Ashland (part one)

Coriolanus

Having just returned from a wonderful week spent in Ashland, the Oregon Coast and Redwood National Park in far north western California, it's a good time to give a brief review of a few of the plays while they are still fresh in my memory.

We saw all six of the plays mounted before the summer opening of the outdoor "Elizabethan" stage. These were Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, The Clay Cart, Fences, and Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Although we enjoyed everything we saw, we were really blown away by the first four plays mentioned above. I will be reviewing them in the next several posts. First up: Coriolanus.

Coriolanus is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. (I am admittedly attracted to the off-beat and under appreciated in general.) It is certainly the most political of all Shakespeare's plays, focusing as it does on the essential tension between the rights and freedoms of "the people" and the authority and power that necessarily must be centralized in and utilized by "the few" who lead and govern them. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare uses the conflict between the Roman mob and the patrician elite as a metaphor for the universal and eternal political battle between left and right, liberal and conservative, the collective and the elite, democracy and dictatorship. The brilliance of the play is that in exploring this inevitable conflict over power between the few and the many, Shakespeare takes no sides. Instead, he reveals the strengths and weaknesses of both. In doing so, he suggests that neither Rousseau nor Hobbes has a monopoly on political truth, and that the ultimate reality is simply the never ending, never resolved struggle for dominance between these two opposing world views.

Veteran director Laird Williamson (whose stunning productions of On the Razzle and Cyrano de Bergerac delighted us in the last two seasons) sets Ashland's current production in a generically contemporary world where modern street people struggle against the power of well-heeled fat cats and authoritarian militarists. The most prominent of the latter is, of course, Coriolanus himself, brilliantly played in this production by Danforth Comins. This is a huge advance from Comins' last role as Orlando in As You Like It, competent as that was. His superb Coriolanus seeths with barely contained anger and contempt for the hoi polloi, and is truly frightening when those emotions spill out. The scene where Coriolanus reluctantly goes through the motions of appealing to the people for their popular votes to elect him consul was wonderful. In Comins' portrayal, it was clear that Coriolanus was sincerely trying to be a good politician even as his contempt for the whole process (and for the people whose votes he needed) prevented him from being successful at it.

Also outstanding in this cast were two stalwarts of the Ashland stage: Michael Elich as Aufidius, the Volcian leader who is Coriolanus' nemesis; and Robynn Rodriguez as Coriolanus' mother Volumnia. Both turned in exceptionally powerful performances, perfectly complementing and not overwhelming Comins' portrayal of the central role. All other members of the cast were excellent as well. The battle scenes were fantastically staged, particularly the intense one-on-one fights (with knives in this production) between Coriolanus and Aufidius. The impact of this production is greatly enhanced by the fact it is staged in the intimate New Theater, with the audience completely surrounding and practically in the midst of the action. Warning: watch out for splattered blood!

I will review Midsummer Night's Dream in my next post.