'Home' (7 June 1981)

 

[I saw Samm-Art Williams’s Home at the Negro Ensemble Company’s new base, Theatre Four on West 55th Street, just outside the Theatre District, in June 1981.  (The date in the headline of this recovered report isn’t the date I saw the play, but the date I originally wrote up the performance.  Given that the mounting I saw closed on 14 June, I probably saw the performance shortly before the 7th, perhaps even Saturday, the 6th.)  The original report was left unfinished or the conclusion was lost somehow, leaving only a fragment, so I have tried to reconstruct it.

[C. Gerald Fraser (1925-2015), a reporter for the New York Times since 1967, wrote a column on 24 February 1980 for the Sunday “Arts and Leisure” section called “‘Home’ Is Where His Heart Is.”  It was based on an interview with playwright Samm-Art Williams, the author of Home, which had opened Off-Broadway in December to universal acclaim.  In the article, Williams revealed the origin of the play and his idea for writing it.

[Like his protagonist, Cephus Miles, the playwright’s a native North Carolinian, born in the small farming town of Burgaw, for which the fictional Cross Roads will become a stand-in.  Like Cephus, too, Williams (b. 1946) is “an admitted romantic and a lover of the soil,” reports Fraser. 

[When he talks about his hometown, his “face lights up.”  His whole family lives on the same street, and like Cephus, his grandfather has a farm just outside if town.

[Many of the people the dramatist knew back home are the models for characters in Home—he just changed their names.

[How did he come to write the play?  “First of all,” Williams begins, “I’m afraid to fly.  When I go down to North Carolina I usually take the bus.  I guess the idea really started that Christmas of 1976 when I was on a Greyhound bus going home.”

[As you’ll see, that’s precisely what Cephus Miles does after spending 13 years on the streets of a northern city like New York.  “There was nothing on that bus but black people going South at Christmastime,” Williams continued.  “I began to look at those people.  They were drinking.  They were happy.  They were glad to be going back.

[Williams, who was an actor before he turned to writing, noticed something else, too.  “But you could see a whole lot of distress.  And you knew what they had to come back North to.”

[Some years later, in an interview entitled “From Burgaw to the Blackstone: Odyssey of a hit” in the Chicago Tribune of 12 July 1981, something I wouldn’t have known about before the advent of the Internet and the availability of digitized newspaper archives from all around the country, the playwright spoke to critic-at-large Richard Christiansen (1931-2022) a few days before Home was due to open a four-week run in the Windy City, and added some details:

[“I started to wonder who they were,” Williams recalled, “what they were thinking, and what had happened to them, and I thought that would make a good poem.”  The poem morphed into a play—explaining, perhaps, where the poetic prose of the dialogue came from.

[NEC premièred Home at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village, which it occupied from 1967 to 1980.  The play opened there on 14 December 1979 and closed on 13 April 1980, accumulating 82 performances.  It transferred to Broadway’s Cort Theatre from 7 May 1980 to 4 January 1981, running for 278 performances and earning nominations for two Tony Awards (including Best Play) and two Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding New Play).

[Following a tour beyond New York, Home returned and inaugurated NEC’s home, Theatre Four, with Samuel L. Jackson replacing Tony-nominated Charles Brown as the play’s main character, Cephus Miles.  Douglas Turner Ward, the company’s co-founder and artistic director, had taken over the direction of the Broadway run from Dean Irby and handled the staging of the revival, which played 45 performances from 8 May to 14 June 1981.

[In its 2008-09 season, devoted to NEC, the Signature Theatre mounted the most recent New York City revival at its home at the time, the Peter Norton Space on Theatre Row (West 42nd Street between 9th and 11th Avenues), between 7 December 2008 and 11 January 2009.  It was directed by Ron O. J. Parson and featured Kevin T. Carroll as Cephus Miles.]

Home, Samm-Art Williams’s poetic drama currently playing at the Negro Ensemble Company’s Theatre Four, is a moving, funny, touching, surrealistic, and, ultimately, entirely comprehensible experience.  With the judicious use of one actor and two actresses, Williams has given us the step-by-step voyage of a young man to his own contentment.  Though based strongly on the contemporary black experience, it still speaks forcefully to all of us. 

Through poetry, flashbacks, fast forward, and other thoroughly theatrical techniques, Williams and director Douglas Turner Ward develop the picaresque tale of Cephus Miles (Samuel L. Jackson), a black farmer in Cross Roads, North Carolina, from early boyhood, through a term in prison, and life “up north” in the city and, finally, back home again to his cherished “soft beautiful black sod.”  The story unfolds with humor—though it’s not a comedy—and compassion.

Playing all the other characters in Cephus’s life, from boyhood friend to girlfriend to big-city hooker, and so on, are two wonderfully inventive and versatile actresses, Juanita Mahone and Carol Lynn Maillard.  These two talented women never fail to differentiate each character, whether man or woman, adult or child, and they do so in the twinkling of an eye by adding a cap or a scarf to their basic costumes.

Cephus relates the events of his life, sometimes speaking directly to us in the house, which Jackson, Mahone, and Maillard act out for us, from a wooden rocker on the porch of the farmhouse.  Cephus is a natural-born yarn-spinner (and, it turns out, so is Jackson), and Williams provides him and us with deliciously limned episodes to conjure up the North Carolina farm country and the other locales of Cephus’s odyssey.

Covering 13 years in 90 intermissionless minutes, Williams’s tale starts where Cephus is happy, tilling the land of his small family farm.  He’s left alone to fend for himself after his Uncle Lewis dies and his childhood sweetheart, Pattie Mae Wells, takes off to go to college, marries a lawyer from the big city, and takes on airs like a society lady,

While many from the little hamlet of Cross Roads have heeded the pull of the big city and the North, Cephus has resisted.  The two women, who also serve as a Greek chorus, speak of “children of the land” and “babies of the soil” to evoke Cephus’s devotion to the homestead.

But “rich Uncle Sam” has other notions, and calls on him to fight in Vietnam, in a war about which he knows nothing.  So he refuses.  He believes, as he’d been taught by his late Gramps, that “Thou shalt not kill” and that one should “Love thy neighbor.”  

But that’s no defense in a federal courtroom, and the judge snaps, “Lock this fool up till doomsday.”  So Cephus spends five years in prison in Raleigh, sustained only by his memories of his first love, Pattie Mae (one of the roles played by Mahone).

When he gets out, he learns that someone had bought his beloved farm for back taxes.  This news prompts Cephus finally to follow the call to abandon the land,  With no home to go to, he travels north to a “very, very large American city” which is unnamed (but is clearly New York) where he’s captivated for a time by the glitz and glamour.

In the big city, Cephus falls in with a gold-digging hooker (Maillard).  When she asks where he’s from, Cephus stammers out Philadelphia (he means Pennsylvania, not Mississippi) so as not to seem such a rube.  Philly is where playwright Williams lived after he left Burgaw and before he sojourned in New York City.

But when Cephus loses his $125-a-week job because his employer finds out about his prison record and goes on welfare and then onto the streets, the tart splits, explaining sweetly as she leaves, “Where there’s no money, there can be no love . . . .”

Totally bereft, the homeless and friendless Cephus feels that God has abandoned him and “gone to Miami on vacation.”  At his lowest ebb, his aunt writes him that someone named Harper has re-purchased the farm—and put the deed in his name. 

Things have changed in the South, he’s told.  He hops a midnight bus on Christmas eve for a 15-hour ride back to Cross Roads.  Like Rip Van Winkle awakening in a new world, Cephus finds many surprises at home.  Integration has come, at least on the surface.

He discovers that the mysterious Harper who had bought his farm back is Pattie Mae.  She’d divorced her lawyer-husband but used his name for the purchase so no one would know.  She’s returned to Cross Raids, too, to rekindle the relationship with Cephus.

In the end, Cephus Miles is born again.  “Well.  You done finally come back from Miami,” he says to the Lord with a grin.

Much of the dialogue is prose poetry—Williams is adept at finding the music in words—and the set never changes from the wood-and-chicken wire construction by Felix E. Cochren that remains an ever-present reminder of the rough-hewn farmstead of Cephus’s memory—the “Home” of the play’s title. 

At bottom, Home is a rejection of novelist Thomas Wolfe’s contention that “you can’t go home again.”  The rustic, latter-day Candide does.  (He even gets his Cunegonde!)

The ending, which I could vaguely sense coming—Home is a fable, not the kind of play that will end tragically—may sound trite in a prose retelling, but Williams’s poetic rendering and his spot-on depictions—with the assistance of director Ward and the marvelous cast—of the sights, sounds, and characters of the world around Cephus, whether in rural North Carolina or the teeming streets of the northern city, in deft, evocative sketches, makes it all work touchingly. 

This fable’s moral is that we all need to reconnect with our roots, whatever they are, from time to time.  In Cephus’s—and, one presumes, Williams’s, too—“home” is the rural South, which is nurturing and healing, and “not-home” is the big-city North, which is degrading and soul-destroying.

The same’s true of the character of Cephus, who, in description, seems too idealistic to be true.  Jackson, however, plays him with such sensitivity and honesty that I accepted him as offered—a romantic with pluck.  His strength in standing up for his principles and his denial of bitterness or meanness just seem right in the context of the play.  There is such warmth and humanity in the character and performance that one just wants him to succeed.

Jackson excels in his physicality and often breaks out into a broad smile that cuts through the meaner parts of the tale as Cephus refuses to succumb to despair and defeat.  He’s less secure in his rendering of Williams more poetic dialogue, which comes out a little flat as if the actor weren’t quite sure how to handle it.

[At this point in my current play reports for Rick On Theater, I quote from a survey of published reviews.  Without the Internet, I wouldn’t have been able to do that in 1981, even had most of the original report not been lost.  I’ve decided to add a section to this post, separate from the reconstructed report, with some excerpts of the contemporary reviews.]

