Let me caution you before I begin. I coached an actor for an audition who had seen All’s Well That Ends Well the night before, and he had loved it. He asked for my opinion, and I told him that my opinion was that if he had loved it, it was a great production.

So much for compliments. I will now discuss Shakespeare in the Park.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
FROM Perry-Castañeda Library
University of Texas at Austin
Helmolt, H. F., ed. History of the World.
New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902.

It’s one of the great treats of the New York City summer. The Joseph Papp Public Theatre produces two productions in the 1,872-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Everything about the event is tremendous. You have to get up at 5:00 a.m. (if Al Pacino or Anne Hathaway is in the production), or stay up all night, to get in line for your two free tickets, distributed at 1:00 p.m. on the day of the performance. You make friends with the people around you in line (whom you will never see again). You buy one of the strange Shakespeare Egg McMuffins when the refreshment stand opens at 8:00 a.m. Then you sit down on the asphalt walk of Central Park, lean against the wire fence, and wait — eight hours for Al Pacino, a mere four hours if there are no movie stars. This eight-hour wait gives you an intimation of what death will be like.

After you get your tickets, you stagger home — if you’re lucky enough to live near the park — to have a nap and pack your picnic lunch (praying all the while that it won’t rain). You return to the Delacorte around 6:00 p.m. with your friends, sit on the Central Park lawn and eat your picnic and then, at about 7:30, file into the amphitheatre. There aren’t any bad seats. Every single actor wears a microphone, so heaven knows you won’t miss a word. The backdrop for the theater is the grass and trees in the park, with Belvedere Castle in the distance on the other side of Turtle Pond. The sun is still shining when the big lights begin to cast a strange pale glow on the stage. The music — either live or recorded — begins to play.

And after that, God help you.

I’m not saying that all the productions are bad — far from it. In the park I have seen magic, priceless performances of Shakespeare’s plays. But I have seen some which made me want to hurl my Kentucky Fried Chicken at the hapless actors — even though I know actors have to do whatever the director says. Or what Joe Papp said, when Joe was alive and in charge. I worked for Joe, and admired him for a thousand reasons, and did not throw fried chicken at Meryl Streep, because I knew she was giving Joe the performance he wanted when she wept all the way through Isabel’s scene with Claudio in Measure for Measure. Joe hated it when that scene got laughs. There were no laughs in that scene in that production, because nobody could understand a word Isabel said. I ate my chicken, crunching up bones and all, like an angry ogre.

In the park I have seen magic, priceless performances of Shakespeare’s plays. But I have seen some which made me want to hurl my Kentucky Fried Chicken at the hapless actors…

But these park productions definitely come in a variety of flavors. In a recent production, at the dress rehearsal, the first thing that happened was that Hamlet came out — barefoot, I think — carrying a suitcase, sat down on the suitcase and recited “To be or not to be.” Moving this soliloquy from its customary place gave Hamlet plenty of time to molest Ophelia during their scene, which he did. At the end of the play Fortinbras said, “Go, bid the soldiers shoot,” at which hint his aide-de-camp drew a pistol and blew Horatio’s brains out. They splattered prettily on the flat behind him, just like that effect in The Manchurian Candidate. Friends who saw this production said to me, “Gee, I didn’t know Horatio died at the end of Hamlet.” “Arrrrgh,” I replied with my usual warm-hearted ogre’s eloquence.

Much better luck befell those of us who got in to see Twelfth Night in 2009, in which Anne Hathaway (the movie star, not Shakespeare’s wife) was Viola, Audra McDonald was Olivia, Raul Esparza was Orsino and David Pittu was Feste. Unless you’re visiting from Mars you know that the last three can sing, and there were other wonderful singers in the cast. You may not have known — I did not — that Anne Hathaway has strong musical theater credentials and when she joined in on “Come Away, Death” — well! The entire theater levitated. We all left in a pink cloud of happiness and floated home through the summer night in a trance, convinced that the composer (Dan Messé, with Gary Maurer and Steve Curtis, arrangements by Greg Pliska) was the next Mozart, and that the director was a genius. I went to this production twice. The girl who sat next to me in line this summer had seen it five times.

