WOMEN IN SHAKESPEARE
at Cafe Voltaire
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Many scenes show considerable imagination. In the soliloquy taken from the end of Act IV in Romeo and Juliet, the heroine is literally of two minds–two actresses argue the wisdom of Friar Laurence’s plan for elopement. Another clever idea informs the staging of the scene at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Hermia discloses her elopement plans to her best friend Helena in the form of confidences between two teenagers in front of the mirror in the little girls’ room. Probably the most experimental bit is a rendition of Ophelia’s mad scene from Hamlet in which the actress is flanked by a silent waiflike creature, identified in the program as Ophelia’s Madness, who mimes the subtext of the spoken lines. The pacing of the quarrel between Falstaff and the tavern hostess, with a drum punctuating the verbal sparring in the manner of stand-up comedy, also demonstrates a novel approach to familiar material.
The actresses make almost no effort to get outside themselves and into the characters. Occasionally someone plays a male character, but no one attempts to mimic male speech or movement. (The male costumes could have come straight from the pages of an I. Magnin catalog, just as the female costumes are pure Laura Ashley, frothing with lace ruffles and velvet swags.) When playing a female character, no one speaks in any voice but her own. Though one actress attempts a New Jersey accent for Helena, she cannot overcome her own cultivated speech patterns. When another actress, playing Juliet’s old nurse, sits with her knees spread wide apart, she does so in a broad, hoydenish manner designed to dispel any notion that she sits that way habitually. Granted, hopping from one scene to another does not give an actor much time to establish a three-dimensional character, but the way the characters here are subsumed by the players’ personalities cannot help but leave the impression that all of Shakespeare’s female creations were young, energetic, modern-thinking, poised, well-bred ladies who never raised their girlishly treble voices, never struck an ungraceful pose, and never allowed an unbecoming expression to cross their faces. (Significantly, ingenue roles dominate the evening’s selections–such viragos as Lady Macbeth and Kate the shrew are conspicuously absent.)
The first, performed by Her Majesty’s Players, is Lunch Before Harrods. This vignette by Anne Godden- Segard depicts a pair of dowagers involuntarily sharing a table with a young couple in a London restaurant; the conversations among the four become entangled as a territorial battle ensues. Directed by Suzanne E. Hannon, the five-person cast delivers hilarious poker-faced performances–Theatre Building publicist Kim Swinton in particular, as an obnoxious Coca-Cola-swilling American.
