By now it should be well known that the much-anticipated and short-lived production of Richard III with Al Pacino in the title role was something of a disaster. Pacino’s interpretation of Richard as a buffoonish Machiavel who leers and cackles at actors and audience alike, who slobbers, spits, twitches, and tugs at his hair in the way nickelodeon villains once twirled mustaches, simply made the play impossible to take seriously. There is, indeed, a great deal of humor in Richard’s character, but it is a cold, ironic sort, founded on his unsparing view of himself and the world’s pieties. It cannot be mugged or mouthed into existence on the stage without draining Richard of all credibility and making the actions of history in which he is caught seem absurd.
If this production showed that a very gifted actor can misjudge his role and perhaps his abilities, it also presented a perfect case study of how not to do Shakespeare. As often in these pages in the past, I’m going to be forced into making invidious comparisons between our actors and those of the English stage, but I would like to say right away that I do not believe Shakespeare to be the exclusive property of one traditional style. To try to force upon his plays the rigid techniques of a single mode of interpretation, no matter how successful it has proven itself, would be foolish, and though there are some critics who would like to see Shakespeare performed in a formalized way, by actors all trained in a single coherent style, I am not one of them.
Still, there must be some style, some technical point of view imposed on the way Shakespeare is put on the stage. The English have one, and we do not. This is not to say that the English can’t perform Shakespeare badly. Anyone who saw the recent television productions of his plays exported by the BBC knows that English acting can be very fallible indeed. But when the English fail, one at least knows how to judge their failure. One can point to an uninspired performance here, a bit of miscasting there, or a wrong-headed notion on the part of the director. American productions, however, have about their failures no such clarity. Since the actors have nothing in common with one another, it is impossible to judge fairly who is doing his job well and to what purpose he is doing it; all seem headed in different directions and to have come from origins peculiar to themselves. Each has a different walk, a different way of handling verse, a different way of managing the swaggers of nobility. Instead of one world, we get dozens of neighborhoods; instead of a play, we get a prodigy of parts. Who can tell why all these bits and pieces of behavior have been gathered together or what made them think they formed a dramatic community? Since they bring no real standards with them, they cannot be judged, only dismissed.
It is often said that the English achieve their Shakespearean coherence at the price of a certain artificiality. By this it is generally meant that their actors speak in a way that has nothing to do with ordinary speech, that instead of acting their parts they present us with exercises in elocution. To this one answers, first of all, that Shakespeare’s language may once have been close to the way people talked in court and tavern, but it is no longer so. To deal successfully with it, a special diction has to be created, a verbal style that manages to make cogent sense out of both the meaning and the music of the words. The English have done this by developing a “stage language,” a device carefully crafted to suit the problems of speaking poetry and prose which were written four centuries ago for an audience whose habits of speech included accents, rhythms, stresses, and a tempo much different from our own, and whose appetite for metaphor and melody was more hearty and unabashed. We, on the other hand, continue to send our actors off on a collision course with the Elizabethan language. In their effort to avoid sounding highfalutin, they struggle to be natural and to make Shakespeare accommodate himself to all sorts of parochial speech. In the Pacino production, this resulted in an Edward IV who spoke in the bland, orotund manner of a radio announcer; a Duchess of York who delivered her maledictions in the homely style of a sitcom granny; and a murderer who sounded as if he had stepped out of a 1930’s movie.
Now, although this particular verbal hodgepodge received a good deal of critical abuse, it was hardly something unique to this production of Richard III. Indeed, the problem is present whenever our actors face a Shakespearean text, and although it is often minimized by our critics, it is always a heavy impediment to an imaginative enjoyment of Shakespeare’s plays. And it will remain a problem so long as our dramatic schools and repertory companies fail to forge an American stage language that is capable of being taught and developed so that it serves both Shakespeare and a modern sensibility.
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The rest of the production’s failures were of the sort that usually occur when there is no single point of view to protect the play from the random attacks of individual insights. The costumes, for example, were a mixture of styles gleaned from four centuries of fashion. Everything from doublets to jackboots, crowns to berets, was on hand to distract one from the action on stage, and if this eclectic tailoring was supposed to enforce the idea of the timelessness of Richard III, it was both redundant and simple-minded. The set, a collection of rumbling platforms that moved to no real purpose, seemed created to display the designer’s mechanical ingenuity rather than to support the needs of the action. The direction, by David Wheeler, the artistic head of the Theater Company of Boston and an instructor in the School of Theater Arts at Boston University, was both aimless and injurious. Even if one disagrees with Pacino’s low comic handling of Richard, it could have compelled at least some sympathetic curiosity had the rest of the production been shaped to accommodate it. As it was, Wheeler allowed the other members of the cast to go about their business in a traditional manner, so that in effect two plays were on at the same time. If was as if no one were meant to see what Richard was doing except the audience, and the result was to make Pacino seem more grotesque and antic than he would have if his fellow actors had responded to him in kind.
All in all, then, Richard III was, as everyone said, a shabby, dismal thing. But to show that something can be salvaged even from a theatrical wreck, let me end on the play’s one enjoyable and legitimate moment. It was provided by Max Wright in the hardly pivotal role of the Second Murderer in the scene in which Richard’s brother, Clarence, is dispatched. Now the Second Murderer is a man whom financial need has caused to enter the wrong profession. He is an assassin with a conscience, and as Wright played him, he is an admirable balance of fear and need, of practical judgments and moral sense. He was the only one on stage who seemed to be aware of the murder and mayhem going on around him and to have thought out how a human being might behave in such circumstances.
