For its 50th season staging outdoor theatrics in Austin Gardens, Festival Theatre is trying something new: Two plays. Well, they’ve done that before, but never before presented in repertory, i.e. on alternating evenings (Mondays off).
And what plays they are — Hamlet by you-know-who and The Importance of Being Earnest by the almost-as-famous Oscar Wilde. Both bards were arguably at the top of their respective games — dazzling stylists of the English language. Shakespeare probably coined more familiar phrases in this play alone — still in use a half-millennium later — than most writers rack up in a career:
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”
“To thine own self be true; thou cannot then be false to any man.”
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
“The play’s the thing.”
“Hold the mirror up to nature.”
“The lady doth protest too much.”
“Get thee to a nunnery.”
“I must be cruel only to be kind.”
“Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
“Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”
“The readiness is all.”
Not to mention, “There is something rotten in ____” (fill in the blank to make it timely).
Shakespeare was a veritable fountain of cliches, but they weren’t cliches when he first penned them. They were just so good that they withstood the test of time. Hamlet is many things — a study in grief, a murder mystery, a ghost story, a coming-of-age story, and a study in revenge. It’s too superficial to reduce the play, as many do, to paralysis, passivity and indecision.
I love the fact that Hamlet dithers. His “revenge mission” requires self-questioning and demands self-examination. It’s part of his coming-of-age, evolving into a man capable of action. The one time he acts impulsively, he ends up killing the wrong person (Polonius). In the end his waiting leads to more casualties (including himself), which is the tragic nature of the story, but vengeance itself is the true villain. The Count of Monte Cristo went about revenge coldly and methodically. Not Hamlet. He takes us along on his stormy journey. In either case, there is no “good” way to pursue retribution (despite Hollywood’s romance with stories of “virtuous vengeance”). On the contrary, as many have pointed out, revenge is like drinking poison and waiting for everyone else to die. But in this case, pretty much everyone does die.
I have grown weary of many of Shakespeare’s plays, but not this one.
However, tragedy needs comedy for balance and Festival Theatre provides it every other night — in Earnest.
When the weather is lovely, as it was last week, and in spite of a swarm of curious fireflies and a giant moth who managed to strum and flit its minute upon the stage, there are few things more rewarding than sitting in the middle of a lovely park with an amphitheater of trees as your backdrop on a beautiful summer evening and savoring the outbursts of world-class wordsmiths, projecting their genius through young and talented mouthpieces.
The play is, indeed, the thing.
And if tragedy isn’t your thing, Earnest is your antidote. Oscar Wilde’s satire of bad behavior, thinly disguised by excruciatingly correct manners (as etiquette expert Judith Martin used to say) is funny enough in its own right, told trippingly from the tongues of stuffed shirts and girdled aristocrats, but Festival’s troupe of talented young players takes all that well beyond the manners borne, layering Wilde’s verbal gymnastics with over-the-top, impeccably choreographed slapstick, laying it on thick.
The result is freaking hilarious. It was good to hear the audience bellowing instead of the polite chuckling of recent years. Festival has tapped into a pipeline of talent, such as Drew Bos, who found his way here from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and is more than up to the prized role of the Danish Prince one night, followed by comic turns as two idiosyncratic butlers in Earnest the next.
But the frolicking foursome of Chad Bay, Sonia Goldberg, August Forman, and Aurora Pennepacker (brilliant in last year’s Amelie in the city) do more than steal the show, all accompanied by well-coordinated musical stylings. This is a delightfully multi-dimensional comic production.
Taken together, this is the best season Festival has produced in years. Hamlet is always worth seeing, but with Earnest, Festival has a real hit on its hands. If you haven’t made it to Austin Gardens in recent years (the pandemic may have had something to do with that), this is the summer to get reacquainted.
Festival Theatre is back (times 2), now through Aug. 15.