Course blog 21 (Andrea)

“There’s some small initial amusement in Cain’s willfully anachronistic language, hearing Shag and his actor pals speaking about their 17th-century current events in modern American Sorkinese…What’s missing is a real emotional core beneath the cleverness.”

(http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/theater/15740471/equivocation-at-victory-gardens-theater-theater-review)

While I agree with this reviewer’s overall assessment of the play, his conclusion that Equivocation fell flat because it had no emotional core misreads one of its worst flaws. True, I found the play ultimately unsuccessful, but not because it was a lengthy theater in-joke that relied too heavily on cleverness. Rather, Equivocation tried to establish too many emotional focal points and never managed to settle on one in a way that could provide a satisfying conclusion.

If the play had truly been as the reviewer describes it, it might have had better success as a performance. He grudgingly admits that there is amusement in Equivocation’s brisk anachronism, and if the playwright had been less ambitious, he might have produced an entertaining comedy for an audience that knows Shakespeare and the theater well.

Instead, Equivocation tried to add weight to its fluffy cleverness by throwing Shagspeare into scenes of torture, political scapegoats, and domestic problems. Shag witnesses the torture of the prisoner played by Arturo Soria and feels so sympathetic to him that he agrees to deliver a letter to the prisoner’s wife and tries to bargain with Cecil on his behalf. But then that prisoner is forgotten and Shag forms a bond with Henry Garnett, the imprisoned priest. But even that emotional connection is muddied—Shag cares about Garnett because he needs his help to write a play, then because of his political involvement in the gunpowder plot, and then, most confusingly, because he thinks the priest can help him heal from death of his son. Finally, there is an attempt to ground the play in the relationship between Shag and his daughter Judith, which felt like an ill-fitting last-minute addition to the script.

None of these plotlines were integrated with each other or with the comedic aspects of Equivocation, and the play never found its center among the various possible emotional cores. The reviewer is correct that this play didn't work, but he misses what is possibly the most important reason why—the problem is not that it had no emotional core, but that it had too many and couldn't pick.