Thursday, August 11, 2016
Review: TROILUS AND CRESSIDA - SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK
SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK
TROILUS & CRESSIDA
The characters
in Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida behave very strangely.
Shakespeare's play is based on the fictional story of Troilus and Cressida, set during the seventh year of the Trojan
War. But the story was written long after Homer wrote the Iliad (and long before Shakespeare adapted the story for his play). Homer's tale describes the war
between Greece and Troy over the abduction and seduction of the Grecian Helen, Menelaus’
wife, by the Trojan, Paris.
Cressida, a
Trojan, stayed behind when her father defected to Greece. She falls in love
with Troilus in Troy, assisted by the efforts of her Uncle Pandarus (whose name, he says himself, will become the word for pandering). But Cressida’s father convinces
the Greeks to bring her to the Grecian camp, by trading her for an important Trojan
captured by Greece.
Ismenia Mendes as Cressida, Andrew Burnap as Troilus, and John Glover as Pandarus
TROILUS & CRESSIDA
Photo Credit: Joan Marcus
Courtesy of The Public Theater
The play contains
humor, farce, love, lust, practical and ethical debates, and tragedy, all
together, and is not easy reading.
The
director, Daniel Sullivan, and the cast of the new Shakespeare in the Park
production, do a brilliant job of making sense of the moment-to-moment action
of the play, finding a way, often through physicality, of justifying, finding
meaning, and interpreting the most perplexing passages in the script.
But that
alone does not explain the characters’ behavior.
Commentators
have suggested that the play, in part, is a comment (or parody or satire) on
political events contemporary to Shakespeare. Perhaps Shakespeare was inspired
by “MacBird!”, the sixties commentary on the aftermath of the Kennedy
assassination structured on Macbeth, to create a commentary (with crude humor and
potentially potent political satire) on his own contemporary politics, based on
the Homeric legends (salted with an extra romance).
Something
like that might help explain the strange behavior of the characters (and the
minor mystery that the play seems never to have actually been performed
publicly during Shakespeare’s life despite at least one claim that the play was
to be produced).
Sullivan
stages the play with minimal sets and costumes, and suggests some more or less
modern war. Indeed much of the fighting is with guns. It is costumed in mostly
drab colors, also more or less modern, and certainly not ancient Greek. For the
most part, I suspect that this modern staging and acting was critical to help make the play
understandable for a modern audience.
Zach Appelman as Diomedes and Sanjit De Silva as Aeneus (center), and the company
TROILUS & CRESSIDA
Photo Credit: Joan Marcus
Courtesy of The Public Theater
Two caveats,
however. It seems to me, that in any play about the Trojan war, one necessary
element is that Helen be so beautiful, so well dressed, and have such great
hair (“hair” is important in the text) that there is no question about why her
abduction “launch’d above a thousand ships” and sparked such a long and costly
war.
Also, a
commentator in one review noted that at one performance, when guns are shot in
the general direction of the audience, someone screamed in terror. With
movie-audience mass-shootings raw in our memory, it is not comforting to have a
gang of men suddenly emerge from behind a barricade and start shooting at you.
(Hopefully, it is in fact safe. But I did
actually know someone, a young and rising actor, who accidently killed himself
with a gun he thought was a safe prop.)
SPOILER (?)
ALERT
The remainder
of this article contains some possible spoilers, although in such a problematic
play, they might actually be “enhancers” rather than spoilers.
The greatest
puzzle in the play for me, which makes it hard to understand, is the behavior
of the combatants.
Sometimes,
they are strangely casual about fighting, as if they are playing a game: friendly
competitors, not people trying to destroy each other’s army. The Grecian
leaders invite the Trojan leaders to dinner.
They verbally bait each other, but no-one is hurt. It is a truly mysterious
temporary truce. The next day they will
go back to killing.
Then Hector
spares the lives of soldiers he has bested – and lets them go back to trying to
kill him.
More
interestingly, major decisions of war and policy are debated… but much depends
on personality and whim and secret agendas.
Troilus
strongly opposes returning Helen to the Greeks, even though it means continued
war, but lets his own lover Cressida be sent to the Greeks with some grousing, but
no real attempt to prevent her leaving.
He does
suggest he will sneak into the Greek Camp at night to see her. (In the middle of a war???)
And there’s
more...
Much of the
play is funny. It seems to me, perhaps, if the point of the play is the illogical,
whimsical way the war (or any war) is conducted, then there might be a way to also
present much of the warriors’ behavior satirically, as actually funny jokes.
CONCLUSION
This is a
rare opportunity to see a strong, clear production of a play that is seldom staged,
yet deals with the human issues -- some profound, some petty -- that can change
the course of civilization.
To see this play requires quick and courageous action.
(It takes courage to wait in heat or rain for tickets, not even knowing if the
weather will permit an evening show.) After an injury forcing a cast change,
the play just had its “official” opening, and it closes in a few days (Aug 14) with
some bad weather planned between now and then.
Tickets are
free, by standing in line early, or by lottery. Reserved seat admissions may
also be possible by means of contributions to the Public Theater.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
CAST
Zach Appelman -
Diomedes,
Tala Ashe -
Helen, Andromache,
Alex Breaux -
Ajax,
Andrew Burnap -
Troilus,
Louis Cancelmi -
Achilles,
Max Casella -
Thersites,
Sanjit De Silva -
Aeneas,
John Glover -
Pandarus,
Bill Heck -
Hector,
Edward James Hyland -
Nestor,
Maurice Jones -
Paris,
Ismenia Mendes -
Cressida,
Forrest Malloy - Menelaus,
Nneka Okafor -
Cassandra,
Tom Pecinka -
Patroclus,
Miguel Perez -
Priam, Calchas,
Corey Stoll -
Ulysses and
John Douglas Thompson -
Agamemnon.
THE PUBLIC THEATER
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA – FULL TEXT
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA – WIKIPEDIA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troilus_and_Cressida
Labels: Homer, Iliad, Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the Park, the public theater, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, Trojan War