Word: epstein
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...Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Alvin Epstein. The premier ART production--revived from the Yale years--stripped away decades' worth of accumulated glitter from Shakespeare's play, revealing a darker fairy world than we're used to. Epstein uncovered hidden streams of conflict--between fairy and fairy, fairy and man, man and woman--with the aid of Purcell's fine-woven Baroque score. These emphases, however, were just that; there were no placards. Costumes and sets had a somber beauty. No one could have left the Loeb feeling Shakespeare's text had been tampered with or betrayed...
...Figaro, directed by Alvin Epstein, and Grownups, directed by John Madden. The ART's final productions this season are both hilarious comedies with plenty of attention to language and enough naturalism for anyone's taste. Epstein repeats his earlier feat in this Figaro, dusting off a far more acerbic play by Beaumarchais than the one we're accustomed to via Mozart. If the ART performers are less assured here than they were in Midsummer. Mark Leib's nimbly colloquial translation more than makes up the difference. With Grownups, a world premiere, there can be little argument about faith...
...supporting cast works with the same attention to comic detail that enlivened Epstein's baroque production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year. William McGlinn's mincing music teacher. Thomas Derrah's stuttering judge, Chris Clemenson's lumbering clerk and Albert Duclos' staggering, alcoholic gardener together cover the entire spectrum of sycophancy...
...A.R.T.'S FIGARO is funny enough, in fact, that you have to think hard afterwards to figure out why it's also unsettling. Epstein has managed to underscore the class tensions in the play without turning it into a Marxist dialectic, and wherever Beaumarchais' introduces a didactic speech. Epstein finds ways for his characters to deliver it naturally. Each character, in turn--except the Count--gets to spout off about his oppression; and those who believe women's issues are a 20th-century invention will note that Marceline (Barbara Orson), who starts the play as Figaro's nemesis, offers...
...through little touches and shades of emphasis that Epstein works his interpretation into the grain of Beaumarchais' play. When Shalhoub presents Figaro's epiphanic monologue, he strides from seat-top to seat through the empty first rows of the auditorium, with all the precarious confidence of his social-climbing instinct--then hops down, nods furtively and scurries by the legs of the audience with some submissive mutters of "excuse me." The moment when the jealous Count gives Cherubino an army officer's commission to remove him from the scene--immortalized by Mozart in his mock-heroic, trumpet-and-drum aria...