Review: Mary Stuart at the Long Center [Theater]

photo by Kimberly Mead

We all know that liberties get taken with history (read: Holocaust denial, the First Thanksgiving). Of course these have often been, in the course of human events, virulent ploys to obscure truth for the sake of agenda. However, in the realm of art, liberties taken with purported facts have elucidated great and (if there's any such hierarchy) more important human truths. With Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller's account of an interaction between Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots, the author has crafted a parable that examines the crushing responsibility of the powerful and the incoherency of truth when viewed through pained eyes. These women never met, but Schiller's imagined liason offers them a humanity that history didn't. It also offers the audience musings on the ties that bind, and the ways hands break those ties.

Schiller's well-serving distortions do not excuse the additional liberties frequently and blithely taken by Ann Ciccolella in Austin Shakespeare's production. To believe fully in these women, we must believe in their power and that others fear it. It's scarcely intimated in the performance that these men actually regard their queens as respectable and potentially fearsome. If this was a choice meant to underline some sort of feminist sympathy or comment that these women were made by their circumstances, it fell flat. And that's the thing: there's clearly a lot of thinking going on here, but the choices it supports are often inchoate, and they frequently feel as if they're being excused by spin-doctoring rather than supported by dramaturgy. Several specific directorial decisions, including an attempted rape; a strange reginal soliloquy during which all other action on-stage freezes; and an instance of slapstick during a pivotal moment in plot all fail. Expository dialogue, being passive and inherently more difficult to make engaging than present-tense dialogue, is not a challenge well-met by wild gesticulation and raised voice. Aside from Ian Scott and Dirk Van Allen, who develop responsive, engaging characters rather than caricatures, Ciccolella's men often indulge themselves. In most of them there's a lack of sense of the sheer nuanced gravity of the situation here; almost continuous shouting betrays and belies a lack of conviction, or even a knowledge of what's being said. Movement is allowed to be cavalierly modern and audacious. Certain characters have hideous accents, while others, for whom accents would've been appropriate, do not. There's too much "ooh, and then we could...!" going on here and not enough, "This is crucial and cohesive".

If a truly great actress can deal adroitly with arduous circumstances on stage, Helen Merino qualifies. Her exquisite and coring turn as Mary is the sort of natural that can only come from extensive character work and consideration. Lush and seemingly photosynthetic, she subsists largely on stage light to produce the evening's most nourishing performance. In fact, both she and Pamela Christian (as Queen Elizabeth) produce some alchemic gold, valuable because of how little is given to them by their director and fellow actors. Christian provides a fantastic (if less physically graceful) polemic, endowing the Virgin Queen with a glinting sexuality and a liquid core that thaws, melts, and vaporizes at slight provocations. They have, with a prodigious understanding of dichotomy, history, and social pressure, created women who are tectonic plates coated in indurate gloss sliding across the text, colliding in to each other, and forging new terrain.

Perhaps that's the great salient irony here: with all the insertions of additional themes and flourishes, Ciccolella perhaps succeeds most by underlining the idea that art does not always speak for itself but should, especially when it speaks for history. She has hindered the piece's ability to speak its truth by cramming hers into its mouths.

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