Westward, ho! Old and new mix it up it the Berkshires BY STEVE VINEBERG
	Heartbreak House By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Anders Cato. At the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, through July 24. A Midsummer Night’s Dream By William Shakespeare. Directed by Nicholas Martin. On the Main Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival through July 25. 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Conceived by Rebecca Feldman. Book by Rachel Sheinkin. Songs by William Finn. Directed by Michael Unger and Rebecca Feldman. At Barrington Stage Company, Sheffield, through August 1. Rodney’s Wife Written and directed by Richard Nelson. On the Nikos Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (closed).

The mix of classic and brand-new plays in the Berkshires is particularly flavorful this summer. At the moment, you can see an updated Midsummer Night’s Dream in Williamstown and a traditional staging of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge; meanwhile, Sheffield’s Barrington Stage Company, in its intimate Stage II space, is presenting the world premiere of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, with songs by William Finn (Falsettos, A New Brain). And if you were lucky enough to get a seat during its sold-out two-week run, you caught another world premiere on Williamstown’s smaller Nikos Stage — Rodney’s Wife, which was written and directed by the prolific Richard Nelson, who’s best known for his Tony-winning musical James Joyce’s The Dead.

Shaw called Heartbreak House "a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes," and that multi-threaded phrase suggests the complexity of its tone — not just wit and irony (Shaw’s trademark combo) but melancholy, which he borrowed from Chekhov (hence the "Russian manner"). Shaw, who wrote the play just after the Great War and set it on the eve of an apocalypse, seems touched by and rueful about the follies of his characters, an odd collection of Brits gathered in a country house that looks like a ship. The characters have names that prepare us for allegory — the house belongs to the octogenarian Captain Shotover, whose daughters are Hesione Hushabye and Ariadne Utterwood. Yet they resist the easy interpretation that allegory usually implies. As Mary McCarthy wrote of the play, "None of the characters can keep his shape; none is consistent. . . . [Their] contradictory traits . . . succeed but do not permanently displace one another. They ebb and flow through the characters, and it is no accident, I think, that Heartbreak House is a ship, its owner and philosopher a captain, and the play’s most poetic imagery predominantly marine." In Heartbreak House, all opposites are possible, all absurdities are real, all emotions are played out; it is, of course, humanity.

The play is a masterwork, but deadly difficult to pull off, so Anders Cato’s delightful production is a real accomplishment. He underscores the comedy — the Feydeau-like farce elements (the mismatched lovers) and the Lewis Carroll–like nonsense elements (the transformations); I’ve never heard so much laughter from an audience at Heartbreak House. There’s a trade-off: while Cato is fanning the humor, much of the play’s sadness slips quietly out the back way. But he doesn’t lose all of the poetry. It’s in the staging, especially in the second half, where Shotover (the marvelous John Horton) and his family and guests sit in the moonlit garden and debate. (The sumptuous set is by Jeff Cowie; Ann G. Wrightson has lit it.) Has any playwright made intellectual banter more dramatic than Shaw? In this streamlined version of the text (following the precedent of the brilliant 1985 TV production, the BTF has excised a minor character who breaks into Heartbreak House in the last act), Cato and his expert ensemble make the characters’ endless parrying over romanticism and materialism, Victorian manners and the demands of the modern age, as delectable as the sweet table at a banquet.

