THEATER

Theater for a New Audience
The Two Gentlemen of Verona - Shakespeare

This show's in Brooklyn and a new theater.  Everything we've seen there has been wonderful.  Just a subway ride away.  We come up from the subway to street level at the Barclay Center.

The actors discussing the production...

A video to watch of this production...

A previous production by the same company...


The NYTs review by Ben Brantley... 

Mating-Season Mood Swings in ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’

For those of you who had been wondering if spring had decided to skip New York this year, there has been a confirmed sighting of that elusive season at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Fresh sap, tickling breezes, blushing blooms — yep, they’re all in evidence. So is the tendency of emerging specimens of human fauna to seize the day as if it were made exclusively for mating.

With impeccable timing, Fiasco Theater’s frolicking production of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” opened on Thursday night, which happened to have been the last day of April. This is a play, after all, that sees “the spring of love” as having “the uncertain glory of an April day,” in which sun and storms jostle for ascendancy.

The speaker of those words is one of this slight but pliable comedy’s title characters, though whether he qualifies as a real gentleman has always been open to debate. His name is Proteus, played here by Noah Brody. And in his attitudes, moods and affections, he is easily as variable as April.

Still, what do you expect? He’s young, as was Shakespeare when he invented Proteus, in what may have been his first play. Directed by Jessie Austrian and Ben Steinfeld, this “Two Gentlemen of Verona” makes a case for a little-loved comedy as a testament to the charms of vacillating youth, struggling to find its path and its form in the green season.

A small troupe with an expansive imagination and an eagerness to wrestle with thorny classics, Fiasco has quickly become a force to reckon with in American theater. Deploying small casts, minimal sets and sparklingly lucid powers of interpretation, Fiasco is the troupe that earlier this year presented what is perhaps the most accessible version ever of the knotty Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical “Into the Woods.”

The company has also shown an affinity for Shakespeare plays that in performance often collapse under the weight of their contradictions. Fiasco’s 2011 production of the lumbering romance “Cymbeline” seemed to be written in air. And last year, the troupe found sweet music in the sour-tempered “Measure for Measure.”

Unlike those plays, “Gentlemen” has never commanded much respect among scholars. It is a skipping portrait of arbitrary desires in which character is bent like a pretzel to accommodate a convoluted plot. (It is perhaps best known for the hedonistic 1971 musical it inspired.) Many Shakespeare analysts, a tribe not known for whimsy, seem to agree that the most intriguing figure in “Gentlemen” isn’t even human, but a very shaggy dog named Crab.

This production doesn’t undermine that assessment. How could it, when Crab’s flea-filled fur is inhabited so winningly by Zachary Fine (who also portrays Valentine, the other title character)?

But Fiasco also finds a beguiling continuity in the play’s erratic behavior, in which an unformed author and his untried characters are both groping for their identities. In a program note, the team explains that they regard “Gentlemen” as “a first draft at love,” a preamble to more mature depictions of richer lives.

Such an interpretation tracks nicely with the text, in which uncertain romancers seem forever to be writing and losing and tearing up declarations of passion. Derek McLane’s set is an enchanting bower of what at first glance appear to be walls of layered white flowers but on closer inspection prove to be crumpled sheets of scribbled-upon paper.

A corresponding sense of teeming hearts and minds tentatively testing their mettle abounds. All the play’s characters (attired in Easter pastels by Whitney Locher) partake in verbal games of one-upmanship. They are not, by the standards of later Shakespeare, terribly sophisticated games. But this production allows us to feel the rush of pleasure these awkward wordsmiths derive from the competition.

Of course, it’s not just pleasure that’s being experienced. People are hurt in “Two Gentlemen,” which presents a fragile daisy chain of romantic entanglements. When the play begins, the title characters are inseparable friends, of a single mind, except that Proteus is head over heels for Julia (Ms. Austrian), and Valentine thinks love is just foolish.

Well, not for long. Valentine goes to Milan, at his father’s behest, and immediately falls for the charming Sylvia (Emily Young). When Proteus follows his friend there, he, too, is smitten with Sylvia and determines to betray Valentine to win her. In the meantime, the doting Julia disguises herself as a boy and hurries to Milan, where she discovers that her beloved’s undying love for her is dead.

This would all end in tears if “Gentlemen” had been written with any strict psychological logic. Instead, it offers one of the least credible happy endings in the canon.

But this production sees in the text a mirror for the irrationality that comes with being young, mercurial and at the mercy of metabolic changes that the sober mind can’t begin to make sense of. It’s not just Proteus who’s a chameleon here. All the characters, even the relatively steadfast women, are subject to moods that match the weather.

As is usual with Fiasco productions, the ensemble members — six in total, rounded out perfectly by Paul L. Coffey and Andy Grotelueschen as crafty manservants of contrasting temperaments — play multiple parts, including a banished band of brigands. (Don’t ask.) They also play musical instruments and sing gentle ballads of love’s waywardness in close harmony.


The four lovers are packed here with emotions that are ultimately as narcissistic as they are intense. (You can imagine them all running to the mirror to see themselves feeling deeply.) So while they match up symmetrically and prettily for the final scene, you kind of doubt that these couples are destined for a happily-ever-after eternity.

The most persuasive love match here is between Proteus’s put-upon servant, Launce (Mr. Grotelueschen), and his dog, Crab (Mr. Fine, in a bulbous black nose, is priceless). When Launce complains about the sacrifices he makes for the love of this dog, we are certain that this guy — unlike the other characters — is enduringly sincere.

And this production’s most memorable kiss is between said dog and his master. Call it puppy love, if you will, but it promises to be a far more lasting commitment than anything between frivolous, fickle human beings.