Timon of Athens: Notes from the Director

There is not a lot of love for Timon of Athens in the theater world nor in the Shakespeare world for that matter.  I’ve met a number of Shakespeare professors and actors who admitted to having never read Timon.  It is not a play that is high on people’s list.  And yet, the play does have its ardent fans.  Renowned Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight considered it to be superior to his other great tragedies:

For this play is Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, become self-conscious and universal; it includes and transcends them all.

(The Wheel of Fire p. 236)

Ted Hughes, while conceeding that Timon was a not great play, was a deep admirer of its poetry:

Timon of Athens seems to be such an evident failure as a stage that most critics have supposed it to be unfinished – an abandoned, half-modelled torso.  At the same time, it is a good candidate for Shakespeare’s most tremendous poem.

(Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being p. 283)

Today most critics consider the play unfinished and / or a collaboration between Thomas Middleton.  Either of these possibilities might account for some inconsistencies in the play (but to be fair to Middleton, he is actually as wonderful playwright in his own right and was chosen to be the successor to Shakespeare in the King’s Men – no mean feat).  At yet, there are parts of the play that are truly extraordinary.  The second half of the play anticipates Beckett with its dark sense of the absurd.  Some of Timon’s soliloquies are as good as Hamlet’s or Lear’s and yet we miss out of them if we are unwilling to push through those less poetic earlier scenes.  At Cutting Ball, we love neglected classics and would hate to have our audience miss out on “Shakespeare’s most tremendous poem.”  I’m pleased to share this production with you as well as the long journey it took to get here.

Timon at Cutting Ball’s Inception

I actually first read Timon of Athens in translation.  The late Paul Schmidt was my translation teacher at Yale and while he was teaching me, he was simultaneously working on two translations: Phèdre for The Wooster Group and a contemporary English translation of Timon of Athens.  His rule for himself was simply to replace every word that was no longer used by English speakers by a word that existed during Shakespeare’s time, that scanned, and had retained its meaning to current times.  I read it and loved the play.  After Yale, co-founder and current Artistic Director Paige Rogers and I lived in Europe for a year on a Fox Foundation Grant to observe rehearsals and productions of Shakespeare in translation in France, Germany, and Italy.  By the time we were done, we had seen lots of innovative productions of Shakespeare in translation.

In 1998, we moved to San Francisco and founded Cutting Ball in 1999.  One of the first projects after our opening production of Richard Foreman’s My Head was a Sledgehammer, was to do a staged reading of Timon of Athens for the Bay Area Shakespeare Marathon.  The Bay Area Shakespeare Marathon was a project created by Trevor Allen, Derek Mutch, and Ellen Koivisto to have Bay Area Theater companies stage all of Shakespeare’s plays in ten days.  Since we were the newest company involved, we got last pick.  I think our choices were Timon of Athens, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII.  Our time slot was Easter morning 2000.  I chose Timon and wanted to do Paul’s translation, but that was voted down by the organizers.  I was told, however, that I could cut whatever I wanted.  This turned out to be a boon, because once I got through the confusing opening scenes, I loved the language of the original, and actually much better than many of Shakespeare’s other plays.  I cut and streamlined a lot of the first three acts and left Acts Four and Five untouched.  I thought that getting the audience to the tremendous poetry of Acts Four and Five as soon as possible was the best strategy.  It turned out to be right.  On Easter morning, we actually had a very nice turn-out of smart, enthusiastic audience members who wondered why this fascinating play wasn’t produced more often.  Paige paced behind the back row of the house with our then two-month-old daughter Charlotte (who is now 18 and going to college in the fall).  My cast was made up of half Cutting Ball company members and half students of mine from Marin Academy (the Marin Academy connection continues – Brennan, playing Timon, is a former MA student of mine, David Sinaiko, playing Apemantus, teaches at MA, and of course Ariel Craft, our producer and incoming Artistic Director, was also a student of mine at MA).  Ever since that reading, Timon has been on our list of potential plays and we have considered doing it a number of times during our first eighteen years.

Timon and San Francisco

Fast forward to 2017.  Paige hadn’t forgotten how powerful that reading was and she encouraged me to direct Timon in the 2017 – 2018 season.  2018 feels like an opportune time with the income inequality of the city and especially our neighborhood feeling vaster than ever.  Throughout our history, Cutting Ball has sought to produce work that speaks to our community – from Annie Elias’ documentary theater piece Tenderloin to my production of The Taming of the Shrew set during the Folsom Street Leather Fair.  With Timon,we explore the collision of the wealth of the tech world with the poverty we see on the streets every day in the Tenderloin.  Throughout our rehearsal process, we have been sharing stories of people we have known in San Francisco to have spectacular rises and devastating falls.  Many moments in the play were taken directly from things we’ve seen on Taylor Street as well as inside the beautiful high-tech offices right across Market Street.

Timon is in many ways Shakespeare’s Misanthrope.  It is based on one of Lucian’s satiric dialogues and is in many ways Shakespeare’s most cynical play.  We are living through the most cynical time I have experienced in my life and perhaps the best way to meet the times is to confront it with cynical art.  In more than one way, we take Hamlet’s advice and hold the mirror up to nature.

At the same time, there is something smart and delightful about Timon of Athens.  Nabokov takes the title of his meta-novel / poem Pale Fire from Shakespeare’s play and there is a dog-eared Zemblan translation of Timon that pops up in various locations throughout Nabokov’s novel.  Like Pale Fire, Timon is full of characters who mirror one another in interesting ways.  Timon, Alcibiates, and Apemantus are all mirrors of each other.  Taking a cue from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (in which the Greek Alcibiates has a chapter to contrast with another on the Roman Coriolanus), Shakespeare puts these these characters next to each other as foils to make their differences more pronounced.  For me, however, the most interesting comparison is with Shakespeare’s play and our own lives today.  I hope you find this exploration of Timon and of San Francisco fruitful and provocative.  I always think the best theater is the one that starts many conversations.  I look forward to watching Timon with you and talking about it afterwards!