On the bright side, you can’t accuse “The Tragedy of Coriolanus” — the text, that is — of being irrelevant. Shakespeare’s late drama about the fall of a prideful Roman general, who refuses to bend his neck to civilian politicking, is as bleak a mirror as any society could ever hold up. It may never have been performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and, hey, if I were running a playhouse in a monarchy, I might have balked too. No producer needs that heat.
The tragedy contains the following: everyday townspeople protesting a contemptuous State; a nausea-inducing disdain for the democratic project; senators who fear their constituents; a violent near-uprising on the Capitol(ine) hill; and soldiers attacking citizens in their own streets. And yet Ash K. Tata’s shouty, oddly arrhythmic production for Theater for a New Audience, which opened on Sunday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, appears unwilling to communicate even one of the play’s many echoes with our own tense era.
War in Shakespeare’s tragedy is particularly and pointedly urban; the title itself is a reference to a city. Caius Martius (McKinley Belcher III) gains “Coriolanus” as an honorific for his wartime brutalization of the town Corioles: He pursues the Roman Republic’s retreating enemies, the Volsci, inside its gates, in a moment of berserker courage.
“He is himself alone/To answer all the city,” gasps a soldier, but when a gore-slimed Martius staggers back out — a “thing of blood” — he inspires the army to an ugly victory. It’s only at home that he gets into trouble. Even under the fond eye of his martial mother Volumnia (Roslyn Ruff), he bristles at the ungrateful “rabble” who expect him (a god of war! A son of Mars!) to obey them.
Tata’s staging takes many counterintuitive tacks here, several of them orthogonal to the play itself. For instance, they interpret a text about public performance — Coriolanus specifically refuses the smile-and-wave part of politics — as a play about covert surveillance.
Above the playing space, a Jumbotron-like cube shows infrared-style footage of the stage action, as well as snippets of what looks like a first-person-shooter game. (The projection design is by Lisa Renkel with the creative studio POSSIBLE.) Tata thus implies that Coriolanus and his gun-toting soldiers are under drone observation or, perhaps, that they are digital combatants inside a video console. Certainly some of the actors pitch their performances as if to a pilot far, far away.
Tata’s breakout production was a digitally inventive 2020 “Mad Forest,” by Caryl Churchill, live-streamed from Bard College during the pandemic shutdown, but the quantity of obtrusive video work here may have distracted them from the play’s IRL realization. Several elements are under-rehearsed — lines were dropped the night I saw it — and, physically, the company seemed at sea.
Some comic moments do work, particularly when the good-hearted patrician Menenius (Jason O’Connell) tries to persuade a lot of unreasonable rage-aholics to take a breath, or when the comedy powerhouse Zuzanna Szadkowski, playing one of the people’s tribunes, realizes that she’s talked the masses into exiling a vengeful, willing-to-burn-the-whole-city-down maniac. Her face shrugs. Who, her?
But the tragic moments fall flat, or even into incomprehension, as does the weirdest and most interesting part of “The Tragedy of Coriolanus”: Caius Martius’s intense quasi-romantic relationship with his greatest enemy, the Volsci’s Aufidius (Mickey Sumner). Like, on and off the battlefield, calls to like.
In casting a woman as Aufidius, Tata dumps all the play’s intense homoeroticism — if Roman combat were hockey, this play would be its “Heated Rivalry” — and turns it into something almost conventional. In 1608 (or thereabouts), Shakespeare wrote a surprisingly hot critique of masculinity; its analysis is still apt. Tata expands on the casting choice in the online program, and they certainly have thought about what a woman in the Aufidius role might offer. But they haven’t thought about what it costs the tragedy — namely, those two pulsing things of blood, drawing, inexorably, together.
The Tragedy of Coriolanus Through March 1 at Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
The post Review: ‘The Tragedy of Coriolanus’ Swerves Off Course appeared first on New York Times.