*  *  *  *

A SAMPLING OF REVIEWS OF HOME

[Because there were several mountings of Home after the début production, and I only saw the third iteration of the play, each one of which was accompanied by cast changes and even a change in director, I’ll stick mostly to assessments of the play and the general interpretation and overlook the performances.  (Only one New York review covered the performances I saw, and even then, only Samuel L. Jackson was in the cast the reviewer saw.)

[The coverage of Home was extensive in 1979-80, so I’ll cherry-pick a small selection of the published record.  I won’t be quoting from notices of the tour stops and I won’t review the 2008 notices.]

In the New York Amsterdam News of 19 January 1980, Lionel Mitchell said of the première production, “It is one of the most entertaining talkies,” referring, I think, to the fact that Home is a story being told by Cephus Miles as he and the two actresses act out scenes of his life.  (This was the opening cast of Charles Brown, L. Scott Caldwell, and Michele Shay.)

Mitchell compared Samm-Art Williams’s play to Under Milk Wood, the 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.  He dubs it “a charming, enjoyable, very entertaining play.” 

Mel Gussow, in the New York Times of 20 December 1979, labeled Home “a freshet of good will, a celebration of the indomitability of man, a call to return to the earth.  In all respects—writing, direction and performance—this is one of the happiest theatrical events of the season.”

Of Williams’s dramaturgy, the Timesman observed:

The author is also an actor, although not in his own play, and the same easygoing ebullience that he brings to the stage as a performer is the fountain of his playwright's energy.  For one thing, Mr. Williams is clearly in love with words, which in his hands become a rolling caravan of images.  Occasionally, he stops for rhyming interludes, talking blues, which remind one somewhat of Vachel Lindsay’s tympanic incantations.  More often, with his gift for local language, Mr. Williams seems closer to the spirit of Mark Twain.  If Twain were black and from North Carolina, he might have written like Samm‐Art Williams.

(For those too young to get the reference to Vachel Lindsay [1879-1931], he was a well-known poet considered a founder of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted.  1915’s “The Congo” is probably his best-known poem, full of onomatopoeia and words that evoke sounds.)

“‘Home,’” summed up Gussow, “is an uplifting folk ballad about the pure in heart.  Welcome ‘Home.’”

“Samm-Art Williams’ play is sweet, simple, funny and endearing,” wrote Douglas Watt in the New York Daily News on 20 December 1979, “a holiday parable, a good-humored, 90-minute myth.”

“Williams, though he is not averse to cliches about black life and behavior, is a disarming fellow,” averred Watt, “and his gossamer evening with its snatches of doggerel and inside ethnic jokes not too far inside to elude the public at large, is both entertaining and inspiriting.” 

The Daily News reviewer added that “it would not be out of place for ‘Home’ to break into song, and even dance, at appropriate moments.  Or, for that matter, for the audience to do so, as the other night’s gave indication of being ready to.”

In Variety on 23 January 1980, Madd. (the reviewing “sig,” or pseudonym, for John Madden) opens his notice with the observation:

Whoever believes that “you can’t go home again” hasn’t seen . . . “Home,” a splendid play . . ., vibrant with warmth, wit, humor and superb acting, with poetic, gutsy writing that can be counted among the best theatrical events of the season. 

Madden felt, “Although Williams, in his depiction of black life and its ethnic influences, obviously ‘tells it like it is’ judging from the enthusiastic response of the mostly black audience at the performance caught, anyone who grew up ethnic can relate to the play’s vision.”

When the play reopened in Broadway’s Cort Theatre, it was re-reviewed by both the Times and the Daily News, but as both notices were by the same writers as the reviews of the St. Mark’s mounting, I’ll start with a different paper and reviewer, Allan Wallach of Long Island’s Newsday.

On 8 May 1980, Wallach characterized Home as “a likeable play.”  Williams, he found, “can make you share his warm feelings toward the play’s land-loving hero and the down-home southern life of farming and fish fries.”

Wallach had a complaint, though:

Unlike a lot of plays that need trimming, however, the hour-and-a-half, intermission-less ‘Home’ could profit from some added length.  Williams has written it with the simplicity of a fable, and more character development and interaction would help.  The people in Cephus Miles’ life . . . come and go so quickly we hardly get to know them.  And some of the play is taken up with patches of writing that strain a bit too hard to be lyrical.

The Newsday writer pointed out that the 13 years covered by the plot “is probably too much to cram into a short play.  But Williams tells his story engagingly.” 

In the Philadelphia Inquirer issue of 8 May 1980, William B. Collins deemed that Home “implies that urban blacks have a strong nostalgia for the southern soil of their roots.”  In the first (and, ultimately only) negative review of the play I found in my survey, Collins continued:

Playwright Samm-Art Williams himself succumbed to this yearning with a drama that merely translates into terms of the black experience, the stale notion of the superiority of country values over city ways.  Rural is good, big town is bad, according to the trite world view from the stage of the Cort.

The Inquirer reviewer admitted to a “sketchy understanding of the reverse migration” between North and South, but contended “that the migrants are more likely to be middle-class professionals to whom doors have indeed opened in the New South rather than unskilled laborers seeking fulfillment in pig husbandry.”

In other words, Collins, white and middle-aged, thought Williams was mythologizing.  He added:

If “Home” is questionable sociology, it is also the blandest kind of drama.  It is written in a “poetic” style that casts two women as Greek chorus, commenting on the turns that Cephus Miles’ life takes.  The poetry is embarrassingly bad and the women irritatingly strident.

The review-writer’s issues with Home didn’t end there.  He found the character of Cephus “an uncommonly literate fellow, considering his background.  There had never been any dirt under those fingernails.  He sounds country only when spinning yarns . . . .”

Collins praises the direction of Douglas Turner Ward faintly, reporting that he “has staged the play in his characteristically vigorous, forthright manner,” but condemns Felix E. Cochren’s “all-purpose unit setting that fails to serve any particular purpose very well.”

Jay Sharbutt, reviewing for the Asbury Park Press on the Jersey Shore, noted the past Broadway successes of the producing team of Elizabeth I. McCann and Nelle Nugent.  On 9 May 1980, Sharbutt declared, “Now they’ve got another winner—'Home.’”

The Press review-writer described the play as “[r]ich in humanity and humor.”  Sharbutt cautioned, however, “It must be said that ‘Home’ . . . seems an oh-oh proceeding when it begins.  You tend to say ‘Oh oh,’ and suspect you’re trapped in an epic poem of more epic pretense.”

“But if you just roll with it, let your mind relax,” the reviewer backed off a little, “you’re in for a wonderful evening that jumps with life and energy, despite author Samm-Art Williams’ sporadic flights into poetic excess.”

Williams, Sharbutt felt, “has a superb knack of capturing in quick, sharp sketches, the sights, sounds and characters of black life, whether at a catfish fry at a North Carolina riverbank or on the mean streets of New York.”  He added that Home “is the McCoy, richly evocative, as they say, and laced with sly ruminations, such as this from Brown as he boards his bus for a 15-hour trip back to Cross Roads.”

“There’s a predictably upbeat end to the troubles of this down-home Job,” Sharbutt found.  “But even that grave flaw—for these times, anyway—is forgiven . . . .”  He concluded that “‘Home’ has the right stuff.  It’ll decorate your mind.  It has no intermission, but doesn’t need one.  It moves that fast, that enjoyably.”

Cliches conjured up by Samm-Art Williams’ “Home” are[:] there’s no place like home, something to write home about, home is where the heart is, I’ll be home for Christmas[,] et al.  But “Home” is no apparition.  It is live, unadulterated drama that hits home hard.

That’s now Marie Moore opened her review of the Broadway presentation of Home in the 17 May 1980 Amsterdam News.  She reports, “The conveyors of ‘Home’ skillfully deliver threatre-goers to Cross Roads, North Carolina, a prison in Raleigh, N.C., New York City and back to Cross Roads, all in a 13-year time span.  The audience is oblivious to time and space when the talented three take command on stage.”

As if to respond to Allan Wallach’s complaint in Newsday, Moore asserted, “Like an epic poem, ‘Home’ is punctuated with heroic figures but enhanced by its brevity.  The 90-minute story-narrative lush with lyrical language is a compressed stick of theatrical dynamite.”

Her concluding comments are indeed high praise:

Broadway has finally gotten a sensitive, poignant play, minus the frivolous trappings, but full of superior talent to match “Home’s” theatrical opulence.

“Home” is an exciting, exhilarating evening full of laughter and tears.  See it now.  No doubt “Home’s” next hearth is Hollywood—where most of the monumental movies are made.”

The Daily World, then New York’s Marxist newspaper, ran the only review I found of Home’s return to Off-Broadway on 27 May 1981—and even then it had a different cast, except Jackson, than the company I saw in August.

Extolling the NEC for proving “that you can’t get too much of a good thing,” review-writer Elizabeth Bowman proclaimed, “Their new revival of Home by Samm-Art Williams is truly theater at its most rewarding, combining comedy and tragedy and with a surprisingly happy ending.”

“Samuel L. Jackson . . . skillfully conveys to us the “boy-next-door” qualities of the character,” reported Bowman—the only member of the cast I saw who got a review that I found—“his idealism and his strength in standing up for his ideals, as well as his refusal to become mean and bitter, despite all the undeserved troubles that befall him.”

In conclusion, the Daily World reviewer affirmed, “There are no dull moments in this play, and I left the theater feeling happy and hopeful.” 

[Coincidentally, the Chicago Trib interview from which I quoted in my introduction also answered an entirely irrelevant question I’ve had about Samm-Art Williams ever since I became aware of him: where did his unusual first name come from?  It turns out that it evolved much the same way as my stage name did.

[The dramatist, who had started out to become an actor, explained that when he went to Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union, to get his membership card, he found out that he wouldn’t be able to join under his birth name, Samuel Arthur Williams.  There was already an Equity member named Sammy Williams, the woman in the membership department told him, and Equity doesn’t permit two members to have the same or similar names.

