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Bad boys
The Publick Hamlet, the Bridge Faustus
BY JEFFREY GANTZ



England’s Renaissance theater is full of shady characters, from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Edward II to Shakespeare’s Richard III and Iago and Macbeth and on to John Ford’s Giovanni (in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore), Thomas Middleton & William Rowley’s De Flores (in The Changeling), and John Webster’s Flamineo (in The White Devil). But the most famous bad boys have to be the title characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and they’re getting their respective two hours’ traffic on the stages of the Publick Theatre (through September 15) and the Bridge Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts (through September 6). The plays aren’t exactly congruent: Faustus wants knowledge of, or at least power over, the world, whereas Hamlet is wrestling with a domestic problem. But both men are in search of the truth, and neither play can survive a poor performance in the title role. And though in this case neither role is badly acted, neither play gets what it needs.

Certainly there’s nothing rotten on Soldiers Field Road, where Hamlet receives a typically solid, sensible Publick production. Janie E. Howland’s abstract multi-level brown-planked set is a variation on the one she did for the company’s As You Like It earlier this summer. The costumes are reasonable (but why so much leather?), the acting is decent, and there’s no out-to-lunch concept (like the clown noses of Shakespeare and Company’s current Henry V). But Hamlet has to be Everyman in his quest to understand the existence of evil in his nearest and dearest, and Shakespeare’s Everyman, as I understand him, is a creature of potential grace and light. Publick artistic director Diego Arcinegas both directs and plays the title role here; his Hamlet starts off sulky and sullied and proceeds to snide, smarmy, supercilious, and sarcastic, as if there were no truth that could set him free. This is a Marlovian Hamlet who masticates his lines because he can find no redemption in them: " To be or not to be " is weightless in its " not, " and " Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ is tossed off as if sensuousness were just another word. It’s all acted where it should be felt.

The supporting cast is one-dimensional. Bern Budd’s Polonius is cogent in his sententious single-mindedness, but a Polonius whom the audience merely laughs at is a wasted opportunity. Although Steve Barkhimer’s Claudius is affecting in his one monologue, he otherwise seems unconflicted by guilt, so it’s hard to get caught up in him. Nancy E. Carroll is a model of line delivery as Gertrude, but she’s emotionally recessed and has no chemistry with Claudius. Tommy Day Carey’s Laertes is all gusto and anger; the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Jason Myatt and Gerard Slattery are objects of ridicule. Val Sullivan’s Ophelia does passably well in her exchanges with Hamlet and exceedingly well in her mad scene, where her paratactical phrasing, all jolts and jumps, expresses the measure of Ophelia’s distractedness. Billy Meleady’s Gravedigger is a model of natural expressiveness; I wonder what he’d have been like in a bigger part.

For all that John Faustus is every bit as large a character as Hamlet, he doesn’t appear on stage anywhere near as often. Although Christopher Marlowe was a great dramatist, he was more literal than Shakespeare and more of his time. Touching on contemporary issues of Thomism versus Neoplatonism and Protestantism versus Catholicism, Doctor Faustus was a hit in Elizabethan/Jacobean England but doesn’t strike many sparks in the 21st century. Can there be Hell without Heaven, Marlowe asks? Why does Faustus, who seems committed to knowledge, make such poor use of the 24 years that Lucifer grants him? Why is Mephistopheles so stingy with answers — is there a God who knows more than the Devil? And what kind of God would let Faustus go to Hell?

Those are questions that the bare-bones Bridge Theatre, which has given Boston excellent stagings of William B. Yeats and Brian Friel, is ill-equipped to answer in Michael F. Walker’s direction of the earlier 1604 version. The Bridge’s two best actors appear in the lead roles, and Jeffery Jones, his feet cloven (toes tied together) and his head swaying snake-like, is a plausible Mephistopheles, especially in his gargoyle poses. But Todd Hearon is all thought, and monotonic to boot — with his elbow-patched tweed jacket and callow, frat-boy manner, he’s a Shakespearean Faustus, albeit with the same superciliousness that mars Arciniegas’s Hamlet. I didn’t believe for a moment that this was a 16th-century intellectual. The rest of the cast is similarly stranded, though Steve Rotolo gives volume and weight to Robin in the comic sections (which Marlowe almost certainly didn’t write). It’s brave of the Bridge to go where the American Repertory Theatre and the Huntington Theatre Company apparently fear to tread, but you need angels to pull off Marlowe.

Issue Date: August 29 - September 5, 2002
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