I’m leaving the director of this marvel nameless.

Shylock and Jessica, 1876
(Oil on canvas, 166.5 × 109.5 cm)
BY Maurycy Gottlieb
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

In summer 2010 one of the offerings was The Merchant of Venice starring — there is no other verb — Al Pacino. The play is a sore subject with me, because I have wasted countless hours trying to convince people that Shakespeare was not an anti-Semite. Pointing out that Shylock is in love with Antonio, and says so, has no effect. Pointing out that Shakespeare was at pains to draw all the Christians in the play as egregious, money-grubbing, slave-owning, fornicating, anti-Semitic and generally abusive swine has no effect. Pointing out that the Jews treat the Christians with kindness and get ruined for their pains has no effect. Pointing out that “Shylock” is not and never was a Jewish name, and that perhaps, in a play filled with locked caskets and keys, Shakespeare was making some point (“shy lock,” get it?) — more wasted breath. My arguments resemble Lear’s conversation with the elements on the heath, except that, compared to the Shakespeare-was-an-anti-Semite crowd, the winds, cataracts and hurricanes are unprejudiced and sympathetic listeners. I see I’ve wandered from the subject and begun to froth at the mouth and drool into the keyboard. Let us return to Central Park.

It seems reasonably clear that the despicable Launcelot hounds little Jessica around the stage with his anti-Semitic rantings until he finally backs her into a corner. Imagine my surprise (I doubt that you can) when this scene was staged with Launcelot leading Jessica in a jolly waltz in great swoops across the stage. I think it was a waltz. When you are in the presence of something incredible, sometimes the brain refuses to record it properly. It is difficult to know what the director had in mind. Shakespeare, as I’ve nagged you, wasn’t an anti-Semite, but the Christians in the play are definitely such, and Launcelot Gobbo is one of the most despicable, so his dance with Jessica was so far out of contact with anything else in the play that my comprehension burned out. I suppose people unfamiliar with the play somehow integrated the dance into their concept of the plot. I don’t know how. The nagging suspicion began to creep into my evil brain that perhaps the genius behind Twelfth Night had not been the director, but had been the composer and his associates — the difference between the two productions was so very great.

(My friend, who saw this production with me, has insisted that I note that the production dramatized Shylock’s baptism, unaccountably left out by Shakespeare. Stagehands lifted the lid off an Olympic-sized swimming pool for Al Pacino to be dunked in, so that Shylock became not just Christian, but specifically a total-immersion Baptist.)

So you can imagine my apprehension (more like terror) when a review for this summer’s All’s Well That Ends Well included the phrase “[Insert name of director] has done it again!” And, by God, the reviewer was right! It was clear from the very first instant!

The first line of the play is the Countess: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.” You might think that in this line the Countess is comparing her husband’s recent funeral to her son’s departure for the court, and that neither event would fill her with cheer. Imagine our surprise — skip that, you can’t possibly — when the cast came on stage dressed in colorful costumes and everybody went waltzing around in great, lighthearted swoops. This went on for a long time, but that’s all right, because said director — oh, hell, let’s print his name: it was the well-known Elmer Fudd — had cut a lot of Shakespeare’s lines, and had to fill up three hours somehow, and he seems to like waltzes. At some point the dance came to an end, and the Countess, beaming happily, said to her son Bertram, “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.” Bertram smiled back and said, “And I in going, madam, weep o’er my father’s death anew.” I know you don’t believe this happened. But it did. This is not meant as a criticism of the actors. I never had any intention of throwing my fried chicken at them.

The revelation of Olivia’s betrothal,
from “Twelfth Night,” Act V, Scene i, ca. 1790
(Oil on canvas, 34.3 x 43.2 cm)
BY William Hamilton
Yale Center for British Art
Paul Mellon Collection

Sometimes the hammer hit the nail. For example: all the women in the play, even the gentle, victimized Diana, had Attitude, as if they had all just come from rehearsing a bad production of Medea. Attitude worked pretty well when the Countess was bullying the truth out of Helen — that Helen loves Bertram. It’s better than making the Countess the gentle, kindly, sweet grandma which some directors assume she is, but the effect was spoiled by the fact that the Countess listened not a whit to Helen’s answer. Attitude required her to look elsewhere. Even the Astringer whom Helen asks to carry a message to the King (though he had no goshawk) had Attitude, for no reason I could see, unless he just didn’t like girls, in which case his surly consent to do Helen’s errand made no sense at all, and I seem to be developing a theme here, something to do with “made no sense at all.”

