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Founder of the feast: Kathryn Turner, being held aloft, plays the wealthy title character in Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens,” opening on Jan. 19 at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare
Center in Fort Greene. Photo by Henry Grossman
Power play
Shakespeare show confronts wealth and gender issues
COURIER LIFE, JANUARY 17-23, 2020 41
By Bill Roundy She’s got a heart of gold.
One of Shakespeare’s least-known
plays will get a vital new staging this
weekend, a revival that deals with gender,
greed, and loyalty. The star of “Timon of
Athens,” which opens at Fort Greene’s
Polonsky Shakespeare Center on Jan. 19,
says that diving deep into the canon offers
a chance to break new ground.
“It’s exciting to welcome people to
a play that they’re not familiar with,
and don’t know the story,” said Kathryn
Turner, who plays the title character.
The play follows a wealthy Athenian
who lavishes money on his friends, goes
broke, and is abandoned by those same
friends. He retreats to the woods and
becoming a misanthropic hermit, only to
discover a hidden trove of gold there. For
this production, Timon has been re-written
as a woman — a change that still feels true
to Shakespeare’s time, said Turner.
“Originally, the female parts were
played by men, so Shakespeare was always
playing gender games. So in that sense,
we’re very Shakespearean,” said Turner.
The creators briefly considered having
Turner play the part as a man, but decided
that it would be more interesting with
a woman in the lead, said the show’s
director.
“At this moment in time, a woman
playing it as a woman felt like the more
audacious option, in a strange way,” said
Simon Godwin, who developed the play
with Turner for a run with the Royal
Shakespeare Company in 2018.
Godwin is not precious with the words
of the Bard, noting that Shakespeare
himself was always experimenting with
his plays.
“The more experimental and brave
we are with them, the more I think
Shakespeare-the-ghost likes us for that,”
he said.
The show has undergone a few
changes since its first production in
England. It opens in Timon’s over-thetop
home, featuring gold walls, gold
chairs, and golden cups. For New
Yorkers, the scene evokes the famously
gilded accessories of Trump Tower, but
Godwin toned down the set to downplay
the connection.
“The set was actually much more gold,
and we’ve made it more silvery this time
in order to avoid too strict a parallel with
Trump,” he said.
The play has a lot to say about greed
and the power of money, but it is not
particular to this time, or to this president,
said Godwin.
“In the play, there are no easy
symmetries,” he said. “Is Timon Trump?
Absolutely not. But is there a resonance
with the corrosive power of money?
Absolutely yes.”
“Timon of Athens” at Theater for a New
Audience’s Polonksy Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Fulton Street
and Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene, (866)
811–4111, www.tfana.org. Jan. 19–Feb. 9;
; Tue–Fri at 7:30 pm; Sat at 2 pm and 7:30
pm; Sun at 3 pm. $90–$117 ($20 students or
those 30 or younger).
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