The New York Times - 06.08.2019

C2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019

Theater

“NATIVE SON,”the 1939 Richard Wright nov-
el, is a murder story without a mystery. In
the first minutes of this stage adaptation by
Nambi E. Kelley, we watch Bigger Thomas,
a 20-year-old African-American man, suffo-
cate the white daughter of his employer.
Here’s the twist: We’re all guilty.
Admired and controversial since its pub-
lication, “Native Son” codes Bigger as both
a perpetrator and a victim. He is a bully and
a coward, roundly unsympathetic. But he is
also a casualty of systemic racism. When he
looks in the mirror, he sees what the white
world, or perhaps even a more diverse con-
temporary audience, sees, which is, in Ms.
Kelley’s script, “a black rat sonofabitch.”
In the Acting Company’s production, di-
rected by Seret Scott at the Duke on 42nd
Street, Ms. Kelley, in a riff on W. E. B. Du
Bois’s concept of double consciousness, has
dramatized that mirror. Wherever Bigger
goes, a shadow self, identified in the pro-
gram as the Black Rat (Jason Bowen, in-
sinuating), follows, stoking Bigger’s anger
and fear, and reminding him that, as a black
man, he will never be accorded full
humanity.
How humane is Bigger? In an essay,
“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright described

basing Bigger on boys and men he had

known, men who felt estranged from reli-

gion and community and attracted to the

glitter of the white world — with no legal or

moral way to satisfy that attraction. Wright

wrote that he wanted Bigger’s story to “be

so hard and so deep” that readers “would

have to face it without the consolation of

tears.”

You won’t cry during this fluid, vigorous

and somewhat nonlinear adaptation of the

novel, which neatly intercuts violent exter-

nal events with Bigger’s equally violent in-

ternal landscape. But you won’t feel that

you’ve faced anything particularly harrow-

ing, either.

Raised in poverty, Bigger (a forceful if

somewhat opaque Galen Ryan Kane) lives

with his mother, sister and brother in a sin-

gle rat-infested room. He is hired by Mrs.

Dalton (Laura Gragtmans), the blind wife

of a real estate tycoon, to chauffeur her

giddy daughter, Mary (Rebekah Brock-

man). Helping a drunken Mary to bed and

helping himself to her semiconscious body,

he covers her face with a pillow to quiet her,

killing her. He conceals her body. When it is

discovered, he flees into the oppressive

whiteness of a snowstorm.

Bigger remains a fascinatingly ambiva-

lent character, but this “Native Son” is so

brisk and so film-noir stylish that you are

more likely to applaud its theatrics than feel

shaken by its implications. Some scenes,

like Bigger’s subsequent murder of his girl-

friend, are over almost before they begin.

(Ms. Scott and Ms. Kelley don’t soften the

book’s misogyny, but neither do they ex-

plore it.) The trial and its speechifying have

been eliminated, a move toward concision.

Yet those speeches are among the ele-

ments that shift the novel from the particu-

lar to the general, from the story of one mar-

ginalized man to a story about all margin-

alized men, rendering it a work, as the critic

Irving Howe wrote, that brought out into

the open “the hatred, fear and violence that

have crippled and may yet destroy our cul-

ture.” As part of that culture, we in the audi-

ence should probably be made to feel more

culpable than we do. This play — which the

Acting Company has paired with Shake-

speare’s “Measure for Measure,” also about

injustice — makes Bigger’s story fleet and

lively. It also makes it smaller.

ALEXIS SOLOSKI THEATER REVIEW

An Old Hatred, Still Without the Consolation of Tears

The theatrics of this fluid

adaptation of Richard Wright’s

novel upstage its implications.

Galen Ryan Kane, foreground,

and Anthony Bowden in the

Acting Company’s production

of “Native Son.”

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

Native Son

Through Aug. 24 at the Duke

on 42nd Street, Manhattan;

646-223-3010,

theactingcompany.org.

Running time: 1 hour

30 minutes.

But if you look closely at his motives —
something Coriolanus would never do him-
self — he’s not exactly what you’d call noble,
unless you mean patrician (which he is by
birth). He’s not propelled to martial glory
by love of country, or a moral code, or even
self-advancement.
Coriolanus is, to put it bluntly, addicted to
war. Without it, he has no idea who he is.
When we see him standing tall on a smoking
battlefield, drenched from head to toe in the
blood of his adversaries, we realize it’s the
only time he looks fulfilled and at ease. He’s
as happy as a spoiled 2-year-old with the
sandbox all to himself.
Scholars of Shakespeare have often been
a bit perplexed by this late tragedy, written
after the concentrated period of creativity
that produced “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and
“Antony and Cleopatra.” Unlike the central
characters of those masterpieces, Coriola-
nus has little time for cosmic reflection or
soul-searching soliloquies.

