Brooklyn Bets on Rep

By T.E.Kalem

THE WINTER'S TALE by William Shakespeare

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has posted an "Under New Management" sign. David Jones, an associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company for 14 years, begins his first season as artistic director with a newly assembled resident company. BAM will rotate plays in true repertory.

The Winter's Tale will be followed by four more productions between now and the end of the year. The second entry, also opening this month, is Johnny on a Spot by Charles MacArthur, who is most famous for collaborating with Ben Hecht on The Front Page. Johnny, originally produced in 1942, focuses on a Southern Governor running for Senator. A satirical comedy about the scalawags infesting the U.S. political landscape, Johnny sounds certain amusing chords of contemporaneity. It features a born-again Christian and the possibility of faking a gas shortage.

In April the U.S. premiere of Maxim Gorky's Barbarians follows, as adapted by Playwright Michael Weller (Moonchildren and the film version of Hair). This is a drama about the in-depth cost of industrial progress. A sociocultural clash occurs when a group of engineers building a railroad invades a sleepy provincial Russian town at the turn of the century. Next comes a prescient feminist play called He and She, which Rachel Crothers wrote in 1911.

The season concludes with The Marriage Dance: An Evening of Farce by Brecht and Feydeau. Brecht's The Wedding centers on a disastrous nuptial banquet, and The Purging, from the grand master of French farce, Georges Feydeau, is an antic confection involving a troubled marriage, a lucrative business proposition and a constipated child.

The most mystifying choice of the BAM season is the very first. The Winter's Tale is late (1610-11) and, to all but cultists and Bardolaters, lesser Shakespeare. As tragedy it does not purge, and as comedy it verges on farce. The fairy-tale elements merely compound the oddity of the mixture. In words from the ,the the language seems to "jog on, jog on" rather than taking lyrics wing.

But the chief problem is the arbitrary action of the drama; it springs from a motivational void. Leontes (Brian Murray), King of Sicilia, begs his wife Hermione (Marti Maraden) to plead with his lifelong friend Polixenes (Norman Snow), King of Bohemia, to extend his stay at their castle. With gracious words and enticing looks, she does so, though she acts no chummier with Polixenes than many wives do with other men at cocktail parties.

Nevertheless, Leontes goes into a state of apoplectic jealousy, convinced that his wife's advanced pregnancy is proof that she and his friend are adulterous lovers. The soon-born infant, Perdita, is deposited on a remote coast. Hermione is condemned to death. The sudden death of Leontes' young son desolates him. BAM subscribers may be comforted to learn that the passage of 16 years heals these wounds and provides happy endings all around. The grown Perdita (Christine Estabrook) marries Polixenes' son Florizel (Boyd Gaines). The two Kings are reconciled, and Leontes discovers Hermione alive.

Ensemble work is not the cast's forte at the moment, but the talent and the will are there. BAM has embarked on an enterprise of high promise and potentially rich rewards.

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