Charleston's Spoleto festivals rock with every kind of entertainment from arcane performance art to a revival of Pride and Prejudice

by Lynn Hamilton and Joel Worth

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Word of mouth about Spoleto's production of Pride and Prejudice made it all the way to Tybee. We were hearing rumors about how good it was before we even hit Charleston where it sometimes seemed everyone was talking about little else.

But we'd scheduled our "Pride and Prejudice" viewing for the last of our five day stay, so we had to sit tight and tell our restaurant servers that we'd be seeing it on Friday.

Spoleto was, as always, humming with activity the last week in May when the two-week festival starts to roll. To be exact, there are two distinct festivals going on in Charleston during this time‹Spoleto USA, an offshoot of the esteemed Italian Spoleto Festival, and Piccolo Spoleto, a fringe festival of sorts that sprang up around the original event and is managed by the City of Charleston.

While Spoleto's world-class talent and high-brow productions assure that people will come from all over the world for the festival, Piccolo Spoleto offers opportunities for local talent as well as small, shoestring budget groups doing innovative work elsewhere.

One such group that has established a Piccolo connection is the Seattle-based Theater Simple which we've been following at Charleston for three years now. This year, the theater offered a production titled "Three Viewings." It's really three, short, one-man plays or soliloquys loosely organized around the same funeral parlor. The play and the way it's produced are typical of Theater Simple which, as its name implies, likes to reduce drama to its essentials‹a script, an actor, a room, and, with any luck, an audience. There's little, if any, set design. The few props used take on a talismanic power because there are, well, so few of them. The one concession to theater's tradition of staged visual cues was a stand with flowers that changed with each playlet.

Spartan as it sounds, "Three Viewings" was one of the most successful of any program in either festival. It was well reviewed by all local publications, and we were lucky to get seats for a mid-week matinee which sold out when a few more Spoletians wandered in five minutes into the show.

The lights dim in Theater 220, a no-nonsense space with folding chairs for about 150 people and black walls, which works surprisingly well with Theater Simple productions. A solitary man walks onto the stage. We soon learn that he's the undertaker for the funeral home. We also learn that, though he is around fifty, he has a terrible schoolboy crush on a real estate agent who shows up at funerals, hoping to get representation of the deceased's estates. As he struggles within himself, hoping to find the audacity to tell her of his passion, the audience gets a lesson that romantic yearning is not confined to the young or to those with romantic lifestyles.

The second monologue tells the riveting story of a woman who makes her "upper five figure" income by robbing funeral corpses of their jewelry‹during their funerals and right under the noses of their dearly departed. The character is immediately engaging and her story only becomes more and more engrossing as we learn that she is mysteriously separated from her husband and that she's now preparing to rob her own late aunt‹under the watchful eyes of her own parents and brother. Funny and irreverent, this playlet is what Theater Simple is all about. We thought this was the show stopper until the third monologue, told by an elderly, sheltered widow who slowly learns that her recently deceased husband was involved in a number of shady construction business transactions.

She seems so like the kind of woman who would just collapse into a pool of tears when confronted with real trouble. And yet we see her summon an inner strength and dignity to meet her husband's creditors who are clamoring to seize her house and everything she owns. This drama unfolds to a surprise ending which is both delightfully wicked and moving at the same time. And what is amazing is that the actress performs the entire thing‹which SEEMS to have a cast of about forty‹sitting down in her little black mourning dress and pearls.

Another highpoint of the festivals this year was "The Battle of Stalingrad," a theatrical production taking up the subject of World War II and, specifically, the battle fought in Stalingrad which cost roughly one million Russian lives. Before we mention that this is a puppet show, you need to understand that eastern Europeans take their puppetry very seriously. It is high art, not relegated to children's entertainment as it mostly is in the United States.

Set to Russian folk songs and Klezmer music, "The Battle of Stalingrad" explores the tragedy of war, not through the battlefield, but through a series of personal vignettes that depict the death or loss of a cross section of individuals. A soldier comes home, having risked his life in battle, to find his fiance marrying someone else. A poverty-stricken, but egotistical artist exits the cafe where he hangs out to be shot dead in the street.

Not all the characters are human. Instead writer/director Rezo Gabriadze invokes Aesop's license to convey human dilemmas through the world of animals. Hence, the frightened mother is an ant. The two young lovers are horses‹Alyosha and Natasha. Natasha's artistic aspirations come between them, but Alyosha pursues his love through the hostile Ural mountains and fields gun fire to find her.

