Against frippery

Near the end of "The Tempest" my favorite characters, Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano are sidetracked from their mission to kill Prospero by a chest of fine clothes. This scene could very well stand as a warning to those attending BAM's Bridge Project production of the play, since its flashy theatrics overshadow the play's most interesting themes of exile and shipwreck. In Mendes' interpretation the magic has the upperhand instead, so Ariel appears with gigantic metal wings spanning half the stage like a creature right out of "Metropolis," fire and smoke overwhelm the theater, and Caliban (ok, this was great) emerges from below stage through a circle of sand. The actors are so busy pacing around that circle in much of the play, kicking up sand and taking far too much delight in showing us how clever the stage set is that their words disappear upstage off into the smoke. I couldn't hear half of the play.

Fortunately, having seen their coproduction of "As You Like It" the play was saved for me by thinking about how the one overlaid the other. Casting the same actors in similar roles in both plays (storytellers Prospero-Jacques; loyal servants Adam-Gonzalo; the usurpers Duke Frederick-Antonio) highlights Shakespeare's systemic structure as a scaffolding for his plays' real brilliance: language. (On that note, check out "Double Falsehood".)

Tragic motes & motley coats

As You Like It is billed as a comedy, and in its sugar-coated marriage finale BAM's Bridge Project adaptation lives up to this. But the play is constantly hinting at the ways that tragedy refuses to go away. The first act ends in the delicate death of Adam--Alvin Epstein who plays the starving elderly servant, slips away so gently in Orlando's arms, that the simplicity of the moment is made the more momentous for its being under-acted.

His death is a morbid counterpart to the boisterous finale. Adam (whose name suggests not only the first man but also the first mortal man) haunts the rest of the play in which characters are so often enjoined to be happy--"Prithee, be cheerful," and "search for cheer." When the singers gorgeously intone "This life is most jolly" the melancholic tune Sam Mendes has chosen for it, suggests the very opposite. When Jacques, who renounces the pleasures of companionship, remarks that he envies foolish Touchstone's "motley coat" of speech, we might recognize that each comedy is rendered happy only through its patches of sadness. The cloud is silver but its lining is dark.