O'Connor's set, suggestive of both the Firmament and a candle-lit cage, is effective, as is Ben Ormerod's lighting design, which flickers like Inquisition fire when it isn't flicking on the stars and moon. But good actors are wasted on caricatured cameos, many of them gliding by on a double revolve that at times makes the fluid production look like an ice show. The vigorous Sanders ages convincingly, but his experiment-relishing Galileo is a bit hammy. Herrmann's characterization of the pope, who must preserve the mysteries that keep God "necessary," is subtler. As Marie Celeste and Barberini confidant Giovanni Ciampoli, Molly Schreiber and Dermot Crowley endeavor to inject some humanity into the cavalcade of Holy Church and hands-on science. But that any of these people are real must be taken, well, on faith.
"Before him/He carries noise," says proud mom Volumnia of her warrior son, the title character of Coriolanus. That's certainly true in Actors' Shakespeare Project's cacophonous production (at Somerville's Arts at the Armory through April 5), with its thunderous percussion design by former Stomp performer Stephen Serwacki and its workers-of-the-world Roman plebiscite banging and clanging tools and farm implements to put their unrest across. When the Word War II–era, social-realist mini-rabble are on stage decrying the arrogant Caius Martius (soon to be dubbed Coriolanus) as "chief enemy to the people," the show sounds like an iron works. And the Roman and Volscian soldiers enact their martial-arts-inspired skirmishes to a din of drums. Yet it's when the production quiets down, the clamor replaced by a low electric hum as steely Volumnia pits her will against her angry son's, that it's most riveting. Robert Walsh's production moves gracefully and carries a big, effectively stylized stick. But it's the performances, particularly in this piercing fifth-act face-off, by Benjamin Evett as the disaffected Roman war machine and Bobbie Steinbach as the mom who made him that carry the day.
Coriolanus has been dubbed by sources from Harold Bloom to The Essential Shakespeare Handbook the Bard's most political play. With its power-mongering operatives, the tribunes, both pressuring the patricians and manipulating the mob, the play offers a critique of democracy that's anything but irrelevant today (though ASP chooses to evoke images of fascist Italy and Soviet Russia in its Asian-technique-inspired production). That Shakespeare's late-breaking (1607-'08) political tragedy is less often performed than, say, Julius Caesar probably has more to do with its unlikable tragic hero than with its shrewd political commentary.
Caius Martius combines the bullying military zeal of General George Patton with open contempt for the commonweal. Moreover, this stubborn, unreflective manchild conflates arrogance with principle, refusing to flatter the people or to beg from them the approval necessary for him to be made consul following his near-single-handed first-act victory over the Volscians. When the spurned plebiscite, incited by the tribunes, rally to throw the bum out, he proves them prescient by turning traitor. Even at the 11th hour, when the vengeful super-soldier opts not to torch his own town, he is surrendering not to mercy but to mama's-boy weakness. Other than the knee-jerk valor bred into him by a withholding mother, what's to admire?
