Hamlet
Eclectic Theater Company
at Odd Duck Studio
Through Feb 2.
As microbudgeted, not particularly insightful, lead-actor vanity
productions of Shakespeare go, this Hamlet is pretty good. The
acting is acceptable (Mark Wilt as the lovable blowhard Polonius is
lively when he isn’t stumbling over his lines, and Justin Tracy as
Laertes is good with the language if not so much the standing around).
The script, though compressed, isn’t mangled. The concept is harmless,
if facile (according to the program, the play is about “politics” and
the production is about “change”—tell me something Wolf Blitzer
doesn’t know). So why would you bother to see it?
Because, apart from the drab modern costumes and a couple of guns in
the opening scene, director Cara Anderson-Ahrens doesn’t get in the way
of the play. Hamlet is a creepy, paranoid, Jacobean blowout;
the proliferation of ear imagery starts to sound almost obsessive when
the play is trimmed. This isn’t so much a production of Shakespeare’s
most famous tragedy as a delivery system for an awesome massacre.
Paradoxically, this success may owe
something to the throwaway
central performance. Rik Deskin (the artistic director of the company)
plays Hamlet as a sort of Gen X nonpresence, not so much paralyzed as
apathetic. His baby-faced frowns, the way he leans ostentatiously
against walls to signal distress—these affectations make Hamlet’s
misery look like a minor bout of crankiness. He’ll get over it as soon
as he murders an innocent bystander or two. ANNIE WAGNER
The Retreat from Moscow
ArtsWest
Through Jan 27.
The Retreat from Moscow, an unsexy, understated
three-character drama about the breakup of a marriage after 33 years,
was written in 1999 and made its Tony-nominated debut in New York in
2003, starring John Lithgow and directed by former Seattle golden boy
Daniel Sullivan. This current run at ArtsWest is the first time it has
played in Seattle, which is surprising for two reasons. First, The
Retreat from Moscow is an unfrilly low-budget piece with no set
changes, ready-made for struggling nonprofit theaters. Second, this
relatively unknown play is good: I formally apologize for
having complained about the prospect of driving to West Seattle to see
a play about an old couple.
Englishman William Nicholson wrote the play—the same William
Nicholson who wrote Shadowlands and the movies
Gladiator and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Russell
Crowe and Cate Blanchett vehicles that aren’t exactly memorable for
their dialogue. But The Retreat from Moscow is all dialogue, a
rhetorical tapestry that portrays divorce as a necessary but cruel
survival technique perpetrated by one spouse on another—a
frontiersman’s strategy of leaving the weak behind so the strong can
keep moving.
In this production (designed by Pete Rush, Evan Middlesworth, and
Craig Wollam), the emotional violence pops out of its environment, an
elegant, old-world home embraced by trees. The large picture windows
look like light boxes containing saturated landscape photographs.
Everything looks like a late, lazy afternoon, and a play like this
could become gloppy with drama. But director Carol Roscoe keeps the
timing and the transitions swift and no-nonsense. And the
actors—Therese Diekhans, James Cowan, and John Wray—are
strong enough so you can relax. When Wray’s bottled-up old Edward
speaks, you lose track of the theater entirely. JEN GRAVES
Swansong
Seattle Shakespeare Company
Through Jan 23.
Swansong is an experiment in thrift. Seattle Shakespeare
Company is dark and quiet in the early part of the week, so artistic
director Stephanie Shine runs a secondary show (Swansong) on
Sunday through Wednesday, and lets Julius Caesar own the
weekends. Unexpectedly, Swansong, the little brother, is the
better production.
A comedy by Patrick Page about the fraught friendship between
William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Swansong is part buddy
comedy, part literary exegesis. Bill and Ben get drunk, insult each
other in couplets, envy one another’s success, and fight about whether
the world is beautiful or ugly. Ben is the urbane, ponderous, and
contemptuous writer who murdered a man for booing one of his plays.
Bill is the opposite—an unschooled, Dionysian country boy who
woos women and writes without blotting out any of his lines. “Would he
had blotted a thousand!” Jonson growls.
The story is simple, even a little pat—it’s the chemistry
between the three actors you want to see: Tim Gouran is a naive and
happy Shakespeare, Brandon Whitehead is a deliciously snide Jonson, and
Ian Bell balances the triumvirate as John Heminges, the actor and
editor of the First Folio. In a characteristic moment, Jonson harangues
Shakespeare for a line in Julius Caesar that mentions a clock.
“Yes?” his friend asks. “There were no clocks in Caesar’s Rome!” Jonson
roars, Shakespeare looks sheepish, and the actors’ glee is palpable.
BRENDAN KILEY
