Two classics this week—one the stage adaptation of a beloved American novel and its iconic film version, the other a classical tale that barely squeaks into the Shakespearean canon. Both productions, now playing on area stages, are interesting, instructive and, for different reasons, infuriating.
There are two main things wrong with the Hartford Stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird: the script and the star. Harper Lee's 1960 novel is, of course, a staple of schoolroom reading lists, and the film version is a classic in its own right. The story of racial injustice in a small southern town in the 1930s, the murder trial of a falsely accused black man that pits the unassuming attorney Atticus Finch against the prejudices of his town and times, the mysterious recluse in the scary old house next door, and the little girl who gains lifelong lessons from these experiences, have become part of the American psyche.
The novel is narrated by the girl, nicknamed Scout, looking back on that episode as a grown woman, and we see the characters from her point of view. But in both the screen version and Christopher Sergel's stage adaptation, which closely follows the screenplay, that perspective is lost—notwithstanding Scout's voice-over in the movie and an onstage grown-up Scout as a between-scenes narrator in the play.
And this shift in perspective, along with the inevitable condensing of the novel's scope, makes the stage Mockingbird into a story that treats with themes of racism but is all about the white people. The black characters are reduced to background figures or plot points. This is particularly galling because Mockingbird is this season's "black play" at Hartford Stage, which annually—usually during Black History Month—makes a point of staging an African-American-centered production. Putting this play in that slot smacks of thoughtless tokenism.
Most of the performances in Michael Wilson's production are effective, including the three principal children—Olivia Scott (as Scout), Henry Hodges and Andrew Shipman. But two of the leads are startlingly miscast.
Atticus is played by the minor movie star Matthew Modine, who has the unappealing task of trying to overcome the audience's image of Gregory Peck's defining performance in the film. Unfortunately, his stiff, unconvincing rendition of Atticus only reinforces our memories. There's a cool abruptness in his manner that suggests resentment more than diffidence, and his summing-up to the jury—a dramatic high point of the piece—is delivered as a scolding harangue.
In what must have seemed like a cute casting coup, Hallie Foote plays grown-up Scout, the play's narrator. She is the daughter of Horton Foote, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of the film version, and a fine actress (she'll also be in Hartford Stage's season-closer, Dividing the Estate, her father's latest play). But she's all wrong here. Her Deep South twang is hard on the ears and her unaccountably sour demeanor, almost glaring at the audience, pulls us away from the story instead of drawing us in.
To Kill a Mockingbird: through April 4, Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford, (860) 527-5151, www.hartfordstage.org.
Stumbling through Adversity
Pericles is one of Shakespeare's least admired and most rarely performed works. And for good reason. It's a jumble of styles, places and moods (scholars agree the Bard didn't even write large parts of it) and defies most directorial attempts to make it whole. That's the case here, too.
UMass graduate directing student Shawn LaCount and his dramaturg, Liana Thompson, have cut and tightened the wildly episodic script and focused some passages to good effect. But there are also some very odd choices that confuse things rather than illuminating them.
The play revolves around the Greek prince Pericles who, in a series of improbable adventures, finds and loses and finds a wife and daughter. The script opens with echoes of Oedipus Rex—incest and a fatal riddle—goes on to unfold an odyssey of unrelated travels, detours into a damsel-in-distress melodrama complete with pirates(!) and whoremongers, and resolves in a family reunion that foreshadows Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. The script self-consciously bows to its 14th-century literary source, the Confessio Amantis of John Gower, by casting the poet himself as narrator.
Thompson and LaCount have conflated two roles—Gower and the lord who rescues Pericles' presumed-dead wife from a coffin at sea (don't ask)—and made them female. But the high-flown faux-medieval Gower figure doesn't mesh with the practical, sympathetic lord/lady, and makes the latter's appearance in the final scene, set in a temple of the goddess Diana, simply confusing.
Set designer Sean Cote has given the sprawling plotline an odd-looking but effective all-purpose setting that contains royal courts and windswept seas, and has rendered Shakespeare's (or someone's) series of "dumbshows" into impressively mobile shadow puppet sequences.
LaCount juggles a huge cast of undergraduates and grad students and even a couple of faculty members, with predictably uneven results. Andrew Ferlo brings a bracing energy—and considerable stamina—to the title role, and several of the supporting actors give admirable turns. But the director's effort to make the Shakespearean speeches clear and to create narrative excitement tends toward sheer volume.
The impression I left with was of a brave attempt to navigate a dramatic minefield by steamrollering through it instead of threading it respectfully. Much of the blame must go to the UMass Theater Department, which thrust the play into the lap of this director whose strength is edgy modernism, almost, it would seem, as a dare. The impulse to "stretch" a student with a daunting challenge sometimes works. But when the challenge is not only to make a stylistic shift but to wrestle with a deeply flawed script, the director ends up like Pericles, lashed by fortune and stumbling from one adversity to another."
Pericles: through March 7, Rand Theater, UMass, (413) 545-2511, 800-999-UMAS or www.umass.edu/fac.