In a single moment in his scene with Clarence, Wright neatly fleshed out the effects of all the misplaced faith and treachery of the play. Clarence is begging to be spared, and tells the murderers that if they have been “hired for meed,” then they should go to his brother Richard, who he believes still loves him and will therefore outmatch any reward set by the king upon his life. Just as Clarence was about finished, right after mentioning his brother’s name, Wright began to interpolate a long “nooo” into the script. This word, wearily brought forth, became a terrible sigh of pity and at the same time a telling comic judgment on Clarence’s, and the world’s, gullibility. For a brief second, the play came to life, but, alas, since Shakespeare didn’t know his Second Murderer would have to carry the weight of the evening, he allowed him to disappear a few lines later.
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Loose Ends, the new play by Michael Weller, is something of a mystery to me. I found it a sodden effort, a long, drawn-out, meandering chronicle of two lives that had little, dramatic or otherwise, to recommend them. Yet the play was almost universally praised by the daily reviewers, many of whom found it to contain sharply observed characters very much of our time, and a theatrical strategy on the part of the playwright that was fresh and honest. My only explanation for this general enthusiasm is that sometimes a play can be so bad that it simply beguiles criticism.
Loose Ends begins with Paul and Susan, a young couple in their twenties, lolling on a beach in Bali. The year is 1970, and Paul, having just finished two years in the Peace Corps, is on his way back to the States to take up a job and begin his life. The Peace Corps sojourn had been for him a time of disillusionment, for after building outhouses for an African village, he discovered that its inhabitants had no intention of using them since they employed human excrement as a fertilizer. Deciding on this evidence that the world may be too complex for social remedies, Paul now intends to scale down his idealism to suit the proportions of a personal life. He rejects Susan’s offer to go vacationing around the globe, and they part—obviously to meet again.
When they do, it is a year later. They are now lovers, both nervously on the edge of a deeper commitment. Susan wants to move in with Paul, but can’t seem to get this through to him. Indeed, they both respect each other’s “space” so much that they communicate through intermediaries during most of the play. Finally, they begin to share the same roof, and eventually marry. Paul becomes a film editor, Susan dabbles in photography, and they seem happy enough. But trouble arrives when Susan begins to take her work seriously. She comes to New York, gets a taste of the good life, and no longer wants to be a part of Paul’s idealistic private world in which money and prestige are viewed as corruptions of hearth and home. After a brief separation, Paul compromises, comes to New York, and, sustained by the vague promise that he will soon be a father, goes about becoming successful.
Have they found happiness? Not a bit of it. Susan becomes pregnant, sees a baby as a threat to her freedom, and, without telling Paul, has an abortion. Of course, he finds out and the final clash occurs. “Let’s talk,” Paul says, an ominous sentence that is used throughout the play as a prelude to diffuse bursts of dialogue about the direction and meaning of their lives. They argue, shout, entreat, and pity themselves for about ten frantic minutes, then mercifully decide to put their problem in the hands of a lawyer. A final post-divorce scene takes place in a cabin in New Hampshire. They make love, but do not make amends. Susan leaves Paul to go out on a date, and he sits alone, looking at old slides taken of the two of them in happier days.
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It may seem that I have been writing a proposal for a sequence in As the World Turns, but this is essentially all that happens in Loose Ends. Two characters of very dim mind and spirit are dragged through nine years of uneventful life by a playwright who seems not to know how to distill, select, or heighten action in order to give those years any focus or form. As for the other characters in the play, they are all stock figures, predictable generalizations that the author uses in conventional ways. There is Paul’s brother, successful in business and, therefore, boorish, dipsomaniacal, and miserable in his private life; a Vietnam veteran of the hippie school who shuns the cities, builds houses in the New Hampshire woods, and ends up “going straight” and making a fortune in real estate; a crudely satirized guru; a flapping homosexual who, one supposes, stands for a sophisticated New York life; a woman in search of karmas and nirvanas who—oh, irony!—ends up married to a prosaic city planner; another who, to put it charitably, is a child of instinct; and a third who is modern, with-it, together, Oriental, and who serves no purpose in the play except that of a sounding board for the endless woes of Paul and Susan.
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There are those who see in all this some sort of generational parable. Susan and Paul, children of the high-minded 60’s, grow up to find life neither so simple nor so sweet as the songs of Woodstock made it seem. But no matter how hard I try, I simply fail to find anything about this couple that transcends their own self-absorptions and petty, personal details. They talk about nothing but themselves; not a hint of politics or anything else is present to give a broader social context to their lives. There is no Zeitgeist tucked away in this play, only a few trendy notions sprinkled through it.
Other enthusiasts of Weller, while admitting that Loose Ends is written in a flaccid manner, and that its characters are not very compelling types, nevertheless claim that this dreary effect is achieved because the author does not romanticize his subject. He wants to show us inane, boring people, so he courageously writes an inane, boring play about them. This idea, that treatment and subject should somehow share the same nature, is something only a desperate critic falls back on when he feels obliged to override his honest reaction. A book about child-raising need not be infantile; a theory of acoustics need not be noisy; and a play about stupidity need not be—but I leave it to the reader to tie up the loose ends of this argument.
