The Alchemist (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Alchemist James Loehlin The Alchemist. Presented by the Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Lansburgh Theatre, Washington, D. C. October 6–November 22, 2009. Directed by Michael Kahn. Set by James Noone. Costumes by Murell Horton. Lights by Peter West. Music by Adam Wernick. Sound by Martin Desjardins. Fights by Rob Hunter. Voice and Text Coach, Ellen O’Brien. Assistant Director, Alan Paul. Literary Associate, Akiva Fox. Stage Manager, M. William Shiner. Assistant Stage Manager, Ruth E. Kramer. With Kate Skinner (Dol Common), David Manis (Subtle), Michael Milligan (Face), Nick Cordileone (Dapper), Jeff Biehl (Drugger), David Sabin (Sir Epicure Mammon), Kyle Fabel (Surly), Robert Creighton (Ananias), Timothy Thomas (Tribulation Wholesome), Alex Morf (Kastril), Rachel Holt (Dame Pliant), Wynn Harmon (Lovewit), and others. Ben Jonson’s plays are rarely staged professionally in the US, so it is an important event when a major classical company, Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre, produces The Alchemist, as they did in the fall of 2009. The play was actually a late addition to their season, after a planned co-production of The Bacchae fell through. The Alchemist was chosen, in part, as a response to the financial bubble-burstings of the previous couple of years, notably the collapse of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Accordingly, the production was aggressively contemporary, equating the alchemical scams of Jonson’s trio of tricksters with various get-rich-quick ploys of the early twenty-first century. The Alchemist was the 150th production by the Shakespeare Theatre’s Artistic Director, Michael Kahn, and his third Jonson for the company (a 2003 Epicoene under the title The Silent Woman was one of the theatre’s most celebrated productions). Kahn has never been afraid of bold choices and broad strokes as a director, and The Alchemist pulled no punches in its satire of American greed and gullibility. However, the production sometimes seemed to founder a bit under the weight of its own concept, with the opulent set and flashy, frequently-changed costumes occasionally getting in the way of Jonson’s brisk and cynical farce. [End Page 185] The Alchemist is one of few early modern plays to observe the unities of time and place; apart from one late scene in the street, all of the action seems to occur in a single room in Lovewit’s house, in the course of a single day. It is therefore tempting for directors and designers to set the play in a naturalistic box set, with permanent fixtures, specific doors leading to specific locations, and so forth. The Shakespeare Theatre production took this tendency to an extreme, with a very elaborate townhouse setting (with nine doors), which could be closed off by a hard front curtain, representing the façade of the house, for act five. The façade was in place when the audience entered the theatre, and its tidy classicism, and the demure pre-show music, created a decorous effect that was shattered by blaring rock as the play began. The Alchemist famously begins in medias res with an abrupt, staccato quarrel among the three tricksters, Face, Subtle and Dol Common (“Believe’t, I will.” “Thy worst, I fart at thee.” “Ha’ you your wits, why gentlemen, for love—”). The opening quarrel, however, failed to generate much heat, just as the trio of crooks never seemed fully to inhabit the brightly lit, elegantly furnished sit-com set. Both Subtle and Dol were cast as older characters, rather worn out in their respective trades; this was a plausible choice but sapped some of the production’s energy. Michael Milligan’s Face thus had to drive the action, which he did in workmanlike fashion, but without much real sense of comic relish. The Alchemist’s plot, praised by Coleridge as one of the three best ever created (along with Oedipus and Tom Jones), is essentially the farceur’s juggling act of throwing more and more balls into the air until they all come crashing down. The crooks meet, one at a time, their various marks, and advance their various schemes for fleecing them, until these begin to intersect and complicate each other, leading to the falling-out of the crooks and the sudden final...