Kevin Crawford as Coriolanus and Zach Myers as Aufidius in Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s production of Coriolanus. Daniel Gordon/Photo provided
By Greg Stepanich
The Roman soldier Caius Martius, later called Coriolanus, is one of William Shakespeare’s least empathetic heroes.
“He’s just a machine,” said Kevin Crawford, who will portray one of the Bard’s most enigmatic roles in the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s production of Coriolanus, which debuts this month at the Seabreeze Amphitheater at Carlin Park in Jupiter. “He can’t fathom the thought of being who he is aristocratically, and having to deal with these common people.”
Crawford, a professor of English and theater at Reinhardt University, a small Methodist school in Waleska, Ga., north of Atlanta, helped found the festival in 1990 and has played many of the lead roles in its productions. He’s also directing the show.
“Coriolanus is often considered one of the finest of the tragedies, even though it’s not lumped with Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear as one of the Big Four greats,” he said. “It made actors’ careers in the 19th century and the late 18th century. If you went to London as a young actor, and you were really going to make it big, you had to do the Big Four, and you had to do Coriolanus as well.”
Set in the early days of the Roman Republic, roughly 500 years before Julius Caesar, Coriolanus tells the story of a city in turmoil, with famine among the people and threats from a neighboring tribe, the Volscians. Caius Martius defeats the enemy at their city of Corioles, for which he is given the name “Coriolanus” on his return in triumph and asked to run for consul.
But he cannot ally himself to the ruling system, in which the voice of the people is expressed, and he is banished from Rome. He defects to the Volscian side and allies with his old enemy, Tullus Aufidius, and they lay siege to Rome. Coriolanus’ powerful mother, Volumnia, brokers a peace treaty between the cities, setting the scene for the final tragic denouement.
Its most recent film adaption, in 2011, starred the British actor Ralph Fiennes in his directorial debut (also featured were Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain). Fiennes’ gritty movie, shot in Belgrade and set in contemporary times, complete with TV reporters spouting verse, brought fresh focus to questions about the organization of civil society.
Crawford, who said the Fiennes film was one inspiration for choosing the play this year, said the Palm Beach Shakespeare version will be among the most stripped-down of all its productions, with a bare stage, monoliths in the middle, and a Road Warrior dress code. In addition to its reflection of Crawford’s love of dystopias, the setting in an undefined “world elsewhere” adds timelessness to concerns that interested Shakespeare at the dawn of the 17th century and that likely will interest us for centuries to come.
“The people are fighting for their lives. Their anger is based on the food shortage; they have no grain. Which I think is very timely for what’s going on in the world right now, and what’s going to be, probably, the major crisis. … It’s food. What are we going to eat?” he said.
Retired drama teacher Karen Chandler saw the festival’s 2012 production of Twelfth Night just after moving to Juno Isles, Crawford said, and then came out for auditions this year. As Volumnia, “she is magnificent. It is a major, major older-female role,” he said. “She’s a beautiful woman, she speaks well … she’s just fantastic.”
Crawford is no less enthusiastic about his Aufidius, a Florida International University theater student named Zach Myers who has appeared in the festival’s productions of The Tempest and Twelfth Night. Myers’ parents read Shakespeare to him when he was a boy, and that has helped him become “the most amazing verse speaker,” Crawford said. “He’s got this natural rhythm to it … and most important, he makes sense.”
Crawford has cut the play, which is the fourth-longest in the Shakespeare canon, to about 85 minutes, not counting the intermission. His cast of 16 will perform the work eight times, at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays July 11-14 and July 18-21.
Coriolanus is not the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays, and its cast of mostly unlikable people makes it hard for audiences to warm up to it. But it draws an urgent political energy from its subject matter, and that makes it almost painfully contemporary.
“It just seems to speak to whatever generation you’re talking about, because it’s about people wanting to eat, and people killing other people to have power to dictate who gets to eat whatever they want to eat,” Crawford said. “And you just can’t get around that.”
Admission to the festival is free; doors open at 6:30 with entertainment from “the court jester.” For more information, email pbsf@bellsouth.net.
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Music: The 22nd edition of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival gets under way July 5-7 with the first series of programs in its four three-concert weekends.
This durable festival, which began in 1992 when flutist Karen Dixon, clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert decided to give an off-season concert at the Duncan Theatre, has spawned six recordings, provided work for area musicians, and kept local classical music culture at a high, serious level, despite the absence of the visiting luminaries who come in thick and fast during the tourist season.
