THE NEWYORKER, FEBRUARY 3, 2020 75
these two strands: there are awkwardly
choreographed scene changes performed
by the privates, and work songs that are
effective on their own but not necessar-
ily as the hinges they’re meant to be.
Blair Underwood plays Captain Rich-
ard Davenport, a black man who has
come to the base to sift through the facts.
He inspires derision from Captain Tay-
lor, who just can’t get used to the sight
of a black officer (not to mention one
who wears sleek dark aviators indoors),
and awed reverence (salutes and grins
and slyly happy repetitions of his title,
Captain) from the blacks who are gratified
to see a version of themselves represented
in so starchy a shirt, such an impeccable
tie. Davenport’s rank kicks up almost as
much chaos as Waters’s death.
Underwood is fine in the role, but his
is by far the cornier half of the proceedings.
There’s too much focus on his relation-
ship, and eventual fraught reconciliation,
with Taylor, and too little on what’s be-
hind the anguished howl he belts out
after he’s broken the case. There could
be a terser version of this show whose
focus is all on Waters, and on the inner
decline that accompanies his professional
advance. Grier plays the sergeant with a
pleasing near-incoherence, his splashes
of anger and despair always threatening
the arrival of fiercer waters. One minute
he charms and the next he bites. He flexes
his face into pantomimes of unspeakable
cruelty and turns his roly-poly body into
a harbinger of constant threat.
Waters’s final words are the first ones
we hear spoken: “They still hate you!” —
it’s the truth as a taunt. The range and
precision of Grier’s voice makes his upper
registers citrusy and substantial, and his
lower tones ragged, like the sound of a
blown-out subwoofer. The multivalence
of that voice, and of Grier’s entire per-
formance—now comic, now inviting
doom, and, finally, much too late, sod-
den with remorse—gives his moments
onstage their bitter, dismal truth: upward
motion means nothing when your ceil-
ing is somebody else’s floor.
“
T
imon of Athens,” William Shake-
speare and Thomas Middleton’s
brusque tale of hard luck, directed by
Simon Godwin at the Theatre for a
New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare
Center, is another disillusioned illustra-
tion of social position gone sour. Timon
(Kathryn Hunter) is a rich woman—
Hunter effortlessly pulls off the flipped
gender of the protagonist, originally
written as male—who is profligately
generous to her friends, and who learns
in the worst way that they won’t return
the favor. The show opens with Timon
hosting a grand dinner. Little do the
revellers know that their benefactor is
badly in debt. The good times are about
to shudder to a close.
The sanest among Timon’s guests is
the astringently philosophical Ape-
mantus (Arnie Burton), who so scorns
the display that he pulls a root vegeta-
ble and some water out of what looks
to be a lunch box and plops down at a
makeshift kids’ table. Despite his warn-
ings, and those of Timon’s loyal atten-
dants, she has spent her very last cent,
and, when the bill collectors come, the
rich partyers are no help. Soon, Timon,
repelled by Athens and its “affable
wolves,” is living on the city’s outskirts,
her once sparkling whites sooty and the
fun in her face gone.
The language in the latter half of the
play is full of the rhetorical device chi-
asmus. In a typical passage, a pair of
thieves come to Timon on her heath in
order to “wait for certain money”; in her
refusal, she inverts their syntax as well
as their wishes—if only “money were as
certain as your waiting.” These clever
phrasings are echoed in Hunter’s as-
tounding performance. She brings to
each dense moment a platter bejewelled
with ironies. There’s a wistful murmur
under her act as the happy socialite;
homelessness and crazily jaded misan-
thropy turn her into a kind of Catskills
comic. (One running bit is her patter
with the audience.) Hunter’s voice is
low, husky, and silkily resonant, a rare
instrument, and the more destitute her
Timon becomes the more ardently she
sings her syllables. Each of her fine ges-
tures expresses a paradox that sits be-
neath the text. Her eyes rage and then
melt, all in the space of a second.
There is neither up nor down, utter
failure nor lasting success, for Hunter’s
wind-tossed Timon—only the person
nearly naked, cast away and caught in
life’s centrifuge. No great nation, or bat-
talion, or sign of status is relevant to ex-
istence at the city’s peripheries: better
to search for higher loves and find a
friend or two.
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