Among the cast, only Marin Hinkle, looking weirdly like Anjelica Huston as the bohemian Hesione, gives the impression of acting at the part rather than acting it; it’s a fussy, unconvincing performance. The others, from Sarah Drew as the unexpectedly pragmatic ingénue, Ellie, to Elizabeth Ingram as the dry, imperturbable housekeeper, Nurse Guinness, are terrific, as are the creations Olivera Gajic has swathed them in. David Schramm (of TV’s Wings) is spectacularly funny as Boss Mangan, the industrial genius who melts to putty in Hesione’s hands; at the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum are a couple of high-comic mavens, the virtuosic Sarah Knowlton as Ariadne, the conventional aristocrat, and Garret Dillahunt as the wing-clipped lothario Hector Hushabye, who woos Ellie under an assumed name but remains tied to his patient wife. Having seen Dillahunt only in modern-day hunky roles, where he never seems completely at ease, I was struck by the comic delicacy he applies to the role of Hector. Allyn Burrows is very funny as Ariadne’s hangdog brother-in-law, Randall, and Patrick Husted seems particularly inspired as Ellie’s father, Mazzini Dunn, an aging idealist with a face as animated as a schoolboy’s, eternally tuned in to the unceasing marvels of human existence.

Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is lively too, but I’m afraid the concept eluded me. It has something to do with the celebration of Williamstown’s 50th anniversary and the construction of the company’s new theater, its outline clearly visible behind the scaffolding as you cross the lawn to trusty old Adams Memorial. So the Athens scenes take place before a drop that replicates the façade of the old theater, and Puck (Christopher Fitzgerald) makes his entrance on a wrecking ball. What this has to do with Shakespeare’s comedy isn’t clear. Neither is the idea behind the costumes Michael Krass has designed for the fairies, who look like party hounds at a gay disco led by a buff, skin-headed Oberon (John Bedford Lloyd) and a Titania (Kate Burton) in platinum tresses. The Athenian wood is a deserted playground. This is a disappointingly — and obviously deliberately — prosaic Dream, though some images — like Titania, blanketed in a feather boa, asleep on the perimeter of a half-moon — are startling.

The company includes a number of Williamstown veterans (Lloyd, Burton, Jennifer Van Dyck as Hippolyta, Jonathan Fried as Egeus, Lee Wilkof as Peter Quince) who read their lines with forthright conviction but don’t appear to have been given much to play. That impish live wire Fitzgerald, his hair studded with something shiny, does one ingenious physical and vocal trick after another, but his performance never jells. It’s actually the lovers who come off best. Their squabbles are so familiar (and so attenuated) that in most productions they seem requisite filler, but Martin plays them very fast, and his staging is enormously clever and fresh. The four actors — Jessica Stone and Dashiell Eaves as Hermia and Lysander, Kathryn Hahn and Jon Patrick Walker as Helena and Demetrius — bring considerable youthful verve to their roles. Stone, a kewpie doll with a peanut-shell voice, is utterly charming. The other stand-outs in the enormous cast are Jeremy Shamos’s boyish Bottom and Andrea Martin in a cameo as Robin Starveling the tailor, the mechanical who plays the moon in the "Pyramus and Thisbe" playlet. Almost unrecognizable in drag, beneath a bushy moustache and a beret (the program lists her as A. Martin), she delivers her lines in a Russian-Jewish accent. It’s a sublime little revue-sketch performance.

I couldn’t whip up much enthusiasm for 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Conceived by Rebecca Feldman and written by Rachel Sheinkin, the script retraces the territory covered by last year’s popular documentary Spellbound, though the setting and stakes are more modest and the tone is parodic — Saturday Night Live–ish. All the children are caricatures of various sorts of nerds. But coming after Spellbound, which with much less apparent effort got way underneath the stereotype of the spelling champ, Spelling Bee seems woefully lacking in ambition. It has two gimmicks: the actors impersonate these sixth-graders as if they were much younger (prodigies trapped in six- or seven-year-old bodies, like the characters in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown), and members of the audience are brought up on stage to participate in the competition. I can’t explain the first of these brainstorms. The second must have struck Feldman, Sheinkin, and Michael Unger (who directs with Feldman) as an uproarious crowd pleaser, but salting four awkward-looking, clearly adult non-professionals among the cast makes very little sense. The real actors work tirelessly, and it’s a very talented group — especially Jesse Tyler Ferguson as the tow-headed Leaf Coneybear, who wears a bandanna like a superhero’s cape and gives new meaning to the phrase "deer in the headlights," and Dan Fogler as the professorial William Barfee, a mess of allergies and assorted other corporeal distresses. Fogler is almost ridiculously inventive; he may be a comic genius. And Celia Keenan-Bolger, as the contest’s undisputed underdog, has a purity that shames the sentimental clichés the play invokes to make the audience sympathize with her plight.