[The woman told him he’d have to change his name for professional use and suggested Henry Williams.  The would-be union actor rejected that because he didn’t want people to think he was Hank Williams, the country singer, and after wrangling with the membership lady for a time, he wrote down Samm-Art Williams, and that’s who he became—even when the incipient actor became the successful playwright.

[Oh, and my own tale is much the same—except my first union was AFTRA, the TV union (now half of the merged SAG-AFTRA).  I couldn’t be registered as Richard for the same reason the writer couldn’t be Samuel—there was already a Richard K***** on the books.  So I took my initials, R. E., and turned them into a name, Ari, and that’s who I was during my short, illustrious career as an actor.]

Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute – Part 2

 

[This is the second and last installment of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute.”  (If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going back to 14 August and doing so; you’ll find this segment of the post makes more sense if you do.)  

[I’ll be presenting a “recovered” report on Carroll and Marty Martin’s one-woman play, Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, introduced in Part 1, followed by a survey of the published reviews of the New York Off-Broadway productions.

[The recovered reports, which I’ve attempted a couple of times on Rick On Theater (“Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive: Othello,” 22 December 2020; “Much Ado About Nothing: A ‘Recovered’ Report.” 20 March 2021), are analogous to the contemporaneous play reports I post on ROT, except that I never wrote up the plays after I saw them.

[These reports are based on some comments I’d made in other contexts and a random collection of very vivid impressions of the performances I saw.  I also use a little research to help remind me of details of the production.

[I called the result a “recovered” report on the analogy of “recovered memory”—which is defined as “a memory of a past event that has been recalled after having been forgotten . . . for a long time,” according to Dictionary.com.]

The Circle Repertory Company presented Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at its Greenwich Village theater for six performances on Wednesday through Sunday, 6-10 June 1979 while the company was waiting for Sam Shepard’s Pultzer Prize-winning Buried Child to move from the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre), but Pat Carroll’s performance and Marty Martin’s script proved so popular that Circle Rep decided to keep it running.

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein and Buried Child opened in alternate-night rep on 24 June at the company’s Sheridan Square Playhouse, a former garage-turned-nightclub, and ran until September.  After a single benefit performance at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Carroll viewed the celebrated Cone Collection—the Baltimorean Cone Sisters were friends of Stein, who advised them on their collecting—on 29 September 1979, GS³ returned to the Sheridan Square Playhouse until October.

The play then moved on the 23rd to the historic Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street, where it ran for nine more months (and where I saw it in June 1980), closing on 3 August 1980—over a year’s run all together.  There was buzz about a possible Broadway transfer, but that never materialized.

After its successful New York run, the one-character play toured the U.S. into 1981 and beyond, including the Arena Stage in Washington; Cleveland Playhouse in Ohio; McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey; Zellerbach Theatre at the Annenberg Center, Penn State, in Philadelphia; Alliance Theatre in Atlanta; and other U.S. cities, many for a single night.  There were invitations to bring the play to festivals in Alaska, Canada, Europe, Australia, Israel, and South Africa.

There was talk of filming GS³ for either the big or small screen, and an adaptation was broadcast on CBS Cable (a short-lived pay cable service) on 6 and 7 March 1982.  (There was also the Grammy-winning 1980 Caedmon recording.)  Carroll reprised the role in productions across the country and around the world many times for the remainder of her career.

Carroll’s portrayal of Stein was a striking change from her habitual comic turns.  We theatergoers saw a compelling dramatic presentation—though with plenty of humor and (often snappish) wit.  I don’t write fan letters, but after seeing Carroll’s performance in GS³, I sat down and wrote one to her.  I told her that if she ever took on students, I was ready to sign up!  (She didn’t take me up on my offer.)

I trained as an actor and worked a decade in the profession, and retain a love for the practitioners of Thespis’ art.  I even used to keep a list in my head of a dozen or so individual performances that had astonished me.  Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was prominent on that list. 

I’ve sat through a good number of realistic and naturalistic performances that fooled me into forgetting I was watching a play.  One of the most notable in my memory is Carroll’s Gertrude Stein.  Her performance was so magical that I found myself literally thinking, as I was watching her, ‘Gee, Stein’s a fascinating person.  I’m so glad I met her.’

When I realized what I was thinking—that that was actually Gertrude Stein in front of me—I was mighty glad I didn’t say that out loud so my companion and others near me could hear how deeply I’d fallen under Carroll’s spell.

The play is set in the Paris apartment in which Stein and Alice B. Toklas live at 27 Rue de Fleurus.  (The street, pronounced flur-ooss, is named for a town in Belgium that was the site of a 1794 battle during the French Revolutionary Wars.)  Stein has lived here since 1903, first with her older brother Leo and then with Toklas from 1910.  (Leo and Gertrude separated in 1913; the break is the climax of the play’s narrative.) 

Designer Anne Gibson’s set at the Provincetown—there was a different scenic designer at Circle Rep, Tony Straiges—was a representation of the cluttered apartment with the Picassos, Gauguins, Matisses, and other art works with which the Steins had decorated their walls.  There were a few pieces of furniture from the period.  The stark lighting was by Ruth Roberts.

When the lights come up—there’s no curtain—68-year-old Stein (Carroll, who was 53 when I saw the play) is seated in a chair, at the center of the room, dressed in a brown caftan (the sole costume was designed by Garland Riddle), with closely-cropped grey hair.  Not as closely-cropped as Stein’s was at this time in her life, which was a mannish brush-cut, but not as matronly as her hair was styled, in a graying bun, in the ’20s.  She’s drinking a glass of tea and lights a cigarillo.

In the play, Stein sits in the throne-like chair with her legs spread, but my vision of her that I still carry with me when I think of this performance is the Jo Davidson terra-cotta sculpture (Gertrude Stein 1874-1946, 1922-23) in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. 

While Stein seems to be kneeling, a Man Ray photo of her posing for Davidson reveals that she was, in fact, sitting in a chair just as Carroll was in the play.  Davidson merely sculpted her from the knees up, making Stein appear Buddha-like—which the artist thought was appropriate for his subject.

(From 1992, there’s been a bronze casting of Davidson’s sculpture in Bryant Park, behind the main research branch of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets.  Whenever I see that rendering, it makes me flash back to the performance of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein I saw in 1980.)

Over the shoulder of the famous expat, among the other paintings, is the well-known Picasso portrait of her.  It’s 1938, the day before she and Toklas will be evicted from their home of 35 years because the landlord’s son needs a place to live.  It’s raining and there are thunderclaps.

Stein and Toklas have been packing and Stein’s flatmate is sleeping upstairs.  The imminent eviction makes Stein reminisce about the life that unfolded at 27 Rue de Fleurus over the past 3½ decades.  The apartment is so full of her life and the ghosts of her illustrious visitors that it prompts an outpouring of memories that’s echoed by the downpouring rain outside.

“It is    it almost always is    it was and it is    almost always    an inconvenience to be evicted.”

After that, Stein/Carroll becomes a superb raconteur and confides in us many of the stories of her life in Paris in the first four decades of the 20th century.  She also reaches back into her childhood in California and her studies at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins.  For 90 minutes, we become Stein’s confidants.  We hear Stein’s views on art, life, writing, and the import of genius and fame.

She recounts the disastrous Rousseau dinner the Picassos organized at their Montmartre home in honor of painter Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier (‘The Customs Agent’), at which everyone got very drunk—because there was nothing to eat but spinach—and behaved badly; the discovery of a painting by the as-yet unknown Paul Cézanne in a gallery by Gertrude and Leo; the time a drunken Hemingway paid Stein and Toklas a call and they refused to admit him, resulting in a rift between the young writer and older mentor and champion; and, finally, Leo’s loss of faith in Cubism and modernism and his embrace of a reactionary sensibility, causing him to call his sister’s avant-garde writing “tommyrot.”

At the end of the play, Stein looks around at the art works on the walls of the apartment.  She declares with quiet pride: “We moved out one century from these rooms and moved in another.”

There’s no plot in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, no narrative though-line, no cause-and-effect chain.  Martin’s text is a stream-of-consciousness tumble of memory, sometimes connected by a lot of “That reminds me”’s and “That brings me to”’s.

Needless to say, after all my undisguised praise, it was all wonderfully spun and fascinating to hear.  We’d been offered the invitation to be part of the literary world’s most renowned salonière’s Saturday evening soirée, and it was a delicious experience. 

It was a momentary puzzle why we’d be included among the intelligentsia who invented modern Western culture, not to mention how we’d all fit in Stein’s apartment—but that passed, unanswered, as we became engrossed in Carroll’s impressionistic portrayal of the disenfranchised intellectual.

There’s only a single actor listed in the program—GS³ is labeled a “one-person play,” but it’s really not.  Martin used the words and recollections of a score or more of the literary and artistic giants of the Western world in the early 20th century to make a portrait of Gertrude Stein, but Carroll contrived to bring them onto the stage for us to see and hear. 

Stein was a name-dropper extraordinaire, but Carroll did far more than drop illustrious names.  She made us see and hear the famous friends Stein and Toklas assembled at 27 Rue de Fleurus, creating and casting virtual playlets (long before that word had any meaning) that were as engaging as the one she was in.  I absolutely believed that Alice Toklas was just upstairs asleep.  It’s a conjuring trick no magician could accomplish.  Only an actor could do it.

Carroll accomplished this feat by recalling the personal traits of these people we tend to know only as icons.  Her Stein knew all their foibles and quirks, and sketched them in.  The distant legends of art and culture thus became warm human beings who did foolish—and sometimes hurtful—things.

Perhaps the most delicate memory Carroll’s Stein discusses is the matter of her lesbianism.  Carroll said she didn’t want GS³ to be a gay play, but she didn’t want it to be dishonest, either.  So when Stein reminisces about her first homosexual experience, with a woman at Johns Hopkins, it’s discussed paraphrastically, by inference. Nothing is said directly. 

