Ashland Theater Note: Equivocation

Bill Cain's play Equivocation, which premiered at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival this spring, seems almost tailor-made for the Ashland audience. It's about Shakespeare. It's got a lot of Shakespearean in-jokes, together with plenty of the one thing Ashland does best--farce. And it's all played out on a platter of Arthur-Miler-like moral earnestness that is bound to sooth and comfort the dedicated Ashland audience.

Cain certainly hit his mark, if the audience here last night is any gauge: they were hooting and hollering. And I grant him this --there was a lot to enjoy. Cain is polished at the kind of rim-shot dialog exchange that you can only learn from long practice in a real theatre. The farce was great--the climax of the show as a ten-minute sendup on Macbeth, which was certainly the funniest Macbeth I've ever seen and which, considering how many ponderous, marmoreal and overwrought Macbeths there are in the world, might just be the best Macbeth I've ever seen.

Cain's problem, I suspect, is that there isn't any other audience in the world that is going to like this item anywhere near as well, if at all. It's just too inside. And beyond the details, the play is rather a mess. Well--the core plot idea is good enough: King James I asks (orders) Shakespeare to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot. Shakespeare puzzles over how to save his skin while telling the truth. That's a good enough setup for a lot of dialog exchanges about "speaking truth to power" but in the end, he just throws it all away and does Macbeth instead.

Say wha--? For the ordinary (non-true-believer) theatre-goer, I suspect that this is just too much to handle. Meanwhile for contrast--I can't help but wonder if Cain wasn't inspired by Tom Stoppard's great score with Shakespeare in Love a few years back, which he turned into such a successful movie (I've seen it several times, and would gladly watch it again). The thing is, Stoppard achieved the trick of throwing a bone to the faithful--realistic Shakespearean atmosphere--while putting together a show that was funny and sexy that you could enjoy without a particle of insider knowledge. Most of what Cain does here would be lost, I suspect, on any but the truest of true believers.

A word about the politics in the play. Let's stipulate that torture is a bad thing. But to say as much to the Ashland audience is not precisely an act of moral courage: indeed, I suspect if you scored Dick Cheney on the hubba hubba metre with this crowd, with a scale of 100 he might hit a one. Torture is bad, true enough, but to go on and on about it with this crowd is about as tough as dynamiting whales in a barrel. Early on in the play (but I don't have a script) someone says something about the purpose of the theatre is to give you a feeling that you have improved without really changing anything. Exactly right.

So taken overall Equivocations strikes me as a pretty specialized taste. A solace for Cain is that Ashland has plenty of those, and so he is likely to be able to bask in a successful run for the full season.