APT Gives Viewers Another Weekend of Summer
Brian Mani, rehearsing for his many roles in APT’s “Out Of The Woods” Series.
At this time of year, audiences at American Players Theatre are usually ambling up the hill — after a delicious picnic on the grounds — to see the second half of the repertory season debut. Successive opening nights on each August weekend draw us back to the woods for one more evening under the stars, seeing our favorite performers in a new round of plays, both classical and contemporary.
Of course this year everything is different. But the company that has enchanted audiences for decades with their extraordinary summer offerings has one nice surprise in store for us — an extra weekend of summer theater. Far from the starry skies of Spring Green, APT is bringing recordings of live Zoom performances into living rooms across Wisconsin for an extended period — until August 9th. The “Out of the Woods” series of six virtual readings has been an enormous experiment for actors, directors, and audiences, as we all adjust to the advantages and disadvantages of theater presented through, and altered by, technology.
After veiwing the complete series, I’d say there are some genuine up-sides to this format. For instance, there are many fewer mosquitoes in your living room than in the great outdoors. There are no rain delays or long drives, the price is a steal (free!), performances are never sold out, and you always have the best seat in the house. If you miss a line, you can back up and see it again. You can hit pause for your own custom intermissions. It’s also inspiring to see a company of artists who are experts in one medium stretch themselves creatively to test the boundaries of another.
But the drawbacks are obvious. The actors have one chance to get their performances right in the reading format, instead of allowing their portrayals to grow over the course of the season. Audiences don’t have the opportunity to laugh, sigh or cheer in unison. Technical glitches abound, even with the advantage of professional editing. And when actors emote into a web camera from their homes, instead of in the same space as their fellow performers, much of the magic of onstage connection is lost. There is a lot of acting and little reacting. And if audiences ever doubted the power of elegantly executed sets, lighting, costumes and sound design to elevate and complete a production, this series is proof that great theater is about more than the words. Our imaginations fill in the bare minimum — they do not enchant or suprise us with other effects.
That said, in this bizarre period of quarrantine, it has been a genuine delight to look forward to APT’s productions. Unsurprisingly, some are better than others, but they are each fascinating in what they can achieve, while we are forced to socially distance. And here’s a pro-tip that may make the experience more fulfilling, especially if you are viewing a play (or group of short plays) that you are unfamiliar with: watch the end first. No, I don’t mean fast forward to the last scene of the play, but do skip ahead to the talkback. In the absence of programs or directors’ notes, I often wished I had heard the artistic team talk about the play before seeing it. Far from a spoiler, I think the conversations about the production really enhance its viewing.
So, which ones should you start with as you binge watch?
My favorite “Out of the Woods” performances are Shaw’s Arms and the Man, (see below) Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Chekhov’s One-Acts, which I previously reviewed. And Gavin Lawrence’s performance makes Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been. . . more than worthwhile. Here are some thoughts on the rest of the series:
An Improbable Fiction
In response to the spread of COVID-19, lot of people turned to jigsaw puzzles to occupy their minds and distract themselves. When actor, director, and playwright James DeVita returned to Wisconsin this spring, after a production of Murder On the Orient Express at Asolo Theatre had been cut short due to the pandemic, he also began working on a puzzle. Stymied in other writing pursuits, he began piecing together a story that put some of Shakespeare’s most well known characters together in a pub at the time of the plague, when London’s theaters were also shuttered due to contagion. An accomplished classical actor for three decades, DeVita is more familiar with the Bard’s words and worlds than most theater scholars. So it is not surprising that many characters’ speeches did, evidently, fall “trippingly from the tongue” and onto the page. After coralling the mischevious and frequently drunken Falstaff in an ale house (played brilliantly, once again, by Brian Mani) with the barmaid Mistress Quickly (familiar territory for Sarah Day), DeVita effectively waited to see who else would show up. Then he wrote down what happened. In all, he estimates that 80% of the lines in An Improbable Fiction are borrowed directly from Shakespeare, but obviously rearranged to create a slightly different story. The other 20% comes from DeVita’s fertile imagination and research about the plague years in London, gleaned from many historical sources.
As the show progresses, (with the aid of narrator Tim Gittings in the reading), Othello (Gavin Lawrence), Cleopatra (Tracy Michelle Arnold), and Juliet (Melisa Pereyra) all join the party, along with one of theater’s great plot devices, a nameless messenger, played earnestly by Nate Burger. As DeVita acknowledges in the post-show talkback, he not only had the advantage of being intimately familiar with these plays, he also wrote with specific members of the company in mind, many of whom brought these characters to life in previous productions. For loyal APT audiences that is definitely part of this piece’s charm.
The first half struggles a bit to find its voice and tone. Sure Othello wants to fight, the messenger wishes he had more news to share, Cleopatra’s jealousy knows no bounds and Juliet throws a teenage tantrum about how parents just don’t understand, worthy of any coming-of-age movie. But one moment the characters are speaking like actors, wondering about leaving London and going on tour. The next moment they are talking about playwrights like Christopher Marlowe and his characters as contemporaries, sharing the same world. And the next moment, they are wondering about how to change their character arcs, a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the famous Tom Stoppard play, which APT also did recently.