The storyline revolves loosely around the lovers. Word has it that Gabriadze's decision to make horses the main characters has to do with the droves of Russian horses that were slaughtered, alongside their human counterparts, in the Stalingrad theater. War isn't confined to the human realm, Gabriadze indicates. Though we mourn humans, principally, when we remember the devastation of war, that devastation resonates throughout the animal world, even down to the insects. It's impossible to do justice to this daring production in words. You really need to see it.

A note about puppet theater: you absolutely must either get seats in the first eight rows or bring a good pair of binoculars. Puppetry is all about visual imagery and its excellence is often most apparent in subtle details of movement and construction. The puppet theaters we went to in Prague were small, with shallow seating and lots of performances. Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts stages its New Directions series in the three-quarters round, so that nobody has to be far from the stage. It's an intimate art form, not like opera where the diva is belting out her arias well into the third balcony. In puppet theater, if you're too far from the stage, you miss a lot of what is going on.

Piccolo Spoleto provided a wealth of other theatrical opportunities. We particularly enjoyed a new musical titled "Six Women With Brain Death." Despite its giddy title and rollicking song and dance numbers, this is actually a very thoughtful piece of writing about how the American media, from Disney to the tabloids, is daily washing our brains. "Expiring minds" is a recurring verbal motif and a play on the most famous of yellow news rags.

"Six women" brings together an ensemble of talented vocalists, each of whom has the starring role in one scene. We particularly enjoyed the bored alcoholic housewife whose television starts talking back to her and the mother who searches her own horrible life for anything that resembles the Disney movies she was brought up on.

We also enjoyed "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)" performed by comedy team Theatre 99. The script is an ambitious romp through every Shakespeare play, with particular emphasis on "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet." "Complete Works" aims to bring Shakespeare, or at least a whiff of him, to folks who can't ordinarily sit through any theatrical production that doesn't involve gender bending, gags, and, best of all, vomit.

Dennis Leary look alike Greg Tavares joins forces with Timmy Finch and Steven Shields to perform "Complete Works." The all-male cast paves the way for plenty of cross dressing humor. Finch plays all the female roles in a variety of wigs. It's funny, and it's also one of the few things about this play that's dead-on true to Shakespeare. During the bard's time, female actors were unknown, and all female parts, down to Juliet, were performed in drag.

The script, by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield, consolidates all the Shakespeare comedies into one play, quipping on Shakespeare's reuse of gimmicks like identical twins, misplaced relatives, and deposed royalty.

The Theatre 99 cast performed with admirably energy, the script calling for a lot of physical comedy and audience interaction which are the group's strengths. The pacing may have been a little slow however, as if the actors were milking the script for big laughs when only smirks and chuckles could reasonably be expected.

The bard was also revived in a modern-dress production of "Macbeth" that reinterprets Shakespeare's witches as heartless television journalists. In this production, the characters are aware of their celebrity and most of what they do is for the camera. To emphasize this thematic overlay, a harsh camera flash from the back of the theater keeps firing throughout the show while the actors periodically stop and mug for their shoot.

Produced by the University of Tennessee's Clarence Brown Theatre Company, this play was cut down to an hour's performance time. Shakespeare's unwieldy cast of characters is also played by the same four actors. This makes for some clever twists. As there are only two females in the cast, you see only two witches in the famous opening scene that traditionally calls for three. Ken Triwush has to play all Macbeth's major adversaries and murder victims, including Banquo, Duncan, and Macduff. Connan Morrissey plays both Lady Macbeth and one of the witches.

It's a democratic way to run a theater company. Nobody has significantly fewer lines or scenes than anyone else. But it may be confusing to people who don't actually know Shakespeare like the back of their hands to see the same actor playing so many different parts‹parts that Shakespeare probably meant to keep distinct so as to develop individual characters in some depth.

It's this depth of character development that's missing from the Univ of Tennessee's production of "Macbeth." The conceit of media awareness‹life lived in front of the camera‹is brilliant, and we could also live with the stripped down cast, but so much of the original play's dialog was trimmed away from this production that what you're left with is more of an elegant appetizer than an entree.

While we can certainly understand the temptation to clip away at Shakespeare's dramas in deference to 21st-century attention spans shortened by MTV and video games, to omit the murders of Banquo and Macduff's family creates more confusion than cohesion. We'd really like to see the theater company take a deep breath and turn this into a full length production of one and a half to two hours in length.

