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Fighting words
The Fly-Bottle and Much Ado About Nothing in Lenox
BY CAROLYN CLAY

The Fly-Bottle
By David Egan. Directed by Tina Packer. Set by Bob Lohbauer. Costumes by Govane Lohbauer. Lighting by Nathan Towne-Smith. Sound by Richard B. Ingraham. With Dave Demke, Michael Hammond, and Dennis Krausnick. Presented by Shakespeare & Company at the Spring Lawn Theatre, in repertory through August 24.
Much Ado About Nothing
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Daniela Varon. Set by Cameron Anderson. Costumes by Jacqueline Firkins. Lighting by Matthew E. Adelson. Original music by Sherrill Reynolds. Sound by Jason Fitzgerald and Daniela Varon. Fight direction by Kevin G. Coleman. Choreography by Susan Dibble. With Malcolm Ingram, Paula Langton, Stephanie Dodd, Mel Cobb, Lane Whittemore, Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Lon Bull, Jonathan Croy, Allyn Burrows, Mark Saturno, Jason Asprey, Johnny Lee Davenport, Gabriel Vaughan, Daniel J. Sherman, Nathan Wolfe Coleman, Jonathan Epstein, and Charlie Ravioli. Presented by Shakespeare & Company at the Founders’ Theatre, in repertory through August


Bickering is at the boil at Shakespeare & Company where, in the Spring Lawn Theatre, 20th-century eggheads Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper duke it out while, in the Founders’ Theatre, Signior Mountanto carries on his " merry war " with Lady Disdain. Tina Packer’s production of David Egan’s " comedy of philosophy, " The Fly-Bottle, which riffs on the famous 1946 incident in which Wittgenstein ostensibly went after Popper with a poker, is the more compelling, in part because the play of ideas is so urgently, emotionally acted. But Daniela Varon’s transportation of Much Ado About Nothing to sunny 1950s Sicily, where the women are bursting and the men are packing, is not without its charms — though they wear thin over a long evening spiffed up with period tunes and a parade of retro fashion.

If The Fly-Bottle is a chip off an old block, the block is Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, from which first-time playwright (and 2000 Harvard graduate) Egan borrows the trick of portraying from conflicting points of view a documented if ultimately unknowable historic event involving actual, eminent figures. In October of 1946, Vienna-born philosopher Karl Popper, then a professor at the London School of Economics, gave a visiting lecture at Cambridge University’s Moral Science Club, of which his fellow Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was chairman. Among those present was logician, social activist, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, who had been Wittgenstein’s mentor.

Before Popper had talked 10 minutes, he and Wittgenstein got into a heated exchange about the nature of philosophy that ended, some eyewitnesses say, with Wittgenstein threatening Popper with a poker before storming from the room. Fifty-odd years later, Wittgenstein’s acolytes insist it never happened. As in the weightier Copenhagen, memory is one trickster here, along with ego, passion, adamancy, and despair. Nonetheless, The Fly-Bottle is a very funny as well as heady small-scale work into which Packer and company pack a lot of spark, showing its big brains incapable of reining in their owners’ volatility. Wittgenstein, in particular, in Michael Hammond’s agitated, explosive performance, comes off as a dangerously intense character, tortured by his inability to stop thinking even as he snarlingly declares the meaninglessness of cogitation.

Egan’s play was inspired by David Edmonds’s 2001 book Wittgenstein’s Poker (from which it departs) and written for Shakespeare & Company (which presented it, briefly, last summer as Wittgenstein vs. Popper: The Main Event). It takes its new name from the " fly bottles " both Wittgenstein and Popper remember from taverns in their native Vienna, which were placed beneath the bar to trap flies that would buzz in for a taste of the beer at the bottom. " Philosophy, " pronounces Wittgenstein, " is a fly bottle, " its practitioners lured in to taste the sweetness of truth, then isolated by a glass wall from the world. He means to help them fly out, he says (possibly, it would appear, by exploding the bottle).

As if to demonstrate the vessel’s fragility and insularity, the dueling Popper and Wittgenstein, vying for the intimate parlor stage in the Spring Lawn mansion, passionately and sometimes nonsensically argue what constitutes " honest thinking. " The less esoteric and more practical Popper (at least in Dave Demke’s smugly mischievous characterization) maintains that there are indeed philosophical " problems, " solvable to the benefit of the world, via the scientific method. For Wittgenstein, the discipline is all linguistic smoke and mirrors, " puzzles " created by philosophers in order to chase their cerebral tails. Russell, in the silver-pompadoured, pipe-smoking, wistfully avuncular person of Dennis Krausnick, admits to long ago having abandoned logic for sex (and, toward the end, to a Proof-like fear of the connection between genius and madness).

