Troilus and Cressida
at the Delacorte Theatre
(L-R: Andrew Burnap, John Glover, and Ismenia Mendes in Troilus and Cressida.)
Explaining
away Shakespearean problem plays is a tough business. It’s tempting to suggest everything the Bard
ever wrote was intentional, that he foresaw trends in theater that had not yet
struck the rest of Elizabethan England, that he is without flaw. The truth is that he was sometimes, if not
lazy, a little messy – and Troilus and
Cressida, from 1602, reflects that messiness. It’s unsure whether it wants to be a history,
a tragedy, or a romance, and that, naturally, excites veteran theater directors
like Daniel Sullivan, who have tired of trying to reinvent the wheel, or, more
immediately, figure out what the hell Hamlet is talking about. Sullivan’s directing a production of Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare in
the Park right now, and it’s shocking how much he succeeds in justifying the
thematic schizophrenia of the text (while also justifying a surprisingly fleet
three-hour running time). But one’s well-served
to read the play before visiting, before closing on August 14th, to
see how far the production, flawlessly acted, directed, and designed, outstrips
the promise of the text itself.
The
atmosphere is thrillingly alive even in its malaise. In a far-off war zone (presumably Middle
Eastern) standing in for the battlefields of Troy, great warriors have been
fighting for seven years over an argument they no longer remember, in a war so
uncertain they can eat dinners and stage cage matches together in all
friendship and go out and slaughter each other the next day. Sullivan’s battle scenes, supremely staged
(if a little loud – Shakespeare would have found it difficult to imagine
submachine guns) are as beautifully chaotic as anything out of Apocalypse Now (for which thanks are
mostly due to his designers, David Zinn, Robert Wierzel, and Mark Menard). It’s a world of fear and continual bloodshed,
surrounding the stillness of men; fitting, for Troilus and Cressida is really a play about love – that most human
of impulses – during war – that least human.
The little, text-bending changes (one involving Corey Stoll’s majestic,
battle-scarred Ulysses nearly made me squeal) are pitch-perfect. It is a production, in light of retrospect,
as good as anything I am ever likely to see in the park in my lifetime. It makes no apologies, only room for its
actors to shine.
It’s rare,
incidentally, to describe a Shakespeare in the Park production as “flawlessly
acted” and mean it. A Delacorte
production, with its colliding and admirable tendencies both to be devoted to
the text and to reinvent it for a new era, doesn’t leave a lot of room for
actorly innovation, and even the strongest performers (Judy Gold in this
summer’s Taming of the Shrew; Sam
Waterston in last summer’s The Tempest)
can’t make the language seem real. It’s
a tough hurdle – one this male ensemble, the strongest this side of 2013’s Twelfth Night on Broadway, surpasses
with ease. (There are two women, Tala
Ashe as Helen and Andromache and Ismenia Mendes – on whom more later – and both
are equally extraordinary.) I’ve never
seen a production where it was so hard to name standouts, perhaps partially
because the intertwining storylines – two little sections from the Iliad blown
up into a not-quite-larger story – give everyone their time upon the
stage. Goddamnit, everyone is great – Stoll as a military contractor who has lost the
will to do anything but win, John Glover as a Pandarus exquisitely rendered from beginning to end, Max Casella as a hysterical Thersites, here a sniping janitor in
the Greek camp, and Louis Cancelmi, an extraordinary Caliban in last year’s Tempest, who here makes a frighteningly
focused Achilles, whose slurred words and lackadaisical movements somehow make
him more frightening.
Of course,
one must be fair even in as talented a group as this and acknowledge that one
person out-acts the entire cast without breaking a sweat. It’s just a bit of a shock he only graduated
from the Yale School of Drama this year.
Andrew Burnap as Troilus is a revelation – real, sympathetic, funny,
human, in every movement, every word.
Troilus, a thinly sketched character at best, here has his story told as
thoroughly as it can be. And in this
production of the play, which for all its sweep reminds us of the love that can
be destroyed by conflict, he would be nothing without his Cressida, and Mendes
stands alone on stage not only because she is mostly the only woman on it
(though this fact makes for some genuinely frightening action in the second
act, brilliantly staged by Sullivan and hammering home the amorality and the
immediate effects of sustained war). She
is fascinatingly modern even while delivering text written four centuries ago
about a conflict which took place eight centuries ago. It is hard to overstate how well this serves
her – whether in Troilus and Cressida’s first scene together, which contains
the modern seeds of romantic comedy in their sweetest form, or in her terrors
as a prisoner of the Greeks in the second act, a bundle of jangling nerves and
a woman destroyed.
Separately,
Burnap and Mendes frame this production; together, they make it. This staging blends large and small, love and
war, pain and ecstasy. So do they. They are its microcosm and its epicenter, a
small, blooming, bleeding heart that reminds us what we could do if we decided
once and for all to wage war no more.
