Theater in February

It’s Beginning To Feel A Bit Like Summer

 

Given the consistently cold temperatures we’ve been having of late, the idea that it felt a bit like summer this weekend may sound a bit absurd, but as far as theater offerings go (a staged reading of Art by Yasmina Reza at the Clark Friday night put on by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and a full-fledged production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton opening at Shakespeare & Company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre on Saturday night), it was the equivalent of an unexpected but always welcomed winter thaw. Interesting that it was also Christopher Hampton who provided the English translation of Art, written originally in French. (Artistic Associate, Justin Waldman, directed the reading and played host to the after-performance Q & A with the actors.)

 

While there has been much talk about year-round theater and other cultural offerings here in our region, the reality is that it can be difficult to see a third of what’s being offered in any given summer weekend, and there can still be weeks during the winter when there is very little to see around here. So it was especially welcome to have two plays to attend on successive nights this past weekend.

 

Here again it was a case of less is more, in that the unadorned, three-person, barely rehearsed, and under 90-minute free reading of Art soared in front of its appreciative audience, while the more elaborately staged, overly long at three hours, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, directed by Tina Packer, had a far more bumpy take off.

 

The actor and sometime film director Campbell Scott, one of the three principals who performed Art, said that with a full production that requires far more rehearsal time, actors often find themselves spending two weeks of that rehearsal period simply trying to return to the fresh, more spontaneous performances that actors often give when first reading the script aloud—i.e. when they’re not over-thinking it, nor overacting it.

 

And indeed, it would be hard to imagine more lively, energetic, “real” performances coming from this trio of actors (John Bedford Lloyd, Campbell Scott, and James Waterston) even if given weeks to prepare. It also helps that Art is a fairly easy play in which to perform (or maybe it just felt that way on this night, with these three), more like a long one act that revolves around the responses of two middle-age male friends to a third friend’s purchasing a very expensive, minimalist piece of modern art: a completely white canvas (though there is some argument about that) with some faint, also white lines running across it. As a footnote, Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., is planning on doing a full production of Art this coming summer and it should be interesting to compare the two.