But it leads Stein into talking about being fat, and that leads into talking about how she always felt different, which is ultimately what impelled her to leave America—because she never fit in.  It was also what made Alice Toklas follow the Steins, and what brought the two women together for the rest of Stein’s life.  (From 1907, when they met, to 1946, when Stein died, Stein and Toklas were never separated.)

The relationship with Toklas, however, isn’t emphasized.  It’s implied, of course, and hovers around the play whenever Stein brings her roommate up, but it’s not the emotional or dramatic center of the play.  As I’ve noted, the break-up with Leo was more impactful to the performance than Alice B. Toklas. 

That’s not in the least inappropriate.  After all, Leo had been his sister’s mentor for over 40 years.  But though he was the one who left their shared abode—Leo had actually instigated the salon, though Stein became the hostess—intellectually, she was the one who left him. 

She championed the new art and the new writing, going in her own direction, and he couldn’t handle that she stopped listening to him.  They never spoke to one another again.  That’s much more wrenching than a 30-year devotion between Stein and Toklas, isn’t it?

Carroll insisted that the performance was not a monologue, as most of the press coverage dubbed it.  It’s a “duologue,” declared the actress.  The other half of the conversation is provided by the audience.  (Occasionally, Carroll recounted, a theatergoer actually voiced a response to Stein.)  She added that the play is different at every performance, but not because she makes any changes.  Each audience responds differently.

Carroll sat in the chair for most of the play.  Only occasionally getting up, when Stein is especially agitated, for brief moments to walk about the apartment.  But her hands were so animated and eloquent that the play didn’t seem static.  Her face, too, was infinitely expressive.  Of course, GS³ is a verbal play, depending on Martin’s words to take the place of action. 

Ordinarily, that would be a detriment; word plays are almost always talky.  In one-actor plays like Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! (Broadway, 1966; television, 1967) and Clarence Darrow with Henry Fonda (Broadway, 1975; television, 1974), the actors walked about the set a good deal, but, as GS³ was conceived for an incapacitated Carroll, Stein is mostly seated.  Yet Carroll exuded energy so vibrantly that her Stein is always vital even when stationary.

Still, the words are the true action of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, and Carroll made them dance—the way one imagines Gertrude Stein would have when she captivated those students in 1934.

I guess it’s obvious without my even saying so that I thought Pat Carroll’s performance was extraordinary.  (I wasn’t the only one; her reviews were excellent.)  Even as restricted as she was, Carroll held the stage for the whole hour-and-a-half and never lost her grip on us.  She even made Stein’s idiosyncratic speech—those triple repetitions—seem like natural talk from a sophisticated, hyper-intellectual woman.

In several interviews, Carroll asserted that for this role, she didn’t just rely on the rehearsals and her homework to develop the performance.  She drew on everything she had learned over the thirty-some-odd years of her career. 

She pulled out all the stops, and whether she whispered or roared, she made the language alive.  No wonder the recording of the play won a Grammy.  (By the way, I even bought the album when it came out.  I wanted documentation of that performance.)

The smallest gesture—the shrug of a shoulder, the twitch of a finger, the slap of a table, or the clench of a fist—filled the theater.  Even her distinctive laugh that made her so popular on TV game shows was part of her offering; boisterous and infectious, it became Stein’s laugh.

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was one of the longest-running one-person shows of the ’70s.  The press found the evening “enormously fascinating” and “poignant” (from the New Brunswick Home News and Variety) and actress Carroll received the best reviews of her career, capturing both the humor and the sorrow of the character.  Let’s look at what some of the reviewers said about Marty Martin’s play and Carroll’s portrayal of the iconoclastic American expatriate in Paris.

Because the coverage was so extensive, with many regional papers reviewing the New York City run and then local papers all over the country writing about the national-tour performances, I’m going to limit my review round-up to the Off-Broadway productions alone.  (There were notices into 1985, and even reviews of Carroll’s performance in Jerusalem in the Jerusalem Post.)

In the New York Times in June 1979, after the play’s fill-in stint at Circle Rep was extended but before it moved to the Provincetown, Richard Eder characterized Martin’s script as “appealing,” but felt, “It lacks the intuitive brilliance of James Lapine’s effort to literally stage a poem of Miss Stein’s in “Photograph,”  two years ago.”  

Mr. Martin's assemblage is anecdotal, and intelligent rather than inspired; but it works very well on the whole, and it gives scope for Miss Carroll’s winning and often very moving performance.

(The 1920 poem “Photograph” is composed in five sections Stein labeled “acts.”  This gave Lapine [books for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion] a rationale to stage it in 1977 for the Performance Workshop at SoHo’s Open Space.  “It is a lovely and remarkably successful attempt to render the qualities of Gertrude Stein in theatrical terms,” wrote the New York Times.)

The Timesman found that the playwright “has realized that Miss Stein’s wit, her reflections about herself and others, and the wealth of anecdote need to be anchored to something; and he has accomplished this very well.”

Carroll, reported Eder, “glares and beams as she talks, caught up in the fascination of telling and recalling. . . .  [She] revels in the beat and counterpoint of her phrases; but she disciplines them as well, cutting them off abruptly in the sheer enjoyment of showing who is boss.”

“It is, all in all,” concluded Eder, “a moving and splendidly personified picture that Miss Carroll gives us; a piece of cultural history that like all good history strikes us as the history of ourselves.”

Four months later, after Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein’s open-ended run had started, the Times’ Walter Kerr saw the play.  “Off to the Provincetown I went,” Kerr related, “and I went expecting a great deal.  I got more than I bargained for.”

He expected “outrageousness,” he confessed, and “Miss Carroll . . . obliges in spades.”  The Times reviewer noted that in her portrayal of Stein, “some of the time,” Carroll is

content to snuggle, warmed with self-satisfaction, in the chair built as four square as she is, as often as not she’s likely to leap to her sandaled feet, take a hearty belt from her omnipresent drink, and bellow out a great bleat of anger.

The review-writer asserted that “we feel confided in” with Carroll.  “I don’t know precisely how Miss Carroll is able to do it, but she manages—without any effort at all—to make us share Gertrude Stein’s attitude toward herself.”

In the end, Kerr concluded, having invoked a housekeeper famous for her outstanding souffles, “Miss Carroll’s own souffle is very choice indeed.  Superb texture, body and lightness both, four‐star anywhere, I’d say.”

Don Nelsen asserted in the New York Daily News that in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, “Martin’s script and Carroll’s performance make a perfect match and Milton Moss’ evenly paced direction is skillful, indeed.”

The Daily News reviewer proclaimed that “Pat Carroll has recreated [Stein] with remarkable fidelity and dimension.  She catches Stein’s snobbery, pettiness, perception, loyalty and wit and at the same time tells the story of an artistic revolution.”

Nelsen concluded, “I have never thought of Gertrude Stein as a particularly enchanting person but if she was anything like Carroll’s portrait, she must have been.”

“Wonderful wonderful wonderful is the phrase for Pat Carroll doing ‘Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein’ off-Broadway at the Circle Repertory Theater,” wrote Mary Campbell of the Associated Press in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  She was one of the many journalists who found it irresistible to mimic Stein’s triple-ese.

The AP reviewer continued: “Gertrude Stein calls herself a genius, and Miss Carroll makes that—and everything else—believable.”

“She tells an anecdote richly . . .,” Campbell added.  “She delightedly sets out insights and one-line quips.  She has a remarkable mind that makes one wish to have known her.”

In a later edition of the paper, Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Barbara Kantrowitz commented that Carroll “dominates the theater’s small stage . . . .  She raises name-dropping to a fine art.”  Kantrowitz prefaced this remark by asserting that “both the actress and her subject have gained new images.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Charles Ryweck observed that “‘Gertrude Stein etc.’ may be a one-character play but it evokes an entire gallery of the titans of modern art and literature . . . .”  Playwright Martin, Ryweck added, “has revealed [Stein’s] personality through the art of the raconteur.”

“Carroll,” the HR reviewer felt, “is a fascinating actress, funny, yet piercing . . . .” 

She is a mesmerizing actress as Gertrude and was rewarded with a standing ovation by an appreciative opening night audience.  Milton Moss directed the ebullient Carroll with flair.”

In the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, William A. Raidy of the Newhouse News Service asserted, “The avant-garde writer would be both pleased and flattered by Pat Carroll’s charming portrayal of her in . . . ‘Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein.’”

Martin’s play “is a warm, intimate portrait of the woman from Allegheny, Pa., who from her armchair in a Paris studio encouraged such young artists as Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and a whole Lost Generation of writers.”

“Martin rarely directly quotes his subject,” explained Raidy.  “Instead, he lets her tell her story as seen through her relationships with others . . . .  He makes, therefore, Miss Stein perhaps a bit more likeable—and modest—than she actually was.”

“Pat Carroll’s Gertrude Stein laughs a lot,” pointed out the Newhouse reviewer. 

Reading most of the Stein canon, we never thought Miss Stein the laugh riot actress Carroll portrays.  Then we came across this evaluation from her old friend, [literary critic, biographer, and historian] Van Wyck Brooks [1886-1963]: “Gertrude’s personality was magnetic; she had a laugh from the middle of her . . . .”

“More than anything else,” felt Raidy, “Pat Carroll has captured the physical sense of Gertrude Stein in this one-woman show.”  The review-writer concluded with the observation “what a pleasure it is to be reminded of [Stein’s] very special genius with the help of Pat Carroll.”

Calling Carroll’s performance “brilliant” and labeling it the “undisputed highpoint of her career,” Variety’s Madd. (the reviewing “sig.,” or pseudonym, for John Madden) characterized GS³ as “an intelligently drawn, poignant, often hilarious, entertaining, thoughtful, instructive, and most of all exhilarating theatre experience.”

“Milton Moss has staged the work with authority,” continued Madden, “but obviously allows Carroll the freedom of instinct.”  Quoting the Circle Rep program for the play, the Variety reviewer wrote, Carroll “was determined to make the world of Gertrude Stein, once again, come alive.”

