Stephen Thorne and Angela Brazil in The Crucible.

These days it seems it's Miller time on American stages. That's Arthur Miller I'm talking about, the once-celebrated writer of Death of a Salesman, All Our Sons, and other earnest contemplations of American politics, money and immorality. Our new playwrights studiously avoid that kind of thing, of course, so - how to put this - they're not much use in the current political environment.

But Miller's sturdy melodramas (okay, maybe they're tragedies, I certainly don't mind if you call them that!) once again seem startlingly apropos, and are popping up in theatres across the country. Because guess what - the corruption of the Iraq War wasn't all that different from the seamier side of World War II (All My Sons).  And every day the greedy, self-absorbed boomer generation looks more and more like Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman).

And then there's The Crucible (now at Trinity Rep through March 13), Miller's lengthy contemplation of the Salem witch trials.  Once thought a metaphor for the McCarthy "witch hunts," (and specifically, a critique of Elia Kazan's famous naming of names to HUAC), it now resonates with parallels to the mob mentality of the Tea Party and Fox News.

Trinity doesn't press this angle, however (although a few bleached-blonde news anchors breathlessly reporting the latest from Salem might have been fun).  Instead director Brian McEleney (who after Twelfth Night and Absurd Person Singular has begun to look like Trinity's most reliable director, and perhaps its next artistic director) allows us to draw our own parallels with the present day, even if it's very present in Eugene Lee's ingenious set, which fills the Chace Theater with a huge blow-up of Providence City Hall.  Before this suggestive backdrop, on bare wooden platforms, McEleney offers a bare-bones take on Miller's script - which, as you'd expect, highlights both its strengths and weaknesses.


For while The Crucible may have become a high-school classic, it's not quite in the same league as All My Sons or Death of a Salesman.  It's longer and preachier than either of those, and Miller can't help but insinuate a 50's-era sexual soap opera (between John Proctor and Abigail Williams) into proceedings that might have been more gripping if they had simply hewed closely to the frighteningly inexplicable historical record.  To me, the Salem witch trials are terrifying because they're not melodramatic; they depend, instead, on the cold, calculated malice of the childish and the religious - aided and abetted by the machinations of those who saw in their cobbled-together kangaroo courts a way to attack, or even exterminate, their personal enemies.

As long as Miller keeps these facts in his sights, however, The Crucible is gripping - in fact it's certainly the most gripping script I've seen this season, and for the usual reasons - the stakes are high, the characters compelling, the writing clean and clear.  And the Trinity actors manage well across the many roles most of them have to play (the cast is huge).  Still, only perhaps Angela Brazil (as Elizabeth Proctor) is working close to the top of her form.  Stephen Thorne makes a sympathetic, but slightly flat, John Proctor, and newcomer Olivia D'Ambrosio sometimes hyperventilates as Abigail Williams.  Indeed, many in the cast tend to get a bit shouty - Fred Sullivan, Jr., could work more subtlety into his bullying Deputy Governor Danforth, and the usually dependable Rachael Warren I think could make Mary Warren a bit more of a mouse.  Better are Mauro Hantman, as the slowly disillusioned John Hale, and Terrell Donnell Sledge, who gives an eloquent simplicity to Giles Corey, the man who was pressed to death rather than confess.

Still, even if imperfect, this Crucible struck me as a kind of tonic after much of the pseudo-political theatre I've endured recently.  It's certainly stronger than anything on the boards in Boston proper right now, and I urge you to make the trek to Providence to catch it while you can.

It's down the hatch on yet another dreadful Christmas Eve at Trinity Rep.

Alan Ayckbourn has been enjoying a revival of late, although there's still critical debate over where, exactly, he should be placed in the critical pantheon. But Trinity Rep's current production of Absurd Person Singular (perhaps his best play) makes a strong case for a higher rather than lower position. This broad, bright version has been under-sung in the local press, but it's probably the best night out at the theatre the region currently has to offer - it both plays to the crowd in bold, funny strokes, and yet (mostly) honors the piece's melancholic undertow, too.

