Bard Becalmed

By T.E. Kalem

Twelfth Night and

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespear

There is no law that requires the American Shakespeare Theater at Stratford, Conn, to vary its productions between the barely adequate and the eminently atrocious. It is just the sloppy custom of the place. The sad truth is that a merely average revival of a classic, whether by Shakespeare or some other great playwright, leaves only the forlorn impression of a weighted balloon. It takes superior acting, direction and a current of passion and imagination to raise it gloriously aloft. Stratford opened its 20th season with two grounded balloons, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet.

Twelfth Night fluttered the less feebly of the two. It is a real plotboiler. There are identical twins, separated by shipwreck and tossed on an alien shore. There are assumed disguises, confusions of love and mistaken identities.

British Director David William emphasizes the languorous melancholy beneath the romantic comedy, the narcissistic infatuation with the image of oneself being in love. This does bring out "the dying fall" aspects of the play. However, too many of the pregnant pauses give birth to nothing.

Too often the paradisiacal glamour of Illyria, the lovely songs, the immortal lines, the great bard himself, dissolve and leave but the plot behind. Now girl-in-boy's-clothing palls, now which-twin-is-which proves yawningly wearisome. Many of the jokes are far past saving and a good bit of the chop logic word play is tedious word work. In Director William's conception of the comedy, the prankishness and the poetry are divorced instead of being mated.

Romeo and Juliet seem to have their signals rather than their stars crossed. When they meet, it seems to be for a quick date rather than to share a common fate. They seem to be unlucky, not doomed.

Director Michael Kahn must bear some sizable responsibility for this. He has elected to fight Shakespeare rather than join him. He has set the play in 1866, though what affinity the drama has with either the risorgimento or the 19th century is dim enough to be imperceptible.

This sort of time change always has the same effect: it up dates the costumes and jarringly displaces the Elizabethan line. Kahn claims to have based his 1866 version on Luigi Visconti's film, The Leopard. But it lacks any trace of the rich textures of the Visconti settings. No one could look at this tacky Verona for a moment and call it "fair."

Puppets might supply more emotion than these actors do. There is only one stridently monotonous note in Roberta Maxwell's voice box. Her Juliet is a fishwife haggling unsuccessfully over a flounder rather than a young girl losing the world and her dear life for love. David Birney's Romeo is so limp and bland that it comes as a wondrous surprise that he has either the will or strength to climb to Juliet's balcony. Mercutio, that man from whom words flow like liquid light, emerges in David Rounds' rendering as little more than a stand-up nightclub comic.

Tampering with Shakespeare, trampling on Shakespeare can scarcely harm adult playgoers who know better. But what of the thousands of young students who are bused to Stratford each season?

They are being aesthetically defrauded and deluded. Here is a cultural center that confirms the worst popular myth -- that culture is a humorless, tiresome, deadly bore.

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