Madden added, “To that purpose Carroll has perhaps exceeded even her own expectations, with a performance that illuminates the stage throughout two acts and ranks among the best of the solo theatre pieces offered over the last decade or so.”

“Carroll,” the reviewer continued, “brings such warmth and personal appeal to the role, as well as a marvelous gift for story telling, the audience becomes immediately intrigued with the gossip and friendly intimacies she reveals . . . .  A lengthy and hilarious tale about a near disastrous dinner party she attended, is a highlight of her impeccable delivery.” 

In Long Island’s Newsday, Allan Wallach, dubbing the play a “tour de force” for Carroll, reported, “Her triumph is so complete that the theater piece has become a surprise hit of the summer . . . .”  In explanation, Wallach said, “What Carroll has done to bring all this about is, simply, turn herself into Gertrude Stein at every performance.

The words of the play aren’t Stein’s, as we’ve seen, “but the actress invests them with Stein’s enthusiasm and rhythms.  The intelligence and humor—and occasionally a haunting sadness—shine through.”

Proclaiming that Stein “has been made, finally and inevitably, the center of an enormously fascinating play,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in the New Brunswick, New Jersey, Home News, “In the person of Pat Carroll she is also the play’s sides, top and bottom.”  The actress, he wrote, “is giving a performance of enormous energy and magnetism.”

“This is a real play,” the review-writer admonished us, “that happens to have as its one and only character a figure from real life.  It is a work created for the stage out of all the things the stage finds most useful.”

“Miss Carroll is seated at the center of the famous room at 27 Rue de Fleur[u]s, Paris, for virtually the entire evening. . . .  But,” observed the man from the Home News, “from this throne-like seat, Miss Carroll miraculously creates a[n] evening that always seems alive and active.  She tells the stories brilliantly.”

“Miss Carroll plays with the language as if it were a musical instrument.  Her stories are oral impressionistic paintings and the glimpse into the ego are startling revelations of vulnerability,” affirmed Albrecht.

He didn’t spare his praise: “If you want a model of stunning acting by which to judge all other such attempts, do visit Miss Carroll at the Provincetown Playhouse.  So much of what passes for acting in other enterprises merely seems so much ranting and raving in comparison.”

The Home News reviewer concluded by stating, “All of which adds up to an enormously varied evening that treats us as [her] intellectual and emotional equal.  What greater tribute can an artist pay her audience?”

“With Miss Carroll playing [Stein], it is sometimes difficult to remember that it is, after all, only a play,” continued Albrecht.  “She makes it seem like a private soiree.”

As readers can see, the reviews all hit much the same notes.  These were all notices of the performances in New York City, either at Circle Rep or the Provincetown, but the reviews of the tour dates were in the same vein.  So, I’ll stop here—with two exceptions.  The first is a review of the Caedmon recording (TRS 367) of the play, released in September 1980, about a month after the play’s New York run ended.

In the New York Times, Paul Kresh, an author, critic, record producer, and broadcaster who specialized in spoken-word recordings, advised, “Plays for one or two performers not only make for economical stage productions but are ideally suited to the recording medium.”

Kresh labeled the two-disk, stereo release “Pat Carroll’s tour-de-force monologue.”  Having seen the live performance, the record reviewer acknowledged,

It was a joy to watch Miss Carroll . . . thronging the stage with the ghosts of the great as she reminisced on a rainy afternoon in her studio about life in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus.  You could swear that Alice B. Toklas was really napping away all the while in the next room!  Yet, little is lost when you only hear this performer, since most of the delights of Mr. Martin’s compelling script are in the flow of language that illuminates character as the formidable Stein recalls her adventures, her quarrels with her brother Leo, her love affair with modern art, and her attempts to make language do what Picasso was doing on canvas.

Kresh made a side note to say that compared to a recording of Stein’s actual voice, “Pat Carroll has caught its cadences and even its timbre without resorting to slavish mimicry.”

The other outlier is a review in the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant of the 1982 television broadcast of the play on CBS Cable.  (The telecast ran two hours, rather than the 90 minutes of the stage version.)  Owen McNally, the paper’s television critic, described GS³ as “a good play, a good play, a good play” (I warned you about the triple-ese) and credited Carroll’s “tour de force performance.”

“It is a one-woman monologue,” McNally explained, “with Carroll pulling out all the stops” in what he called Martin’s “imaginary monologue.”  The TV reviewer characterized Carroll’s work as a “vivid, earthy performance,” presenting “a very bold, flesh-and-blood Gertrude Stein, a Stein running over with brilliance as raconteur and writer.”

“Although most sympathetic,” warned McNally, “this is not a totally idealized representation of Stein.”  The reviewer added (as we recall what Anita Loos revealed), “What you get in this two-act monologue is no mere ‘Saint for Two Acts.’  Stein also comes across as at least a bit of a bitch.” 

The Courant writer reported, “The play itself is all but totally static.  Yet Carroll makes it come very much to life by generating static electricity that lights up the Stein character. . . .  The words—the words made flesh by Carroll—are the real action.” 

(Stein wrote the libretto to an opera with music composed by Virgil Thomson entitled Four Saints in Three Acts, 1927-28.  She also wrote a libretto, often performed as an avant-garde play, called Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, 1938—but I think that apparent reference is inadvertent.)

I will also quote a few passages from one of the tour-stop reviews because it was the only one I read that had anything negative to say about GS³.  James Lardner’s Washington Post notice was generally laudatory, especially regarding Pat Carroll’s performance (the piece’s headline was: “On Stage: Fierce, Convincing ‘Gertrude Stein.’”)

The WaPo reviewer, who saw the show at Washington’s Arena Stage two months after it left the Provincetown, found that Martin’s script “succeeds in making Stein an absorbing and sympathetic figure,” but “is much less successful in its structure and selection of material.”

Carroll is constantly forced to jump from one subject to another . . . .  And there is no compelling dramatic reason behind Stein’s speaking to us from the mid-1930s: The story doesn’t build to any ’30s climax, and indeed sweeps through the ’20s . . . with alarming briskness.

Lardner, however, immediately returned to his complimentary assessment of the play, which he dubbed “a highly entertaining excursion to a unique time and place,” and especially Carroll’s acting, which, he proclaimed “is the bottom-line reason to see this show.”

In Carroll’s bio in the Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein program, the actress made a statement, part of which the Variety reviewer quoted.  The rest of Carroll’s thought reads: “personalizing history through Gertrude Stein is a fantasy come true.”  I’m thrilled that it did and I got to share in it.  It’s remained indelibly engraved on my memory for 43 years . . . and counting.

[Thinking about the possibility of other negative reviews of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein aside from a brief passage in the Washington Post notice, I wondered what John Simon might have written in New York magazine.  In my original searches, I never found a New York review, so I made a search specifically directed at finding one.

[It looks as if Simon may not have written a full review, but penned the blurb New York used in its theater listing for GS³.  It doesn't have his name attached, but it sounds like him and the abstract/citation on one database points to it if you look for “John Simon” and "Pat Carroll." 

[(Wouldn’t you know that the first use of the blurb in question—there was another text in the theater guide in earlier issues—appears in an issue that follows one that’s missing from the database of complete issues.  If there was a full review from which the blurb was excerpted, the frequent practice, it'd probably be in that missing issue.  I’ll try to remember to check in a library my next opportunity.)

[So, to complete the record, here’s what the “anonymous” critiquer of New York magazine said about Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein:

The Gertrude Stein that emerges is, unlike the title, far from triple—only a third.  She is less formidable, much more easygoing than the original.  The comedienne Pat Carroll plays her heroine with verve, variety, and finesse, but Marty Martin’s monodrama simplifies, falsifies, and vulgarizes the life and times and works of Ms. Stein.

[Assuming this is John Simon, I’m not sure how he would know “the original” Gertrude Stein—though he was 20 when she died.  I don’t know, though, that he was in Paris at the time.  We’ve heard in the testimony of people who knew, or at least met, her, that Stein presented a different face in person and in private than she did in her writing. 

[Besides, as Carroll and Martin both repeated, GS³ isn’t a history lesson, it’s theater.  It isn’t presenting historical truth, but theatrical truth—and, however the New York reviewer felt about Martin’s dramaturgy, he praised Carroll’s acting.]

'Much Ado About Nothing': A "Recovered" Report

 

[On 22 December 2020, I posted “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” a collection of pre-Rick On Theater performance reports for plays I saw in Washington, D.C., in the ’90s and ’00s. 

[All but one, that is.  One of the three reports wasn’t actually written at the time I saw the play.  That was Othello, which I saw at the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger in the early 1990s.  I had, in fact, never written a report on that production.

[As I explained in my introduction to that section of the post, I had some scattered notes, some comments I’d made in other contexts, and a random collection of very vivid impressions of the performance I saw that night.  I decided to try to create the report I might have written back then, using a little research to help remind me of details of the production. 

[I called the result a “recovered” report, on the analogy of “recovered memory”—which is defined as “a memory of a past event that has been recalled after having been forgotten . . . for a long time,” according to Dictionary.com. 

[I think it worked out well, so I’m going to try it again.  There’s one more play, from 1985 this time, that I saw at the Folger Theatre, the forerunner of STF, that left a strong impression and I’ve wanted to try to resurrect my recollection of the performance for a long time: Much Ado About Nothing.  In fact, I was going to “recover” that report for “Some Out-Of-Town Plays,” but I realized that one of the other two plays was another production of Much Ado.

[I put that idea aside temporarily, and now I’m going to revive it.  Let’s see what I make of it this time.]

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
by William  Shakespeare
Folger Theatre (Washington,  D.C.)
13 February 1985 

I’ve probably said this a dozen times or more on Rick On Theatre—and countless times orally whenever the subject of Shakespeare’s plays comes up—but I’ll say it again here, just so there’s no doubt: Much Ado About Nothing is my favorite Shakespeare play. 

