Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand ( Navy Pier )
Runs Through: June 24; $30-$67
Phone: 312-595-5600
By Catey Sullivan
With a stark, silent parade of stone-eyed ghost soldiers, Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Troilus and Cressida opens with one of the most politically charged, visually arresting images of the year. Shakespeare's intensely problematic drama, a misshapen convolution that's neither fish nor fowl—not tragedy nor romance nor history—becomes politically charged and, at times, absolutely gripping in Barbara Gaines' cleverly accessible staging.
Troilus and Cressida lacks the poetry and clarity of Shakespeare's later plays as it skids through mountains of exposition between love story and war story without adequately plumbing either. What makes it work is the urgent spectacle Gaines creates in shaping a drama that's a searing indictment of all who would make war under false or petty pretenses.
The strongest character isn't mentioned in the title—Troilus and Cressida ( Kevin O'Donnell and Chaon Cross ) are underwritten, callow subplots. No, the power belongs here to Pandarus ( Stephen Ouimette ) , deliverer of the play's scathing prologue and despairing epilogue. It's Pandarus who makes the case that the Trojan War and ( by slicing insinuation ) all the wars that followed, are creations of the arrogant and the willfully ignorant. Pandarus infers with gleaming, sorrowful eyes that we're all just food for cannons.
As for the warring Greeks and Trojans, they make up a who's who of both The Iliad and the The Aeneid. To Gaines' credit, you don't need a scorecard to keep them straight. The director has imbued each with a few salient, compelling characteristics, so even if Hector, Ulysses et al. aren't the deepest buckets in the shed, at least they're memorable. Achilles ( Bruce A. Young ) is the self-important sloth so stuck on his own reputation that he can no longer be bothered to fight and spends his days spooning with his ripped boytoy lover, Patroclus. Wanton Paris ( Lea Coco ) is a too-pretty-for-words preening prince whose vanity is equaled only by his flowing coif. Blockish Ajax ( John Timothy McFarland ) is a WWF star living out a former life; Agamemnon ( Scott Jaeck ) is the king, and the only one with a shred of nobility; Nestor ( James Harms ) is old and talks too much, Cassandra ( Lacy Coil ) is feral but not crazy; and Ulysses ( Greg Vinkler; Patrick Clear from June 20-24 ) is the only one with a shred of wisdom, except for the cunning Thersites ( Ross Lehman ) , a clown whose jests are rooted in Hades.
The cast does a superb job finding the indelible etches in flimsy, two-dimensional characters. At its troubled heart, however, Troilus and Cressida belongs to Stephen Ouimette's Pandarus, whose opening and closing gambits sear and haunt even as the trifling love story between the title teens quickly fades from the mind.