Timothy Treanor

Write what you know, the adage goes. Thus, John Grisham writes courtroom dramas. Bill and Hillary Clinton write political thrillers. Robin Cook writes stories about medicine.

It is, of course, mere coincidence that former South African State President F.W. de Clerk died only three days before Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa! opened at Washington Stage Guild, but it sets a mood. de Clerk was the last President of apartheid-afflicted South Africa; he led the government’s sometimes acrimonious negotiations with Nelson Mandela to bring democracy to that benighted country, for which they shared a Nobel Prize.

It is mere coincidence that Anaïs Mitchell’s remarkable, Tony Award-winning Hadestown, now being given a solid production at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, debuted on Broadway just before our twenty-month plague began, but it fits. Mitchell’s story is at bottom a moral call to arms, which cleverly mines the saddest tale in all of mythology and marries it to a still older myth – one which was designed to explain the seasons.

Is it possible that Richard III, had he been beloved by those around him notwithstanding his hunchback, would have abandoned ambition and treachery and instead become a loving and gentle mentor and guardian to Edward V?  Would he have gracefully stepped aside when the young King reached his majority, thus ushering in thirty generations of peaceful Yorkish rule?

Is it time to hold God (inhabiting the body of Jacob Yeh) to account?  God knows – forgive the reference – we have occasion to do so.  Even as we hunker, masked, vaccinated and socially distant, within the confines of NextStop Theatre Company, we add more counts to our indictment – a terrible disease, economic disruption, social unrest. And that’s just for us, the richest country in human history! At least we don’t have to worry about religious maniacs entering our homes and shooting us. Yet.

How could you not love a play about theater critics? Especially where, as in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, now available in virtual format through Spooky Action Theater’s website, the critics are pompous, abrasive and criminally uninformed. Moon (Robert Bowen Smith) and Birdboot (Steve Beall), critics both, are the only audience – perhaps we should say witnesses – to the butchery known as Murder in Muldoon Manor. Muldoon is an enterprise so catastrophic that it makes Nothing On (the calamity being performed by the actors in Noises Off) seem like Beckett, or Shakespeare, or – Stoppard.

It is 1950, and on a rainy South African afternoon in the St. George’s Park Tea Room, Hally (Nick Apostolina) is becoming himself. He was a boy – one prone to arrogance and self-pity, certainly but vulnerable, and capable of sweetness and hope. But now he is becoming a man – a brutal man, “MASTER HAROLD”, who embraces the world’s ugliness and claims it as his own. He does this by spitting in the face of Sam (L. Peter Callender), a Black man who had sheltered him to that point from the world’s worst, including his own father. In this primal way Master Harold joins the oppressors as a way of not joining the oppressed.

“What’s past is prologue” Prospero says in The Tempest, but when the present passes into the past what’s left is Will on the Hill and Far Away, the earnest and frequently successful effort by Congressmen to do Shakespeare funny. In this annual exercise, designed to raise funds for arts education, members of both Houses, as well as various other political luminaries (Washington is crawling with them), put themselves in preposterous situations which magically turn out well, just as characters in the Bard’s plays often do.

There is an astonishing turn of events toward the end of I and You, but let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about Walt Whitman instead. Whitman was a revolutionary who overthrew poetry. He trashed the self-conscious, hyperstylized European tropes which had dominated the art and substituted something purely American: a rough, colloquial, muscular free verse which tumbles over itself like the streams and brooks of his Long Island home.

The thing about Romeo and Juliet – but you know this, Grasshopper – is that it isn’t a love story – not at all, not even a little bit. It is rather a story of desperation, ego and self-regard. Juliet is a thirteen-year-old girl who has just been given the alarming news that she will be forced to marry a man she’s never met.

On June 3, 1950 the French mountaineer Maurice Herzog stood on the impossibly high summit of Annapurna I – and dropped his gloves into the yawning chasm below. Descending barehanded, he soon lost his fingers to frostbite; most of them were eventually amputated. He thus became the patron saint of all who have, with a single act, a single mistake, ruined their lives.