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| by Jeff Smith San Diego Reader March 16, 2000 |
The King Stag, by
Carlo Gozzi, adapted by Shelley Berc and Andrei Belgrader Directed with inventive flair by Andrei Belgrader, Stag was that rare production that inspires instant confidence: it was funny, the actors obviously enjoyed their work, and at no time could you doubt that a moment, a scene, or the evening would ever lose its infectious assurance. I caught the second performance of Stag. Even one of the notoriously dull nights in theater -- the night after opening (and the opening-night party) -- couldn't stifle its spirit. Carlo Gozzi (17201806) reinvented the Commedia dell'Arte all' Improvviso. Aided by Antonio Sacchi's legendary troupe, the Venetian aristocrat wrote fiabe, fairy-tale romances with stock characters: the buffon, the vain soldier, the clever rogue, and, Gozzi's special contribution to the pantheon, Tartaglia, the dishonest stammerer. Julie Taymor directed Gozzi's Green Bird for the La Jolla Playhouse in 1996. Like Bird, The King Stag (1762) combines unfettered theatricality with an abhorrence of the earthly, the mundane, the real (Gozzi was an aesthetic and political reactionary light years from the temper of his times). Before the curtain's fully risen, you must accept a different order of being: a world of magic spells, curses, the ability to body-snatch (and become that person, or animal). Your first sight is a human-sized green parrot, in a gilded cage, that can talk, not because it's been trained, but because it was once the magician Durandarte. True to the commedia tradition, the actors wore expressive masks. Their eyes located them on a sliding moral scale. The good, trusting types, like the King, had wide orbs for eyes. At the other extreme, the bumbling conniver, Tartaglia, had black brows the size of crow wings and Jack Palancelike slits for eyes, as if taking aim at unsuspecting targets. King Stag was an ensemble show, the cast fully attuned to Gozzi's commedia-improv style, though a couple of performances stood out. Jennifer Smith-De Castroverde's Smeraldina, one of the King's suitors, was a hoot. There was no way she'd win the King. Her slightly wooden movements, like a human puppet, betrayed her status, and the lie-detecting statue laughed loudest at her claims. And yet she had such hope! The cross between her comic antics and the degree of her delusion made Smeraldina a surprisingly rounded, both funny and touching, "type" character. When people remember Erik Johnson's performance as the smarmy Tartaglia, most likely it'll be his fall. Tartaglia climbs at least five rungs of a ladder, inside the King's 12-foot robe. He falls to the floor, sideways, and bounces up a good foot or two, and bounces again, and again. Flashy stuff, unforgettable. But so was everything else Johnson did: Tartaglia's famous stutter (you could never predict when Johnson'd do it, yet each skipped beat fit just right); his archness (you sometimes get the sense, in plays like this, that villains are the only ones in touch with their true feelings); his rapport with, and spontaneous antipathy for, the audience. Johnson's assured performance included the possibility that even evil can sometimes be inept. * * * I want to plug a book. Lives of William Shakespeare come in two kinds: scholarly factual; or, someone named Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616 -- the evidence is undeniable -- but never wrote the plays. In either case, a gap spans between the works and their maker. Who was he? Did he swoop down from Parnassus, aureate pen in hand, or did he drag his bum leg through London grime when writer's cramp made work inbearable? Robert Nye's novel The Late Mr. Shakespeare (ISBN 1-55970-469-1) blusters fearlessly into the gap. Convinced that "things do more in the mind of a poet than they do in the world as a whole," Nye's narrator distinguishes between town history and country history. Town history's just the facts. It offers "believable and reliable" proofs, but somehow "it can't see the forest of Arden for the trees." The narrator, a rickety old comedian who once played Shakespeare's famous women, prefers country history, where "facts obscure the truth." Country history's told for "years, passing from mouth to mouth. And when it is written down, it loses something. Publishing stops it." Later, he sums up his approach. Fiction, he says, is the best biography. The Late Mr. Shakespeare is a bawdy, Rabelaisian frolic with a subtle interlacing of town-history facts. It's not who the Bard was but what it felt like to be Shakespeare. Did he, for a moment, hold all the future in memory? Was his quipster father, "merry-cheek'd" John, the drunken model for Falstaff? Did he fail at tennis, on the Earl of Southampton's walled and roofed private court, to invent new epithets -- "Detested kite! Leprosy o'ertake! You chaos"? How could Shakespeare know so much about the law and about darnel, rank fumitory, hateful docks, rough thistles, burrs. "Weeds a man learns from intimate acquaintance with wild places," says the narrator, "from walking abroad in the sun and the wind and the rain, from personal experience of ploughing land, from lying in a ditch after a hard night's drinking." Since the narrator likes to smell the flowers, the book is both a read and a wayward amble. Flowers bloom, though. Two examples: Shakespeare "was a man who wanted to taste the sweetness and the bitterness of everything. He would eat each day to the core, and the dark night too." The second example
refers as much to acting as to poetry: "Meaning what you said was sometimes not quite
enough in poetry. You had to sound as though you meant it, which was harder. You had to
get words and meaning to make the one tune." |
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