That’s no small feat, and this year’s selection of unusual but rewarding repertoire continues a hallowed festival tradition. Also this year, the festival will be expanding, with a fall series in September, October and November of six concerts at Lynn University in Boca Raton and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lake Worth.
Ellert said in May that the players are looking to the future with the fall concerts, but they also are responding to audience demand, a point he emphasized in the group’s annual funding-appeal letter to its patrons.
“I made a big deal out of it,” Ellert said. “I said, ‘You asked for these concerts, you want to come — now you have to support us.’ ”
While ticket prices and venues for the summer season are staying the same as last year, there is one big change this time around: The Friday night concerts, which will take place at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall in West Palm Beach, will now start at 7 p.m. instead of 8 p.m.
The July 5 concert, which will be repeated at 8 p.m. July 6 at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens and at 2 p.m. July 7 at the Delray Beach Center for the Arts’ Crest Theatre, features as its major work the Serenade No. 1 (in D, Op. 11) of Johannes Brahms, in an arrangement for nine players by Alan Boustead. The concert opens with the Fantaisie for violin and harp (Op. 124) of Camille Saint-Saëns, followed by the Trumpet Sonata of the contemporary American composer Eric Ewazen.
The second series, set for July 12-14 at the same three locales, offers the Piano Quintet (in F-sharp minor, Op. 67) of the early 20th-century American composer Amy Beach, a beautiful and important work by this pioneering woman composer. Another female composer, France’s Claude Arrieu, is represented by her Dixtour (Dectet) for 10 winds, written in 1967; opening the concert is the Serenade in D (Op. 25) for flute, violin and viola, an early work by Beethoven.
Dvorak’s great second String Quintet (in G, Op. 77) is the big work on the third series, planned for July 19-21. Rounding out the program is a Scherzo for wind quintet by France’s Eugene Bozza, an arrangement of Rosina’s cavatina (Una voce poco fa) from Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville for trumpet and wind quintet, Clifford Shipp’s Six Variations on a 13th-Century Minnelied, for the same sextet, and the Clarinet Trio of the Russo-Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian.
Closing out the festival July 26-28 will be Ernst von Dohnanyi’s big, powerful Piano Quintet No. 1 (in C minor, Op. 1). The concert will open with the Duo No. 1 (K. 423, in G) for violin and viola of Mozart, and includes the Quintet in the Form of a ChÔros for wind quintet (English horn substituting for French horn), by the prolific Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Pastorale, composed for a similarly unusual ensemble (violin instead of the flute) by Igor Stravinsky.
Tickets for each concert are $25; a four-concert subscription is available for $85. Call 800-330-6874 for more information, or visit www.pbcmf.org.
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Film series debuts: Also premiering this month at the Crest is a new eight-episode film series, set for consecutive Wednesdays starting July 10 and running through Aug. 28.
Art Cinema at the Crest will screen each film twice, at 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. The second screenings will be introduced by local radio personality Caroline Breder-Watts, now the midday host on Miami’s WRLN-91.3 FM, and the pilot of her own show, Cinematically Speaking, on Arts Radio Network.
Six of the films are of very recent vintage, including the Dustin Hoffman-directed Quartet (Aug. 14), Price Check (July 31), starring the always engaging Parker Posey and the Keira Knightley-Jude Law remake of Anna Karenina (July 24).
But the series opens with two classics, the Coen Brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski (July 17), and on July 10, the most beloved melodrama in the canon, Casablanca (1942), with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, plus a host of European refugee actors whose careers and lives had been upended by the Nazis.
Tickets for each film are $8, and a cash bar and concessions are available. For more information, call 243-7922, ext. 321.
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Outsider art: A traveling exhibition featuring work by artists with developmental disabilities arrives July 27 at the Boca Museum of Art and lasts through Sept. 22.
Create, organized by the University of California-Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive along with New York’s Independent Curators International, presents more than 100 pieces by 20 artists who have worked at three nonprofits for disabled artists.
The exhibition is being presented in tandem with a summer art class for teens with mild to moderate autism. The weekly classes, organized with help from Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Autism, began July 2 at the museum’s art school on Palmetto Park Road and continues through July 26. (For more information, call 392-2503.)
The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Standard admission is $8. Call 392-2500 or visit www.bocamuseum.org.
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