TT: Eat love die

Shakespeare & Company, the summer theater festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, has become one of my most eagerly awaited annual out-of-town reviewing stops. To see why, take a look at my drama column in today’s Wall Street Journal, in which I report on three of the company’s ten summer shows, a new play by Joan Ackermann called The Taster and a pair of Shakespeare productions, Richard III and The Winter’s Tale. Here’s an excerpt.
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“The Taster” is one of those plays in which the members of the cast double as characters from the past and present. Tom O’Keefe and Maureen O’Flynn play Gregorio, a 16th-century Basque king, and his unhappy Queen Mariana (he longs to sire a son but has fallen out of love with his wife). They also play Henry and Claudia, a modern-day New York couple whose marriage is on the rocks (he’s a depressed ex-banker who is living off his wife’s modest income as an opera singer while attempting to translate a forgotten play about the plight of King Gregorio and Queen Mariana). Rocco Sisto is the title character, one of Gregorio’s food tasters–he specializes in the detection of slow-acting poisons–whom Mariana seduces in the hope of passing off their bastard child as the king’s heir.
If all this sounds impossibly tangled, don’t despair. Not only has Ms. Ackermann woven her two plots together so adroitly as to recall Jorge Luis Borges at his most virtuosic, but Tina Packer, the director, has staged “The Taster” with such scrupulous attentiveness to period detail that you always know where you are and what time (so to speak) it is. The dialogue blends quiet, uncloying lyricism (“The back of her neck smells like my childhood”) with comic flashes that crackle like summer lightning…
John Douglas Thompson, who took New York by storm last year in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of “The Emperor Jones,” is very much the star of “Richard III,” in which he gives yet another timber-shivering performance as the hunchbacked beast who’ll kill anyone, up to and including his brother and his wife, in order to set England’s crown upon his head. Mr. Thompson’s pellucid diction is a known quantity among American connoisseurs of classical acting–he makes every syllable shine–but even those who have seen his Othello will be impressed anew by the individuality with which he makes manifest the monstrous urges of Shakespeare’s nastiest piece of work. What I liked best about his interpretation was its grisly humor…
As for “The Winter’s Tale,” which appears to be well on the way to becoming the most frequently performed of Shakespeare’s less popular plays, Kevin G. Coleman’s wonderfully balanced staging makes each tricky change of mood feel as natural as the turning of a page. Jonathan Epstein, who plays the self-laceratingly jealous King Leontes, starts off in a low, intimate key, then unleashes his dark fury so persuasively that you almost want to look away from the stage….
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Read the whole thing here.