THE NEWYORKER, AUGUST 19, 2019 69
obvious: Cry. Feel. It’s true that a lot of
drama these days has a cold-fish qual-
ity. Many newer playwrights aren’t much
concerned with plucking the strings of
the heart; when they try to, the inci-
sion is made in the head, not the chest,
and the operation goes on perilously
from there. But, to the extent that this
is a problem, lachrymose exercises like
these are more cause than cure.
Grief belongs to all of us. It surfaces
much more easily than the other feel-
ings that theatre helps us to clarify and,
if we will it, to expunge. And so its treat-
ment onstage requires special care. You
have lost and so have I. O.K., fine. Tell
me something about it that I’ve never
heard: how it looks and sounds, or how
to carry it a bit further. (Earlier this year,
“Grief Is the Thing with Feathers,” Enda
Walsh’s adaptation of Max Porter’s début
novel of grief after the loss of a mother,
was all over the place, but at least, I
thought, it had the courage to explode
into total chaos.)
One indication of the problems of
“Sea Wall / A Life” is the set. Off to the
side, there’s a piano (the Chekhovian
kind: all night you sit there hoping against
hope; a very famous song gets mentioned
and you draw a breath; then, toward the
end, Gyllenhaal inches in its direction
and you mutter, “No-no-no-please-no”),
and behind it a high brick wall with a
ledge like a little roof. Plants push out
from a few cracks. It’s... maybe an alley-
way? A rough piano bar? An intense
comedy club’s back wall? Whatever it
is—I’ve got nothing against abstraction—
it’s emblematic of the show’s unfulfilled
hope of making its monologues rise to
the level of watchable drama. Sometimes
Gyllenhaal and Sturridge interact with
the audience; there’s some funny play
with the lights. But, seriously, what is
this? It feels weird to take the trouble to
go to the theatre just to watch Jake Gyl-
lenhaal do a glorified audition. I mean,
he’s got the part! Now what?
I
found myself thinking about a pair of
recently deceased Republicans, John
McCain and George H. W. Bush, as I
watched the Public’s new rendition of
Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” directed by
Daniel Sullivan at Central Park’s Dela-
corte. Caius Martius, the titular hero,
played with cerebral, kinetic aplomb by
the excellent Jonathan Cake, has Mc-
Cain’s aversion to conventional manners
and Bush’s hapless common touch. Like
both of them, he’s attracted to politics
for reasons he’d be hard pressed to express.
His mother, Volumnia (a harsh, cutting,
wonderful Kate Burton), certainly wants
him to assume the Roman consulship.
Caius relishes battle; it’s riveting to
see him rushing onward, coated with
somebody else’s blood, ready to meet the
Volscians, the invading enemies of his
people, in battle, reinforcements be
damned. After he leads the victory in
the Volscian city of Corioli, he’s renamed
in remembrance of the event and put up
for the top job. His highborn friends—
including the funny Menenius Agrippa,
played by Teagle F. Bougere, who makes
Elizabethan English sound easy-peasy,
the smoothest conversation—try to coax
him out of war mode and into the hearts
of the people.
Thanks to Sullivan’s colorful imagi-
nation, all the action takes place in a post-
apocalyptic future. The visual language
here—rusted metal, bright, thrown-to-
gether clothes, the bowing trees in the
Park—owes something to the classic
music video for Tupac Shakur’s “Cali-
fornia Love.” There’s a food shortage in
Rome, and the people, led by two rabble-
rousing tribunes ( Jonathan Hadary and
Enid Graham), are particularly peeved
with the anti-populist Coriolanus, who,
making the hatred reciprocal, wishes to
“pluck out the multitudinous tongue.”
He wants power but, unabashed aristo-
crat that he is, can’t force himself to do
the song and dance that democracy needs.
In a nice touch by the costume de-
signer, Kaye Voyce, the commoners wear
red-white-and-green flag pins that imply
a connection between ancient Rome and
modern-day Italy—where popular opin-
ion has recently placed an immigrant-
bashing proto-Fascist government in
power. In late July, some hundred and
fifty migrants, probably hoping to skirt
Italy’s inhuman immigration restrictions,
drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of
Libya. When Coriolanus is driven into
exile and, bent on revenge, teams up with
his former sworn foe, Tullus Aufidius—
played convincingly by Louis Cancel-
mi—a downbeat message bubbles up
into view: Come war or peace, feast or
hunger, slow decline or eco-disaster, there
will always be politicians, and they will
mostly be wolves.
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