Orange County Register

On Sept. 11, 2001, playwright Bill Cain watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center burn and collapse. That cataclysm inspired him to write a play, “Equivocation,” which made its California premiere Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse (it debuted earlier this year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival).

Like most good artists, Cain addressed the messy issues of 9-11 and its aftermath through inference and metaphor – a method often employed by Shakespeare, for example, who deftly tackled contemporary political controversies by cloaking them in history and fiction.

Shakespeare (Joe Spano, pictured at left) is the pivotal character in “Equivocation.” “Shag,” as he’s affectionately known to the other members of his theatrical cooperative, The King’s Men, has been commissioned to do the impossible: turn a one-sided account of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot into a play. (The failed conspiracy was hatched by disgruntled English Catholics to kill King James I and his Protestant allies while he was in the House of Lords by blowing the place sky high.)

The mastermind of this dastardly P.R. project is Sir Robert Cecil (Connor Trinneer), the King’s Secretary of State. A scheming, crippled Machiavelli with more than a passing resemblance to Richard III, Cecil will stop at nothing, including intimidation and blackmail, to transform the official version of the Gunpowder Plot – described in a slim book by the King himself – into a cautionary play for the masses.

Shag hesitates. He and his colleagues need the money; they have mortgages and families.  This gig, though, is odious. “We don’t do politics,” Shag tells Cecil. “We do histories. True stories of the past.”

Shag is caught in the kind of trap that is the nightmare of every writer with integrity: lie or die. If his play even brushes up against the truth – a tangled web, he soon discovers, that would implicate Cecil and reveal the assassination conspiracy as a propaganda tale – he and his company are dead men. If he creates the revisionist history that the King and Cecil want, he’s a political pawn of the lowest order.

In desperation, Shag visits two of the alleged conspirators in prison.

Young Tom Wintour (Patrick J. Adams), weary from torture and fear, softens Shag’s heart; he agrees to secretly deliver a letter to Tom’s wife and children (an act of pity that Cecil is quick to use as leverage, of course).

Later, Shag meets Father Henry Garnet (Harry Groener), a leading Jesuit whose fervent Catholicism placed him under constant suspicion in a Protestant country that had been persecuting Catholics for almost a century. Shag’s interest in Garnet is partly self-serving: he wants to learn the Jesuit art of equivocation, avoiding self-incriminating statements by the careful parsing of statements and principles — the only way to speak the truth in difficult times.

Will the King’s play get written? Will Shag manage to salvage his self-respect without getting himself and his colleagues hanged? And why is he so cruel to his sweet, wise and all-knowing daughter, Judith (Troian Bellisario)? Watching Cain work out these questions is tremendous fun, and not incidentally provides some fascinating (if completely suppositional) insight into the mind and creative process of history’s greatest playwright.

There’s plenty here for Shakespeare buffs to enjoy: talk of his dishonored father and possible secret Catholicism, his tangled relationship with his family as his success kept him physically and emotionally removed from Stratford, the inspiration for plays such as “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”

There are also moments of brilliant comedy. Shag’s actors struggle with Lear’s mad scene, doomed to make a hash of it by their outsized egos and dim grasp of the big thematic picture. The King’s love of witches is indulged, many times. And the young, preening Scottish monarch has a thing for the lassies – especially if they’re laddies underneath the dress, as they were in the productions of Shakespeare’s era.

Director David Esbjornson goes for an unadorned look (his set is bare-bones black and Frances Kenny’s costumes are non-descript and modern), the better to emphasize Cain’s muscular and engrossing script. The actors, four of whom assume a rogue’s gallery of roles, smartly handle the frequent changes of tone that the quick shifts of scene and character demand, using a bare minimum of props and costume changes. Spano’s Shag is impressive – a fading and wistful literary warrior, almost too weary at times to fight this battle. Trinneer’s Cecil and Groener’s Garnet are also vivid, memorable creations.

Cain’s play works so well, I think, not just because it entertainingly examines Shakespeare and his time but because it is fundamentally Shakespearean in scope and technique. It addresses contemporary issues allegorically. It’s filled with delicious conceits: many play-within-a-play sequences, cross-dressing, gruesome deaths, courtroom drama, royal intrigue, dirty dealing at the highest levels. And, as in so many Shakespeare plays, everything in this story emanates from and comes back to the family — in this case, Shag’s clan, living, estranged and dead, and his London band of brothers, the King’s Men.

Is “Equivocation” close to historical reality? Probably not, but that deception is part of the playwright’s point.

Besides its robust success as a good tale, “Equivocation” is a celebration of the strangely cathartic magic of theater. Even as he thoroughly entertains us, Cain reminds us, again and again, that we are being held in thrall by a work of high artifice (Judith even complains, in a soliloquy, about how she hates soliloquy). 

“Theater is our religion!” proclaims Richard (Groener), the larger-than-life veteran actor who’s the alpha dog of Shag’s company. Ironically, in this story it’s the only belief system that seems pure, true and ultimately impervious to the most powerful enemies and ideologies.

In our own turgid times, as in Shakespeare’s, many of us might agree with him.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.