The Shakescene

It is a bad year for the Philistine fringe. For summer theatergoers who cannot stand Shakespeare, avoiding him is all but impossible in this season of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. There seem to be even more Hamlets in the country than Smiths. Herewith a selective survey of Shakespearean productions in the U.S. and Canada.

sbASHLAND, ORE. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is the oldest in the U.S. (1935). In the remote forests, casting has to be done by questionnaire rather than audition, but Producer-Director Angus Bowmer has in the past discov ered actors like Hollywood's George Peppard (Breakfast at Tiffany's) and Off Broadway's Joyce Ebert (The Trojan Women). This summer he has a witty, elegant Portia, a sunlit Viola, and a really arachnid Regan, all in the person of Elixabeth Huddle, a 25-year-old ac tress from San Francisco. Richard Coe, drama critic of the Washington Post, recently came away from Ashland pro claiming her "the finest young undiscovered actress in America."

The Oregon group does Henry VI, Part I as well as Lear, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, and does them all with fluid skill. Rigorously Elizabethan in style, the company offers no intermissions and performs in a simulacrum of 17th century London's Fortune Theater. "This is a stepping-stone between the academic and professional theaters," says Bowmer. "We use Shakespeare because we think he's a damned good theater man."

sbATLANTA. The Southern Shakespeare Festival occurs in a converted Baptist church before audiences that have sometimes achieved levels of unsophistication reminiscent of the sort of people who watched Shakespeare's plays when they were originally performed. "He went thataway," a bloodthirsty young man once shouted over the footlights to Macbeth, indicating where the thane might corner King Duncan. But this year the Atlanta group has a really outstanding Hamlet in Jonathan Phelps, whose considerable technical facility is matched by a scholarly understanding of his subject, resulting in a performance of unusual balance.

sbHIGHLAND PARK, ILL The Ravinia Shakespeare Company may prove to be the best performing in the U.S. this summer, but this remains to be seen, since its opening night is Aug. 18. The group consists of 25 English Shakespearean actors, many of them graduates of the Old Vic. Assembled in London by Peter Dews, who produced and directed the BBC's An Age of Kings, the company will give 52 performances in the open air of Ravinia Park. King Henry V and Hamlet will be played by Robert Hardy, who played Laertes to Richard Burton's Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1953-54 and became one of Burton's favorite friends. The Ravinia Shakespeare Company has been imported as a result of the efforts of a Chicago advertising man, who thinks of Anacin by day and dreams of anapaests at night.

sbLAKEWOOD, OHIO. The Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival has a fine Hamlet too, notable mainly for the breadth of its excellence. Hamlet himself is adequately played by Dennis Longwell, who finished at Yale four years ago, has earned a graduate degree in dramatic art at Northwestern, and has worked two seasons with the excellent Equity repertory company at Princeton. Perhaps too close in age to the academic world, he still has a lot of living to do before he can become a fully rounded Hamlet. Mario Siletti's Polonius is consummately aeolian. Emery Battis, once of Broadway (Winged Victory) and now a history professor at Rutgers, plays King Claudius with all the high colors of evil, villainy and cowardice that the role could possibly be made to display.

The Great Lakes group also does Henry VI (a compression of all three parts), Antony and Cleopatra, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew. The consistent high level of its productions is the achievement of Director Arthur Lithgow, long a professional man-about-Shakespeare, whose players are always well-drilled and speak their lines as if they understand the characters they are playing.

sbLOS ANGELES. Morris Carnovsky's King Lear, first seen at Stratford, Conn., last summer, has become an institution in itself, said to be even better than Paul Scofield's. Carnovsky-Lear is presently mounted in a straightforward and well-paced production staged by John Houseman for Hollywood's Pilgrimage Theater. The cast as a whole fully supports Carnovsky, and the outdoor setting is stunning. He shouts, "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!" at the sheer parapets of the Hollywood Hills--at least they turn into sheer parapets under the magical lighting of Broadway's Jean Rosenthal.

sbLOUISVILLE. Like New York, Louisville has free Shakespeare in its Central Park, with 1,500 permanent seats and open space for folding chairs, stools and blankets. Equity actors are the nucleus of the Carriage House Shakespearean Repertory Company, which this summer is doing The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, As You Like It and Julius Caesar. So far, the Courier-Journal has described the group's work as "vital," while the Times has limited its praise, saying only that "several scenes were skillfully, imaginatively staged."

sbMINNEAPOLIS. Given the tendency of Director Tyrone Guthrie to bejazz his productions, the present Henry V at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater might have been expected to whip out a .45 at Agincourt. But he does not--and Henry V is a palpable hit (TIME, May 22), more memorable for Guthrie's overall staging than for the at times unkingly performance of George Grizzard.

