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BTW downsizes Antony and Cleopatra
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Antony and Cleopatra
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Jason Slavick. Scenic conception by Slavick. Costumes by Rachel Padula Shufelt. Lighting by Stephen Boulmetis. With Brian Abascal, James Barton, Shelly Bolman, Christopher Crowley, Anne Gottlieb, Elizabeth Hayes, Ted Hewlett, Dev Luthra, Bill Molnar, Robert Pemberton, Mara Sidmore, Michael F. Walker, Elizabeth A. Wightman, and cellist Peter Walden. Presented by Boston Theatre Works at the Tremont Theatre through October 12.
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The Nile is a slim strip of blue material in Boston Theatre Works’ streamlined Antony and Cleopatra. But there is nothing slim about the challenge Shakespeare’s epic portrayal of the doomed love of the Bennifer of the ancient world presents. With 37 changes of scene and more than 30 characters, the play is one of the Bard’s longest and became, in the 19th century, an occasion for as much pageantry as poetry. So director Jason Slavick’s small-scale conception of the work, played out on a Persian carpet in an intimate theater in the round, augmented by Asian-theater techniques and the contributions of a single cellist, is refreshing. Cleopatra eulogizes the dead Antony: "His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm/Crested the world." Slavick creates a world contained enough that that might not be hyperbole. But Antony and Cleopatra, for all the pull of its superstar lovers and ravishingly quotable encomiums, is difficult. According to Boston Theatre Works, the play has not been professionally produced in these parts for over 20 years, and it’s easy to understand why. To begin with, there’s the question: who plays the flawed paragons of the title, the Herculean Roman and the Egyptian Queen? In the 1950s, they were assayed by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh — Heathcliff and Scarlet O’Hara, that sounds about right. (A more recent Royal National Theatre revival starred Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman.) Slavick fields two good actors, though neither boasts economy-size charisma, in Robert Pemberton, his Antony a debauched general sporting an earring and five-o’clock shadow, and Anne Gottlieb, who brings to Shakespeare’s "lass unparalleled" fire, humor, and lovely bones. But the strongest performance in the uneven production is by James Barton, whose ironic Enobarbus proves, upon deserting Antony and dying in a near-backbend of remorse, touching. Slavick doesn’t find a way to circumnavigate the problems of the work, which in Shakespeare’s acts three and four (with 13 and 15 scenes, respectively) hops around like Pericles channel-surfing the Mediterranean. It’s here that the production loses direction — though the effective use of Peter Walden’s cello, now bowed, now plucked, now plain thwacked, adds continuity. And the multiple casting of the 13 actors, who range in skill, can get confusing. The main characters, fortunately, make an impression; would that there were more spark between them. For what renders Antony and Cleopatra indelible is the domestic drama — the mutual, gorgeously articulated sexual thrall and conflict of the title pair — that wags, even as it determines, the political drama of broken alliances, betrayals actual and perceived, and battles ingeniously represented here by choreographed showdowns between armadas of colored cloth. Antony and Cleopatra, it has been argued, are not truly tragic since they do not learn from their ill-fated affair but repeatedly return to glorifying both themselves and their mutual besottedness. Joyce Carol Oates opines that Antony and Cleopatra is "the most godless of Shakespeare’s plays, because it is about human beings for whom anything less than self-divinity will be failure." These are people who believe their own press releases. And though we are more likely than either the Romans or Shakespeare’s audience to be seduced by the People magazine-worthy glamour of the pair, Pemberton and Gottlieb pay service to both the grandeur in their self-mythification and its tawdriness. Pemberton’s Antony first appears in cargo pedal-pushers, looking like a guy who’s been hanging around the Egyptian equivalent of Gilligan’s Island too long. He cleans himself up for the trip home to Rome, exuding a steely charm that’s still a little decadent. Though the actor lacks the exceptional pipes, there are shades of Richard Burton in his brawny Antony. But once he starts to rage, what Octavius Caesar calls "the old ruffian" takes over, and his death is as unglamorous as Shakespeare wrote it (though Pemberton might tone down the sarcasm upon learning, while struggling to shuffle off this mortal coil, that the report of Cleopatra’s death was exaggerated). Gottlieb’s Cleopatra is funnier than haute, milking her lines for double entendre and going after the terrified servant who reports Antony’s marriage of political convenience with a stiletto. But she’s never vulgar, and she makes a resplendent end, flashing her bangles and wielding a puppet asp of purple satin.
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