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The Player King
Reviewed by Jenny Lower
Met Theatre
Through Oct. 25
Directed by Paul Koslo and written by and starring Darin Dahms, The Player King follows the fortunes of one of the most infamous acting families in American history: the Booths. They are headed by drunken patriarch Junius Brutus; his son, Edwin, who breaks with his father to become a leading Shakespearean performer; and younger son John Wilkes, whose vaulting ambition ultimately takes a devastating and well-known turn.
Dahms’s resounding performance imbues these three men, along with several minor characters, with tremendous force and braggadocio. The power of his acting technique and the script’s oversampling of Shakespearean soliloquies, however, fail to serve as sufficient through-lines for a story that often feels temporally as well as thematically disconnected. John Wilkes’s allusion to his father’s dictum that “an actor must act,” as well as his later ruminations on Macbeth’s “poor player” speech while facing certain downfall, pique curiosity without substantially illuminating the central conflict — the self-styled Southerner’s thought-process prior to executing the sixteenth president of the United States.
The Player King is an actor’s play, one that showcases three distinctly demanding performances but begins to feel like an excuse to launch some of the greatest speeches in English theater. The play’s most intriguing and affecting moments are those invented to tell this story, in which Edwin reflects on first meeting his actress wife, a palm reader predicts sorrow in John Wilkes’s devil-may-care life-line, and a weathered miner elucidates the meaning behind the half-taunting, half-pitying phrase, “to see the elephant.”
But without more in-story context, it’s difficult to know what we should take from these compelling vignettes, or what relationship they bear to the play’s main thrust. The script requires more exploration and refinement to equal Dahms’ performance; as it is, we don’t get enough of the assassin, his family, or his era to feel wholly satisfied on any of these counts.
The MET Theatre, downstairs in the Great Scott Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hlywd., Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; through Oct. 25. (800) 838-3006, theplayerking.brownpapertickets.com
