Mary Stuart
“A single death is a tragedy,” Joseph Stalin once observed. “A million deaths is a statistic.” But after the horrific events of September 11, with the threat of more carnage to come, plays about the deaths of royals in centuries past present some problems. With so many innocents slaughtered so close to home, it’s hard to feel sorry for two supremely self-involved monarchs like Mary Stuart and Richard II, particularly given the appalling lack of judgment both rulers demonstrated.
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JoAnne Akalaitis (whose previous Court Theatre production was last season’s In the Penal Colony) opts for a broad B-movie style that sets up the combative queens–Mary and Elizabeth I of England, Mary’s cousin–as vain, silly, histrionic cartoons, then abruptly abandons that concept in the show’s second half. Jenny Bacon as Mary and Barbara E. Robertson as Elizabeth are hamstrung by Akalaitis’s proclivity for anachronistic stage business that doesn’t expand our understanding of either queen’s precarious state.
Akalaitis’s staging is more somber and stripped down in the second act. And intermittently some of Schiller’s best passages do come through. Bacon imbues Mary’s final scene with the grace and sense of victory the Scottish queen could never find in life, coming close to the romantic martyr Schiller envisioned. But Elizabeth remains an enigma despite Robertson’s cyclonic performance. Near the play’s close, Elizabeth’s trusted adviser Talbot, who’s argued passionately against Mary’s execution, mournfully tells the English queen, “I could not preserve the greater part of you.” But this staging hasn’t allowed us to glimpse what this greater part might be.
Parkinson’s rich, fluid performance is well matched by Mike Nussbaum’s affecting John of Gaunt and comically philosophical gardener, Scott Jaeck’s surprisingly charismatic Bolingbroke, Steve Pickering’s honorable and conflicted Duke of York, and Brian Hamman’s swaggering Henry Percy. Felicia P. Fields delivers Alaric Jans’s original song with sweet soulfulness and nails the Duchess of York’s simultaneously fierce and funny mother love as she pleads for her scheming son’s life.
