'Timon of Athens' Gets a Makeover

The plainness of that plot is but one of the problems built into “Timon,” written around the time of “King Lear” with an assist from Thomas Middleton. There are many others, including the troubling fact that the play is simply more fun when Timon is lavish than when, having been bankrupted by his largesse, he winds up a hermit rootling for turnips. Most productions can’t help falling into the same unsatisfying pattern: dessert followed by vegetables.

If that has made “Timon,” as some critics contend, the least loved play in the canon, it has also left it the ripest for re-imagining. That seems to be director Simon Godwin’s brief in staging the energetic and somewhat Frankensteined revival that opened Sunday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Theater in Brooklyn. Reshuffling and montaging its scenes, adding live Greek-style music (by Michael Bruce), interpolating shards of at least four other Shakespeare plays and the entirety of Sonnet 53, he and Emily Burns, who together edited the text, attempt the dramaturgical paradox of making one unified work from the spare parts of many.

They almost succeed, and if they don’t quite it’s not because of their most obvious alteration, the regendering of the title figure. It takes less than no time, and only a few pronoun flips, to accept Kathryn Hunter, attired and coifed like Beatrice Lillie in “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” as “Lady” Timon, the wittily offbeat host of an arty Athenian salon.

Hunter’s generosity as a performer — listening intently, never grandstanding — spills over into her interpretation, giving us a Timon who chooses to think the best of her toadies. Rewarding the poet’s fatuousness, the portraitist’s flattery and the jeweler’s smarm with gold, she believes she is modeling a higher form of love. But perhaps she is needier than she seems.

Godwin, the new artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, establishes all this in a few confident gestures that unavoidably keep repeating, as lavishness tends to do. The brilliant sets and costumes, by Soutra Gilmour, are so glitzed and gilded they look as if Liberace exploded. Timon’s servants offer even the audience hors d’oeuvres.

But when her loyal steward (John Rothman) finally convinces her that all this liberality has left her broke, and her creditors’ minions come calling with bills, her world and her illusions collapse. Not only do her stingy friends prove useless, denying her one by one, but her own internal resources do too. She snaps, and so does the play. The lavishness turns quickly into horror — Godwin gives us buckets of blood unasked for in the original — and then into a presentiment of Lear on the heath.

Like Lear, Timon has two friends who do not betray her; one, taking the role of the fool, is the cynic Apemantus (Arnie Burton). Having refused gifts from Timon when she was rich, he does not find her alfresco poverty off-putting. A punk wearing a Patti Smith T-shirt and black nail polish, he needles her either way.

The other steadfast friend, the soldier Alcibiades, has been vastly rejiggered in an attempt to give the play a timely hook. Now a woman (Elia Monte-Brown) and a political firebrand instead of a carouser, she has been stripped of her accompanying prostitutes; her purely personal beef with Athens has been turned into a noble grievance.

“The dispossessed without the city walls/make their abode,” she says. “No roof, no comfort, no hope of citizenship,/No home, no country, they have abandoned hope.” (These lines are by Godwin and Burns.) Later, when she orders the Athenian senators to step down or die, their unlikely answer — “We no longer are defensible” — is cadged from “Henry V.”

As written, “Timon” isn’t coherent enough to justify much fidelity. But the aspects of it that still reward investigation — the satire of sycophants and the tortured portrait of Timon — do not jibe comfortably with this Occupy Athens interpretation. It’s hard to connect the problems of contemporary wealth distribution to a story whose conflict is confined to the upper classes. (Timon’s servants adore her.) And though Godwin tries to make her a Christ of the kleptocracy, even having her bear her own tombstone on her back, what Timon has against the rich is not that they won’t share with the poor but that they won’t share with her.

Not that there are many rich or poor in this staging. Physically lovely, the big multicity endeavor — produced by Theater for a New Audience in New York and Godwin’s Shakespeare Theater Company in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon — is nevertheless short on troops; a cast of 14 means more doubling than desirable in a play originally stocked with some three-dozen roles. Still, it goes further than most in making the two halves of the play hang together; emphasizing the almost vaudevillian humor throughout (complete with vengeful spritzings of seltzer) is a big help.

So is Hunter, a natural shape-shifter, whose roles at Theater for a New Audience have included Puck, a wax statue, a gallery of Ethiopians and a chimp. That she apparently contains multitudes is an especially useful trait in joining the joyful Lady Bountiful of the opening scenes with the mad misanthrope of the later ones. She finds the link between them in the way money corrupts Timon’s understanding of human relations, turning generosity into a kind of usury, extorting the interest of the idle well-born. When wealth is the measure of all things, she learns too late, being wealthy in friends isn’t worth much.

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Production Notes:

“Timon of Athens”

Tickets: Through Feb. 9 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; 866-811-4111, tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes

Credits: By William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton; edited by Emily Burns and Simon Godwin; directed by Simon Godwin; choreography by Johnathan Goddard; sets and costumes by Soutra Gilmour; lighting by Donald Holder; sound by Christopher Shutt; props by Alexander Wylie; composer, Michael Bruce; dramaturg, Jonathan Kalb; production stage manager, Shane Schnetzler; voice director, Andrew Wade; fight director, Lisa Kopitsky; general manager, Michael Page. Presented by Theater for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz, founding artistic director, Robert E. Buckholz, board chair, Dorothy Ryan, managing director, and Shakespeare Theater Company, Simon Godwin, artistic director, Chris Jennings, executive director, in association with The Royal Shakespeare Company.

Cast: Shirine Babb, Arnie Burton, Helen Cespedes, Liam Craig, Zachary Fine, Yonatan Gebeyehu, Kathryn Hunter, Adam Langdon, Kristen Misthopoulos, Elia Monte-Brown, Julia Ogilvie, Daniel Pearce, Dave Quay and John Rothman.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .