The Third Wheel

Refreshingly boring

Michael Feingold at the Voice, more than any living critic, has the ability to size up a production and show how it reflects on the state of theater as a whole. Unlike John Simon, who usually simply spews fire (often hilariously) on whatever he dislikes and moves on, Feingold can detect a hopeful trend in a dull evening. He observes the following in a Henry IV at BAM’s Next Wave Festival that mostly bored him: bq. The good part of Maxwell’s approach is that he has thrown away all the interpretative clutter. Aside from simple painted drops to indicate changes of place, his Henry IV contained nothing but people in crudely appropriate costumes (by Kaye Voyce), mostly standing still and saying the words to each other conversationally. There was no attempt to “interpret,” and only occasional attempts even to inflect or color the speeches. The physical staging was minimal: no blocking, virtually no comic business, and precious few props except swords. Most of the cast spoke clearly, if uninterestingly; you could receive the play without any intrusive actorial or directorial shenanigans, fancy lighting, or sound effects. The show evoked the innocence, and the ineptitude, of middle-school Shakespeare. If it failed to bring the play to life, it at least offered a chance to see what Shakespeare could do alone, unencumbered by artifice or showy interference. Feingold has lately made a mission out of his fatigue with the referential, Pop Art cleverness and arm-twisting contemporization that load down the produced Shakespeare of our time. Relevance, he asserts, is built into a true classic. The directorial cut-and-paste jobs — the machine guns, the Nazi salutes, the S&M gear, the disco music, the white trash impersonations — that purport to bestow relevance instead suggest a certain desperation, a fear that the material at hand is inaccessible and needs a brilliant visionary to fix it. The result very often feels like those dreary PoliSci classes whose professors cannot refer to a single event, person, or phenomenon without telling the pupils exactly what they should think about them. Speaking of trends, this gussying up of classics has been a prominent — perhaps the prominent — approach to directing classics for over 30 years. It’s no longer a trend. It’s fully enshrined. And it desperately needs desecration. Michael Feingold articulates that need better than anyone right now. Here’s hoping he becomes influential.