sbNEW YORK CITY. Richard Burton's Hamlet will continue to run for two more weeks on Broadway; during its extended run, Burton's standby, Robert Burr, played Hamlet for Joseph Papp's free Shakespeare group in Central Park in a production that, with Julie Harris as Ophelia, outdistanced the one on Broadway in nearly every respect save the performance of Burton himself. Papp's group is still doing a successful, broad-laugh presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream from a collapsible mobile theater touring the five Boroughs* (TIME, July 10), and at present in Central Park an excellent production of Othello, with James Earl Jones as a hip-swiveling, primitive Moor. The staging is bold. In the bedroom scene, for example, Desdemona (Julienne Marie) does not just wait to be strangled. She makes a desperate dash to get away. Othello chases her, catches her when she trips on a flight of stairs, carries her, struggling, back to the bed, where he falls on her and chokes off her life.

sbSAN DIEGO. In Balboa Park, the replica Globe Theater contains productions this summer of Measure for Measure. Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing. The first is notable chiefly because the actors wear codpieces, but San Diego audiences do not comprehend the play's intricate fornications. The second features a good performance by Charles Macaulay, a discovery from television. And the third is memorable because it was directed by B. Iden Payne, 82, a formidable figure in professional and bush theater for more than 60 years. His Much Ado is literal, straightforward, underdirected and onedimensional, which will indicate to any former Payne student that the master has not lost his grip. Some of the actors in Much Ado strike poses like various Barrymores. Small wonder, B. Iden Payne directed Ethel in Declasse and John in Justice.

sbSTRATFORD, CONN. This is the tenth season for Stratford-upon-Housatonic, which once tried to enrich its box office with stars like Jack Palance and Robert Ryan, apparently hoping that audiences would confuse qualitative accomplishment with mere surprise that the stars could say the lines at all. Then in 1962 the Ford Foundation gave $503,000 to Stratford to help finance a wintertime school in speech, dance, fencing and so on, designed to develop a permanent company with all the depth, facility, and technical skill of an English group.

To some extent this paid off in Morris Carnovsky's 1963 Lear, but for the most part the American Stratford is still disappointingly inept. Someone named Tom Sawyer is playing Hamlet there this year. The poor fellow may very well know how to get a fence painted, but he certainly has no idea how to sit on one. Left alone on the stage for soliloquies, he is wooden, stiff-legged and ill at ease. His fencing lessons have resulted in a duel scene that might have been fought between Mrs. Warren Harding and the lady in Ohio. Considering the Gertrude, the Laertes and the Ophelia that surround him, Sawyer is at least letting no one down. The highlight of the production occurs when a procession of supernumeraries enters bearing long poles topped by huge, flaming, antlered skulls. There is no other fire in this Hamlet.

Stratford's Richard III is equally unsettling. As Douglas Watson plays him, Richard is monstrously twitchy but uncomplicatedly gleeful, a modern rather than a medieval sicknik, never giving the sense that he really loves evil for its own sake. The company's Much Ado About Nothing, on the other hand, is the best evening for sale at Stratford this summer. Riotous and briskly paced, with leafy sets, garden-party costumes and lighthearted acting, it goes some distance toward being the dish of sherbet that Much Ado should be.

sbSTRATFORD, ONT. A Shakespeare memorial summer seems an odd time for the Stratford Shakespearean Festival Foundation of Canada to present two plays by other authors, but that is what is happening in Ontario, where Wycherley's The Country Wife opened early this week and Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is already playing. King Lear and Richard II are playing too. John Colicos. who looks much like Paul Scofield in the role, is an able and imperial Lear in a production skillfully but somewhat sentimentally staged by Stratford's Artistic Director Michael Langham. The star of the summer, however, is William Hutt, 44, who is probably the best of Canada's actors. A deeply trained Shakespearean, he novelly plays Richard with strength at the start, gradually shading him into weakness. He is also candid about the shortcomings of earlier actors in the role. Alec Guinness, he says, "was impressive without being definitive." Michael Redgrave "played it like Barbara Stanwyck with a mustache." Gielgud? "I guess he thought Richard was a neurasthenic who could cry at the drop of a crown." As for the play itself, in which Richard's queen is a young child, Hutt says: "It out-Humberts Humbert. It should be retitled Take Her, She's Nine"

sbWASHINGTON, D.c. Begun three years ago, the Shakespeare Summer Festival is staged on the sloping lawns that lead up to the Washington Monument, and is in itself something of a monument to the determination of a housewife named Ellie Chamberlain Galidas, whose husband is a General Electric systems analyst. She decided that the capital should have free, outdoor, summer Shakespeare, and she brought it off. Her actors are partly Equity and partly amateur, plus 20 ballerinas from the Washington School of the Ballet. They do one play a season, and this summer's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is just right for its setting --full of pageantry and horseplay and Mack Sennett chases.

* Where it has run into some local competition. In Brooklyn, the Orthodox Jewish Shakespeare Troupe of the Menorah Home and Hospital for the Aged and Infirm has its annual summer production too. This year it was Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, 76, wearing a blue gown she made herself, addressed the audience at the end, saying: "Did I do bad? I wanted my husband to be a somebody." Said the 82-year-old Macbeth to his lady: "A king I had to be? A 15-room castle wasn't good enough for you?''

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