We were a little disappointed by a couple Spoleto events that smacked of emperor's new clothes. A revival of Samuel Beckett's radio play "Words and Music" falls into this category. Beckett, best known as the author of "Waiting for Godot," wasn't satisfied with the original debut of "Words and Music" for what may have been sufficient reasons. Set to choppy spurts of dissonant music, an elderly man converses with God who appears to be quizzing the former on the subjects of age, sloth, and love. While this script is infused with the same despair over a meaningless universe that you find in "Godot," it lacks "Godot's" humor and vitality.

That said, we wouldn't hesitate to go to another play that featured actor Alan Stanford, who played both roles. He is enormously talented and did as much with the role as could possibly be done. Ditto for the musicians who were obviously at the top of their form. But it's questionable whether "Words and Music" needed to be jump started out of a peaceful obscurity. Only the most die-hard fans of theater of the absurd and/or dissonant music were probably able to appreciate it.

A brilliant cast of musicians and dancers was also assembled for the revival of Meredith Monk's "Quarry." We had high hopes for this event which was billed as musical theater by Spoleto literature. "Quarry" has been so well reviewed and showered with awards that it may be regarded as heresy to pan it, but we have to honestly admit we didn't get it.

Not that the singers weren't great. They were‹when they got around to singing. The dancers were also clearly some of the best during the odd moments when they were dancing.

And yet. We found the production as a whole static, discontinuous, repetitive, and altogether dreary. Writers and, we assume, composers are instructed early on to repeat only at their peril. Performance art somehow gets away with breaking this rule. In a few rare cases, such as the work of Laurie Anderson, to whom Monk is compared, the rule against repetition is broken with magical results. But "Quarry" doesn't achieve that magic with linens that get folded over and over again and the repetition of the same four-note line of music.

Monk plays a sick child, lying in the center of the stage under a quilt. Around her, actors, singers and dancers act out her dreams. Monk, who looks to be at least sixty, really doesn't need to be pushing on the envelope of suspended disbelief this hard. She doesn't have the elasticity of childhood, and her dances, which are meant to capture the movement of children, seem contrived and awful. What may be worse, when she lies down in the middle of the stage, you wonder if it might not be because she is tired.

We had great expectations for "Pride and Prejudice" when we finally got to the Dock Street Theater for our Friday matinee. We had heard about this production from everyone from our local librarian to our cab driver. Few experiences can live up to that much anticipation. So, as we seated ourselves among the throngs of Jane Austen fans, as we examined the meticulously crafted stage‹powder blue landscape murals that captured the contained romantic idealism of the early nineteenth century and elegant drawing room chairs‹we braced ourselves for a little disappointment.

And yet, "Pride and Prejudice" lived up to all its hype. What a charming play! It has all the wit and sparkle of Jane Austen's novel of manners. All the best quips from the novel are preserved and deliciously reeled off by the talented actors of the Gate Theater in Ireland, from which this production hails.

"Pride and Prejudice" is the story of five daughters who will be disinherited upon their father's death, their house and assets "entailed away from the female line," one of the nineteenth century's worst abominations of sexism. The girls' mother, Mrs. Bennet, admirably played by Susan Fitzgerald, is entirely consumed with the ambition to marry her daughters off to men who can provide for them‹and for Mrs. Bennet‹once she is a widow.

Mr. Bennet, a man of wit and learning saddled with a silly wife, takes the opposite position. Where his wife is all worry and conniving, he shows almost no concern for the financial security of his offspring. Enter Elizabeth Bennet, the second child of this union. She's twenty, still single, and forced to look for a suitable husband amidst the shoals of her father's cynicism and her mother's often embarrasing and transparent manipulations.

What's a young woman to do? Marry the first man who comes along whether she likes him or not? It's not something Elizabeth, played by Justine Mitchell with just the right blend of irony, sweetness, and remorse, can bring herself to do.

This story has been brought to film so often, you might ask why a self-respecting theater group would want to rehash something that's been so frequently worked over. And yet, the Gate Theater's production is so fresh and lively, you may feel as if this is the first time you've seen it. That may be because this production doesn't sentimentalize the characters as Hollywood is so prone to do. They are delivered with all their faults and foolishness intact, just as Austen conceived them. Austen never gushed with emotion and the Gate Theater production is true to that.

Beyond the great acting and the gorgeous set, there's another reason that Spoleto's "Pride and Prejudice" has won the hearts of so many festival goers. Despite its dated premise that girls must marry to succeed economically, there's still something timeless about Jane Austen's story. Most young women still hope to find the right guy. Men still fall in love against their own good intentions. Times haven't changed that much since Austen's day. And, while the dating game is as much an odious ritual as it was in the early 1800s, it's still a game most young adults have to play.

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