivering performance as the hunchbacked beast who’ll kill anyone, up to and including his brother and his wife, in order to set England’s crown upon his head. Mr. Thompson’s pellucid diction is a known quantity among American connoisseurs of classical acting–he makes every syllable shine–but even those who have seen his Othello will be impressed anew by the individuality with which he makes manifest the monstrous urges of Shakespeare’s nastiest piece of work. What I liked best about his interpretation was its grisly humor…
As for “The Winter’s Tale,” which appears to be well on the way to becoming the most frequently performed of Shakespeare’s less popular plays, Kevin G. Coleman’s wonderfully balanced staging makes each tricky change of mood feel as natural as the turning of a page. Jonathan Epstein, who plays the self-laceratingly jealous King Leontes, starts off in a low, intimate key, then unleashes his dark fury so persuasively that you almost want to look away from the stage….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

August 13, 2010 by Terry Teachout

“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”
George Santayana, “Ideal Immortality”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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