But despite all the performers’ efforts, and even though the script has some funny lines (Jay Reiss, as the Reader, has the best ones, and he intones them with just the right blend of officiousness and befuddlement), everything goes to hell every five minutes or so when one of William Finn’s tuneless songs starts up, with its tortured rhymes and tortuous phrasing. (What’s Rosalind’s line in As You Like It, in protest against Orlando’s untutored love verses — "more feet than the verses would bear"?) In their music and lyrics, the songs are shapeless; you wonder how in hell the actors managed to learn them.

Keep your eyes open for Rodney’s Wife in New York next season; it’s worth the trip. Set in a villa outside Rome in 1962, Richard Nelson’s chamber play catches a family at a moment of unmistakable but mysterious tension. Rodney (David Strathairn), a movie star at a career low, lands a role in a major Hollywood picture, courtesy of his manager (John Rothman), but to take it, he’d have to run out on the Italian Western he’s currently shooting. He’d also have to leave his daughter Lee (Susan May Pratt) in Rome with the fiancé (Tom Sadoski) she’s just brought round to introduce to her stepmother, Fay (Haviland Morris). There’s a crisis, but until the second-half revelations, we don’t know precisely what has engendered it — the movie offer, the engagement, Rodney’s drinking, the omnipresence of his widowed sister Eva (Maryann Plunkett), or all four.

The drama is in the complexity of the characters’ motives and in their horribly fraught tentativeness; everyone seems to be pitched on the edge of some private abyss. You can see why Nelson directs his own plays, especially when, as with this one and Goodnight Children Everywhere, their language is fragmented and suggestive: the actors have to mine them for hidden meanings, and you can understand why Nelson would want to supervise the excavation. But his modus operandi as a dramatic writer is diametrically opposite to that of a flamboyantly theatrical (and much more obvious) one like David Mamet. Nelson uses the jagged shards of lines not to reveal the old Pinter saws about sex and power but rather to reflect the broken worlds of Chekhov. He’s a lyrical minimalist.

He’s also a master actor’s director, and all six of the performers rise to the frightening challenges of the text. (This is one of those rare plays that make you wish you could have been around during the rehearsal process.) There isn’t a false or facile actor in the group, and Strathairn, Morris, and Plunkett are truly remarkable. Plunkett, as the obsessively maternal sister whose romanticizing of her late husband amounts to a desperate illusion, gives the most accomplished performance; there are times when she articulates three layers of emotion at the same time. Strathairn and Morris, with the toughest roles, are less polished — and even more amazing. It took me a while to get used to Morris’s methods for conveying Fay’s raw, semi-repressed feelings — the sudden jerks of the hands, the physical retreating, the frozen smiles that hint at concessions that are only superficial, resignation at war with rebellion. You sense the actress knows she’s playing a completely original character, and she doesn’t want to betray the role by making any easy choices. You sense, too, that she’s still working through the character, and the same can be said for Strathairn, a wonderful, underappreciated actor who has a knack for making the cerebral process dramatic. In the course of the play, Rodney learns that he’s been as blissfully unaware of the underpinnings of his family’s interactions as Eva has been unprepared to acknowledge her husband’s chronic infidelities, and it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out how most actors would play the moment when events conspire to open his eyes. But Strathairn, too, steers away from the predictable.

Rodney’s Wife is a very unsettling piece of theater, and even though Nelson sews up the story — well, he almost does (I retained some doubts about the details of the title character’s fate) — he doesn’t want us to be able to resolve the characters in our minds. It’s to his credit, and to the actors’ credit, that we couldn’t possibly.