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Equivocation
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Theatricum Botanicum
Through Oct. 4.
The best evidence that the enigma known as William Shakespeare is as much an article of faith as a body of canonical plays and poetry is in the fur that flies whenever the Bard himself gets transmuted from literary legend into a dramatic character of fiction.
Because to create such a characterization is to openly take a position on the Great Schism in amateur Shakespearean critical circles — namely, whether the supreme English-language playwright of all time started life as an uneducated bumpkin from Stratford-upon-Avon or was a pseudonymous somebody with a nobler pedigree.
The smartest version of the latter is perhaps filmmaker Roland Emmerich’s heretical, 2011 Oxfordian-oriented political thriller, Anonymous. The not-so-smart Stratfordian-orthodox corollary may be playwright Bill Cain’s seriocomic, 2009 Jacobean conspiracy tale, Equivocation, which has been amiably revived by director Mike Peebler at Theatricum Botanicum.
Both stories take broad liberties with historical-biographical facts while pinning the Byzantine court intrigues of their respective plots to narrow political explications of key Shakespeare texts. It is, however, Cain’s blandly anodyne Bard and much-ado-about-nothing-much storytelling that most rankles.
The time is 1605, and Shakespeare (the able Ted Barton) is summonsed by Sir Robert Cecil (the always fine Alan Blumenfeld). Cecil is the powerful chief minister and spymaster for James I (Dane Oliver, in a dexterous turn). Shakespeare reluctantly accepts a commission to break with his custom of adapting stories set in the past and write a play about the most explosive current event of James’s early reign — the just-foiled Gunpowder Plot.
To that main thread, Cain weaves in numerous subplots, including the strained relationship between Shakespeare and his housekeeper-amanuensis daughter, Judith (Taylor Jackson Ross), and a rivalry at Shakespeare’s theater company, The King’s Men, between lead actor Richard Burbage (the solid Franc Ross) and one of its rising young stars (Oliver).
As the blocked and frustrated playwright further investigates the Gunpowder Plot by interviewing the still imprisoned conspirators, however, Shakespeare begins to suspect that the unlikely particulars of the story are more the product of Cecil’s propagandistic imagination than they are actual fact.
And while Peebler and his muscular ensemble prove expert at seductively selling Cain’s quasi-historical premise, his audience-flattering allusions and lively turns of phrase, it does not take long for the troubling hollowness masked by such glibness to make itself felt.
Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the entire enterprise is Cain’s primary suspense device — the gunpowder play itself. Every member of the Botanicum audience is painfully aware from the outset that no such Shakespeare tragedy was ever penned.
In a sense, that makes Equivocation liable to the same despairing criticism that Cain’s fictional Shakespeare levels against his own apocryphal gunpowder first draft — “a four-act buildup to an explosion that doesn’t happen.”
Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga; Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 4, 8 p.m.; through October 4. (310) 455-2322, theatricum.com
