Gammons has streamlined the arguably Artaudian script, calling forth the military toughness of its characters (Titus and his black-clad sons all wear boots and dog tags) but also their unexpected tenderness. The play’s two female characters (other than an unfortunate nurse) appear in long dresses and with shaved heads. John Kuntz’s Tamora ably marries submissive apprehension to covert brutality, but Paul Melendy’s frail, dark-browed Lavinia is as delicate as any actress might make her — and the magisterial lovingness shown the ravaged and mutilated girl by her father and particularly by her uncle, the tempered Marcus Andronicus of Joel Colodner, is quite moving. Moreover, despite this contrast of martial brutality and sad sweetness, the production, with its dim but harsh lighting by Jeff Adelberg and effectively mechanistic sound design by Cam Willard, is very much a whole. And on the whole it’s well acted, with Robert Wash an eloquent, increasingly anguished old soldier of a Titus, in whom grief ignites at last a grim whimsy. To the role of unrepentantly havoc-wreaking Machiavellian villain Aaron the Moor, Shakespeare’s rough draft for Iago in the hue of Othello, Dmetrius Conley-Williams brings both bravura and daddy love. ASP can’t place Titus Andronicus in the firmament with Hamlet. But burying it in a hole beneath Harvard Square, the company shows the play worthy of the light of day.
You might call Allan Knee’s Syncopation, winner of a 2000 Steinberg New Play Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association, Dancing Without the Stars. And you don’t miss them. Set in 1911 on New York’s Lower East Side, Syncopation (at Merrimack Repertory Theatre through April 15) chronicles the blossoming of ballroom hoofers far more unlikely and endearing than Jerry Springer and Heather Mills McCartney. Henry Ribolow is a meatpacker who dreams of being Vernon Castle; Anna Bianchi is the more inhibited garment-factory beader who answers his ad for a dance partner. Their journey is both a romance and a metaphor for possibility, set in a working-class immigrant milieu that doesn’t offer much of either. The play is somewhat sociologically obvious, and too much of it takes the form of direct address to the audience. But what makes the piece captivating is the dancing, which moves from shy, tentative clomping to a swirl of lifts, dips, and fancy footwork set to the rhythms of ragtime (and at one point Stravinsky). Not only is the choreography fun to watch; it nicely manifests the building of both sexual tension and trust.
Knee, who wrote the play that became the film Finding Neverland, chronicles the burgeoning relationship over the course of a year, beginning with Henry’s rental of a grubby sixth-floor tenement walk-up in which to dance. Unlike resolute 38-year-old dreamer Henry, Anna, the decorous 24-year-old daughter of an Italian vegetable salesman, isn’t quite sure what she’s doing locked up in a grubby room with a man whose ebullient confidence would seem to exceed good sense, but something must be missing from her sheltered life. Around the dancing partners’ practice sessions, Knee sketches a rudimentary portrait of an era poised for change: Henry occasionally meets with socialist radicals; Anna takes up with a group of suffragettes and bohemians called the Odd Women. Before long she’s hiking up her ankle-length skirt to show off beaded stockings and responding to dance inventor Henry’s body as well as to his dream. Along the way, of course, there are small liberations and setbacks as the pair respond differently to the debate of the age regarding whether, in an ostensible land of opportunity shedding its Victorianism and class distinctions, there are “limits.”
