Troilus and Cressida Closing Night
My production of Troilus and Cressida at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival closed tonight. Full house, great weather and an extraordinary performance by a terrific company in front of a receptive and vocal audience. It was one of those rare and wonderful evenings at which I could only beam. A confluence of blessings capped by a closing party filled with genuine and humble joy. I am truly lucky.
And I fell in love with the play tonight.
We wrestled with this script from the beginning, starting about 5 months ago. It’s long, it’s not at all obvious (at least not to me), the language is rich and convoluted, and it defies all expectations usually attendant on Shakespeare plays.
But none of us ever felt it was a bad play, which is its reputation in a lot of circles. In fact, while we were working on it, we felt it was a very good play, though very unusual. And none of us ever questioned whether any part of the script was written by anyone other than Shakespeare. Not that we’re scholars of authenticity, or even if we were that anyone alive today would ever really know for sure. But the script seems so even-handed, confident and single minded it’s hard to imagine that anyone else collaborated on the writing.
As I was watching the show tonight, I was struck again and again by its originality, relevancy, unpredictability, depth, the way it defies convention, the way the author satirizes himself, the extraordinary rhythm, the incredible insights, fantastic characters, and the full palette of human deficiencies not in the least sugar-coated, but still made vastly entertaining.
Not that it can’t be helped by judicious editing. But still ….
During the last week or so I’ve been wondering how someone can assess a play like Troilus and Cressida and come to the conclusion that it’s a bad play, or a lesser play. Is it because Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night are the standards against which all the others are compared? The comparative approach doesn’t allow plays to be judged on their own merits. It’s like saying peaches are the standard, and you’ve just bitten into a juicy ripe heirloom tomato. ”Well, it doesn’t taste at all like a peach.”
Well, a tomato is not a peach. And a tomato must be judged on its own merits. And I like heirloom tomatoes.
