Theatre in Review: The Last Will (Abingdon Theatre Company)It's tempting to wonder what Robert Brustein, the critic, would have made of Robert Brustein, the playwright of The Last Will. The former was a tough customer, with a lethal eye for the false and trivial; the latter is a much more self-indulgent soul. The Last Will, the final play of a trilogy about the life of Shakespeare, is a lion-in-winter portrait of the artist grafted onto a Lillian Hellman-style wrangle over the family estate. So little is known about Shakespeare that playwrights have ample room for imagination, but The Last Will is, largely, much ado about nothing. The action begins on a mildly intriguing note, with the playwright returning to Stratford, leaving behind the delights of London and his glorious career. Having neglected his family for decades, his homecoming is frostily received. "Does that mean you intend to resume your marital obligations? Or, shall we say, begin them?" inquires Anne, his disaffected wife. The early scenes of marital infighting are fairly amusing, partly because Austin Pendleton, as Will, and Stephanie Roth Haberle, as Anne, have fun flirting and trading tart remarks. (When, in a moment of distraction, he tells her to "get thee to a nunnery," she quickly replies, "And get thee to a whorehouse. Appetite, thy name is man." "Did I write that?" he wonders.) Nevertheless, the casting is topsy-turvy, given dialogue that makes reference to Anne's eight-year seniority to Will. Watching the 73-year-old Pendleton pretend that Haberle, in her mid-40s and looking terrific, is his elder requires more of an imaginative flight than The Last Will can manage. There are other, more felicitous, interludes, especially when Richard Burbage shows up to complain about Will's recent "far-fetched" plots. Citing the notorious Winter's Tale stage direction that reads, "Exit, pursued by a bear," he snaps, "Where are we? In a theatre or the Circus Maximus?" And it's fun when Will's solicitor, Francis Collins, has a few sharp words with him about a certain line ("Let's kill all the lawyers") from Henry VI, Part II. But, as Will's behavior gets stranger, The Last Will gets lost in a series of circular family squabbles. He starts calling Anne "Gertrude" and "Desdemona," and, accusing her of flagrant infidelity, asserts that his two younger children were fathered by his brother, Gilbert, now dying of the plague. He condemns his daughter, Judith, for her engagement to a local vintner and tobacconist, who in his youth was fined for fornication. Such puritan posturing is a prime case of the pot calling the kettle black: Will's mental instability is due either to syphilis or the mercury treatment for it, or both. His reason clouded by illness, he plots to disinherit most of his family, unaware that he is being manipulated to do so. (The name of the malefactor will remain veiled here, as it is the only bit of surprise that The Last Will has to offer.) It's a decent premise, but the execution -- both in the writing and Pendleton's staging -- is lacking in urgency and drama. The dredging up of family secrets is interspersed with legal haggling with Collins and shop talk with Burbage, who is planning to rebuild the Globe Theatre, which was destroyed by a fire caused by a cannon being fired during a performance of Henry VIII. ("One clumsy piece of stage business and a major portion of my capital goes up in flames," notes Will, irritably.) As presented, Will is hardly Shakespearean; instead, he's a grumpy, low-energy old coot. Only in the final scene, when he lapses into Lear's speech upon learning of the death of Cordelia, does Pendleton invest the role with any convincing fury. Haberle is her usual expert self, but she doesn't have nearly enough to do. The others -- Jeremiah Kissel as Burbage, Christianna Nelson as Judith, David Wohl as Collins, and Merritt Janson as Susanna -- are as good as their roles allow, but their dialogue is distressingly banal. At least Stephen Dobay's set, which features an upstage wall of unsanded wood bookended by what seems like miles of unfurled writing paper, is an interesting concept; it is nicely lit -- entirely in warm white washes -- by Travis McHale. Laura Crow's costumes are solid examples of unornamented everyday wear of the early 17th century. David Margolin Lawson's sound design, which includes church bells, tavern noise, and a thunderstorm, is thoroughly solid. Overall, The Last Will feels like a play written not because the author had anything particular to say but to complete a trilogy. Not having seen the first two plays, I can't say how well they work. But certainly the last thing you'd expect from a Brustein -- the scorn of Brustein, the critic, for conventional commercial theatre was notorious -- is a historical potboiler like this.--David Barbour 
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