Ayckbourn made his start in the British sex-comedy tradition, but sex is pretty far from everyone's mind in Absurd Person Singular - status is what these people are after (or what they have to lose). And note that last word in the title - everyone in Absurd is going at it alone, essentially, even though the play takes place over three consecutive years' worth of Christmas parties (in one of Ayckbourn's postmodern extrapolations of what used to pass for dramatic "unity"). In this dyspeptic view of the holiday season, everybody's feigning good cheer so much they don't even notice that every year, somebody's not waving but drowning (usually it's one of the wives stuck in the script's trio of dysfunctional marriages). Indeed, in the play's most notorious scene, one desperate homebody repeatedly attempts to take her own life at her own party, as the celebration carries on cluelessly around her (when she sticks her head in the oven, for instance, everybody assumes she's cleaning it).

That ghoulish congruence of hilarity and heartbreak probably sums up the tone of Absurd - and maybe of all of Ayckbourn - and the Trinity folks pretty much nail it. The production is a little cold (Michael McGarty's slightly surreal set makes that a given), and maybe a little cruel, but never quite heartless, and it holds us through its sense of high-powered ensemble. And director Brian McEleney is quite conscientious about noting Ayckbourn's many clues that large, Chehovian shifts in power are moving behind the scenes of these sad little domestic dust-ups. By the end the play, the bourgeois squirrels (Stephen Berenson and Angela Brazil) have worked their way to the top of the heap, while the bored - and boring - patricians (Timothy Crowe and Anne Scurria) are in utter disarray, and the pretentious bohemians (Phyllis Kay and Fred Sullivan, Jr.) have seen their marriage fall apart, but have somehow pasted it back together again (by, we guess, the wife finally putting her foot down about her husband's "dog").

The performances are all strong, but as is always the case, some are stronger than others.  I felt that if anyone in the cast stepped over the line into caricature, it was Angela Brazil, whose frenzied neatnik screeched in panic a little too often (Brazil would do better to concentrate on the pathos of her attempts to draw some attention from her avidly self-interested husband).  Likewise Phyllis Kay, though generally working in the right dry, world-weary vein as the play's would-be suicide, didn't quite have the devastated, 1000-yard-stare required to send her big scene into orbit.  The men were more consistently on point, though none matched Anne Scurria's turn as the condescending local luminary who is eventually brought low by economic circumstance.  This the best work I've seen from Scurria in some time, and it's certainly award-worthy - she ruled the last act of the play, in fact, as she wandered her kitchen in a housecoat, drunk out of her mind, and desperate to connect some emotional dots - any dots.  Hers was the most singularly absurd person in this sadly hilarious theatrical gallery.

Trinity finds a most congenial spot for Camelot

Yes, Lancelot, this is Camelot!

You have to feel for artistic directors these days - they can't approach a great old chestnut without some sort of radical excuse for doing so.  Don't worry, they tell us, we're not going to just "do" Our Town or You Can't Take It With You - we're going to "do" something with it!  The genders are reversed this time; or it's set on Wall Street; or everybody pees on the flag at the end; or a giant pineapple rolls through!  We're going to rip away the mask of gentility, and leave you shivering in the existential dark, staring your own failed, miserable existence in the face!   And you're going to love it!

Only of course nine times out of ten, you don't love it; the radical update, or reconstruction or what have you, falls terribly flat. You try to stare the meaninglessness of your own existence in the face, but you find yourself thinking about the grocery list instead.  That is when you're not happily daydreaming - as Emily urinates on George in the middle of Our Town - of innocent productions of chestnuts past, which gave you such pleasure, before Bob Brustein explained to you how wrong you were.


