TT: What’s up, Bard?

Direct from the Berkshires to The Wall Street Journal, today’s drama column is devoted to Shakespeare & Company’s Twelfth Night and Barrington Stage’s A Streetcar Named Desire, both of which are excellent. Here’s an excerpt.
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Did William Shakespeare invent screwball comedy? Not exactly, but “Twelfth Night,” among the dizziest and most farce-like of his romantic comedies, bears a definite family resemblance to the damn-the-torpedoes craziness of such classic examples of the genre as “Bringing Up Baby” and “The Lady Eve.” Nor does Jonathan Croy’s staging for Shakespeare & Company seek to paper over the similarities. Instead, Mr. Croy and his cast revel in them, hurtling through “Twelfth Night” with knockabout abandon and flinging laughter in all directions. No matter how rough a day you may have had at the office, a visit to Lenox to see this production will send you home with an ear-to-ear smile on your face.
While this is the first time that Mr. Croy has directed a mainstage play for Shakespeare & Company, he starred in the company’s brilliant versions of Tom Stoppard’s “Rough Crossing” (2007) and Charles Morey’s “The Ladies Man” (2008), and his “Twelfth Night” crackles with the lunatic energy of those full-tilt farces. I don’t know when I’ve seen anything funnier than his staging of the swordfight between Viola (Merritt Janson) and the fatuous Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Ryan Winkles), a piece of slapstick so precisely calculated and perfectly realized that it comes close to stopping the show. Almost as ludicrous is the near-demented lust with which the exquisite Countess Olivia (Elizabeth Raetz) chases the hapless Viola (who is disguised as a boy) all over the stage, eventually nailing her with an eye-popping kiss that clearly causes its recipient to reconsider the strength of her commitment to heterosexuality.
At the same time, much of the strength of this production lies in the transparent simplicity of its presentation. The open Elizabethan-style stage of the Founders’ Theatre is decorated with nothing more than six pennants and a catwalk. The costumes are colorful and traditional. No tricky directorial concepts are sprayed over the text–Mr. Croy is content to let Shakespeare be Shakespeare–and the actors respond by giving of their best, with results that are not merely funny but also emotionally true….
Now that I’ve seen two productions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” directed by women, I’ve come to the belated conclusion that the play makes perfect dramatic sense–when a woman is at the helm. Julianne Boyd, who directed Barrington Stage Company’s new revival of Tennessee Williams’ best-known play, has taken the same straightforward approach that Bonnie J. Monte brought to the version that she mounted for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey last season, with equally rewarding results. Blanche DuBois, not Stanley Kowalski, is the star of Ms. Boyd’s show, and Marin Mazzie, like Laila Robins before her, gives us a Blanche you can believe in, a middle-aged woman who knows that she’s still sexy but can’t accept the earthy consequences of her fleshly longings. Christopher Innvar is no less believable as Stanley, playing him not as Superman in a bowling shirt but as the kind of traveling-salesman type you could imagine meeting in a bar…
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Read the whole thing here.