Sublime RidiculousOut of the Loop ranges from ancient Rome to trailer parkBy Glen Arbery, Senior Editor Issue Date: March 8-9, 2007. See complete review. LUCRECE For all the terrors he portrays, including the murder of innocent Desdemona in her marriage bed, Shakespeare never makes rape the central event of any play. He reserves that dark deed for a narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece. Lucretia’s story, taken from Livy’s History of Rome, fascinated the Renaissance imagination. Not only did her suicide represent a bracing, if entirely non-Christian, insistence on honor, but her story was about the founding of the Roman republic and was therefore rife with anti-monarchical themes. In their production, called simply Lucrece, VOX and Shakespeare Dallas brilliantly dramatize Shakespeare’s poem through judicious cutting and a startlingly effective use of a black-robed, four-person chorus (Emily Scott Banks, Mary Lang Fournier, Valerie Hauss-Smith, and Keith Kubal). Like the end of Beloved, where Toni Morrison writes of a similar group of women “in the beginning was the Sound,” the women of this chorus begin in darkness with a high, primitive keening punctuated by sharp raps on the floor with the staffs they carry. Gradually, the narrative begins to unwind as the principal characters — the lustful Tarquin (David Goodwin) and the chaste Lucrece (Anastasia Munoz) — emerge as characters, and the sinewy couplets of Shakespeare’s poem begin to take hold. In a few passages, the lines get hard to follow, because they have no immediate theatrical action that they inform. Further refinement after this production will shorten a few speeches, I suspect, and pare the language to an even richer spareness. Yet even now it’s always perfectly clear what’s happening. It’s a riveting theatrical experience. This combination of talented actors makes the poem leap to life. Parents should be warned, though, to keep younger children away, because the company gives the subject matter a full R-rated treatment. This isn’t showy movie nudity. The rapist looks at his naked, sleeping victim, and the audience has to see her through his guilty eyes, as the subject of a violation — like seeing the naked Eve in Paradise Lost through the eyes of Satan. The very act of looking at someone lustfully is being interrogated as it happens. All the members of the chorus perform forcefully, and they use the whole space of the cottage to excellent effect. It’s difficult to overpraise the “ear” of VOX. To hear Emily Scott Banks, in particular, sounding her lines from the shadows — Shakespeare’s language rarely has it so good. Shakespeare Dallas must revel in this collaboration as well, because it’s a chance to do Shakespeare indoors, without microphones and loudspeakers or the rush of I-30 in the background.
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