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Pillaging Shakespearean plays is not a new practice, but few playwrights who do so are as clever as August Schulenburg, whose new play Rue has been given a playful and energetic staging by Kelly O'Donnell at Theater for the New City in the East Village. Rue is not another retelling of one of Shakespeare's plays in contemporary dress. Far more innovative, it is neo-Shakespeare with a poetic, invented language just shy of iambic pentameter and a plot that dexterously weaves together elements of The Tempest, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play is set on an imaginary island called Ru that is divided like Cyprus or Korea into a north and south, with a DMZ-like zone populated by animaelus, a subhuman indigenous race that might be described as a hornier cousin of Caliban. The northern part of this fictional island is ruled by a fanatically religious dictator, while Suru, the southern part, is a hedonistic idyll occupied by an army from a powerful country called Meriglund that ostensibly keeps the dictatorship in the north at bay. This set-up allows for a layered island social structure; not only is there class conflict between the rich Meriglish people and the poorer Suruvians, but there is also some kind of interspecies conflict in that the humans are both repelled and attracted by the primitive animaelus. In this way, Schulenburg adroitly employs the island as an analogy to the feral primeval forests and magical lands that often figure in Shakespeare's plays, fusing the magical creatures that populate the island in The Tempest, with the dark sexuality of the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the class antipathy demonstrated by Colin and Touchstone in the Forest of Arden. The savvy sociopolitical picture that results gives weight to the otherwise lighthearted story of the mending of two ruptured relationships. The play begins with one pair of unhappy lovers as they arrive in Ru. Meriglish scholar Candace Donovan-Chase (Laura Walczak) has written about Ru in best-selling travel guides, though her most direct experience of the island comes from her diplomat husband, Robert Donovan (David Crommett), who chastises her for her unrealistic expectations in this long-awaited visit. With her romantic faith in the island's miraculous healing powers, she believes that she will finally quell her insistently ticking biological clock and at last have a child, thus overcoming the mysterious obstacle that has come between her husband and herself -- killing two birds with one island, so to speak. The other dysfunctional couple is comprised of a hunky social-climbing Suruvian named Handsome (Ian Bedford) and his pregnant girlfriend Pip (Jessica Conrad), whom he jilts in order to accept a glamorous hotel job from Boss McReis (Victor Truro), the wealthiest man on the island. Banned from the hotel, Pip disguises herself as a male barback and finds Handsome chasing Candace. In order to get rid of her rival, Pip procures a love potion for Candace to administer to her husband, setting off a whole string of chaotic events when the potion is wrongly given. This frothy romance is underpinned by the darker conflict between Handsome and McReis, as Handsome finds himself resisting McReis' orders to cross all kinds of ethical and moral boundaries. Attired in a white suit like Ricardo Montalban in Fantasy Island, McReis omnisciently manipulates all the action like Prospero and Oberon, though his motives are far more sinister and selfish, finally activating a long-dormant volcano and jeopardizing the entire island. The most intriguing aspect of Rue is Schulenburg's command of the English language. The natives on this island speak a fictional Irish-sounding patois, but even McReis and the gentry in the hotel speak lyrically. "Help pay for the babe," says Pip early in the play, "If you no shine my heart, you shine my palm." McReis in the same scene says, "I love a dirthole, who doesn't, can't appreciate cleanliness without dirt, and cleanliness is next to Godliness, so where is God without dirt?" The language is skillfully created and in general, the actors not only delight in its playfulness, but also are able to comfortably inhabit it, although it must be said that inventing an island patois is something of a conceit since several beautifully poetic ones already exist. I couldn't help but think of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, which is known for its blend of Irish and African culture. Like the fictional Ru, a volcano that had been long dormant erupted on Montserrat in 1993 and over half the population had to evacuate. True, the fantastical element of the play might be compromised if a real Eastern Caribbean dialect were used, but since Ru's social structure is so reminiscent of real islands like St. Martin or Jamaica, and the very essence of patois is the union of two or more languages, I wondered if the play would have more resonance if the Suruvians looked more like the mixed-raced indigenous peoples on other islands. Not that I want to get overly affirmative-action -- the play features a very good ensemble of actors with Shakespearean experience and it is supposed to be fictional -- but with its 100% Caucasian racial composition, the island of Ru must be off the coast of ... Kansas. That aside, Victor Truro has a believably blithe authority and a nimble way with language as McReis and Jessica Conrad is a persuasively passionate Pip and equally convincing as an awkward teenage boy. Other standouts in the uniformly terrific cast include David Crommett as the conflicted Robert Donovan, Liz Dailey as, the formidable hotel chatelaine Brickles, and Candice Holdorf as the appealing island actress Chuck. O'Donnell's spirited direction keeps the action bouncing along past a few over-earnest summer stock bumps that are utterly forgiven as the play crescendos hilariously in a sick bar-game response to the religious fanaticism on the northern half of the island and in the riotous grand finale over the wrongly administered love potion. Schulenburg is a very gifted writer and Rue is another example of the depth of his imagination and his tremendous versatility. In this homage to Shakespearean comedy, he has written a play that is at both profoundly comic and comically profound. "Rue", Copyright © 2006 by theater2k.com. All rights reserved. |
