Playwright: William Shakespeare At: Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave. Tickets: 312-595-5600; www.chicagoshakes.com; $44-$75. Runs through: June 10
The real-life Timon's legacy is to be a synonym for misanthropy. Even his grave, its epitaph exhorting the curious to stay away, is located on unstable ground in danger of collapsing under the weight of too many onlookers. What turned this once-cheerful and prosperous Athenian so sour? The tale is as old as it is universal: He loved those he thought were his friends, only to have them spurn him when he needed their friendship most.
This is why, despite its being one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, the tragedy bearing his name is so rarely performed. Its first two acts establish Timon's generosity, its third ends in his betrayal and the final two are almost wholly given over to his denunciation of all mankind. However juicy his invective, when spread out over an hour or more, it cannot help but grow tedious.
So how does director Barbara Gaines forestall audiences suffering a surfeit of vituperation? She dresses Timon's profligacy in the familiar fat-cat accouterments of our own societythe chrome-and-brushed-steel corporate offices of "Timon Capital," well-fed men in expensive suits, the latest electronic gadgets and, for party entertainment, we get a ballet troupe that abruptly morphs into a squad of strippers. Then there are the spectacular technical effects that have become Chicago Shakespeare's stock-in-trade: war planes buzzing overhead in stereophonic sound, a CEO's portrait shattering in a crash of broken glass, Kevin Depinet's lonely seashore complete with sand dunes and low-lying fog, Lindsay Jones' low-down-dirty blues bridging the scenes.
Gaines also wisely casts, in the role of Timon, Ian McDiarmid, who renders our deluded hero a scrappy self-made magnate as extreme in his celebration of wealth as in his later rejection of it, and whose English vocal rangealong with such AARP stuntwork as leaping off tables and stripping down to the buff for his final walk into the sunsetendows his lengthier diatribes with a delivery sufficiently varied to ensure our attention for the duration.
He is ably supported by James Newcomb's Apemantusas capable a sparring partner as he was in The Madness of George IIIand an ensemble featuring Chicago's best character actors but, ultimately, it's McDiarmid's Timon who makes us long for spectral assistance (Christmas ghosts, perhaps?) to steer our bitter pilgrim back onto the path of reason.