It may also be my favorite play of all time, irrespective of genre, period, or classification, but I’d have trouble sorting that out.  When I was a (young) actor wannabe, I always wanted to play Benedick, but few directors would see me in that role.  I did get to play Don John, the play’s villain, in a very nice Off-Off-Broadway production of Much Ado in 1979.

The closest I got to playing Benedick, though, was doing a scene from Much Ado in an acting class in the mid-1970s.  (I’d have been just around 30 at the time.)  It was the act IV, scene 1 declaration scene in which Benedick and Beatrice declare their love for one another and she asks him to kill Claudio. (My partner was Jennifer Sternberg, another “mature” actor in the class.)

I’ve seen a great number of productions of Much Ado About Nothing over the years, including the 1993 film adaptation (about which I have mixed feelings) with Kenneth Branagh (who also directed and adapted the script) as Benedick and Emma Thompson as Beatrice.

The closest I seem to have come to a traditionally-set production was that Branagh film, which was set in an unspecified-but-vaguely-Renaissance Italy (though filmed in Tuscany rather than Sicily, where Messina actually is—but we aren’t to know that!).  It’s truly cinematic, rather than theatrical, but otherwise faithful to Shakespeare.  (The 2012 film adaptation by Joss Whedon, besides being made in black and white, is updated to a contemporary setting.)

Arguably, the staging that was the farthest from the original that I saw was the 2017 Shakespeare REMIX adaptation (see my report on this program on ROT on 31 December 2017) created and performed by the Chelsea Career & Technical Education High School of lower Manhattan.  Also reset in contemporary times, the plays Shakespeare REMIX participants work on comment on the students’ own lives and the times in which they live as they insert their own writing into Shakespeare’s text.  (I had previously seen Chelsea CTE’s Henry 4 remix in 2016.)

Chelsea CTE’s Much Ado About Nothing took place in New York City’s Messina High School, where “gossip fills the hallways, classrooms, and bathrooms.”  Yes, the set incorporated the school johns, including stalls! 

I also saw the London troupe Cheek by Jowl’s 1998 staging of Much Ado About Nothing (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater, now known as the Harvey), reset in the aristocratic climes of Edwardian England (about 1901-10), when the distinctions between the genders was rigid and absolute.

I don’t remember very much about the show—which gives you an idea of my receptivity to the production. I did, however, stop seeing Cheek by Jowl shows after that, it seems.  I’d seen a couple of the company’s performances before, though, and hadn’t much cared for them.

Much Ado apparently cries out to directors for a change of setting for some reason.  I saw a production on New Year’s Eve 2002 at the Shakespeare Theatre (a successor to the Folger Theatre) in association with the Hartford Stage of Connecticut.  (This was the archival Much Ado report I posted as part of “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” referenced earlier.)  It was directed by Mark Lamos, who reset the play in the Roaring ’20s (that is, right after World War I).

Everyone did a nice enough job and the costumes were terrific.  The show just didn’t sparkle, however, and I wonder if the laid-back era of the setting put everyone in that mind-set.  It was Shakespeare à la Noël Coward, if you can picture that.  If this weren’t my favorite Shakespeare (and if it hadn’t been New Year’s Eve), I might have objected more. 

The transportations can get farther and farther away from Shakespeare’s turn-of-the-17th-century Sicily.  In 2011 and ’12, the Shakespeare Theatre Company (the name of the company after it left the Folger’s Elizabethan theater) hired Ethan McSweeney to direct a new production of Much Ado About Nothing.  (See my blog report on this production on 19 January 2012.)  He reset the play to mid-1930s Cuba, at a time when the 1933 Sergeants’ Revolt brought to power a short-lived, reformist-but-unstable pre-Batista government.

McSweeney’s Much Ado took place on a sugar cane plantation and the designers clearly had a great deal of fun creating a credible evocation of Cuba in the ’30s, with the women’s fashions especially flattering and sexy.  The trade-off of the choice of period was that the military uniforms of Don Pedro and his soldiers were dull khaki jodhpurs and tunics, and lots of Smokey-the-Bear hats.  With the verdant hacienda set behind them, though, it was little enough for the men to give up the colorful and elaborate uniforms of the 16th or 17th centuries.

The production was fun, I’m happy to report.  STC has almost always been superb in its acting, directing, and design—even if I’ve occasionally disagreed with elements of the interpretation.  In this instance, the new locale and time didn’t illuminate anything in Much Ado that a more straightforward presentation wouldn’t have accommodated.

McSweeney’s Cuban relocation of Much Ado About Nothing was probably one of the most unusual among the professional productions I’ve seen.  (I make special allowances for the Shakespeare REMIX high school performance, given the educational philosophy behind the project.) 

I’ve read of some other interpretations that are “out there”:

·   A 1958 mounting at Stratford, Connecticut’s now-defunct American Shakespeare Festival, directed by John Houseman and Jack Landau with Katharine Hepburn and Alfred Drake as Shakespeare’s “merry warriors,” set in Mexican Texas during the Texas Revolution (1835-36)

·   A Franco Zeffirelli-directed camp Much Ado for London’s Old Vic updated as a Sicilian carnival with peanut vendors, carabinieri, and Italian accents (1965); Maggie Smith starred as Beatrice opposite her soon-to-be-husband, Robert Stephens, as Benedick

·   A New York Shakespeare Festival staging at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1972, set “[b]efore World War I [in a] small town in middle America” with Don Pedro’s men as Rough Riders and Dogberry’s watchmen as Keystone Kops; staged by A. J. Antoon, the production (which moved to Broadway and has been issued on DVD) starred Kathleen Widdoes as Beatrice and Sam Waterston as Benedick

·   A 1988 staging for the Public Theater (successor to the NYSF) by Gerald Freedman set during the early Napoleonic era (around 1800) at the Delacorte, starring Blythe Danner and Kevin Kline; part of the Public’s 10-year-long Shakespeare Marathon (1987-97; 37 Shakespeare plays)

Of all the incarnations of Much Ado About Nothing I’ve seen or with which I’ve been associated, perhaps the oddest is the one I’m going to try to describe and evaluate in retrospect, the 1985 production at the Folger Theatre directed by the troupe’s artistic director, John Neville-Andrews.

Neville-Andrews’s Much Ado About Nothing was, of course, staged in the Folger Library’s Elizabethan theater, the company’s home.  (See my afterword below for a brief history of this company and its many name-changes.)  It started previews on Tuesday, 15 January 1985, opened on Monday, 21 January, and ran until Sunday, 10 March.  I saw it on Wednesday, 13 February, with my parents. 

(Full disclosure: my father was at this time a member of the Folger’s board.  In addition, sometime in 1982—or thereabouts—I auditioned for the company in one of those omnibus audition sessions that groups of regional companies hold in New York City.  Sometime during the next year, Neville-Andrews was at dinner at my folks’ house and he offered me a part “if you’re available.”  I had to turn the offer down because I was committed to starting a graduate program at New York University that September.  I had determined by then to give up my pursuit of an acting career.)

The Much Ado production, which starred Mikel Lambert and Roderick Horn as Beatrice and Benedick, was set in the 1930s.  What’s more, the story unfolded aboard the luxury ocean liner S.S. Messina at sea.  This made it more reminiscent of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes than William Shakespeare—and raised at least one unanswerable question. 

The whole production was accompanied by music from Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, among other recognizable period songsmiths, as the play’s circumstances required.

I assume that most readers know the plot of Much Ado, but I’m going to give a brief summary for the few who don’t—and to apprise you all of the adjustments necessitated by setting the machinations afloat.

Don Pedro (Steven Crossley), a wealthy bachelor, and his entourage board the S.S. Messina for an Atlantic crossing, looking for fun and romance.  They and their fellow voyagers climb up a ramp from the house aisle with a band playing.  With him travel his friends Claudio (Michael Tolaydo) and Benedick (Roderick Horn).  Another passenger is Father Francis (Floyd King), a Bible-thumping Southern evangelist.

Also aboard are Don John (Edward Gero), a New York gangster and his henchmen Conrade (Alessandro Cima) and Borachio (Michael Howell).  However incongruous, Don John was Don Pedro’s brother, just as he is in Shakespeare’s original.

The gangsters are cartoon characters, figures of comedy almost as low as Shakespeare’s original clowns, the constable and his watch.  In keeping with the musical-comedy atmosphere director Neville-Andrews conceived, they’re more Kiss Me, Kate hoods (speaking of Porter—think “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”) than Guys and Dolls.

Below deck are Dogberry (Jim Beard), the ship’s purser (formerly a constable in Shakespeare’s original), and his bumbling cohorts Verges (Richard Hart), George Seacole (Stephen Hayes), Hugh Oatcake (Terrence Riggins), and Harry Starboard (Reginald Metcalf), who make up the ship’s crew. 

Balthasar (a singer in the original; Rob Bowman) is the tuxedoed lounge piano player, offering such period numbers as “Where or When” (1937, Rodgers and Hart), “The Lady Is a Tramp” (1937. Rodgers and Hart),“Tea for Two” (1924, Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar), “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” (1924, George and Ira Gershwin), “Night and Day” (1932, Cole Porter), and “The Way You Look Tonight” (1936, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields).

Young Claudio is in love with Hero (Tara Hugo), the young daughter of Leonato (Emery Battis), who are also passengers on the Messina, while Benedick can’t stand Beatrice (Mikel Lambert), Leonato’s beautiful, witty, but sharp-tongued niece, who returns his disdain.  In Leonato’s traveling party is also Beatrice’s father and Leonato’s brother, Antonio (John Wylie).

Claudio and Hero are soon engaged; as they prepare for their wedding, they decide, with the help of Don Pedro and Ursula (Erika Bogren), Hero’s companion, to trick Benedick and Beatrice into confessing their love for each other.  The plan works without a hitch, but trouble comes in the form of Don John.  

Out of pure cussedness, Don John devises a scheme in which Borachio will make love to the gang’s platinum-blonde moll, Margaret (Hannah Weil), while calling her Hero, at the porthole of Hero’s cabin the night before the wedding.  

