Presence of malice

Michael Baron helms Trinity's Scandal

by Bill Rodriguez

Michael Baron

Sitting there in his black polo shirt and pants, he looks like one of those Bunraku puppeteers, dressed to fade into the background. But appearances can be deceptive. For a recent graduate of the theater's conservatory, Michael Baron sure seems comfortable giving marching orders to the assembled Trinity Rep veterans.

At a recent rehearsal, the 29-year-old director is pleased and amused with what has just been rehearsed, but he has some suggestions. This scene in The School for Scandal has the main gossips of the play convening to dish up some misinformation. Trouble is, Baron says from his folding chair, the three actors besides Mrs. Candour, Barbara Meek, should "be relishing it" rather than intently exchanging their wild exaggerations, as they have been doing.

"It's like" -- and the director grins and raises his eyebrows in mock glee -- "can you believe it?!"

The five actors run through it again, and this time glints of malice fairly spark from eyes. As Lady Sneerwell, Phyllis Kay's previously cautious delight is now unabashed.

When they are done, Baron nods and says what everyone knows. "It was much juicier, on the whole."

Eighteenth-century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan didn't hold back in this 1777 satirical comedy of ill-manners. When fictitious gossip besmirched her own reputation many years before, Mrs. Sneerwell was not ennobled -- as the pious sentiments of earlier plays of Sheridan's time would have it. When Scandal was first staged, the sunny French Enlightenment view of human nature was the conventional wisdom, even though the vengeful barbarities of the French Revolution were just a decade away. The observant, if cynical, Sheridan has last-act exposure rather than changes of heart save the day.

Lady S. has her eyes on Charles Surface (Mauro Hantman), who has a reputation as a ne'er-do-well but actually is honorable, in contrast with brother Joseph Surface (Stephan Wolfert), a hypocrite regarded as a sincere and virtuous gentleman. Charles is interested in Maria (Angela Brazil), ward of Sir Peter Teazle (Timothy Crowe), but so is Joseph. The central plot involves Lady Sneerwell and Joseph conspiring to ruin what little regard the carefree Charles has so far managed to keep in the eyes of Sir Peter. The main sub-plot involves Lady Teazle (Rachael Warren), the 50ish Sir Peter's new young wife and a potential new recruit to the shallow society that she wants to accept her.

During a rehearsal break, Baron sits at a café table in the upstairs lobby and discusses what he has gotten himself into. He was nervous at first, he says, directing professionals he'd long admired, even though he'd gotten to know them at the conservatory, where he graduated last year. But after all, Trinity is known for the kind of collaborative, ensemble work that Baron says is his own natural style, so all he had to do was "set up a framework and let them play within it."

The hardest challenge has been to clarify the six intertwining conflicts for the audience.

"It's slightly confusing. There are 16 or 17 characters, three love plots . . . and disguises," he says. "Sheridan's a great playwright, and it's all laid out fairly clearly. Our American attention span is so much shorter, though, that we're not really as patient to sit and listen to that much set-up."

So Baron has taken pains to entertain us through all the early explanations of who is who and who wants to do what to whom. He is having characters appear in the background when their names are mentioned, so we're more likely to remember who they are. Although the costume and set place the story in modern times, Rose Weaver will figure-snap to Cole Porter songs as Richard Cumming accompanies on piano.

Oh, that set. In the upstairs theater, it will sprawl wider and look more opulent than usual in recent Trinity years. All the back-biting and emphasis on appearances is placed in a Donald Trumpish milieu of the rich and famous. Polished brass, glass brick walls, an Architectural Digest center-supported stairway. And ooh those costumes. Nine RISD apparel design students have worked with costume designer Marilyn Salvatore to put together some 60 character-defining costumes for these wicked and wealthy people, some of whom will have five or six changes. The opportunity to lampoon haute couture fashion must have been delicious.

Both the production and the set design by '98 RISD grad Lee Savage trace back to the first production of The School for Scandal that Baron did last fall as his graduate thesis production, staged at Perishable Theatre. The two worked together two years ago in an interdisciplinary class led by Eustis, with RISD, Brown and conservatory students. Trinity artistic director Eustis liked the Perishable production and asked Baron to come up with a cast list of company actors he'd like to see if Trinity ever produced the play. Eager to demonstrate their enthusiasm, Baron and Savage put together a full-blown presentation, complete with a model for an ambitious set.

Baron feels that our age, when every waiting room has a few People magazines scattered about and even the New York Times has a gossipy style section, can certainly relate to what Sheridan was satirizing.

"I think it's a play for every age," he says. "Ever since there has been a city society, where information can be spread quickly, where rich people and poor people are in contact with each other all the time and can know about each other, then it's totally applicable."

Who does Baron get the biggest kick out of among these characters?

"Lady Teazle is by far my favorite. She's, I would say, most like me in that she's this girl from the country," he says. "I'm not from the country but I'm from Florida, Orlando, which to the Northeast might as well be the country."

After he was graduated from Wake Forest College, in North Carolina, he spent four years in Chicago, where he interned at the Goodman Theater and formed a small theater company. The big city could have turned his head even more than it did, Baron says.

"You can literally go out every single night and party every single night -- which she does. You can get wrapped up in a group of people," he goes on, speaking about the naïve Lady Teazle as well as his experiences, "who are so vicious that if you're not with them you feel that your life is in danger or your character or your reputation. So you're more likely to hang out with them."

Well, however much he felt like a country mouse on rat turf in the Windy City, Providence and New England have given him safe haven professionally as well as personally. In addition to being associate director on several Trinity productions, he has directed several plays at Perishable as well as a recent Brown Summer Theatre production, The Sum of Us.

As much as Baron has aspired to be where he is now, he's grown confident enough in his talent and in the ensemble process at Trinity to relax.

"I built this experience up my whole life: this is a regional theater show, and it's all-Equity," he begins. "But really it's just like all the other rehearsals I've had, only the cast is bigger, there are more people sitting at the table, and there's more money involved. But it's the same creation process. Which is nice."

The School for Scandal runs September 1 through October 8.