Harold Bloom, in “Shakespeare: The In-
vention of the Human,” went so far as to say,
“Inwardness, Shakespeare’s largest legacy
to the Western self, vanishes in Coriolanus.”
He describes the character as having “very
little mind, and no imagination whatso-
ever.”
Yet problematic, easy-to-loathe charac-
ters from the canon bring out the best in the
director Daniel Sullivan, who steered Al Pa-
cino to a Tony nomination as Shylock in a
“Merchant of Venice” that began life in Cen-
tral Park nine years ago. With “Coriolanus,”
Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Cake send off thrilling
depth charges by probing a titanic figure
who is afraid notto live entirely on the sur-
face.
Mr. Sullivan hasn’t neglected the bigger
picture or failed to tap the play’s power as a
mirror of contemporary anxieties. He has
set his “Coriolanus” in the tomorrow of our
nightmares. Beowulf Boritt’s ingeniously
transformative set conjures a terrain of
makeshift scrapheap citadels.
Lighted in polluted tones by Japhy Wei-
deman — with costumes by Kaye Voyce
that look as if they might rot off the body —
this landscape brings to mind the blasted,
post-apocalypse world of the “Mad Max”
movies. Don’t imagine, though, that living
in limbo has brought people together.
On the contrary. Led by two scheming,
self-serving tribunes (Jonathan Hadary
and Enid Graham, wonderfully craven), the
common folk of Rome are a fickle, fearful lot
whose allegiances change with the wind.
The ruling class of senators and generals,
who pander to the crowd, are no better. Like
their latter-day equivalents, they know that
when it comes to controlling the masses, op-
tics are everything.
Which means that their star soldier
presents a serious problem. Caius Martius
Coriolanus makes no secret of his contempt
for the proletariat, “whose breath I hate as
the reek o’ th’ rotten fens.” His refusal to
court their good will — and bless his heart,
he does try, but it’s just not in him — leads to
his banishment. This in turn triggers a re-
versal of fortune for his country, as a venge-
ful Coriolanus switches his allegiance to
Rome’s greatest enemy, the Volscians.
Such an account of nation-destroying fac-
tionalism hardly sounds like fun summer-
time fare in these days of a dangerously dis-
United States. Yet this “Coriolanus” is the
most purely entertaining one I’ve seen.
That’s not so much because of the pictur-
esque battle sequences (Steve Rankin is the
fight director), or any suspense about their
outcome. And it should be said that the pro-
duction’s big, scene-closing moments, in-

cluding its finale, rarely land with full im-

pact.

But more than any Shakespeare in the

Park offering of recent years, “Coriolanus”

combines insight and showmanship with a

clarity that makes you forget you’re listen-

ing to Elizabethan English. All the cast

members — including a gimlet-eyed Louis

Cancelmi as Coriolanus’s Volscian archrival

and secret soul mate, Tullus Aufidius; and

Nneka Okafor as his neglected wife, Virgilia

— speak with engaging, heightened natu-

ralism.

What makes this production so uncom-

monly gripping is its view of Coriolanus as a

man not exactly at war with but rather in

flight from himself, determined to avoid the

identity beneath the armor. Mr. Cake (who

was a memorable Jason to Fiona Shaw’s

Medea in 2002 and clearly deserves more

classic starring roles) presents him as a

gangly, overgrown, socially challenged ado-

lescent who is graceful only in battle.

He’s all unedited impulse, and watching

him try to control his peacetime temper

evokes the irresistibly awful spectacle of a

tantrum-prone tennis star losing it on the

court. (Ian McKellen has said that his 1984

Coriolanus at the National Theater was

partly inspired by John McEnroe.)

Such behavior makes a lot more sense af-

ter you meet dear old Volumnia, whom a

splendid Ms. Burton portrays as the ulti-

mate macho mom. When this Roman ma-

tron sits, she man-spreads. And please note

her sentimental pride when she learns that

Coriolanus’s son (Emeka Guindo) has been

chasing butterflies and mangling them with

his teeth, just like his dad used to do.

The toxic chemistry between mother and

son has seldom been more effectively or en-

joyably rendered. And the homoerotic ten-

sion between Coriolanus and Aufidius, his

canny nemesis, has a warping heat that

charges and confuses both men. Their em-

brace when the banished Coriolanus seeks

out Aufidius is a sly masterpiece of tragi-

comic awkwardness.

Not that Coriolanus would ever acknowl-

edge that there’s anything sexual going on.

As Mr. Cake portrays him, Coriolanus is for-

ever on the run from self-knowledge.

Speaking of Aufidius early in the play, he

says, “Were I anything but what I am, I

would wish me only he.”

Mr. Cake stumbles on the phrase “what I

am,” as if he knows he’s skirting dangerous

territory when he verges on self-definition.

When he leaves Rome in exile, he looks out

with welling eyes and says, in a simple line

that throbs with greatness, “There is a

world elsewhere.”

The words are as hollow as they are hope-

ful. Coriolanus carries his own world of de-

struction within him. And while he is unable

to acknowledge that world, he will never es-

cape it either. He may not be a classic tragic

hero. But Mr. Cake makes him shatteringly

tragic.

BEN BRANTLEY THEATER REVIEW

He Loves the Smell of Blood in the Morning

Jonathan Cake, above

center, in the Central Park

production of “Coriolanus,”

directed by Daniel Sullivan.

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1

CORIOLANUS

TicketsThrough Sunday at the

Delacorte Theater, Manhattan;

212-539-8500, publictheater.org.

Running time: 3 hours.

CreditsBy William Shakespeare; directed by

Daniel Sullivan; sets by Beowulf Boritt;

costumes by Kaye Voyce; lighting by Japhy

Weideman; sound by Jessica Paz; hair and wigs

by Tom Watson; composer, Dan Moses

Schreier; fight director, Steve Rankin;

production stage manager, Michael D. Domue;

company manager, Liza Witmer; production

manager, Kelsey Martinez. Presented by the

Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director,

Patrick Willingham, executive director.

CastTeagle F. Bougere (Menenius Agrippa),

Kate Burton (Volumnia), Jonathan Cake (Caius

Martius Coriolanus), Louis Cancelmi (Tullus

Aufidius), Chris Ghaffari (Titus Lartius), Enid

Graham (Junius Brutus), Emeka Guindo (Young

Martius), Jonathan Hadary (Sicinius Velutus),

Thomas Kopache (First Senator), Max Gordon

Moore (First Citizen), Tom Nelis (Cominius),

Nneka Okafor (Virgilia) and Amelia Workman

(Valeria).

Our hero here is about as

introspective as a great

white shark.