Theatre in Review: Antony and Cleopatra (The Public Theater)

	Joaquina Kalukango and Jonathan Cake. Photo: Joan Marcus

The script for the Public's new Antony and Cleopatra is subtitled "a radical edit," but I wonder if Tarell Alvin McCraney, who adapted and directed, hasn't gone far enough in reworking Shakespeare's play to his purposes. It is true that he has trimmed the admittedly rangy script, eliminating a number of minor characters and streamlining the action to be performed by a cast of nine. Even so, at a two-hour-and-forty-five-minute running time, this is still a lengthy evening.

It is also listlessly staged, often confusing, and trapped in a conceptual frame that does little to illuminate the original text. Instead of unfolding in Rome, Egypt, and other parts of the Mediterranean world, the play has been transferred to the Caribbean in the early 19th century. Cleopatra is apparently the queen of Haiti, and Antony, Caesar, and the other Romans all seem to hail from post-revolutionary France. The attempt at remaking Antony and Cleopatra into a parable of empire and colonialism is jarring to say the least. In Shakespeare's text, Egypt is a regional power of enormous consequence, and Cleopatra is a formidable, if erratic, figure. But the Haitian Egypt of McCraney's imagination is little more than a vassal state , an island nation filled with colorful music and voodoo ceremonies overseen by a pretty young thing with poor impulse control.

In Shakespeare's canon, the history plays are the hardest to update or reconceive, for reasons that should be obvious. Still, it's not impossible; I've seen Julius Caesar reframed as a modern political parable with actors in contemporary dress and a set filled with video screens. Pearl Theatre Company did a modern-dress Henry IV last season, with perfectly good results. Ian McKellen's famous Richard III for the National Theatre featured a neo-'30s atmosphere, with Richard's rise signaling the onset of fascism. But none of these productions attempted to impose another culture on the world of the play, which, I think, is where McCraney goes wrong; it results in a kind of blurry double vision. Ancient Egypt and 19th-century Haiti are two very different things; Imperial Rome and Napoleon's France make a slightly better fit, but there are still significant differences. Rather than getting caught up in Shakespeare's global chess game filled with political and sexual maneuvering, one can become deeply distracted by the many points where McCraney's concept and Shakespeare's play don't fit together.

The production is further beset by questionable casting choices, beginning with the Cleopatra of Joaquina Kalukango, here presented as a flirty ingénue rather than a woman whose passions rattle the known world. She fools around with voodoo dolls, chases after a servant with a riding crop, and even executes a war dance of sorts, but she lacks authority throughout; it doesn't help that her suicide finds her wrestling with an oversized basket filled with water, trying to get bitten by the requisite asp. Suicide has never seemed so difficult. Most damagingly, she has little chemistry with Jonathan Cake's rather better Antony, who at least has a strong stage presence, a facility with the verse, and some tartly ironic line readings. But unless we feel that their passion for each other is strong enough to overrule their better judgment, there isn't really a play here.

McCraney's edits make the sprawling play that much harder to follow, and his double- and triple-casting of certain performers adds to the muddle. Every time Henry Stram entered, for example, I had to stop and consult my program to ascertain who he was playing this time; even then, I sometimes wasn't sure right away. The same is true of Ash Hunter, who plays the rebellious Pompey and two other roles, and of Chivas Michael, who plays a soothsayer and various servants.

On the plus side, there are some incisive turns. Samuel Collings' Octavius Caesar, wittily dressed by the designer Tom Piper to resemble a young Napoleon, bristles with warlike fervor, not to mention a touch of incestuous passion for the sister he marries off to Antony. For all his apparent opportunism, he greets the death of Antony with impressive agony. ("The breaking of so great a thing should make/A greater crack: the round world/Should have shook lions into civil streets/And citizens to their dens.") Chukwudi Iwuji is a consistently intelligent presence as Enobarbus, although the latter character has weirdly been remade as the evening's emcee, talking to the audience and sometimes announcing which scene and act we are currently in.

Piper's spare set features an upstage pool that Stephen Strawbridge illuminates with eye-catching color treatments; his costumes contrast simple linen garments for the islanders with epaulets and gold-embroidered uniforms for the Europeans. Walter Trarbach is credited with "audio system design," a slightly unusual way of putting it, but anyway, he provides solid reinforcement for the four-person Caribbean band.

It seems clear that McCraney has thought long and hard about how to create a new and more politically relevant version of Antony and Cleopatra, but the result is a play that has been stripped of its own considerable qualities and yet which cannot serve McCraney's vision. This is play about worlds in collision, of earth-shaking emotions, and armies joined in battle -- but, as presented here, nothing ever seems to be at stake.--David Barbour