Play On!
Goodman Theatre
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Turning Shakespeare’s fanciful Illyria into “the magical kingdom of Harlem” during “the swingin’ 40s,” Play On! focuses on two couples whose members spend most of their time pining for the wrong partner. Vy, modeled on Shakespeare’s Viola, is an aspiring songwriter recently arrived in New York from her Mississippi home (“I don’t want your Dixie,” she sings of her plans to trade in “southern skies” for “that classy uptown style”). She falls in love with the bandleader Duke–a reactionary sexist despite his Ellingtonian urbanity. But since she’s posing as a man in order to make it in the macho world of jazz, she can’t tell Duke how she feels about him. Meanwhile Duke is hung up on Lady Liv, the “black butterfly” star of the Cotton Club, but she wants nothing to do with him. So Duke enlists his new pal “Vy-Man” to plead his case–only to have Liv, like Twelfth Night’s Olivia, fall for the girl she thinks is a boy. Liv is also adored by Rev, a straitlaced Uncle Tom who manages the Cotton Club for its white owners; he’s despised as a “bought and sold Negro” by Liv’s Fats Waller-like pianist Sweets and her scat-singing maid Miss Mary (surrogates for Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch and Maria). Like Twelfth Night’s Malvolio, Rev is duped by his clownish enemies into thinking he can win Liv’s love if he changes his style, dressing up in an outlandish yellow zoot suit and posing as a strutting, jive-talking hepcat, which only makes everyone think he’s gone crazy.
Passing mischievous comment on the romantic roundelay is Vy’s uncle Jester–a cross between the Shakespearean troubadour Feste and the Harlem song-and-dance men John Bubbles and Avon Long (both of whom are best remembered for playing the dandified drug dealer, Sportin’ Life, in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess). The Jester role seems tailor-made for Andre De Shields, a onetime Organic Theater actor whose unforgettable performance as the reefer-sucking Viper in Broadway’s 1978 Fats Waller revue Ain’t Misbehavin’ is echoed in his sleekly serpentine moves here: “You can’t go hither if you can’t slither,” he hisses. De Shields and portly, gap-toothed Ken Prymus team up for the showstopping blues number “Rocks in My Bed,” and Cynthia Jones as Miss Mary joins Prymus on the bubbly comic duet “Love You Madly.”
Directors have often soft-pedaled Synge’s earthy ugliness in favor of a lighter, more humorous interpretation; the great Abbey Theatre actress Marie Nic Shiubhlaigh lamented in 1956 that “nowadays, the play is done as a comedy–and is invariably successful. When it was given for the first time it was played seriously, almost sombrely, as though each character had been studied and its nastiness made apparent.” She’d have approved Steppenwolf Theatre’s revival of the Celtic classic; director Doug Hughes of Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre (where this production will play after its run here) gives Playboy’s gab its due without ignoring the grit.
