I recently saw
back-to-back two plays whose marketing makes them look like one-woman shows.
Fortunately, both actually provide a diverse cast telling a story far more
interesting than the one I had originally anticipated.
Roundabout
Theatre Company's production of Theresa Rebeck's new play Bernhardt/Hamlet plays up the star power of actress Janet McTeer,
who portrays the divine Sarah Bernhardt. See one of the great actors living
play one of the greatest performers ever in what is probably the greatest role
of all time! What more could you need?
Well, whether the
play needs anything more, it gives us
so very, very much more than that. For one thing, the supporting cast of
Bernhardt's production of Hamlet is
led by the great actor Constant Coquelin, played by Dylan Baker. Coquelin is
more than willing to allow Berhardt to take center stage, despite the fact that
he himself has played the role of Hamlet numerous times in the provinces.
Today, Coquelin
is most famous for originating the title role in Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac, and Rostand himself
appears in Bernhardt/Hamlet, played
by Jason Butler Harner. Rostand is working on a new play, but Bernhardt's antics
keep interrupting his writing. The audience can probably guess that the interrupted
masterpiece is Cyrano, and Rebeck
gives us a duel between two great artists, Berhardt trying to give a great performance,
and Rostand trying to write a great play, both of them in the shadow of the
great Shakespeare, who looms in the background like the ghost of Hamlet's
father.
As if that weren't
enough artists for one play, Rebeck also introduces us to the Czech painter and
theatre poster designer Alphonse Mucha, played by Matthew Saldivar. Mucha is
deservedly famous for his Art Nouveau posters featuring Bernhardt, and his
poster for Hamlet was one of his most
iconic creations. Perhaps the most memorable performance in the play, however,
is by Ito Aghayere, who plays Rostand's wife Rosamond. The historical Rosemonde
Gérard has come to be known as a rather second-rate poet in spite of her fame
in her own lifetime, and Rebeck turns her into a portrait of a woman determined
to make sure others create great art even if she cannot create it herself.
After being
delighted by Bernhardt/Hamlet, I went
with a little bit of trepidation to New York Theatre Workshop to see Heidi
Schreck's new play What the Constitution
Means to Me. I loved Schreck's Creature
and There Are No More Big Secrets,
but the last play I saw at NYTW was an unimaginative piece of garbage, so I was
rather afraid I would be disappointed. Fortunately, I was not. Though Schreck's
latest work doesn't have the supernatural elements of some of her earlier
pieces, it is filled with a magical theatricality that gives it a similar air
of the uncanny.
What the Constitution Means to Me is inspired by Schreck's experience as a
teenager traveling to various towns to enter contests by the Veterans of
Foreign Wars in which high school students gave speeches about the U.S.
Constitution. Schreck's mother was a debate coach, and she created a bit of a
racket for her daughter, driving large distances so she could enter what were
supposed to be regional competitions for scholarship money. It worked, and
Schreck was able to pay for her college education with her winnings.
This all sounds
like a set-up for a one-woman show, but again, the play provides us with
something much more unexpected, and altogether delightful. Schreck is
accompanied onstage by actor Mike Iveson, who plays a VFW moderator giving her
warning signs when she approaches her time limit and ringing a bell at the end
of sections of her speech. Later, Iveson speaks directly to the audience not as
a character, but as himself, as Schreck does throughout the piece. Both speak
from the heart about not just the troubled history of our nation, but their own
troubled personal histories, emphasizing how the personal and the political
intersect.