The play’s big irony, borne out by the production, is that all three of these geniuses are, on some level, petty, temperamental intellectual thugs, unable to put into practice in their personal and professional lives their vaunted philosophies. Popper, the program points out, advocated growth through criticism — yet he was a megalomaniac who brooked no dissent. Wittgenstein, who eschewed the usefulness of philosophy and published only one book but whose influence on 20th-century thought was enormous, believed self-understanding was rooted in understanding others — yet he was alienated from everybody. And the admired pacifist Russell married four times and abused friends and relatives alike.

Yet in The Fly-Bottle, Russell and Wittgenstein, at least, come off somewhat sympathetically, as victims of their own brains and doubts. Popper registers as a more mundane and self-congratulatory thinker whose jealousies of the fashionable Wittgenstein, left over from the heyday of the Vienna Circle, are more personal than philosophic. Challenged by the poker-wielding Wittgenstein to come up with a single " ethical proposition, " Popper crows prosaically: " Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers! " So did he or didn’t he? As recently as 1997, when varying accounts of the alleged display of philosophic pique triggered a series of letters to the Times Literary Supplement, a jury of eyewitnesses was still out.

Meanwhile, in the Founders’ Theatre, the Mafia has taken over Much Ado About Nothing. After Vegas and the liquor trade, some might argue, it was bound to happen. And the co-opting is, for the most part, harmless — though director Varon means something by it, namely the examination of honor, which is important in the play, in " a culture of violence. " Still, after Kenneth Branagh proved with his ebullient, Tuscany-set 1993 film that a reasonable Much Ado could be produced in two hours, it’s hard to countenance a three-and-a-quarter-hour version, even when it’s correctly located at the northeastern tip of Sicily.

In Varon’s production, most of what is usually cut (including several exchanges for the women) remains. And room must also be made for the flavorful musical interludes, which include a swoony rendition by lounge lizard Balthasar of " Strangers in the Night, " sung in Italian, that turns Beatrice, Hero, and their gentlewomen into squealing, villa-dwelling 1950s bobbysoxers. A little harder to justify is the transformation of returning war heroes Don Pedro, Benedick, and Claudio into snappy, rifle-toting, benevolent gangsters — though the " sleep with the fishes " fate of malevolent Don John seems apt.

One of the reasons the lively, Italian-string-steeped production is long may be that Varon means to give equal weight to the battle of words carried on by smitten wiseacres Benedick and Beatrice and the melodrama of dishonored Hero and callow Claudio. In the first part of the play, the two plots intertwine, after which the plight of Hero, who’s set up by Don John to appear unfaithful and then denounced at the altar by Claudio, takes over until we return to a suddenly more sober Beatrice and Benedick. At Shakespeare & Company, the excellent Allyn Burrows is a violently love-disgusted if ultimately snookered Benedick (who sometimes makes you think of Malvolio) and Paula Langton a feisty, sweater girl of a Beatrice who recalls Grease’s Rizzo. The setting of the " tender trap " (we get the song on the soundtrack) that tricks the pair into acknowledging their feelings is irresistible. And the scene in which Burrows’s Benedick attempts to sequester himself in every cranny of the wide-open stage in order to hear himself being set up is a farcical gem (though the parallel one in which Beatrice tries to disguise herself as laundry on the line seems pushed). By contrast, the simpy Hero of Stephanie Dodd and the teary, face-making Claudio of Mark Saturno are wooden.

Adding to the ponderousness of the second half of the evening is the protracted, though often funny, Pink Panther–ish treatment of malapropping Constable Dogberry and the Watch. Varon turns this crew of homespun police into clowns out of Beckett who pop up out of manholes in set designer Cameron Anderson’s glimmering-white thrust-stage villa courtyard. And S&C treasure Jonathan Epstein brings a touching sincerity and perplexity to the (not entirely ineffectual) Constable. But oh, the plodding investigation, drawn out by the doddering of Charlie Ravioli’s senile Verges, does go on.

Some of the best performances in the production are in smaller roles. Jason Asprey is a nasal, dangerously depressive Don John, but equally arresting is the strong, surly Borachio of Johnny Lee Davenport, who at one point flicks open a nasty stiletto to spear the olive in his martini. And Elizabeth Aspenlieder is an irrepressible Margaret, sticking out in a world where women are meant to be repressed.

Issue Date: June 13 - 19, 2003
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