Much
Ado About Nothing
Tygres Heart Shakespeare
Company at the Winningstad Theater,
Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway,
288-8400
7 pm Wednesdays-Thursdays, 8 pm Fridays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays
Closes May 23
$8-$28
If anyone
ever continues chronicling the history of Oregon theater from
where Cecil Matson left off in The Way It Was, one
wonders what the writer will make of the Machiavellian saga
of Tygres Heart. The company's upheavals have become perennial,
and they strike the curious bystander as resembling nothing
less than a Jacobean revenge drama.
Last year, the board's chairwoman, Nancy Kline, gave long-suffered
artistic director Jan Powell the push and named two company
members, Jacque Drew and Doug Miller, as co-artistic directors.
But Drew and Miller in turn fell foul of Kline by insisting
that the company should strive for a level of professionalism.
Finding truth in the maxim that no good deed shall go unpunished,
Drew and Miller were forced out of the company, along with
a number of sympathetic board members. Kline is now casting
around for a more malleable artistic director, one who will
be dedicated to keeping alive Jan Powell's vision--which
focused on entertainment rather than substance and which
Miller and Drew knew to be purblind.
In the middle of the latest intrigue, the company began
to piece together the final production of the season, Much
Ado About Nothing, with Drew and Miller playing Beatrice
and Benedick. It's the perfect swan song for the departees,
who are among Portland's most talented and intelligent actors.
Despite their luminous performances, however, director James
Cox loses control of the play, and the whole veers toward
Powellian inanity.
In The History of Oregon Literature, Alfred Powers
writes of the trapper Ewing Young, who walked west from
Tennessee carrying a pelt kit and a two-volume edition of
Shakespeare--touching proof that the average man is quite
capable of comprehending and delighting in the Bard's words
without needing them reduced to the level of a child's comprehension.
But Cox, usually a fine director, adopts the catchpenny
populism of many Portland directors, which maintains that
the audience is too ignorant of language to know what's
being said onstage, requiring pratfalls and dumb show to
signal meaning. Cox employs so much useless gesturing and
cartoon business that a deaf person could be forgiven for
thinking she was watching a musical comedy in Lake Oswego.
It finally reaches a level of ludicrousness when the excellent
Stephan Henry utters Don Pedro's line "What, a feast, a
feast?" and rubs his stomach like a starved mime.
"Art is convincing only when it springs from conviction,"
Aldous Huxley said, and Cox's recent work has proven that.
His handling of Lee Blessing's Cobb and the stage
version of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel were
both expertly done and sincere. But here, Cox seems to feel
little for the play one way or the other, and he has offered
up a finished assignment rather than a labor of love. The
tone is wrong, perhaps because Cox lacks an appreciation
for the play's importance. In The Death of Tragedy,
George Steiner wrote that with Much Ado About Nothing
"English prose established a firm claim to the comedy
of intellect." In short, it is closer in spirit to Congreve,
Wilde and Sheridan than to the vaudevillian Comedy of
Errors. But in Cox's hands it's all one, and wit degenerates
into romp.
What saves this production is the cast, which is mostly
strong. Kevin Connell's villainous Don John is, next to
Drew and Miller's work, the most memorable performance.
Connell's command of the language is second to none, and
he handles it with such confidence that he never permits
Cox's heavy-handedness to intrude. Dan Crane's Claudio is
also excellent, as is Henry's Don Pedro, though both bear
the brunt of Cox's stage business and are ill-served by
the director's Mexican-melodrama ending to Act I. ("O mischief
strangely thwarting.")
In true Powellian style, the watch scene is milked dry
for laughs. Cox delights in portraying Dogberry as a case
of mental retardation, missing the point entirely. Dogberry
is comical because his lordly, pompous behavior is punctured
by his catachrestic speech. "A little learning," wrote Pope,
"is a dangerous thing," and it's Dogberry's pretensions--and
those of his literary daughter, Mrs. Malaprop--that are
humorous, not the fact that he's supposedly suffering from
a learning disability, which is hardly a laughing matter.
Any production of Much Ado must rise or fall on
the strength of its Benedick and Beatrice; thus is Cox's
inadequate direction happily camouflaged by Drew and Miller's
delightful performances. Drew has charm to burn, and her
performance is assured, whether she's wielding her crop
or her quirt-like tongue. Miller's Benedick, wonderfully
hyperbolic and immodest, is the perfect match for a merry
war. The two drive the piece and create the crown to their
careers at Tygres Heart. Of Kline and Co. and their continuation
of upheaval, think not on them till tomorrow. For Drew and
Miller, strike up, pipers.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 28,
1999
|
