I
very much liked Equivocation
by Bill
Cain, currently at the Manhattan
Theatre
Club, but I wanted to love it.
The
premise is terrific: Shakespeare (here called Shag and played by an
intensely
driven John Pankow)
is ordered
by King James to write a cautionary political play about what history
would
call “the gunpowder conspiracy,” a recent attempt on his life—that
failed. Which translates to Shag, in dramatic terms, as a story with no
ending.
But the heat of power is brought to bear and he finds himself stuck in
the
age-old dilemma between free artistic expression and art controlled by
governmental regulation.
This
is a very witty play with a lot of intentional present-day parallels,
and a
good deal of double-casting theatricality (David Pittu portrays both the King’s nefarious
right-hand man
and an actor in Shag’s company; Michael Countryman plays both a Priest held political
prisoner and
Richard Burbage; and all portrayals by all actors—who also include Remy
Auberjonois, David
Furr and Charlotte
Parry—are crisply excellent
under the direction of Gerry
Hynes). But somehow its
cleverness and
provocative ideas don’t coalesce into the kind of thrilling period
allegory I
think it may aspire to be. And possibly that’s because while we know
what Shag doesn’t
want to do—compromise his artistry—neither we nor he
really knows what he intends to do about it until, late in the game, he
makes
what will be a surprising decision (to those who have not read spoilers
elsewhere); so he spends much of the play examining his options. The
examination is vigorously played and expressed, but it’s still a
dramatization
of stasis and indecision…(even the title defines a condition of being
neither
here nor there, though the word eventually has compelling meaning
within the
play)…and the lack of a hero actively driving the story may well be
what keeps Equivocation
from
being, an experience that's well…less
equivocal.