Don John takes Don Pedro and Claudio where they can see the encounter and are convinced Margaret is Hero.  The next day Claudio shames Hero publicly at the wedding and refuses to marry her.  She faints and Father Francis persuades Leonato to pretend that she’s dead until the situation is sorted out.

Dogberry manages to arrest Conrade and Borachio and they confess the plot.  Claudio’s crushed when he learns that he killed Hero with his false accusations.  He begs Leonato to punish him and Leonato tells him his punishment is to marry Antonio’s “other” daughter, who is “almost the copy of” Hero.  Claudio agrees but first spends a night mourning for Hero and proclaiming her innocence.

Don John escapes the Messina.  (How? you may well ask.  I have.)  The next morning, Claudio marries Leonato’s “niece,” who removes her veil to reveal that she’s Hero.  Claudio and Hero are very happy but Benedick and Beatrice almost break up when they discover they were tricked into admitting their love.  Benedick and Beatrice get married, however, and everyone dances around the deck singing.

Father Francis, in the person of a pulpit-pounding King, officiates at the ceremony from a neon pulpit equipped with a flashing cross.

(In the end of Shakespeare’s version, Don John is arrested and brought back to Messina to face punishment, but Neville-Andrews seemed just to have forgotten him.  I’ve never figured out how the scoundrel got off the ship in the middle of the Atlantic.  Drop a lifeboat over the side?  A hidden jet ski?  Riiight! 

(Having generated that conundrum, I suppose bringing Don John back to face charges would only spotlight the logical disconnect—so best not to bring it up.  So the miscreant just skated. 

(I saw this play 36 years ago—and this has always bothered me.  I wasn’t the only one, either.  David Richards, the Washington Post reviewer, asked the same question in his 1985 notice.)

There were obviously textual changes and adjustments necessitated by Neville-Andrews’s idea.  For instance, the Folger’s script added such anachronisms as, “Places please, for the Hollywood ball,” when a crew member called the passengers in to the masked party in act II, scene 1. 

Most noticeably, Don John, whom Edward Gero played as a hood from Brooklyn, interpolated dese’s, dem’s, and dose’s into the Shakespearean dialogue.  Steven Crossley, by the way, is from England, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, though he works extensively in the U.S.  

One critic quipped, “From the sound of things, while Don John was running numbers as a young man in Brooklyn, his brother, Don Pedro, was probably studying at Oxford.”  It was sort of Damon Runyon meets Noël Coward.

The malefactor also shifted more of the Bard’s prose into Brooklynese: in act II, scene 3, Don John told his brother and Claudio: “De lady is disloyal,” and then, “. . . when ya have seen more and hoid more, proceed accordionly [sic].”

Alessandro Cima’s Conrade followed suit, of course, as one of Don John’s gang, but not Borachio.  Actor Michael W. Howell is African American and played Borachio with an black street accent.  There was a lot of laughter, some of it from the hoods’ take on movie gangsters, but some from the incongruity of hearing Shakespeare’s words in contemporary American street speech.

(Neville-Andrews’s Much Ado wasn’t the only Shakespeare I’d seen that went this route.  In 1988, the Off-Off-Broadway Independent Theatre Company Americanized its production of Romeo and Juliet by making the characters Italian-American in the Mafia vein.   

(This inspired particularly those playing the lower-class characters to affect Hollywood gangster accents.  Somehow, “What light t’rough yonda winda breaks?  It is de east, and Juliet is de sun!” just doesn’t ring right.  I kept flashing on the hoods in Kiss Me, Kate singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”)

The program doesn’t say who’s responsible for the emendation of the script, director John Neville-Andrews or dramaturg Genie Barton, who authored the “Notes on the Play” in the program.  Text adaptations are usually the job of a dramaturg, but in this instance, Neville-Andrews may have been at least largely in control.

There were loads of problems with this production because of Neville-Andrews’s “concept,” but one thing can’t be denied: it was a handsome and miraculous setting.  Designed by William Barclay and lit by Daniel M. Wagner, the Messina was a sleek, sparkling vessel that stretched across the Folger stage, the stern at stage right and the gleaming white starboard hull angled up to the left.

The miracle was that Barclay got a credible facsimile of the ship onto that tiny stage and still left (barely enough) room for the actors and their business.  It was cramped—but the Folger always was anyway—though serviceable.

One of the drawbacks of the Folger’s Elizabethan stage other than its tiny size was the permanent architecture around which every production and set design had to work.  (This was one reason that Michael Kahn, Neville-Andrews successor, eventually moved the company out of its longtime home at the library: it was extremely limiting.  The other principal reason was the small seating capacity of the Folger—243 seats in comparison to 451 seats in its eventual new space.)

This includes the inner stage and its overhanging “heavens” as well as the pillars downstage that blocked sightlines, made movement on stage awkward and limited, and got in the way of almost any set design with which a scenographer came up.  Remarkably, Barclay devised a plan that left the Elizabethan elements exposed while weaving the S.S. Messina in and around them.  A touch of Shakespeare peeking out from Noël Coward. 

The ship’s interior, modeled on the luxurious French liner Normandie (in service 1935-39), revealed up center by means of an inner stage on a turntable, was art deco and painted ocean blue.  The chairs in the ship’s piano bar were upholstered in zebra stripes and Bowman tinkled the ivories on a gleaming white grand reminiscent of Liberace (sans candelabrum).  The rest of the ship was all shined brass railings and fittings, with curved staircases connecting the two decks of the set.

Though Neville-Andrews’s concept turns Much Ado into a high-society comedy of manners for the screwball-comedy era, David Richards of WaPo asserted that it was “easily the handsomest Shakespearean production” the company had mounted so far in its history.

Needless to say, John Carver Sullivan’s costumes were equally ’30s-elegant, right out of Hollywood’s golden days.  The women’s gowns looked like clothes Ginger Rogers might have worn and the male passengers were mostly attired in dinner suits—except for Don John and his confederates, who dressed like refugees from a Jimmy Cagney flick in pinstriped suits, snap-brim fedoras, shades . . . and gats.  According to one account, director Neville-Andrews ordered 70 period costumes, including the crew uniforms and the mobsters’ pinstripes.

The masque scene, which is a party at Leonato’s house in the original, was a “Hollywood ball” aboard the Messina.  The revelers masked themselves as movie stars like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire (Benedick), and Rogers (Beatrice).  As Balthasar played such period numbers as “The Continental” (from the 1934 Rogers-Astaire film The Gay Divorcee) and “Hooray for Hollywood” (featured in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel), the partiers danced the latest Latin steps such as the samba, rhumba, and conga. 

Ursula did a Shirley Temple routine during the ball to the tune of “On the Good Ship Lollipop” (the child actress’s signature song which she first sang in the 1934 film Bright Eyes) which seemed unnecessary and unjustified.  The dances were choreographed by Virginia Freeman and the masks designed by Michael Eade.  Bowman, who played the pianist Balthasar, was also the production’s musical director.

But all this good-natured fun was problematic.  It didn’t greatly detract from the play, but neither did it add anything.  (In his review in the New York Times, Mel Gussow observed, “As a concept, a Porterized porthole version is, itself, much ado about nothing.”)  It may have been ultimately harmless, but it created some logic problems.  I’ve already raised the matter of Don John’s escape from the Messina and the omission of the scene of his arrest and return.

Before that, when Don John’s gunsels, Conrade and Borachio, were caught, Dogberry didn’t bring them to a ship’s officer to be examined, but to one of the passengers: Leonato.  Whatever for?  Leonato has no authority in this version of the play.

In Shakespeare’s version, Leonato is the Governor of Messina, so Dogberry is a minion of Leonato.  It makes sense for the constable to bring prisoners to his superior for questioning.  You might have expected Neville-Andrews to make Leonato captain of the ship here, but he didn’t; Leonato’s just a passenger.  So why would Dogberry report to him?  Aside from the fact that the plot needs it, I dunno.  Go figure.

Neville-Andrews established that the scenes between Benedick and Beatrice were played on deck at the ship’s railing.  Under Wagner’s daytime sun or evening moon, the setting created a warm and serene ambiance. 

In keeping with that convention, with the help of Wagner’s mood-setting moon- and starlight and Balthasar in the lounge playing “Poor Butterfly,” Horn in a tuxedo and Lambert in a sensuous evening gown declared their love and Lambert’s Beatrice swore Horn’s Benedick to be her agent in revenge against Claudio.

But the scene, which Shakespeare put in the church right after the aborted wedding (IV.1), Neville-Andrews moved to later that evening in order to take advantage of the moonlit setting.  The scene was lovely, both in the setting and the performances, so no harm was done to the play.  But it was a change motivated solely to accommodate the look—after the daytime wedding scene, the lovers couldn’t wear spiffy evening dress!—and the director’s whims. 

Whatever it accomplished dramatically—as written, the scene shows a mature couple, 10 to 15 years older than Claudio and Hero, forging a commitment in fraught circumstances while the unseasoned Claudio behaves rashly at the drop of an unverified allegation—the point wasn’t strengthened or emphasized.  It just looked prettier.  In fact, seen in the church where the marriage was to have taken place and where the offence was committed immediately before could make the scene more impactful than delaying it.

This kind of thinking didn’t seem to have entered into John Neville-Andrews’s consideration for conceiving this Much Ado.   For example, making Don John into a comic villain, a sort of Boris Badenov (from Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show, the ’60s era TV cartoons) as a gangster instead of a spy, stripped him of the true evil and destructiveness he brings to the original version of the play.  (I’ve frequently spoken of the character as “Iago-lite.”)

Then, in his “Director’s Note” in the program, Neville-Andrews asserted that “the thirties was an extremely joyous, optimistic and romantic era,” but he was ignoring the Depression (1929-ca. 1939); Prohibition (1920-33); the gangster era in the U.S. (around the late ’20s to the late ’30s); European dictatorships (Mussolini – Italy, 1922-43; Stalin – Russia/Soviet Union, 1924-53; Salazar – Portugal, 1932-68; Hitler – Germany, 1933-45; Franco – Spain – 1939-75); World War II and build-up to war (1939-45; 1923-39); labor unrest, riots, and revolts (1920s and ’30s).

