Civil Blood

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 14^th, 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.