ROAD and
The author is nearly dead. These days a playwright tends to occupy a place somewhere between producer and lighting designer, as lots of directors and actors carefully study the deconstructionist edicts that there’s no such thing as an original text and that interpretations are more valid than the works they’re based on. The result is any number of pretentious, self-serving productions.
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Road is the better of the two. Not so much a traditional play as a moody piece of street theater, it’s an examination of a devastated northern English town and the miserable collection of winos, miscreants, misfits, and desperate souls who live along its main road. They include a violent skinhead trying to find peace through Buddha, a young man starving himself to give meaning to his life, and a lascivious spinster intent on seducing an incoherent, puking soldier on leave. Our journey along this road is led by a lovable rogue named Scullery (Duane Sharp), who acts like a character out of Dickens as he gives us the grim tour of Thatcher’s England.
Much of the rest of the production is long on technique and short on believability. Many of the actors, a good number of whom are double cast, appear to be in different plays. Frequently it looks as if each of them rehearsed his or her own speeches in front of a mirror and came to the performance with no interest in interacting. And a few of them apparently see little difference between north Evanston angst and north England alienation; the accents are English, but the attitude is undeniably American.
Disguise and mistaken identity are important in Twelfth Night, but director Derek Goldman makes them his key themes, shuffling actors and roles like a baseball manager in a losing game hoping to get something going by juggling his lineup. In this double- and triple-cast interpretation, the actor playing the duke becomes Feste and then Malvolio. One of the fools becomes Olivia, and Olivia for a time becomes Sir Toby Belch. Maria, who delights in tricking Malvolio, becomes Malvolio after the intermission. And at the end everyone sings the song of Feste. Sometimes Sir Toby Belch is a short-haired guy, sometimes he’s a long-haired woman. Sometimes Feste is a guy with a stutter, sometimes he’s a woman with a glazed, zombielike expression. The actors change roles like players in a game of freeze-tag until plot and character are rendered meaningless.
