Word: schmidts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Belonging to that unhappy second category Paul Schmidt's production screws around a lot, and most of it is pretty second-rate. Shakespeare's vicious savage, often Websterian tragedy is, for God's sake, not the lightweight collection of ideas on this stage, and when the play does assume characteristics of the darkest and most destructive comedy (as the program notes fashionably term the entire play) in the last few scenes, Schmidt reverses the entire style of his own production to heavy and symbolic drama, groping I presume for an ending via sudden spurts of electronic music and taped dialogue...
...this production, the effort and matter-of-factness instilled in the love scenes lend to even-out the wildly different qualities tossed-about in the play (and Schmidt's notes concede this diffusion) in favor of repetitious and uninteresting mannerism. About the middle of the second act we begin to feel we've seen it all before in the first act. Troilus washing his face recalls the Trojan's first act entrance, actors who project physical characteristics early in the play keep projecting them and, as in the Loeb's Balcony, everyone is always clutching at one another...
...think it's an obvious and unrewarding way to alter more accepted interpretations of the character. And this is also true of James Keach's Achilles, a psychopathic narcissistic Hell's Angel type, quickly uninteresting once the gag wears off. A more original job of reinterpretation is Schmidt's casting of Raymond Singer as the venemous fool Thersites, a character at once completely repellent yet perhaps the only moral person in the play. Singer is young and attractive, and therein lies the original job of reinterpretation. But again after awhile, the novelty of Thersites as a Caliban-cum-Puck wears...
...terror inherent in the confrontation of the fairies with the oncoming dawn goes beyond interpretive rightness and suggests a vision of dimension and paradox not easily dismissable; also that the emphasis on Helena's "And I have found Demetrius like a jewel/Mine own, and not mine own" and Paul Schmidt's delivery of Oberon's "Her dotage now I do begin to pity" speech suggest an individual and serious attitude about love and love-making; also that the third-act curtain (which I won't ruin by describing) and the corresponding images at the end of Act Five are bittersweet...
...Paul Schmidt (Oberon) and Maeve Kinkead (Titania) played their roles relatively straight with precision and intelligence. Which leaves Susan Channing's bi-sexual, jealous, and somewhat perturbed Puck, and if you don't know by now what watching Susan Channing on stage is like, I suggest you find out fast...