THE STAGE: To Man From Mankind's Heart

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newly extended apron stage (designed to achieve neo-Elizabethan intimacy), see a forgettable version of Two Gentlemen from Verona mounted on a revolving stage, a tricked-up Twelfth Night, and a fine Taming of the Shrew, starring Peggy Ashcroft. ¶ Ontario's Stratford, a 1953 offshoot of England's, and heavily Anglicized in cast and directors, was originally housed in a huge tent, eight miles from the town of Shakespeare; the festival moved indoors-in 1957, and its parasol-roofed theater makes Ontario's the only Stratford with true arena staging. More a purist than a tourist mecca, the festival has nonetheless lured nearly 1,000,000 theatergoers, for a box-office gross of $3,000,000. Much of Ontario's pulling power has stemmed from Tyrone Guthrie, perhaps the ablest living Shakespeare director, who likes to take a lesser-known play and tilt it like a kaleidoscope until the characters tumble into new and exciting shapes. Ontario will lead off its season this week with a Byzantine-styled King John, followed by Romeo and Juliet with Julie Harris, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. ¶ Stratford, Conn, is salad-green in years (1955), in its bucolic setting along the sleepy Housatonic River, and in the juvenile cuteness of most of its productions. The 200,000 ticket-queuers anticipated this season must expect only Jello-weight Shakespeare inside the handsome teakwood playhouse emblazoned with British heraldry and flying pennants. This year's opening Twelfth Night was greeted with morning-after queasiness by the critics: Illyria became a British seaside resort circa 1830, and most of the cast appeared to be on shore leave from H.M.S. Pinafore, including tremolo-prone Katharine Hepburn, an exponent of the Bryn Mawr school of Shakespearean diction. The Connecticut Stratfordians followed up with a becalmed Tempest. Expected later with some foreboding: Movie Actor Robert Ryan's Antony to Katharine Hepburn's Cleopatra.

Two Hours' Traffick. If none of the Stratfords is great—too many gimmicky productions betray the fear that the greatest entertainer in the history of the theater is not entertaining enough—they do have the overriding merit of bringing Shakespeare alive for huge audiences. The actors and directors are not smug; seesawing between Shakespeare straight and Shakespeare as straight-man, they remain as restlessly dissatisfied as their customers are satisfied. Above all. the Stratfords have recaptured some of the fluidity of the Elizabethan theater, in which the "two hours' traffick of our stage" was literally true, since scene followed scene without break, and the scenery might be no more than a placard reading "A Wood Near Athens" (see cut). To judge by the traffick rush to the Stratfords, today's audiences agree with Critic Maurice Morgann, who wrote of Shakespeare in 1774: "It is safer to say that we are possessed by him, than that we possess him."

What possesses the modern playgoer? Above all, it is the chance to get away from modern drama that represents little more than introverted self-communion, from little plays about miserable little people. In Shakespeare, he sees characters probed in Freudian depth, without the jargon. Instead of words that plop over the footlights like dead tennis balls, he hears language that surges like the sea. The modern stage bleats with special pleadings;