The Berkeley Rep's new theater must feel like a candy store to a director, with its powerful pulleys and ropes, computer-driven lighting, and sophisticated sound. Since directors, as a breed, like spectacle, putting one in charge of all that machinery is like putting Willie Brown in the White House. Tony Taccone's Oresteia, at the Rep last spring, was an orgy of swoonily painted skyscapes and soaring Greek temples. Mark Wing-Davey's production of an essentially inert script, 36 Views, refined the art of theater into pop-video cinematography. And now Brian Kulick has loosed a team of high-powered interior decorators on Much Ado About Nothing.
Kevin Berne
Civilized Wit: Francesca Faridany is a bright spot in the otherwise uneven cast.
Details
Written by William Shakespeare
Produced by the Berkeley Repertory Theater
Through Jan. 4
Tickets are $10-54
(510) 647-2949
www.berkeleyrep.org
Berkeley Rep's Roda Theater, 2015 Addison (at Milvia), Berkeley
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The opening scene shows a white slope of erect, geometrically arranged roses, a scrim of scattering birds, a shining brass gramophone, and a gabled mansion levitating in the background against a brilliant blue sky. It's beautiful and strange. It does look like Sicily, sort of, but a modern, dreamy one imagined by Pirandello. Later in the show a grove of white-painted trees drops upside down from the rafters; on my night one of them dropped too fast, hit the stage, and bounced distractingly on its rope for the rest of the scene.
Despite Kulick's unwieldy vision, we can still make out a Shakespeare play performed by pretty good actors. It's not great Shakespeare -- it doesn't match the ambitious design -- but at least there's life under the glare of these sets, which is more than I could say for 36 Views.
Shakespeare set his romantic comedy in a Sicilian town after a war between two half-brothers, Don John and Don Pedro. Kulick moves events to the 20th century, so that Pedro and John come home from opposite sides in World War I. The returning soldiers tramp over the clean, bright set in combat boots and trench fatigues. This contrast puts an interesting spin on the play. For Shakespeare, the soldiers are cruel but spirited gentlemen who had to be tamed by marriage and love. Soldiering is almost beside the point; they could be cruel young students or bricklayers. But Kulick's version stresses the problem of a soldier coming home to civilization after a brutal sojourn on the battlefield, and this interpretation lays an appealing but problematic shadow on the play.
Nathan Darrow, unfortunately, doesn't play the main soldier, Claudio, very well. He's uncomfortable with Elizabethan language, and wears his lines like an awkward suit. Noel True is bland and formal as Hero, his bride. The story of Hero and Claudio has to do with an act of revenge by Don John, the defeated brother: Out of still-simmering anger from the war, John tries to scuttle their marriage by wrecking Hero's reputation. But this main plot has always felt like a device. The funny subplot, between Benedick and Beatrice, is stronger. Benedick and Beatrice are the warring "secondary" characters who make Much Ado so famous. In the search for life in this production you have to move down the hierarchy of characters.
Benedick and Beatrice hate each other. They were lovers, briefly; now they trade barbed quips. Early on, Beatrice says she would rather hear her dog bark at crows than listen to a man declare his love, and that's fine with Benedick, who fancies himself an eternal soldier with no time for soft female distractions. In the end they get married. Their vicious dance forms the heart of the play. Francesca Faridany plays an excellent Beatrice. Last spring she was a bright point in the Oresteia as the wild, prophetic Cassandra; here she's equally good as a dry, sharp, civilized wit -- Cassandra's polar opposite. Sterling Brown also does nice work as Benedick: He brings an unconventional, Chris Rock-style inflection to the role (especially a high-pitched laugh), which he could never pull off if his lines and character weren't under control.
Still, the real energy in this production comes from even lower down the character list: Geoff Hoyle's Constable Dogberry is masterful. Since the play has been set to take place around 1920, Hoyle can wear a tall constable's hat, like a Keystone Kop, and twirl a silly baton. Hoyle tends to get hired for his clown training, and here it serves him well; every syllable is charged with energy and character. Sometimes he overdoes it, of course, but the vividness of Dogberry carries the show.
The rest of the cast is uneven. Elijah Alexander plays a one-note Don John and Andy Murray is a pompous Borachio (drunken assistant to John), but Julian Lopez-Morillas plays a sonorous Leonato (Hero's father) and Charles Shaw Robinson is a smooth Don Pedro. Stacy Ross is also a funny Watchman, abused by Dogberry.
I just wish the whole production were up to the aspirations of Kulick's concept and Mark Wendland's fanciful set. With broad, unsubtle gestures Kulick has tried to shift the emphasis of Much Ado from love to the aftermath of war, and the program notes make a big deal about the timeliness of this reading. But the story about Don John's blackhearted scheme to denounce poor Hero isn't serious enough to carry so much significance. His quaint form of revenge has nothing to say about Afghanistan, or the aftereffects of Vietnam, or any modern battle, really. Since at least 1918, war has been a poisonous butchery, ungentlemanly in a way Shakespeare never imagined.
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