Finally, the Shakespeare mash-up settles in as a valentine to Falstaff. By piecing together scenes from four different plays where the bawdy scamp is featured or discussed, there is a beautiful story told of the fall of the OG jolly good fellow. Broken hearted after being spurned by his onetime playmate Prince Hal — later King Henry V — and isolated by the plague from the company of friends he thrives on, the lusty hedonist “shuffles off this mortal coil.” Even an eleventh hour remedy from Othello cannot keep Falstaff alive during this dark time.
Apart from the robust merry-maker, the most interesting character in the play is the one who is least described in Shakepeare’s pages. Burger’s messenger is the bit player who rises beautifully to the occasion when suddenly given a spotlight. His arc is also the most surprising to the audience, since instead of exiting hurriedly after delivering a key piece of news, he lingers in the pub to really live amongst characters who are all larger than life.
Like last season’s Book of Will, by Lauren Gunderson, An Improbable Fiction borrows heavily from Shakepeare’s greatest hits to tell a story about an unexplored moment in the bard’s history. It’s not quite original and not nearly as interesting or elegant as the real thing, but with the theaters closed by a pandemic, it suffices.
Arms and the Man
George Bernard Shaw is not known for playful, romantic comedies. But he comes close in this one, directed with great affection for the material by APT regular Bill Brown. Like most of Shaw’s work, Arms and the Man reflects on inequality — class differences, sexual politics, and the ludicrous, destructive and power of governments at the expense of their people — particularly in war. Although it was initially panned by critics, the play found favor with appreciative audiences when it debuted in 1894. And if that production was anything like APT’s, it owed a great debt to the character of Captain Bluntschli (a practical and straightforward Nate Burger).
A Swiss mercenary in the Serbian army, Bluntschli calmly disabuses an aristocratic family in the middle of the conflict of any overly romantic ideas about war, the importance of social status, or the necessity for arranged marriages to protect wealth. A thoroughly unlikely hero, Burger’s character hides in the bedroom of the charming, twenty-something daughter Raina (a love-struck Melisa Pereyra) when the fighting gets too intense nearby. His down-to-earth approach to the soldier’s profession and his dismissal of the pageantry of war is refreshing, even if he’s teased by others, called a “chocolate cream soldier,” after he eats sweet treats while waiting for the shooting to abate. He is the calm, clear-headed realist in an otherwise silly comedy of manners. As Raina, Pereyra is also a breath of fresh air, transforming from a sheltered girl into a more independent-minded woman, as the scales of repressive tradition fall from her eyes.
As the family’s spunky maid Louka, Kelsey Brennan also stands out, as she challenges ideas of class and privilege — rejecting her station and the pleasant servant Nicola’s offers of marriage (Tim Gittings). Filled with willful determination, she scratches her way towards a match with the ridiculous and mercurial Sergius (a delightfully buffoonish Marcus Truschinski) as a way of climbing the social ladder. Sarah Day and Jim Ridge teeter perfectly on the edge of farce in their roles as Raina’s old guard parents. They are so cemented to their outdated ideals — that have benefitted their class tremendously — that the events of the play come as a complete shock.
In exploring the medium of Zoom theater, director Brown plays with the “sets” behind each actor in clever ways. As the opening scenes take place in the middle of the night, each actor emotes into their laptops from the darkest rooms of their houses, which is both effective and amusing. For a later conversation that happens in the stately home’s library, the performers each surround themselves with books. In other scenes there are a variety of potted plants in the background of each character. These visual markers do wonders at unifying the scenes, though the actors are physically in different cities.
A brighter, less dense and less polemical Shaw, the play and this particular reading feel like a pleasant escape from heavier matters, which are all around in this odd summer.
Julius Caesar
I was very much looking forward to seeing Julius Caesar in the Hill Theatre this year, since I have never seen it performed live. The classic story of ambition, power, murder and plotting seemed apt for an election year. It was also the first Shakespeare play I studied in high school and it was such a bad experience for my entire tenth grade, I was anxious to finally see it done well.
Unfortunately, of all the “Out of the Woods” pieces, this play loses the most when it’s translated to Zoom. For those who don’t know the character list thoroughly, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who, and who’s on which side in the sea of onscreen video bubbles. Transitions from scene to scene feel labored and crucial crowd scenes sound clumsy. The slow pace overall doesn’t help add urgency to the story of political intrigue, and the sound effects, which are touted in the talkback, don’t actually add much to the video version.
At most, this reading feels like a distant preview of a production we will see in 2021, with actors warming to their roles and exploring the language. So I’m stil looking forward to seeing Tracy Michelle Arnold’s crackling Cassius, luring Jim DeVita’s pensive Brutus to colluding against Caesar. The tension added by casting opposite sex conspirators is interesting and I’m excited to see more. Likewise, Colleen Madden’s Portia is a wild-eyed, worried wife to DeVita, and her instability is a nice foil to his unnatural calm, even as his plans for regicide coalesce. Gavin Lawrence gives a stirring funeral speech as the faithful Mark Antony, but one aches to hear it proclaimed to a full house from the stage, rather than confided to a small screen.
This Julius Caesar is a reminder that live, in-person theater is a singular and beautiful experience. All the more reason to support American Players Theatre in this precarious time and look forward to the warm summer nights that await, in the woods of Spring Green in 2021.