But some artistic directors are beginning to realize that you can have your radical frosting and still eat your theatrical cake, too.  Take Trinity Rep's new staging of Camelot, for instance, by artistic director Curt Columbus.  On the surface, it seems like a groovy radical update of this tired old thing that noobody could take seriously anymore - it's set not in some Ed-Sullivan-Show version of Sherwood Forest, but in London, in the Tube, during the blitz.  Gritty enough for you?  None of the ladies are wearing those pointy hats with tissues at the end, either - no, instead they're putting the best face they can on being forced out of house and home by the Nazis (just like in Cabaret!), who seem to be getting closer and closer, as the roof shakes, and plaster falls from a relentless bombardment.  In a word, this is not your father's Camelot!

But guess what - it is.  Within that newfangled frame, the "show within a show" unspools pretty much like that old-fashioned Ed Sullivan version, with witty romantic leads, and an idealized love triangle in which everybody's suffering and it's nobody's fault, and even an unapologetically lush rendering of that gorgeous chunk of melodic rock sugar, "If Ever I Would Leave You."  The whole radical update thing is really just a conceptual Trojan horse; the Camelot you love is hidden inside, and you'll pretty much love it all over again, much as you did before you went to college.  (Just don't tell Bob Brustein.)

And to be honest, the frame story is appropriate in its way - T.H. White began The Once and Future King, the source material of Camelot, as the bombs began to fall on London. Still, the concept trips up director Columbus a bit at the end (when he equates the battle over Guenevere's infidelity with the Battle of Britain); till then, however, it only intrudes superficially, and often to positive effect.  The whole "show" is here presented as an attempt to cheer the public up (rather like in real life, but never mind!) - so when the performers are interrupted in "The Lusty Month of May" by falling bombs, they defiantly do a second chorus, stiff upper lips firmly in place.  The updating even leads to some felicitous jokes in the staging, as when the Knights of the Round Table gather to listen to the day's jousting on an old-fashioned radio.

And the Trinity cast has the chops to (mostly) carry on in the long shadows of Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet (a cast which my partner actually saw on his eighth grade field trip to New York, so many moons ago; he was still enchanted by the Trinity version).  Stephen Thorne makes an endearingly callow Arthur (which is, actually, exactly as it should be; Burton's weary brooding, sexy as it was, was an imposition on the role), and though Rebecca Gibel (right, with Thorne) comes off as too experienced and common-sensible for Guenevere, her voice is beautifully matched to her songs, and she's a wonderful comic actress, too, so that's fine as well.

Alas, there's a subtler problem at work in Joe Wilson, Jr.'s performance as Lancelot.  Wilson has an eccentric charisma that could probably carry him through playing Mary Poppins, and he's hilarious whenever the part leans toward Lancelot's innocent conceit.  He even has the pipes to do justice to the lustrous "If Ever I Would Leave You."  But somehow he has no real chemistry with Gibel - or she has no chemistry with him - even though they both work awfully hard at pretending it's there; thus we accept, but don't really feel, the supposed pathos of their situation.

There are other missteps  - Jamey Grisham makes Mordred a kind of Kurt Hummel in bitch mode, and Mauro Hantmann mostly phones in his performance as Merlin.  But Janice Duclos may have never been better as a gimlet-eyed but gluttonous Morgan Le Fey, and Barbara Meek (who begins her fortieth season with Trinity this year) makes a crustily perfect Sir Pellinore.  The ensemble is slyly skillful, and director Columbus keeps bringing fresh twists to the unfolding action.  Until that slightly discomfiting finish (which is hardly the original's finest hour, either), I was consistently charmed.

But then why shouldn't I be?  Is it really so square to like Camelot, even in the Kennedy-White-House version (below) with the ladies in the pointy hats?  I mean, sure, Robert Goulet is obviously fatuous in his doe-eyes-and-chest-hair sensitivity.  But just ponder for a moment what the hip young Spamalot fans of today will be listening to in, say, forty years - an 80-year-old Amanda Palmer still singing about abortion.  Feel a little better about Robert Goulet?  I thought so.  ;-)

A belated Christmas present from Trinity Rep

Some have greatness thrust upon'em in Twelfth Night.

