Antony and Cleopatra

**Whoops, never posted this.  Enjoy it now!**

The first play of Seattle Shakes' new season, and hopes were running high.  The cast is full of stars and regulars.  Darragh Kennan, who was the best Hamlet I've seen.  Mike Dooly, who was brilliant as his Horatio.  Charles Leggett, who among other things was the best Shylock I've seen.  John Bogar, who despite a poor turn in Threepenny Opera gave one of my favorite performances ever in Turn of the Screw.  And to top it all off, Hans Altwies and his wife Amy Thone, two giants of the Seattle acting community, in the titular roles.  What could go wrong?

So much.  So...so much.

Maybe the first clue something was wrong was the set itself.  A giant Egyptian-looking symbol hung suspended in the middle of the stage, and before it, a sand pit surrounded by poles with more Egyptian symbols atop them.  But alright, I can forgive you having a budget and wanting to set a certain style.

Maybe then it was the second clue, when the play began with an oddly choreographed, ritualistic, sexualized-yet-somehow-not-sexy dance in the sand with all the Egyptians (eventually including Antony and Cleo) which basically said "Welcome to Egypt!  We're all sluts!"

Maybe it was in the first time Antony and Cleopatra spoke to/made out with each other, and despite them being husband and wife in real life, there was no passion between them.

Maybe it was when Darragh Kennan as Octavius Caesar came on in modernish attire, spent his entire first scene doing a workout routine while speaking to his counselors, and I realized that even though I had enjoyed the scene I had no idea what anyone had just said.

The point is, I'm not sure quite when it struck me that what I was watching was not a good play, as there were far too many points it could've happened for me to pick it out.  Granted, Antony and Cleopatra isn't one of Shakespeare's greatest plays.  Much like his other lesser performed works it has its issues.  But what I watched was no fault of the play.  What I watched was an amalgamation of poor directing, poor acting, and poor design.

The greatest offender was Amy Thone.  After seeing her in Titus Andronicus and now this, I feel obligated to shoot down anyone who calls her a good actress and wants to do her Shakespeare intensive.  She's perfect for Lady Macbeth (which she did very well several years ago with her husband as Macbeth), but her style of acting is so...well...British.  It's cold, proper, feigned passion.  And it does not work.  Cleopatra is supposed to be this flighty, completely bipolar creature that is at once a whim to her passions and controlling of them to suit her needs.  Thone was practically one-note the entire show, and all her flights from one emotion to the next looked just plain fake.  There was no joy to the character.  What finally struck me about her performance, though, was at the end when the Cleopatra wig came off and I realized...she's not Cleopatra.  She's General Dramatic Shakespearean Woman.  Once that wig came off there was quite literally nothing recognizable about her character.  And possibly worse still, this meant that all the passionate romance she and her real life husband were supposed to have on stage was pure surface and faked.  I seriously worried that if that's how those two express passion in real life they might need a marriage counselor.  Altwies at least struck some good points in the play, though he phoned in the rest.  By the end, when he tries to kill himself and fails, it became a comedy because we simply didn't care what happened to him.  By the end the audience needs to feel like this man has been through so much he deserves a quick hero's death, and when he can't even have that it should be heartbreaking.

However, a play can still move on with a bad lead.  Unless of course it's hampered by everything else on top of it.  The budget for this play was extreme.  Or if it wasn't, they thought it would be and went way over.  There were so many extraneous parts it was hard to find any cohesive theme or see anything more than someone saying "Oh, this thing would be cool!" without anyone on the side going "Maybe, but do we need it?"  A ship battle involving aerial stunts?  A giant egyptian medallion that hangs from the ceiling yet only appears in like 3 scenes?  The loudest, most distracting lift you will ever hear being lowered from the ceiling to be Cleo's bed, then swaying precariously and once again assaulting your ears as it carries her and her 2 maids up into the air for her temple/balcony?  All of it screamed a lack of vision and discretion.

Props must be given to Darragh Kennan and Charles Leggett, who, by measure of actually caring about the play and their performances, completely stole the show and became its sole redeeming qualities.  Want to see the history of acting?  Look to Thone.  Want to see the improved direction where acting is going?  Look to Kennan.  As I said of his Hamlet, you can look to the classics like Olivier and enjoy them, but Kennan's soulful performance was the epitome of a modern Hamlet.  He continues it here, and even though his part is fairly small compared to some others, he still manages to bring a depth of character that is sorely lacking in the leads.  Leggett brought out an honesty on stage that was so very refreshing after all the dull fakery of the rest of the play, and had a couple tear-jerking moments that reminded us we were in fact watching a tragedy.

As always with Seattle Shakes, you never know what you're going to get.  Sometimes a masterpiece, sometimes an overstyled dud.  Antony and Cleopatra, unfortunately, falls squarely in the latter.

Antony and Cleopatra gets a 4/10.