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McCraney is, at least, on solid thematic ground. There are some notable parallels, of both politics and race, between the revolutions of Egypt in the late BCs and Saint-Domingue (located in what is now more or less Haiti) in the early 1800s. And placing the titular general (Jonathan Cake) and queen (Joaquina Kalukango) on the opposite sides of both divides puts a sufficiently relatable modern spin on one of Shakespeare's most sharply fractured and hardest-to-pin-down tragedies. But Antony and Cleopatra must, above all, be driven by heat, and that's what's missing from every component of this mounting. The set (by Tom Piper, who also did the costumes) boasts an elegant classical bathhouse look that proves ideal as an amplifier for the various voodoo rituals and chants McCraney has injected into the play, but not for the passions, either erotic or military, that arise between Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavius Caesar (Samuel Collings) as they struggle with the question of who's really in charge of what and whom. This dampens any tension that might otherwise kindle between the white interlopers and the black natives, and leaves you not really caring who wins or loses. More problematic still are the leads. Kalukango is firm of voice and statuesque in her attractiveness, and Cake is hardily gym-cut; on a three-sheet advertisement for the play, they'd be perfect. But although they frequently share the stage they share no chemistry, always talking past each other, with Kalukango's distant stateliness never meeting Cake's barking intensity somewhere their personalities could believable entangle. If it's McCraney's intention that they're captivated solely by the other's unavailability, it's unclear to the point of being confusing, and ineffective as a dramatic technique. (As neither actor is particularly more engaging when playing in scenes with others, that may not be the entire problem.) Collings, however, is a commanding Octavius, convincing as both the regal figure and the war hero he must play at separate points; and Charise Castro Smith, as his sister Octavia, provides a scope and depth of both likability and feeling that makes her a magnetic fixture during her brief appearances (she also plays, quite well, Cleopatra's attendant Iras). Ash Hunter's forceful pirate Pompey, Chivas Michael's ethereal soothsayer, and Sarah Niles's strong-willed but sympathetic Charmian shore up the periphery with aplomb; only Henry Stram, going all-out fop, seems to be at odds with his roles as Lepidus, Proculeius, and a messenger. But it's McCraney who paints the biggest question mark here. As a playwright he's demonstrated his abilities at plumbing unusual psyches, to varying degrees of success, with Wig Out!, Choir Boy, and especially The Brother/Sister Plays (seen at The Public in 2009), and has never faltered as far as raw creativity. Too often here, though, that creativity is an impediment, his hunger for wrenching stage pictures and full-stage cavalcades of movement (the heavy-stomping choreography is by Gelan Lambert) and song (the music is by Michael Thurber, and played by a four-piece onstage band) tamping down the meaning that should be the show's most important function. Preternaturally slow pacing that suggests the waters of Hispaniola have been replaced by molasses kills most of the mood; placing a fair number of crucial events far upstage in an extraneous pool of water and backlit (by lighting designer Stephen Strawbridge) takes care of much of the rest. As he's a fairly inexperienced director (his Playbill bio lists only one other credit, Hamlet for Young People's Shakespeare), these missteps are perhaps understandable, though the sweeping scope of this play would not seem ideal for a beginner as a general rule. So one can see why McCraney felt it necessary to inject so much of himself that, in many scenes, Shakespeare becomes a footnote—but that makes matters worse, not better. This is seen primarily in Enobarbus (played with jaded, up-for-anything gusto by Chukwudi Iwuji), whom McCraney has uneasily refashioned as a narrator, and whose own transformation to island sympathizer is used as a visual metaphor for tracking the uprising's progress. But his monologues, which have been rearranged and cut and pasted from throughout the play to support this concept, are distracting and unnecessary, eating up time more than they convey vital new ideas. And his fresh tendency to announce stage directions to the audience feels flat-out lazy, as though McCraney either couldn't figure out how to make locale shifts clear or couldn't bear not reusing a device that was so central in The Brother/Sister Plays. In any case, you're seeing exactly what McCraney describes on the title page of his version of the script: a radical edit. You are not, however, seeing an edit that shines any new light on a play that straddles genres or that offers one of the most complex and fascinating heroines in all of Shakespeare. Cleopatra, like much of what surrounds her, has been reduced to a one-sentence description and left to fend for herself. Whether in Egypt or Saint-Domingue, great women—and great plays—deserve more.
Antony and Cleopatra
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