Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival presents Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

Naturally, a play in this mode will be less polished, trading the governance of a director’s vision for the adrenaline of actors with less than a week’s rehearsal. The critical question is whether the production channels enough raw energy to offset its rougher edges.

A powerful tragic trio

With this Coriolanus, the answer is, well, sometimes! The play works best in its presentation of Coriolanus (Geoffrey Kent), a Roman general with an almost superhuman prowess on the battlefield, who comes to find his blunt manner less effective in peace than in war. Kent imbues Coriolanus with gruff diction and a steely temper; his red beret completes a portrait that seems calculated to evoke Curtis Sliwa, New York City’s most recent Republican mayoral candidate. Like Sliwa, this Coriolanus is not immediately likeable (the plebians protest his leadership with “No Kings” signs, in the play’s most explicit modern-day parallel), but he nonetheless carries himself with an old-school oddball sensibility that, no matter what you think of the guy, comes to be genuinely endearing.

Kent’s Coriolanus finds excellent stage partners in both Greg Wood’s Menenius, a fellow Roman patrician and father figure to Coriolanus, and Susan Riley Stevens’s Volumnia, Coriolanus’s domineering mother. Wood animates Menenius with a nimble touch, a figure of authority who grieves the rupture in his body politic, while Stevens becomes the focal point of any scene she’s in, her countenance that of an overbearing boy mom, her outfit a splash of dark purple. Together, the two characters form an essential unit in the play’s tragic mechanism. Coriolanus’s flaw is that he carried out the ethic of his society to its fullest logical extent, so his demise ultimately reflects back on his forebears. He may be the play’s tragic figure, but the tragedy echoes deepest in Menenius and Volumnia.

Shakier ground

Absent this central trio, the play finds itself on shakier ground. Whereas the patricians are considerably rendered, the plebeians, led by Brutus (John Hedges) and Sicinius (Sarah Gliko), generally devolve into dimensionless rabble. Hedges and Gliko never quite locate their shared motivation in why they so desperately wish to oust Coriolanus, and the ensuing mob is no more than a cavalcade of angry voices.

Other ideas are introduced but not fleshed out, buds that haven’t yet had time to blossom. Drums occasionally, irregularly sound. When the Romans vote for Coriolanus, ballots are distributed and then collected from some audience members, but there is no further effort to implicate us in the democracy. David Pica leans into the homoerotic energy of Aufidius, Coriolanus’s sworn enemy and later ally, but the script is too trimmed for a full resonance. Certainly, some of this can be attributed to the truncated rehearsal process, but even so, the production seems strangely tempered at times. It shies away from Coriolanus’s strange energy rather than leaning further in, an Extreme Shakespeare that never quite feels so extreme.

A cast run wild

Still, the fact that the production works as well as it does is a testament to the value of PSF’s continuing experiment. Even (and perhaps especially) when the play’s a bit mushy, as stretches of this Coriolanus are, you can’t help but marvel at the relative solidity of the production, how well this newly minted cast comes together at its best. It remains a thrilling alternative to the director-first style of Shakespeare, enabling a cast to run wild and show you what they’ve found.