“Coriolanus” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Coriolanus
By William Shakespeare
in a modern verse translation by Sean San José
Directed by Rosa Joshi
Ashland, OR at the Oregon Shakespeare Fetival July 23 – October 13, 2024
Coriolanus Masthead. Design by Krzysztof Bednarski.
From start to finish this production of Coriolanus is estranging without approachable characters, involving movement, or interesting text. The show fails to bring any real life to the stage.
Coriolanus is a war hero who is headed to political power when his elitism causes the lower classes to block his assent. He joins an enemy city in attacking his home, stops when his mother appeals to him, and then is killed as a traitor when he goes back to his adopted city.
The play is often referred to as a problem play that isn’t produced often. I couldn’t understand that characterization when I saw OSF’s 2008 superb interpretation that spoke to the Presidential election contest between army hero John McCain and Barak Obama. Coriolanus in that presentation was a real, conflicted, flawed person who clearly fit the definition tragic hero. (See my review.)
Unfortunately, this election year’s Coriolanus (Jessika D. Williams) is a testosterone-driven, stuck-up jerk with weird onstage movements. Coriolanus, like all the other characters, has no subtlety and there is no reason to sympathize with anything he does or gets done to him.
The underclass that insults Coriolanus are equally unlikable. They are a socialist rabble that shout without nuance or basic thinking. Slogans R Us chanters with unhinged movements make me want to giggle (or leave), not sympathize with their cause.
The other nobles and Coriolanus’ family share the traits of inexplicable movements and in-your-face boring personalities. Lines are delivered without delicacy or variation. It felt like everyone’s goal was to get to the end of the play.
All the characters and staging suffer from a simplistic, rushed, over-the-top feel. I guess director Rosa Joshi guided everyone and everything to this unsatisfactory level. Ugh.
Some aspects of the evening deserve special note. The very last scene when the mob cuts open bags of red corn and dumps them on the stage, possibly mimicking Coriolanus’s just-spilled blood, got me to audibly guffaw. It was too, too much.
The other notable tick is the chronic moving of boxes around the stage by the cast. Stagehands apparently cost too much so the actors have to do it? But, more importantly, none of us figured out why the boxes were moving around.
Coriolanus set before Act I
This production uses an exclusively female or non-binary cast, a specialty of the Upstart Crows with whom the show is produced in association. I have seen and loved other Upstart Crows productions and appreciate that they give non-CIS males a chance to star in male-role dominated Shakespeare. The group purposely does not feminize the male roles, but lets women and non-binary actors deliver the characters as written.
But, for this production I felt that most of the cast was too stereotypically male. I mentioned the testosterone level earlier, and I felt throughout that the butchness was being thrown in my face. The actors on stage had the dial on 10 almost all the time.
The other intentional uniqueness of this production was that it was a “modern verse translation” produced in association with Play On Shakespeare. This is the first Play On show I’ve seen, so I don’t know if all the Play On works take eloquent speeches and dumb them down to the fifth-grade level. But, the words spoken in this production were simple, never uplifting, basic, basic modern English. I may not need old fashion words, but I miss the feeling of language artistry.
I admit that we saw the first preview, so technically it is not fair to call this a review of the production. However, the problems we saw weren’t simple flubbed lines or unsure blocking. I don’t think the flaws in this Coriolanus can be solved with director’s notes or changes, and, in fact, a friend who saw a later show had a similarly low opinion.
This was a very disappointing evening of theater. It sadly validates the statement that Coriolanus is a seldom-produced problem play.
