Tamburlaine, Parts I and II Review

When staging a 427 year-old drama, acknowledging the audience is a crucial trick for keeping them alert. In this mammoth adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s 1587 war epic Tamburlaine, Parts I and II, murderers roam through the aisles and make eye contact with people in the crowd. A king appears with a half-eaten leg of chicken in his mouth and passes it off to someone in the front row. And in a self-referential joke plump with irony, that same king (Paul Lazar) whips out the show’s Playbill from his jacket pocket and scolds the audience for not following the plot, mimicking our sneak-reading-by-stage-light of the play’s synopsis. Indeed, this rare NYC production of Marlowe’s neglected two-parter (running through Dec. 21 at Theatre for a New Audience’s magnificent Polonsky Shakespeare Center), is occasionally indecipherable to the point of mental surrender. What is said to have been a scandalous narrative in the Elizabethan age now seems stale and ludicrously repetitive. But as with an overripe opera, the words here are not exactly the thing. The rewards of this gnarly, muscular production—edited and directed by Michael Boyd and headlined by the monumental John Douglas Thompson—come from the retrofitting of Marlowe’s jumbled text into a dark, cracked fantasy of carnage and revenge.