Antony and Cleopatra
Opening Night: February 18, 2014
Closing: March 23, 2014
Theater: The Public Theater
At the fringes of a war-torn empire, a man and a woman have fallen desperately, passionately in love. But for a soldier set to enforce the imperial will and the queen intent on throwing off the yoke of the empire, there is no place for personal desire.
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March 5, 2014
The Public Theater, kindly giving local Shakespeareans a break from the exhausting parade of King Lears, is offering a “radical edit” of Antony and Cleopatra by the 32-year-old playwright and 2013 MacArthur fellow Tarell Alvin McCraney. Edited or not, Antony and Cleopatra, written around the same year as Lear, poses some of the same difficulties; its story, though brilliant in précis and overflowing with beautiful poetry, plays out like a deliberate exercise in diminishing returns. Some three dozen characters speak, not to mention supernumeraries; the action careens almost drunkenly about the Mediterranean; and what started as an exquisite rarity — a study of passionate love between great equals — winds up as a count-the-corpses Grand Guignol.
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March 5, 2014
For all its exoticism, passion and action, Antony and Cleopatra is hardly a known quantity around New York. The last time Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy played Broadway, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were starring in 1951. The last time the Public Theater ventured near the Nile was 1997, when Vanessa Redgrave both directed and starred in a time-tripping version so eccentric and daffy that, ultimately, I wondered if she were just seeing how many actors Cleopatra could kiss in three hours.
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March 6, 2014
History repeats itself, whether you learn its lessons or not. That’s the biggest takeaway from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s production of William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at The Public Theater. With the support of Miami’s GableStage and London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, McCraney (Choir Boy) has set his production in colonial Haiti. It’s a sweaty, sexy Antony and Cleopatra that reaches an early boiling point then unfortunately cools to lukewarm as the show progresses.
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March 5, 2014
The program for the Public Theater’s new Antony and Cleopatra tells us that it was “edited and directed” by Tarell Alvin McCraney. That credit sounds more revisionist than it actually is; the rocketing young playwright behind The Brother/Sister Plays and Choir Boy has rearranged scenes in the original and turned soldier Enobarbus (Chukwudi Iwuji) into a narrator, but directors have been tinkering with Shakespeare for centuries. This version, coproduced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and performed by English and American actors, takes liberties, but—like its passion-driven, doomed queen—remains strikingly faithful.
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March 5, 2014
You know that Caribbean vacation you’ve been dreaming about in these last draggy days of winter? Well, you may want to rethink such fantasies after you see the Tarell Alvin McCraney’s squishy, misbegotten Antony and Cleopatra, which resets Shakespeare’s tragedy on the island of Hispaniola during the reign of the French. True, as designed by Tom Piper, this production — which opened at the Public Theater on Wednesday night — looks travel-brochure seductive at first, with its beckoning seascape of gleaming water and airy shades of blue. But be warned. Swimming equals death here: When characters get wet, in the rippling pool at the rear of the stage, you know they’re goners.
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