Coriolanus Off-Broadway Reviews

Generally, the acting proves spotty. Possibly that thudding, bass-heavy sound design by Brandon Keith Bulls, icy music by David T. Little and an intermittent yellowish atmospheric haze undermines performances. A less than charismatic McKinley Belcher III is a handsome though mostly stolid Coriolanus; speaking the blank verse, he tends to hit the cadences hard. The greater disappointment is the director’s slack, unimaginative shaping of the crucial scenes involving those so-swayable Roman people, who collectively become the drama’s motivating force. Clad in East Village mufti, they’re noisy but scarcely suggest a dangerous Roman mob. Perhaps it would have been wiser to invest more in additional actors and their rehearsal than in tech.

Coriolanus is not Shakespeare’s most compelling work, but this production’s standout actors, anchored by Belcher, could make you think otherwise. The plot includes war, politics and a civic uprising as the Roman general Coriolanus vanquishes the rival Volscians only to plead for their alliance when his arrogant refusal to display his battle wounds gets him banished from Rome. The ping-pong of allegiances threatens to get confusing, but director Ash K. Tata keeps the action clear and active, and projections by Lisa Renkel and Possible help define the locations. Other sequences are less clear; during battles, the video design sometimes becomes a muddled first-person shooter game, à la Call of Duty. But the performances are always crystalline.

There are no weak links in the cast, though. Roslyn Ruff’s understated power as Volumnia and Jason O’Connell’s heartbreaking valor as Menenius Agrippa balance the searching pain and sacrifice of Belcher’s title soldier. All too often with Shakespeare, however, the attraction is the lasting power of the unfaltering text. The story and the actors delivering it are reason enough to see this lesser-produced tragedy, but the rest of its trappings amount to spectacle.

Blame my ever-diminishing attention span, but I quickly lost interest in Tata’s techno-extratextual commentary on Coriolanus, now running at Theater for a New Audience’s home, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. I get it, to an extent: it’s impossible to divorce our consumption of politics and civil unrest from the technology we’ve plugged into our brains. But with performances as strong as the ones we get from this cast, I would have welcomed the chance to unplug.

Theatre for a New Audience’s production of the play is performed with a monotony that flattens the text’s brutal complexity.

Tata’s production takes three full hours to get through the play, searching for a compelling hook somewhere in the modern setting, but consistently falling short. Belcher’s Coriolanus is precisely as bombastic and aloof as Shakespeare wrote him, which only makes the few glimpses of his humanity seem abrupt and jarring. O’Connell’s sleazy and conniving Menenius is a fun bright spot and the always excellent Ruff shows, with little doubt, why Volumnia is so adept at overpowering the emotions and intellect of her son. But, on the whole, the performances highlight rather than assuage the static nature of these characters.