‘Timon’ revives suspense in Bard
It’s not hard to see why “Timon of Athens” seldom piques producers’ interest. The play, which Shakespeare probably wrote with Thomas Middleton, follows an overgenerous aristocrat who gives away all his wealth, only to have his myriad beneficiaries deny him in his own hour of need. Then, after a drawnout splenetic fit, he dies. Where’s the satisfaction in that?
Turns out there’s a good deal, at least in the capable hands of director Rob Melrose at Cutting Ball Theater, where the show opened Thursday, April 5. In particular, long-standing Shakespeare fans should avail themselves of the opportunity to see the rarely performed script. It’s one thing to catch another excellent production of “Hamlet” or “Macbeth,” but to witness a Shakespeare play you’ve seen once or maybe never affords a special treat: suspense. Encountering that gnarly syntax for the first time, you listen not at your leisure but like a detective racing against the clock, puzzling through a riddle because you need to.
Linguistic riches abound,
especially when Shakespeare strikes at the worst of human nature. Here’s the japing beggar Apemantus (David Sinaiko), observing the ungrateful hordes feeding at Timon’s trough: “It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man’s blood.” Or here’s Timon (Brennan Pickman-Thoon) himself, explaining how he arrived at his beggared state: “As the moon does, by wanting light to give: But then renew I could not, like the moon; There were no suns to borrow of.”
Under Melrose’s fleet direction, successive scenes swoop in on each other’s heels, each sneaking in from a different corner of the tiny Exit on Taylor. If the cast doesn’t always wring clarity and urgency from repetitive or static text, a flurry of costume changes helps spur the pace. In one especially striking moment, ensemble member María Ascensión Leigh instantly transforms from earnest servant to hair-twirling, lips-pursing maiden, just by donning a magenta pleather jacket. (Alina Bokovikova did the smart costumes.)
Melrose makes the show’s early party scenes as extravagant and debauched as those chronicled in Emily Chang’s “Brotopia.” (In another costuming coup from Bokovikova, one reveler sports crotchless and bottomless silver pants.) An iPad and a Bluetooth headset underscore the show’s connection to the heedless spending of our own wealthy, and the plastic tarp of Timon’s later poverty evokes our own homeless.
Those stabs at contemporary relevance might sound obvious, just as a brief outline of the show’s plot might imply a pat moral, that money can’t buy you friends. Yet Melrose, who has long brought to the bay the canon’s weirdest morsels, like August Strindberg’s chamber plays, makes “Timon” less tidy than avant-garde. The way Timon and Apemantus revel in cursing each other, the way Shakespeare devotes reams and reams to Timon’s misanthropy, the way Timon’s former hangers-on only get worse, even begging from a beggar cast out from Athens’ walls — it all feels almost forbidden. It’s as if Shakespeare’s a 20th century writer railing at playwriting rules, insisting that no wellmade play could accommodate his bleak vision.
And the play invites still more probing inquiry: Does generosity that consumes itself cease to be generosity and become something else? If Timon’s magnanimity can sour so quickly, was it ever magnanimity to begin with? What is it in the fallen Timon that, as Apemantus says, doesn’t let him become “a flatterer now, and seek to thrive by that which has undone thee”? Is it nobility of spirit, or tragic pride?
Similar questions animate many of Shakespeare’s greatest protagonists. Timon might not be one of those men, but he’s still an intriguing vehicle for Shakespeare’s career-length themes. Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak
The play invites more probing inquiry: Does generosity that consumes itself cease to be generosity and become something else?