MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
at the Theatre Building
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Boasting good notices from sources as diverse as the scholarly Shakespeare Quarterly and the Washington Post (whose reviewer compared Othello to O.J. Simpson!), as well as an advisory board that includes the British star Dame Judi Dench and Broadway director Jerry Zaks, Shenandoah Shakespeare Express travels year-round, bringing Shakespeare to high school and college audiences as well as community and professional venues. Founded by Ralph Alan Cohen, a professor of English at James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley, and his former student Jim Warren, the group grew out of Cohen’s classroom experiments with a low-budget, “unplugged” Shakespearean style that eschews almost all theatrical effects in an effort to reproduce something like the original conditions for which Shakespeare wrote. For example, SSE shows use “universal” lighting that illuminates actors and audience unchangingly and equally over the course of a performance. And why not? The Globe, where Shakespeare’s company performed, was an open-air theater, after all; and SSE’s visually uncluttered, easily transportable productions remind us that Shakespeare toured too, playing the provinces or traveling to his royal fans’ various courts.
But even more than simplicity and affordability, SSE’s trademark is speed. Most of its shows are two to two and a quarter hours long–brief in comparison to the three or more hours Shakespearean plays often require. The fast pace is achieved not through heavy cutting or hurried performances but through lack of pauses. There are no intermissions, no between-scene breaks, no interludes of dance, martial arts, or other pageantry. Nor are there any passages of what might be called silent acting; the performers either speak or listen to someone else speak whenever they’re in a scene. “Act and talk at the same time” is the company credo, as discussed by Cohen in a 1992 program note: “Actors have grown accustomed to acting in the spaces between the lines, and that habit can turn Shakespeare’s ‘two hours’ traffic’ into three hours of gridlock.”
But a more fundamental problem lies in the SSE style–brisk, efficient, fresh, but also prone to glib shallowness and lack of subtextual insight. In Shrew, an early work whose lead female role is underwritten, the audience needs guidance into the conflicted and evolving thoughts and feelings behind the masterful language; it needs visual support (Petruchio’s taste for ridiculous garb is completely lost here) and the dramatic inflection of pauses now and then.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Julie Ainsworth.
