Flimsy Feud

Two lovers enmeshed in family feuds, promised to others, doomed to feign suicides that become all too real: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra have often been likened to a grown-up version of Romeo and Juliet. But the churlish duo in Theatre for a New Audience’s overemphatic revival, played by stage fixture Laila Robins and a strapping New Zealander named Marton Csokas, all but negates this comparison. Given Mark Antony’s vainglory and Cleopatra’s artifice-drenched histrionics in Darko Tresnjak’s technically proficient but emotionally opaque “Antony and Cleopatra,” this pair wouldn’t be likened to a grown-up version of anybody.Mr. Tresnjak, responsible for last year’s excellent revival of “The Merchant of Venice” for the same theater, has shifted the setting from ancient Rome to the late 1880s, when the “scramble for Africa” was slicing the continent into a grisly patchwork of colonial outposts. Linda Cho’s costumes draw heavily on Kiplingesque pith helmets and riding crops, a tightly confined aesthetic that makes Antony’s louche embrace of Egyptian mores all the more dramatic.The director later risks trivializing this exoticism by punctuating a post-treaty celebration with belly-dancing Egyptian girls and boys. This sexual fluidity carries through to Jeffrey Carlson’s rather epicene take on Octavius Caesar, whose dismissal of his fellow triumvir (Antony “is not more man-like / Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he”) takes on a curious new gloss.It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the most compelling relationship in the play is between Antony and his increasingly disillusioned lieutenant, Enobarbus. John Douglas Thompson’s take on this bloody-minded warrior is strangely jocular at first, but this approach soon pays off as Antony’s misguided actions take their toll on Enobarbus. His ultimate defection carries an emotional sting that frequently eludes this production; when he claims that “I am alone the villain of the earth,” the statement, for once, seems appropriate.Antony begins the play with one wife and soon marries Caesar’s sister. (In contrasting this political marriage of convenience with Cleopatra’s presumably superior charms, Shakespeare omitted the fact that Antony and Octavia had three children together; Mr. Tresnjak combats this by showing both Octavia and Cleopatra in varying states of pregnancy.) But all roads lead back to Egypt, even when abandoning Rome imperils his troops and even his own life.The passion that fuels this virtual death wish, however, goes largely unexplored here. Mr. Csokas and Ms. Robins each wrap their supple voices around their alternately enraptured and vengeful soliloquies — even the softest whispers are completely audible — but this Antony and Cleopatra too often talk past, not to, each other. Even during their many heated clutches, the two actors seem to have a plate-glass window between them.Perhaps this stems from Ms. Robins’s textually defensible but nonetheless distancing focus on Cleopatra’s penchant for emotional posturing. Or perhaps Mr. Csokas’s blend of besotted lassitude and battlefield rectitude (he looks at times like Russell Crowe channeling Julian Schnabel) rings false. Either way, is it an inadvertent comment on love or an unfortunate quirk of casting that the two stars’ love speeches are invariably more persuasive in those scenes where only one or the other is onstage?While Mr. Tresnjak makes versatile use of a shallow wading pool, the primary element to Alexander Dodge’s spare set, several other staging gambits fizzle. The protracted use of Cleopatra’s soothsayer as a mute angel of death extends the production just when it most wants to surge forward — at least one of his appearances comes after the three-hour mark. And the awkward removal of the play’s many corpses spurred undesired titters from the audience at a recent performance.Still, this production is capable of striking insight at surprising moments. During one of the triumvirate’s early conferences, Enobarbus begins pouring the snifters of brandy that were clearly de rigueur in Egypt. Caesar disdainfully rebuffs the offer, forcing the third leader, Lepidus (a sturdy George Morfogen), to take a glass as a conciliatory gesture, only to discreetly put it down after nursing one sip. Shakespeare’s tensions between Western austerity and Eastern abandon come to the forefront without a word of dialogue.Smaller instances like these indicate a deep level of thought on Mr. Tresnjak’s part. If ever a Shakespeare play hinged on animal passion over analysis, though, it’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” The setting of 19th-century Africa may bring to mind the anti-colonialist likes of Joseph Conrad, but the hearts of darkness on display here would benefit from some illumination.Until May 2 (229 W. 42nd St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 646-223-3010).

Flimsy Feud

Flimsy Feud

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