BWW Reviews: RED VELVET at Shakespeare & Company

Theater history buffs have two reasons to seek out a production of RED VELVET, Lolita Chakrabarti's historical drama, which has just closed its American premiere production at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. First, it sketches in part of the true story of the first great black classical actor, Ira Aldridge. Second, it depicts the beginning of the shift from old-fashioned 19th century declamatory acting style to something closer to the naturalism of the 20th century, a naturalism that still dominates today's stages.

The play begins and ends in 1867, the year Ira Aldridge died, in Poland. These scenes frame the bulk of the two act drama, which is otherwise set in 1833, the year Aldridge stepped in to play Othello at Covent Garden when the great white tragedian, Edmund Kean, who had been playing the role in blackface, fell ill.

If the drama hews close to the history--and Chakrabarti did extensive research--then Aldridge faced enormous overt racism as he took on the part of the Moor, both from his fellow actors and from the critics. The prime voice of disgust in the play is Charles Kean, Edmund's son, played with a determined sneer at Shakespeare & Company by Ben Chase. His disdain is not shared by his fiancée, the famous actress Ellen Tree (Kelley Curran), who is playing Desdemona.

Aldridge is embodied by John Douglas Thompson, who won an Obie for his Othello with Theater for a New Audience in 2009, and has won acclaim in numerous classical roles on Broadway. For his portrayal of Louis Armstrong in the one-man show, SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF, he won the 2014 Drama Desk Award. Thompson trained at Shakespeare & Company and has been a company member there for nine years. He brings grace and power to the 1833 moments, and painfully grotesque gravitas to the ending.

Chakrabarti asks a lot of her audience in this, her debut stage play: it begins in murky darkness, and all the dialogue in the opening moments is between minor characters, speaking German. Even once the play shifts to its central characters, and into English, racist rhetoric confronts us so directly that it is impossible to relax into complacent sense that our current society is beyond all this. So this isn't a feel good evening, despite the reverent ending, when the company bows to a portrait of Aldridge.

Rather than presenting a full-on biography of this seminal figure, the playwright focuses instead on Aldridge's attempts to loosen up the rigid staging conventional in classical drama in his time. Director Daniella Varon furthers this focus by foregrounding issues of theatrical style in the highly choreographed scene changes, which are performed by the company as a silent ballet. She's also provided a very helpful timeline and historical context in the program, which illuminates some of Aldridge's complicated marital and family history, which the play addresses only tangentially. Here's a bit of the script, from a moment when Aldridge is rehearsing a moment with Desdemona:

Ira: I like chance. Possibility. I like to listen and respond.

Ellen: So I may play what I feel?

Ira: Absolutely!

Ellen: How avant-garde!

The charm of moments like this lighten what is otherwise a glimpse back into highly charged terrain, racially, sexually, and theatrically--terrain that certainly remains contested today. RED VELVET is a worthy link to an earlier chapter in the ongoing cultural struggle to reduce exploitation and promote equity, still so far from a just conclusion. Chakrabarti is a British actress of Bengali descent; she is married to Adrian Lester, a British actor of Jamaican descent, who played Aldridge in the original British production in 2012. I hope we'll hear more from her.

photo by Enrico Spada