On the night of May 10, 1849, the celebrated British actor William Charles Macready, on the last leg of an American tour, was slated to play “Macbeth” at the Astor Place Opera House, in New York City. During his performance, a production of the same play at a nearby theatre, starring the celebrated American actor Edwin Forrest, led to a riot in which dozens of people were killed or wounded. According to Mary C. Henderson, who describes the riot briefly in her book The City and the Theater, the incident was the result of “a confrontation between the Anglophilic aristocrats and the Anglophobic Bowery gangs.” The Oxford Companion to the Theater, which states that Macready had become “Forrest’s implacable rival,” cites “their mutual animosity” as the cause. The actor Bryan Forbes, meanwhile, in his book That Despicable Race: A History of the British Acting Tradition, refers to “mobs organized in support of Edwin Forrest,” who evidently blamed Macready for Forrest’s poor reception during an earlier tour in England. Whatever the cause or causes of the riot, Macready—who hadn’t wanted to be an actor anyway (he was driven into the profession by financial need)—never quite recovered from the incident. The Opera House never recovered, either. Henderson tells us that the incident “forever tarnished its reputation” and that the theater was eventually “sold at auction to the Mercantile Library Association and renamed Clinton Hall after extensive remodeling.”
Richard Nelson’s latest play, “Two Shakespearean Actors,” takes the Astor Place riot as its subject. It doesn’t choose any one circumstance as the cause of the incident, though it alludes to all of them—nationalism, class resentment, anti-British feeling, personal and professional enmity. What’s surprising is that out of such potentially sociopolitical material Nelson has fashioned a play that is more about character than about anything else. “Two Shakespearean Actors” takes as its real subject narcissism—in particular the forces that drive the actor in his quest for whatever it is he seeks. Nelson’s Macready embodies the Victorian actor-manager tradition: he is the supreme egotist; Nelson’s Forrest looks forward to the infantile boy-man of the contemporary show-business world. Ultimately, though, “Two Shakespearean Actors” is as much about communion as it is about ego and rivalry.
That the play, which opened last week at the Cort, is such a treat is due partly to the subject matter, partly to the elegant writing and ensemble acting, and partly to the performances of Brian Bedford and Victor Garber as Macready and Forrest. I can’t remember when I last saw a play in which the stars lived up to (and even exceeded) their reputations and one’s hopes, or a play that justified so costly a production and so large a cast. In addition to Jane Greenwood’s period costumes and David Jenkins’ versatile beam-and-doorframe set, which finds ingenious ways to juxtapose real and backstage life, “Two Shakespearean Actors” has a twenty-eight-member company, in which the only casualties are Eric Stoltz, who gives an incompetent performance as the playwright Boucicault, and the usually first-rate Zeljko Ivanek, who, playing the turncoat actor John Ryder, managed to be truly insufferable in just the wrong way on the night I attended. It’s a mark of the play’s strength that Jack O’Brien’s production could survive and even transcend such performances, but it does. And the presence of so many familiar New York actors in the ensemble—Tom Aldredge, Frances Conroy, Judy Kuhn, Bill Moor, James Murtaugh, Graham Winton, and Jennifer Van Dyck—makes one feel almost as though New York had a repertory company like London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, where “Two Shakespearean Actors” began.
In Nelson’s new play, the foibles of actors are as well and as lovingly served as were the duplicity and self-aggrandizing of the academics in his last, “Some Americans Abroad”; but here the satire is more broadly based and the payoff more uplifting. Where “Some Americans” counted on the pleasure we derived from watching exquisite acting to offset the grim truths it conveyed, “Two Shakespearean Actors” actually redeems its fundamentally unlikable heroes.
Or, rather, it sets lovableness against unlikability. We find ourselves honoring actors—loving them (if possible) even more than they love themselves, not least because the play has shown off real actors to their best advantage. It’s generous on their behalf, giving them lots to work with. For all the skill and cleverness in the writing, the lines require performance. They need a master of irony like Bedford, or a complex picture of bastardliness, such as the one Garber gives us, to mine the layers of meaning. Throughout the play, characters are forever making vague but pointed statements about the breed of actors. “We’re actors,” someone will say, or “I’m an actor!”—as though that somehow explained everything. The meaning is entirely dependent on the delivery, and in every case it means something different. Late in the play, Garber caps an anecdote by exclaiming “Actors!” and makes the word mean a dozen things.
In its celebration of actors, Nelson’s play is reminiscent of the Mr. and Mrs. Crummles portions of “Nicholas Nickleby.” That we should have to resort to the nineteenth century to properly rejoice in the figure of the actor is a curious phenomenon. It may have something to do with the way we view Victorian melodrama. To get sentimental about serious theatre feels wrong—unseemly or self-indulgent. But for us a certain brand of bad theatre—like the glimpses we get of Forrest’s signature “noble savage” play, “Metamora,” and the contrapuntal scenes from “Macbeth” we see being rehearsed (whether in Forrest’s new-fangled down-and-dirty style or in Macready’s fustian)—has come to mean not so much failure as a genial, expansive, and tragically naive form of aspiration.
Nelson himself seems to understand the lure of melodrama, but he keeps the momentous events in Macready’s and Forrest’s lives offstage. In the brilliant closing sequence, you get the full effect of Nelson’s gift for juxtaposition—for setting the seen and the unseen side by side, or the ostensibly trivial and the ostensibly dire. It’s one of the cleverest liberties Nelson takes with history: a scene in which the two actors finally confront each other in the safety of Forrest’s dressing room, Macready having sought shelter from the violence in Forrest’s theater. (In real life, he took refuge with a friend.) While all around them is mayhem and confusion, the two actors chat, engage in a little textual analysis, and then adjourn to the stage, where each tests the acoustics of the theater by acting a little Shakespeare. It’s a tour de force for both playwright and actors. You have to have written a pretty good play for it not to look shabby when the characters start spouting Shakespeare. By the same token, your actors have to be pretty good to carry it off. It’s one of the nicest things about “Two Shakespearean Actors” that when Garber starts delivering some famous lines from the end of “Othello” it’s hard to choose between watching Garber and watching Bedford watch him.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, January 27, 1992