Patrick Page

Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus

Though apparently popular in its own time, Titus Andronicus (ca. 1592), Shakespeare’s first tragedy, and his bloodiest, hasn’t enjoyed much esteem since. One 17th-century playwright declared it a “heap of rubbish”; T.S. Eliot thought it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.” Others conveniently decided that something so barbarous could not have been written by Shakespeare (although it likely contains some material by the dramatist George Peele, there is no doubt of Shakespeare’s authorship of the bulk of the play). It’s a good thing, then, that Red Bull Theater, led by Jesse Berger, was undeterred: Berger directs a harrowing, and funny, production of the play, featuring a ferocious Patrick Page in the title role.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Archduke

Archduke

If the title of Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, Archduke, conjures up Franz Ferdinand, the most famous archduke of all, that’s exactly what’s intended. But Joseph is less concerned with the death of the Serbian monarch whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I than he is with the social and historical forces that helped radicalize the three principal killers: Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović, and Trifko Grabez.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

All the Devils Are Here

All the Devils Are Here

Patrick Page’s investigation into Shakespeare’s villains is a master class on the Bard and a bravura demonstration of Shakespearean acting. In All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, Page brings a lifetime of performing and thinking about Shakespeare to the stage. He inhabits characters running the full range of Shakespeare’s dramatic career and imparts some of the wisdom he has accrued along the way, summoning evil spirits one moment and serving as congenial, good-natured, and charismatic host into the heart of darkness the next.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Coriolanus

Coriolanus

The playbill for the Red Bull production of Shakespeare’s rarely staged Coriolanus gives the time period as "Rome, 493 B.C.E. Here, now." But, under Michael Sexton’s direction, the latter prevails: military men in camouflage fatigues and dress greens, a First Citizen with a T-shirt that reads “You can’t have capitalism without racism,” and several female soldiers all declare it’s now. There’s virtually nothing identifiable from 493 B.C.E. 

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post