[In the following review, Brantley finds director Karin Coonrod's stylized and political interpretation of King John with the Theater for a New Audience well-realized, though somewhat lacking in “intricate characterization.”]

The man in the front row, the one with the heavy black eyeliner, can't believe what he's seeing. Actually, he's a character in Karin Coonrod's lively new production of Shakespeare's King John, but he has decided to join the audience to get a clearer perspective on what's going on between the play's title monarch and the King of France It is, he has decided, a pretty disgusting spectacle.

All those rubber principles bending every whichaway, all that instant backtracking, all that compromise parading as conviction, this all comes as a shock to the fellow known as the Bastard, a virgin in the realm of government, played by Derek Smith. What he observes leads him to wax poetic and satiric on something he calls “commodity,” or pure self-interest.

It's the most famous monologue in this brooding political cartoon of a play, which opened last night in a production by the Theater for a New Audience at the American Place Theater, a mock-Machiavellian primer of a speech on how to get by in a corrupt society. That it is delivered by a man who has just been sitting among us seems especially apt. As far as the stage of statesmanship is concerned, the view from the audience really hasn't changed much in four centuries One need only look to that American spectacle known as the presidential primaries for a contemporary equivalent.

The Bastard (who wears his epithet proudly, by the way) isn't the only character in this King John to step back and sit down with the audience to watch the wicked world go by, and the device matches the evening's governing point of view. This early, intriguing history play, written in the 1590's, is arguably Shakespeare's most detached-seeming work, a cool look at a fraught era in which alliances are made of straw, and heroes are hard to come by.

Accordingly, Ms Coonrod, the vigorous and imaginative director of the Henry VI plays at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, provides an evening of energetic, stylized carnage and double-dealing kept at a cynical remove. This interpretation doesn't provide much in the way of psychological insight. But it's appropriately tough-minded and darkly funny, and the production makes its central points (which, refreshingly, are also the play's) with gusto.

John (played here by Ned Eisenberg) is among the least charismatic of Shakespeare's crown wearers, with nothing of either the outsize villainy of Richard III or the patriotic glamour of Henry V. (The event for which his real-life model is best known, the signing of Magna Carta, isn't even mentioned.)

He struts and fulminates and pulls rank, but basically he's a waffler and a mama's boy, which is understandable when you realize that Mama is the domineering Eleanor of Aquitaine (Myra Carter). John's foreign peer, Philip II of France (Mark Vietor), isn't much more decisive or commanding.

In fact the only character with kingly virtues, as Shakespeare would later define them, is that same Bastard, who is the illegitimate son of John's brother, Richard the Lion-hearted, and who, taken up by the royal court, winds up running it. Harold Bloom has gone so far as to say that the Bastard “inaugurates Shakespeare's invention of the human.”

It is true that the character has that rich mix of varied elements associated with great Shakespearean figures and that we are allowed to see him grow in a way no one else in the play does, his initiation into realpolitik is also ours. Ms Coonrod and the vibrant Mr Smith have chosen to bypass interior-probing portraiture in favor of an exaggerated everyman figure, a jaunty master of ceremonies who is part jester, part moral watchdog.

This may serve the evening's thematic purposes, but for more intricate characterization you'll have to look elsewhere. There is above all Mr Eisenberg, who has ingeniously taken hold of the slippery John by playing him as a small-time mafioso thrust into the role of leading don (John Cazale's Freddie Corleone in the Godfather movies comes to mind).

The Eleanor of Ms. Carter (of Three Tall Women), her mouth set in a militant pout, and Pamela Nyberg's high-strung Lady Constance—the determined mother of the young Arthur (Michael Ray Escamillo), another claimant to the throne—are maternal dragons to remember, vivid studies in vicarious ambition. And Nicholas Kepros is excellent, somehow dry and unctuous at once, as the most skilled politician of the lot, a papal legate from Rome.

Despite the charged physicality of Ms Coonrod's staging, starting with a wordless crown-tossing free-for-all as a curtain raiser, the evening has its longueurs. You can't avoid the feeling that this is one of those rare Shakespearean plays in which the language has more fat than meat, with speakers taking a dozen lines to say the equivalent of “Get out of here.”

P. K. Wish's costumes are a little too self-consciously hip, suggesting a medieval-themed collection by Helmut Lang, and there's enough hair gel in use to start a serious oil slick. And while Christopher Akerlind employs lighting to inspired effect in underscoring soliloquies and asides, the use of performers in multiple roles can be confusing, as when Katie MacNichol, the lovely actress playing Blanche, John's niece, later shows up in an expensive-looking debutante dress as a messenger from the battlefields.

By and large, however, the evening moves forward with speed and clarity. And Ms Coonrod consistently demonstrates a keen ear for the hollowness and duplicity of the language of state, getting laughs from the characters' orotund speech, especially as rendered by Bruce Turk's Dauphin.

And in one terrific bit of interpolated business, the toll taken by battle between England and France is registered by having those nations' monarchs meet several times, repeating exactly the same lines. The words—beginning with, “France, hast thou yet more blood to cast away?”—are brave and lofty.

In the repetition, they lose their sheen, perfectly setting the stage for a less than noble truce between two posturing kings.