Bill Cain's "Equivocation,' Off-Broadway

Strife is the order of the day: a new government, ambitious advisors, religious hatreds, political prisoners, torture, backroom political machinations, public dissatisfaction, revolutionary unrest, terrorist attacks, sexual shenanigans at the highest levels, moral equivocation everywhere. It's 1604. The Scottish king, James I, has just acceded to the throne of England. Enter: relevance.

Enter: Robert Cecil (David Pittu), with a commission from the king requiring Shakespeare (John Pankow)— here called "Shag"— to write a play about the recent Gunpowder Plot, when a group, disgusted with the king's reneging on his promise of religious tolerance, planned to blow up Parliament and the Royals. The plot was undone by an anonymous letter betraying them to the authorities. (The infamous Guy Fawkes gave the event his name, celebrated in England as Guy Fawkes Day, when he is burned in effigy).

Shag sees this commission, accurately, as a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't deal. How to write it, how to survive the setup is the problem of the play.

Strife persists as well within Shakespeare's company, the King's Men— the most celebrated actors in England— filled, unsurprisingly, with egos, self-interest and divided loyalties. The actors of this production (Michael Countryman, Remy Auberjonois, David Furr and Pittu) play the actors of the King's Men— who in turn play various scenes from Shakespeare plays— Lear, Macbeth— and then they double or triple their roles as historical figures. Sometimes these changes occur before our eyes, sometimes with lightning-quick costume changes.

Fathers and lost daughters

Strife infects the family, too: Shakespeare's daughter, Judith (Charlotte Parry)— a constant, almost silent presence, twin of Shakespeare's dead son Hamnet— tells us, in a soliloquy, how she hates soliloquies and, in fact, hates theater. But does she ever know theater, since she knows how personal her father's plays are; all those daughters in all those late plays (The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, for examples) lost and restored to their fathers. Their complicated, tense relationship, with her awful mother in the psychological background, is a play in itself.

But Bill Cain has ideas to burn, and never stretches one too thin or clobbers us to make meaning obvious. Under Garry Hynes's imaginative direction, the scenes dazzle the audience with sometimes-sudden shifts, sometimes slides; on a minimal set of clanging metal walls (designed by Francis O'Connor), David Weiner's lighting changes the mood from workaday at the Globe to grim in prison.

O'Connor's clever costumes feature jeans and Renaissance doublets. This visual connection is rendered startlingly actual when Robert Cecil, the ruthless, hollow man who does the monarch's dirty work, reminds us that there have been 400 years of Robert Cecils, up until the 21st-Century conservative leader of the House of Lords.

Beyond cheap realism

With a cast this uniformly skilled and a play this rich, we have to provide the audience it requires. As Judith tells us, "The last plays are completely unbelievable…. Audiences loved them…They cried…They believed them. Of course, audiences— they'll believe anything."

"Believing," of course, means more than responding to the cheap and easy domestic realism of most contemporary theater; it means holding a mirror up so that we feel, not just see, the truth in a play. As Bill Cain learned from Shakespeare, "Laughter makes the tragedy bearable."