For those reeling from the recent pseudo-Shakespearean atrocities at the A.R.T., or discomfited by the 6-actors-in-36-roles stylings of the Actors' Shakespeare Project, Trinity Rep's Twelfth Night should come as a welcome - and bemusing - balm. With a shockingly low actor-to-role ratio (of approximately 1:1, if you don't count Viola, who does double duty as Sebastian), an honest-to-God set, and (ka-razy, I know!), most, if not quite all, of the text, this Twelfth Night represents a return to something like recognizable Shakespeare.

And at least in its comic interludes, it's also a remarkably rich account of the play, probably the best Bard we've seen in these parts for some time. Director Brian McEleney's approach is refreshingly free of academic or political dogma, and perhaps because he has played Malvolio himself a few times (as he does here), there's a level of comic invention in his scenes and the schemings of his tormentors that may be broad, but is also most wonderful. Alas, things thin out a bit elsewhere, and the play's complex, melancholy music isn't always heard where it should be. But even if this Twelfth Night doesn't represent an artistic epiphany, it nevertheless demonstrates that there are more things in heavenly verse than are dreamt of in Diane Paulus's philosophy.

It's also nice to see that Providence is a bit ahead of the Boston curve when it comes to casting: there's a mix of ethnicities in the Trinity company, and thus in the cast of Twelfth Night, that doesn't even figure as a statement; it's just the way things are, and should be. Amusingly enough, the one bit of political correctness that I'm actually grateful has attached itself to Twelfth Night - the openness to a romantic relationship between Antonio and Sebastian (at least on Antonio's side!) - was, however, also missing. But you can't have everything!

What I missed far more was a truly poetic, interior dimension to newcomer Cherie Corinne Rice's Viola (she was actually at her best doing brisk, brusque double duty as twin brother Sebastian). Rice did capture some touching moments of melancholy here and there, but she was perhaps somewhat circumscribed by two problematic performances surrounding her: Annie Worden's Olivia was oddly haughty and more sex-starved than grief-stricken, and Joe Wilson, Jr. was morosely elegant as Orsino but also somewhat forced. Thus little romantic atmosphere was conjured by the twists of their various encounters, and the play's deep probing of identity (this is a play about self-love, after all) never even surfaced. Perhaps as a result, Stephen Berenson's rather blank Feste seemed to be talking only to himself, and McEleney's Malvolio was left hanging high and dry once he was declared mad, for the character's final imprisonment, lost in a series of false selves, should strike us as a variant on the romantic delusions that have come before. With Shakespeare, at his greatest, everything is connected, and as Twelfth Night represents the fullest flowering of a certain mode of his comedy (before he plunged into "the problem plays"), much is lost when the subtler facets of the piece are ignored.

But to tell true, this was all easy to forgive once we were swept up in the warm humanity of this production's strongest scenes (Malvolio's gulling and Viola's duel). Here Trinity mainstays Fred Sullivan, Jr. (as Toby Belch), Stephen Thorne (as Sir Andrew) and Mauro Hantman (as Fabian, with Sullivan, McEleny, and Anne Scurria, above) were at their deliciously hammy best, and line after line (even some lines that actually aren't in the play) popped with specificity and wit. Meanwhile McEleney's Malvolio, though snootily malicious, somehow hung onto our sympathy, and Rice blossomed as a physical comedienne when given the chance (her duel with Aguecheek was the best I've ever seen). In a word, this is how Shakespearean comedy is done, folks.

I had a few quibbles elsewhere. The show is clearly set on the literal "Twelfth Night," the end of the Christmas season - and perhaps therefore the music was largely transcribed onto various carols, some of which worked ("The Twelve Days of Christmas" cleverly corralled the audience into the revelry), and some of which didn't (the melody of "Auld Lang Syne" made for too sentimental an ending). But even when I didn't agree with the production's choices, it was still delightful to see music featured so prominently in a production of Shakespeare (even if Feste wasn't a gifted warbler). And Eugene Lee's striking set - a decrepit country house at holiday-time, into which the elements literally poured - was subtly detailed and offered ample opportunity for pratfalls. All in all, this production should make Shakespeare fans feel like kids on Christmas morning.