The year in theater

Whole lotta Shakespeare going on

by Bill Rodriguez

It was an original theater year around here. There wasn't much in the way of knockout, must-see productions off-Trinity, but there were more premieres of new plays than ever before. And it's also been a year heavy on the Shakespeare, as though Trinity's Project Discovery and Bob Colonna's late great Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre had an extra, belated effect on local audiences.

It was a solid year for Trinity Repertory Company as Oskar Eustis entered his fourth season as artistic director with the books finally in the black. The chipper financial mood might very well continue, now that there are such practical practices in place as double casting the perennial money-maker A Christmas Carol. As a result, in the first two weeks of the production, as many tickets were sold as in the entire run three years before. (Yet it was this season's Having Our Say that broke all-time Trinity sales records. More story than theater, Emily Mann's biographical adaptation was about the black centenarian Delaney sisters.)

The world premiere of Anthony Clarvoe's immigration tale, Ambition Facing West, was the high point of Trinity's New Plays Festival debut. The festivity was limited to only two full-fledged offerings, however. And the other -- Paula Vogel's comical The Minneola Twins -- had only its Rhode Island debut, not the world premiere that was billed. Nevertheless, Eustis established firm links with the fertile Brown University playwriting program, as no prior head of Trinity had, and an array of embryonic plays was also produced from that creative cornucopia. Yet for me the breathtaking heart of the new plays effort was a simple staged reading of Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, magically given life by Fred Sullivan and Ellen McLaughlin. It was my purest theater enthrallment of the year, as it demonstrated that production values merely enhance art rather than generating it.

Trinity's A Midsummer Night's Dream was both sweetly (rose petals drifting down) and contentiously (Oberon and Tatania battling like cartoon action heroes) romantic. But the wildest variation on the Bard's theme, on Washington Street or anywhere else in recent memory, was Brian Kulick's stunning Romeo and Juliet. You loved it or hated it; and if the latter, you took pains to not spray spittle as you explained why. One director said to me, after a polite pause, that he couldn't find Shakespeare in it. Well, admittedly you had to be familiar with the play to assemble the story. Performed sloshing through water, as though on the bank of the River Styx, the star-crossed lovers began and "ended" their story in Purgatory, in an endless cycle of loss and redemption. A brilliant melding of theme and staging.

The most remarkable Shakespeare elsewhere was Hamlet, starting off the year with a wow at Alias Stage. The prolix Bard's bloody broadsword of a text was pared down to precise, stiletto sharpness by Trinity's Fred Sullivan, who directed with equal precision. But the soul of the production was Anthony Estrella as the dour Dane; staunch, electric with angst, entirely convincing. The success of the attempt has given them the audacity to promise King Lear for February, with Sam Babbitt in the title role.

Another satisfying performance was URI/Theater's Macbeth. Under Judith Swift's canny direction, the feral ambition spilled off the stage as the power-suited witches wrecked malevolent havoc via cell phones. The most impressive off-Trinity stage design all year was created here by illustrator David Macaulay, and complemented by Darleen Viloria's carefully shadowed lighting design it was worth visiting as a sculpture in itself. Twelfth Night at Westerly's Wilcox Park, directed by Colonial Theatre's Harland Meltzer, was intermittently amusing if slack-paced. But the funniest Shakespeare was the Pan-Twilight Circus annual summer offering, Prospero's Magic Island, or A Tempest in a Big Top. It was probably the only adaptation ever in which one of the comic relief players, Trinculo the butler, was the high point, in more than one sense. (Balancing-actor Jens Larson did a hand-stand atop a tower of chairs and wooden blocks, back arched and audience agog.)

Fans of musicals had a few good memories. Of course, the long-awaited Miss Saigon finally came to the Providence Performing Arts Center, to deserved acclaim. The stage had been enlarged for the show and for additional first-city touring shows, and we can be glad of it if the caliber of productions remains this high. On the home-bred front, Theatre-by-the-Sea down in Matunuck put on an Oklahoma! that deserved its immodest punctuation mark, with heel-clicking cowboy choreography by John Dietrich and a perfectly villainous Jud, the dark heart of the story, in Brent Black. A similar combination powered URI/ Theater's recent La Cage aux Folles, ring-mastered by Judith Swift, with brisk choreography by Paula McGlasson and the spot-on performance of Richard Blue as the fey Albin. Add to that the glitziest costume design all year, as Thom J. Peterson's profusions of feathers and sequins kept coming and coming.

In a category all its own was The Birthday Party, in a superb production at Alias Stage, directed by Fred Sullivan. Grimly funny, Harold Pinter's nose-thumbing at nameless dread had Nigel Gore and Brien Lang doing a shuffling Blues Brothers bit as the menacing strangers and Robert Grady all but howling as their victim. It was an actorly version of "Dueling Banjos," in three-part harmony. Alice Tuan's Some Asians was a stand-out in the Fifth Annual Women's Playwriting Festival at Perishable Theatre, packed with surreal images and observations about the Western "fornicasian," as she put it, of Hong Kong.

But the most impressive new play at Perishable was Aishah Rahman's Only in America, a dynamic psycho-sexual exploration energized by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley as a Clarence Thomas-esque lust-head and Nehassaiu deGannes as the woman whose language turns from nonsense syllables to empowerment poetry. The end of the year also gave us two more premieres. Jeanine Kane's simple but ambitious Molly Bloom was effectively adapted by her at Alias from the closing soliloquy in Ulysses. And, perhaps over-ambitiously, at NewGate Theatre there was St. Andrew's Eve, James D'Entremont's staging of a Gothic novel. Of the very lengthy latter, convincing rococo dialogue reminded audiences that the process itself can be the payoff in theater. Which is just fine. Even the less successful local new plays unmentioned here can bring a raw vitality to storytelling that no amount of computer-generated special effects will ever be able to supply, in this or any future year.