Unless you’re oblivious to the upheavals of the decade, it’s impossible to call it carefree—unless you belong to the privileged moneyed class.  Or you believe the silver-screen image of the time depicted in the escapist fare projected by the film studios on both sides of the Atlantic.  Aboard a luxury liner at sea, you’re insulated from that real world, of course.

(In the same note, by the way, the Much Ado director observed that in “the physical constraints of ship life, no one can flee from confrontation.”  But, as I’ve noted, that was precisely what Neville-Andrews arranged for Don John to do, first when he mysteriously escaped form the S.S. Messina and then again when he wasn’t brought back to face his deserts.)

Furthermore, one of the aspects of Much Ado About Nothing is that it’s rooted in the real world.  There are no enchanted forest or magical creatures to manipulate or protect the characters.  Neville-Andrews’s S.S. Messina is, however, a world apart from reality ashore.  In addition to all those terrible events that I catalogued as going on out in the world, there’s also the world Shakespeare invoked for Much Ado.   

The Bard doesn’t ever say when Much Ado takes place.  One era scholars suggest is the mid- and late 13th century, the reign of King Jaume (James) I of Aragon (1208-76) and his son, Piero (Peter, or Pedro; c. 1239-85), who conquered Sicily and became king of both Aragon and Sicily.  Piero was an experienced soldier from fighting in his father’s wars.

It’s these wars from which Don Pedro’s “returning” in Much Ado, according to this origin theory—actual, historical wars in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.  But on the ship, these wars don’t exist.  The closest things, one writer suggested, in which Don Pedro and his men might have been engaged, unlikely though that would have been, would have involved “black sedans and submachine guns” in a Hollywood gangland. 

The performances were hard to judge.  The Much Ado cast included several Washington favorites, such as Edward Gero (who’s made several appearances on this blog) and Floyd King (an actor my mother always enjoyed), whose work I’d seen numerous times.  In the role of Antonio was also an actor, John Wylie, with whom I’d worked in New Jersey eight years before.

Neville-Andrews turned many of the aspects of Much Ado’s comedy that derived from wit and snappy language into buffoonery and clownishness.  Don John’s henchmen were subjected to this transformation, as I’ve already suggested, but Tolaydo’s Claudio and even Horn’s Benedick had to display a penchant for farce.

It's one thing for Claudio to be callow and immature, but Neville-Andrews made Tolaydo play him as a bumbling schlemiel.  It seemed out of place and unfitting.  Horn’s Benedick got it worse, however

In the overhearing scene (II.3), Horn started out concealed by a large menu then he squirmed under a table and crawled under the piano bench.  When a steward removed the menu, Horn hid under a tablecloth and finally ended up under a deck chair.  Pure slapstick—but more Inspector Clouseau than Benedick the Shakespearean lover. 

The actors executed Neville-Andrews’s vision well enough.  The problem wasn’t that they couldn’t handle it.  The question was, were they doing Shakespeare’s play . . . or something else.  In all those other variations of Much Ado I listed at the top of this report, no matter how far removed from Renaissance Italy their directors had moved the setting—they were still doing William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  I just wasn’t sure about the S.S. Messina. 

I didn’t feel that the Folger cast was.  The Times’ Gussow quoted Don John portentously: “Let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me” (I.3).  Richards of WaPo asserted, “About 50 percent of the time, the Folger Theatre seems to be on to a good thing—indeed, a snazzy thing—with its production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’” 

Richards continued his half-and-half appraisal through his notice.  “I’m not sure the approach makes sense down the line,” he caviled, “in fact, it makes no sense at all in some places.”  Later, he referred to “those recurring moments when Shakespeare’s Messina and the Folger’s SS Messina just don’t jibe.”

Another reviewer, Michael J. Collins, Emeritus Professor of English at Georgetown University, wrote: “Although it is sometimes thoughtful and illuminating, the Folger’s version of Much Ado About Nothing is finally not Shakespeare’s.”  I think I have to agree.

In a way, this was paradigmatic of the whole production.  It was silly, even funny—but it wasn’t Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  Not only had the physical comedy replaced the verbal wit for which Much Ado is justifiably famous (and, I daresay, beloved), but Neville-Andrews undercut Shakespeare’s commentary on human vulnerability to gossip, inuendo, and malicious deception.

John Neville-Andrews’s interpretation of the play was truly “much ado”—that is, a great fuss—over “nothing”—that is, something of no consequence.  While an accusation of infidelity would have caused immense consternation in Elizabethan times—Elizabeth’s own mother lost her head over such an accusation, after all—in the swinging, sophisticated 1930s (especially in Neville-Andrews’s sunny rendering), would it even raise more than an eyebrow?

Furthermore, in Shakespeare’s day, nothing sounded much like noting, which at that time meant ‘gossip,’ ‘rumor,’ ‘overhearing.’  So “much ado about noting” would have meant ‘a big deal over gossip and rumor.’  There are two important elements of the play that come out of overhearing and rumor: Benedick and Beatrice are tricked into declaring their love for one another, and Claudio rejects Hero because of a false rumor. 

That suggests to me that Shakespeare intended the play to say something about our responses to false reports and things we hear other people saying.  (Much Ado isn’t the only play in which the Bard treats this issue.  It’s an important plot element in The Winter’s Tale, too.  If the playwright put this in two plays, don’t you think it’s significant?)

Reconceiving plays can have profound, and not always felicitous, results.  In 1997, Washington’s Arena Stage presented Ibsen’s Ghosts, directed and designed by Romanian avant-gardist Liviu Ciulei.  The director turned one of Ibsen’s prototypical realist plays into a symbolist production to disastrous consequences: nothing fit and all of Ciulei’s adaptations reeked of imposition.  

Arena later produced a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire staged by Hungarian director János Szász which appeared to have been updated to the time of the presentation (2001) and performed in tune with Artaud’s theater-of-cruelty theories rather than Williams’s lyric realism.  Again, the style and the text fought against one another.  

Making a play different isn’t the same as making it better, and if that’s what Neville-Andrews thought he was doing with Much Ado—improving the original—then I have to object.  (This kind of discussion always reminds me of something my father told me.  Dad studied German in high school and he was amused when he was assigned to read German translations of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as other works of literature, to find the title page of the texts inscribed with the phrase: übersetzt und verbessert.  In English, that means “translated and improved”!)

It may be my own prejudice speaking, but I just don’t think Much Ado needs help to get across.  That 1979 Off-Off-Broadway showcase I did was set in Renaissance Italy like Shakespeare’s original, and a number of people told me then and later it had been one of the clearest and funniest productions of the classic comedy that they’d ever seen.  No help, in other words, had been needed aside from good acting and directing.   

[The discussion of this production of Much Ado About Nothing and several of the others I mentioned may have gotten a little confusing because they were all presented by the same theater company—though in different incarnations depending on when in the company’s history the production occurred.  I’m speaking, of course, of the current Shakespeare Theatre Company and its progenitors.

[If you haven’t spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C., STC’s hometown, you’re probably not familiar with the troupe’s long history and the changes in name and venue that have occurred over that time.  I’ll try to straighten out the confusion by recounting a brief synopsis of STC’s evolution.

[The Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library, an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington administered by the Trustees of Amherst College, opened in 1932.  It has the world’s largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare and is a primary repository for rare materials on the Bard.  The library is also the site of the Elizabethan Theatre, a two-thirds-scale replica of a London Shakespearean-era theater (a composite design of multiple 17th-century playhouses). 

[Folger’s tiny Elizabethan Theatre was not originally intended for theatrical performances; it was used for concert performances and academic lectures.  In 1970, the space (later called simply the Folger Theatre) was converted into a functioning playhouse, and the Folger Theatre Group was formed.  In 1982, the name was changed to the Folger Theatre.

[In 1986, as the consequence of a financial shake-up, the FT became the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger.  FT artistic director John Neville-Andrews, who had assumed the post in 1980, was succeeded by Michael Kahn, former Acting Company artistic director and director of the acting division of Juilliard.  The newly established company presented its first production, Romeo and Juliet November 1986.

[In March 1992, the troupe moved into the newly-built, 451-seat Lansburgh Theatre (renamed the Michael R. Klein Theatre at the Lansburgh in November 2019) in the Penn Quarter, the revitalized shopping area in the city’s downtown.  (The highrise building which houses the new space, the first new theater in Washington to be built from the ground up after the Kennedy Center in 1971, was the former Landsburgh’s Department Store, a household name in the District.)

[The new theater was a couple of blocks north of the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor occupied by the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s museums.  The company changed its name again, to the Shakespeare Theatre.  (In 1991, a new and independent troupe, the Folger Theatre, was organized to perform in the library’s Elizabethan theater.)

[In 2005, the troupe took its current name, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and built the 774-seat, flexible-stage Sidney Harman Hall near the Landsburgh.  Harman Hall opened in October 2007 with repertory productions of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Edward II (see “Three Plays from the Shakespeare Theatre from the Archives: Edward II,” 26 April 2020).  Together, the two performances spaces are known as the Harman Center for the Arts.

[In June 2012, the American Theatre Wing awarded STC the Regional Theatre Tony Award.  Michael Kahn left the company following the 2018-2019 season after 33 years. and in September 2018, Simon Godwin, associate director of London’s National Theatre, was named the incoming artistic director.

[After taking up his position as artistic director in September 2019, Godwin made his directorial debut at STC in February 2020 with a production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens with a female actor in the title role.  On 8 April 2020, Godwin announced the closing of all of STC’s facilities in response the coronavirus pandemic, pursuant to the recommendations of the Center for Disease Control and the D.C. Health Department.  A few months later, the company announced that some planned productions would be offered online.  To date, plans for reopening its theaters for live, in-person performances have not been finalized.]