Some well-meaning but dreadfully misguided soul must have praised the effective use of music in Elmer Fudd’s production of Twelfth Night to him, because music (by a different composer) had been added in liberal scoops to All’s Well, in the intelligent manner in which any sensible person would add scoops of strawberry ice cream to a pork roast. When Helen was working up to her peroration “For with the dark, poor thief, I’ll steal away” — which we are shortly to learn means she’s going to commit suicide — she was suddenly underscored — overscored — ridden down and trampled to death — by the recorded throbbing of violins of Brobdingnagian size, and no matter how high you boost Helen’s volume, the music rendered Shakespeare’s words inconsequential. There was no way for the actress to say those lines like a woman who has lost all desire to live. What came out of her mouth sounded like Lady Macbeth’s injunction for thick night to pall itself in the dunnest smoke of hell, and she exited like somebody determined to commit a murder, but certainly not suicide.

Really, I have only two complaints about the play: that the director didn’t understand it as a whole, and didn’t understand it at any point. For the structure of the play, let’s point out that it is a morality play from beginning to end. Shakespeare’s conceit is that Helen (the good angel) and Parolles (the bad angel) are contending for the soul of the flawed Bertram. Everybody else in the play fits into this structure: the King is God, and Lafew (from the French le feu, the fire) is the devil. But Shakespeare shifted the morality play focus to the right: every single person in the play is good, human and flawed. The brothers Dumain in this play are both so intelligently virtuous that Shakespeare himself could only keep track of which was the Good Angel and which the Evil by calling them “Lord G.” and “Lord E.” in his manuscript (see the Folio). Shakespeare no longer believed in God when he wrote this play, but he believed that human beings were capable of behaving as if they were under the influence of divine grace, and he signaled that they were under such an influence by writing their dialogue in rhymed couplets (as when Helen cures the King).

For detail, let me complain that every time the director didn’t understand a line, or didn’t understand Shakespeare’s intention for it, he cut it. So we lost Parolles’ “Marry, ill, to like him that ne’er it likes,” which is Parolles first bit of good advice to Helen. (Reg Rogers is nothing like what Shakespeare envisioned as Parolles, but he handled the part so well that it would the greatest stupidity to complain. And he was well matched with Dakin Matthews as Lafew. Not even I could find fault with their scenes together. Wonderful.)

Helen wasn’t on stage for the Countess’ “Even so it was with me when I was young,” so we had no idea what the Countess was talking about, and the point of the scene went out the window and into the Turtle Pond. Helen got down on her knees, not to beg the Countess’ pardon, but to pick up a bunch of what looked like egg cups that she had dropped. Helen got out a stethoscope and cured the king with a tiny jar of snake oil she had brought with her; so what was the point of Shakespeare’s giving her that magic spell?

Mr. Fudd didn’t understand why Lafew would say “But first I beg your pardon,” so out it went. Nor did he understand the King’s “Our own love waking,” and of course he had no idea why Helen would say “Et cetera,” which makes one wonder if he’d read the play. Mr. Fudd thought it was a mistake for the King to say “I will throw thee from my care forever,” and changed it to the royal “We will,” which Shakespeare didn’t write, because that speech belongs to the morality play structure, in which the King of France stands in for God. God doesn’t use the royal “we.” He says things like “I am that I am.” I doubt that this change could possibly be blamed on the actor who played the King, the intelligent John Cullum, who has been a leading actor for so long that he makes playing the King of the Universe (or, if you insist, King of France) look effortless — and very satisfying it was to see, too. But that’s enough of that.

Bugs had heard from somebody that Measure for Measure was supposed to be a carnival of fun, and that’s how he directed it.

Next I went to see, as a professional obligation, the production of Measure for Measure which was running in repertory with All’s Well, perhaps as another example of “things not to do.”

Management decided to get their director from the same stable that had supplied the director of All’s Well, and since they could not reasonably use Elmer Fudd again, they hired Bugs Bunny. Bugs had heard from somebody that Measure for Measure was supposed to be a carnival of fun, and that’s how he directed it. For the casting, he wrote the parts on cards. Then he flung the cards into the air, and forced the actors in the repertory company to take whatever part he or she picked up. (Either Bugs or the stage manager or somebody had the good sense to palm the card with “Lucio” written on it and slip it to Reg Rogers, who is as good in this production as he was in All’s Well. I hope you have already seen him in person because he is certainly destined shortly for a television series and will disappear from the stage.)

This random casting had at least one good effect. Angelo, who is generally (wrongly) considered an immoral snake and is cast with an actor of reptilian appearance, was played by Michael Hayden, a handsome leading man, somebody with whom Isabel could easily fall in love (though in this production she most certainly did not). For the rest, it seldom worked out. Froth played the part that should have been played by Pompey, and Pompey got Froth’s part, and so on.

After Bugs had cast the play, he ignored the actors, and concentrated on directing the set. The set perambulated itself around the stage at every possible scene-change opportunity (the reader knows that Shakespeare’s theater didn’t have scene changes), and usually wound up wrong, like you when you lose at musical chairs. Angelo’s chair faced exactly upstage so that we had a good view of his back in his first scene with Isabel. We got one throne when Shakespeare’s dialogue specified two. Bugs the director must have sneaked into rehearsals of All’s Well, because he has two gigantic set pieces, staircases, lock and engage in a swooping waltz, like the darling waltzes of the other production.

If I were to confront Bugs, I might say to him, “You have missed a few things, Bugs. You do not understand that Shakespeare incorporated the central image of Plato’s Phaedrus into his play, the charioteer, though the chariot would have appeared automatically if you had used logical blocking and had not cut Lucio’s lines or given them to the Provost in Act II, Scene 2. Nor do you understand why Shakespeare named a character in his play ‘Juliet,’ when he knew that somebody had already written a very successful love story with a character in it named ‘Juliet,’ and so you never considered that maybe Measure for Measure is a love story. You ignored Shakespeare’s hints and presented us with your own rancid ideas. You should be whipped first, Sir, and hanged after.” Then I might glare at him. But as Nietzsche says, if you glare into the abyss long enough, the abyss glares back, and I’m not Nietzsche, but the production was certainly an abyss, so enough is enough.

I have worn out my welcome, and I have committed what is for theater professionals the unpardonable sin: to be a critic. But I’m not too ashamed. At both performances I behaved myself. At All’s Well That Ends Well, I tried to start a round of applause for John Cullum when, as the King, he left the stage after laying down the law to Bertram, but nobody joined me, probably because the rest of the audience had been so stunned by such a piece of excellent acting, which exactly suited the play and made ringing sense of the text, that their brains were frozen, their mouths were hanging open and their limbs were paralyzed. I was with my beautiful friend Susan, who was wearing shorts, and from time to time I caused her to glance at me when I had a seizure because of something the management had done (for example, rewriting the text to force Diana to rhyme “maid” with “false”). And when there were stretches that were absolutely unspeakable I lowered my head and stared at Susan’s perfect legs until I could tell by the noises coming from the stage that it was safe to look up again (although less fun).

But as Nietzsche says, if you glare into the abyss long enough, the abyss glares back, and I’m not Nietzsche, but the production was certainly an abyss, so enough is enough.

Look, Shakespeare is bullet-proof. He can stand up to, and overcome, any kind of abuse. Despite my sour remarks, the vast majority of the spectators had a good time. This article won’t be published until long after the production has closed. I doubt that any of the actors will read this, and the directors, Mr. Elmer-has-done-it-again Fudd, and Bugs the Bunny, still basking in the lauds of publications like The New York Times, can ignore me. I would have liked to have praised everybody in the cast — I think they were all good — but see my remarks above about how actors are subject to the director.

You should indubitably go to Central Park next summer and see a production of a Shakespeare play. It’s free! The setting is beautiful! The text is by the greatest writer in the English language! You strike a mighty blow for civilization! How can you go wrong?