... a mixed bag featuring anniversary Ibsen, a hot young Hamlet, a blood-and-thunder Titus, a possibly high-concept Richard III -- and Ken Ludwig?
Sorta-kinda. For the 2006-2007 season at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, unveiled at a criminally early breakfast to-do at the Lansburgh Theatre this morning, Lend-Me-A-Tenor Ludwig has finished up a half-written Thornton Wilder adaptation of The Beaux' Stratagem, a class-conscious comedy from Restoration playwright George Farquhar (The Recruiting Officer). The opportunity came courtesy of an overture from Tappan Wilder, who shipped Ludwig a manuscript "in Thornton Wilder's handwriting, with lines scratched out and little balloons full of changes."
"I felt like Columbus, and like the luckiest archaeologist who'd ever lived," Ludwig said at this morning's announcement. "To my delight, it not only contained the best of George Farquhar, but was also filled with the wonderful things we associate with Thornton Wilder: the structure, the humor, the humanity. And best of all, from my perspective, it stopped about halfway through." Tboy can only imagine Ludwig's delight.
STC artistic director Michael Kahn said he'd thought about doing The Beaux for years--it was a favorite in an earlier England, with a twisty plot involving two debt-plagued London layabouts who escape to the countryside in search of wealthy wives, only to be tripped up by "true love and a band of thieves"--but after having a stab at it in the Shakespeare Theatre's Restoration Readings series, he decided it just wouldn't work for an American audience. But when the Wilder-Ludwig version came in, "I thought it was just enchanting." Kahn will direct the world premiere of the completed adaptation this November.
Elsewhere: The company launches the new season September 5 with Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, to commemorate the centennial of the death of the father of modern drama. "I don't think the Norwegians of his time thought very much of him," cracked hiz excellentness the Ambassador of Norway, who helped Kahn introduce the play at a press conference this morning, "but today we are very proud of him." Director is Kjetil Bang-Hansen, a big-deal Norwegian who used to run Den National Scene, where Ibsen was writer-in-residence in the mid-19th century (Some of you will remember that he staged A Doll's House at the Kennedy Center in 2000. In Norwegian.
"Ibsen is our greatest commodity," Bang-Hansen joked, "and we're happy to export him. But not just because he's Norwegian. ... His ethical universe ... gets more and more important" as geopolitics get increasingly complicated.
Born out of Ibsen's rage at the reception Ghosts got when it was published, Enemy of the People is about "a man who discovers that the whole foundation of his society ... is rotten." Tainted water means the play's setting, a spa-resort city, "is founded on a lie," but when he sounds the alarm, the play's hero gets anything but a hero's welcome. Reading the play, Bang-Hansen has been thinking about "how easily idealism turns into fundamentalism, how easily faith turns into fanaticism."
Actor/director/academic Nicholas Rudall, who also did the Hedda Gabler adaptation Kahn directed a few seasons back), is translating; he's discovered a rich vein of Ibsenite rage about "the toxicity of false liberalism -- and I'm enjoying that."
After Enemy and The Beaux, Kahn's staging a Richard III around Geraint Wyn-Davies, who buckled so swashily through Cyrano in 2004. The company's last romp with the hunchbacked villain was 2003's blistering modernist take on the play, starring waifish Wallace Acton as an eery, elfin-charming Richard. Wyn-Davies will bring a dramatically different physicality to the part, but at this point, he said, it's anybody's guess what the production will look like. "It's early days," Wyn-Davies confessed. "I don't even know where we're going to set it."
The actor was doing a one-man show about Dylan Thomas in New York when Kahn came to see him -- "he was the one-man audience that night," Wyn-Davies cracked -- and afterwards the two talked about projects over drinks. "After the fourth or fifth, I picked him up off the floor, and he asked me if I wanted to play Richard." Ba-dum-dum.
Kahn may not have decided how or whether to conceptualize the production, but Wyn-Davies is already offering helpful suggestions: "I'd like everyone else to have a hump." Local tidbit: Tana Hicken, who played the Duchess of York in that 2003' staging, is set to be Queen Margaret in Kahn's.
After Richard, another light-hearted romp: Australian Gale Edwards (who directed that 2003 Richard) returns with Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's first and bloodiest tragedy. Hometown boosters in the crowd cheered when Edwards, a four-time Royal Shakespeare Company veteran, said her two previous outings at the Lansburgh have convinced her that the Shakespeare Theatre is "one of the best companies in the world to work for."
Those who've seen Titus (at the Washington Shakespeare Company, maybe, or in the musical version launched a couple of years back at the now-threatened Source Theatre space) know it's a lurid revenge tragedy, "written," as Edwards put it at this morning's thingy, "for thrills and spills -- the more heads that were severed the better," as far as Shakespeare's early audiences were concerned. Titus, Edwards said, exists in "a kind of Quentin Tarantino world where the guys in flashy suits pour petrol over somebody and set them alight -- and where that's all right." The relish in her description of the play--and in her recollection that Peter Brook's 1955 Titus famously had ambulances lining up to haul away swooning audience members--may suggest colorful things to come in April '07, hooray.
There may be a whiff of the political about it, too. Something about the play feels Greekish to Edwards: It's an epic family tragedy, after all, in which "crimes in the past breed crimes in the present and so bring down the House," she said, stopping to throw a significant look the audience's way. And "it's a play about how the addiction to violence and war leads humanity down a dangerous path."
Last up, in June 2007: Hamlet with Jeffrey Carlson, last year's sensational Lorenzaccio, again with Kahn directing. "I made my Broadway debut in The Goat," said a sleep-deprived Carlson at today's shindig, "and Edward Albee walked up to me one day and said, 'I can't wait to see your Hamlet.' And I said, 'I'll never play that part.'"
Now he will. Tboy supposes the question is: Will Albee take the Amtrak?
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