Director delves into 17th-century desire, decay
CAMBRIDGE -- In the last Restoration comedy he did, British director Mark Wing-Davey had a trough built around the stage containing decaying matter to give the audience a whiff of the 17th century. For his newest production, John Vanbrugh's ''The Provok'd Wife," which begins previews at the American Repertory Theatre Saturday, the actors were instructed, as part of the rehearsal process, to give short talks on various aspects of life at the time. Hygiene, or the lack thereof, was one of the topics.
''Some of the actors were staggered by the approach to washing," Wing-Davey said in an interview before rehearsal. ''People then were thought excessive if they washed once every three weeks. They thought it was bad for you."
Still, when ART member Karen MacDonald, who plays a French maid, was asked if she planned not to bathe or brush her teeth during the run, she looked taken aback. ''I don't think so," she said. ''I have to kiss [actor] Tommy [Derrah], you know."
Wing-Davey says that Restoration comedies -- those lightning-quick plays of manners and debauchery that flourished during the reign of King Charles II -- are often directed in a rather ''antiseptic" style, one removed from bodily functions.
Wing-Davey says his sensibility is closer to that of British painter and engraver William Hogarth. ''His engravings had lots of decay, things happening in corners," he says. ''He was much more concerned with the decay of the body. Certainly I'm interested in the juices and the smells."
In ''The Provok'd Wife," a play of bad manners told with slashing wit, Sir John Brute (Bill Camp) is sick of his two-year marriage and constantly berates his wife. The long-suffering but faithful Lady Brute (Kate Forbes) is fed up and contemplating giving in to a persistent admirer. There is much talk, both arch and bawdy, about how men and women differently view relationships, sex, and marriage, and the fictions each must produce to get what's desired. (Prohibitions against women performing onstage had only recently been lifted.) There are masked meetings in the forest, plots hatched to thwart romances, and lovers hiding in closets.
Wing-Davey says the play is just as much about desire as it is about decay. ''The tension between reason -- represented by order and refinement -- and nature is constant through it. So what you have in Sir John Brute is someone brutish who is unpleasant to his wife. Then you have his wife and her struggle to control her desire to take revenge on him for his behavior. The play is set on a fulcrum where she says, 'Why not? Maybe I will go down that road.' It's a play about intersecting desires."
And this new production is about the intersection of the 17th and 21st centuries. In the dark basement rehearsal space that the ART uses at a nearby church, Remo Airaldi spools out the prologue. As 18 actors do a graceful minuet behind him, he prepares the audience for the play in surprisingly modern and specific terms. Contemporary words like ''e-mail" and ''green card" mingle with words associated with the Restoration, like ''roundelay," a refrain in a song.
The music they're dancing to, composed by David Remedios, blends the mincing harpsichord of the period with a darker synthesized sound.
In a brief snippet of rehearsal, the actors all speak with a syrupy drawl that makes one think of a Southern plantation. The choice of language is deliberate. Wing-Davey didn't want American actors imitating the traditional British accent. And there's a historical reason for using the Southern drawl. The people who settled in Virginia were Royalists fleeing the Puritans from the west of England, he says. So the lengthened vowels and languorous speech of Virginia is similar to that of the British during the Restoration.
If this is not your grandfather's Restoration comedy in language, neither will it be in look. The set has all the doors required for comedy's quick entrances and exits, but Marina Draghici, a designer Wing-Davey works with frequently, is creating a much more modern-looking set, with several levels and plexiglass boxes.
Wing-Davey likens the stage furniture to Philippe Starck's , the French designer who might fashion a Louis XIV chair in acrylic. Gabriel Barre's costumes also are a modern version of the period, with a nod to Vivienne Westwood, the British designer most associated with punk fashion. Watch for the paniers (those stiffened petticoats that jut out from women's hips, making them look like walking sofas) made out of camouflage material. And the 10-inch-high platform shoes.
Until the '90s, Wing-Davey was an actor, director, and teacher in England. He was a member of the Joint Stock Theatre Group, a collaborative group that created high-profile, provocative works. He also played Zaphod Beeblebrox on the BBC's ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and was the first appointed artistic director of London's Central School of Speech and Drama.
In late 1989, Wing-Davey was dreaming up projects for his students to do when Romania's bloody revolution toppled dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. ''I rang up [playwright and ex-Joint Stock member] Caryl Churchill and said the people who were dying were the same age as the kids [at the school] now. Wouldn't it be interesting to do a Joint Stock process, where you go and investigate it?"
Wing-Davey, Churchill, a designer, and 10 students went to Bucharest and interviewed people about their experiences before, during, and after the revolution. Out of their collective work, Churchill created ''Mad Forest," which was a big hit at the Royal Court Theatre. In 1992, the New York Theatre Workshop production of ''Mad Forest," with Calista Flockhart, won Wing-Davey the Village Voice OBIE Award for Outstanding Director of the Year.
It also launched him on an American directing career that's taken him from the New York Shakespeare Festival, where he directed Liev Schreiber in ''Henry V," to the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, where he directed Tony Kushner's ''Angels in America."
ART artistic director Robert Woodruff has known Wing-Davey for about 15 years and was particularly taken with his ''Henry V" last year. ''Mark has always been wonderful at developing ensembles of approach to diverse material and mounting very muscular work -- that is, he likes the physicalness of production," Woodruff said in an e-mail. ''I noted that Bob Brustein [ART's founding director] hadn't touched Restoration in the repertory, and I wanted to give this audience a taste of this moment when the theaters were reopened and women got to give as good as they got."
Restoration comedies aren't done much, although this season, Boston audiences will see two: The Huntington will do Richard Brinsley Sheridan's late-Restoration ''The Rivals" in January.
The plays are expensive to mount, requiring lots of actors, ornate costumes, and wigs. They also can be difficult for both actors and audiences.
''When we think of classics, we think of Shakespeare," says Gideon Lester, ART's associate artistic director. ''With Restoration plays, the rhythm and the language -- and the speed at which it needs to be delivered -- requires a kind of virtuosity on the part of the actors to make it seem effortless. Even though it was written in the late 17th century, it needs to be seen as if it was just written. It's not done often but when it works, it works like gangbusters."
