[In the following excerpt, Armstrong appraises the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Timon of Athens as directed by Penny Metropulos, noting that the director viewed the play as a work-in-progress and took a number of liberties with the text in order to quicken the pace of the production.]

OSF [Oregon Shakespeare Festival] associate artistic director Penny Metropulos directs a welcome production of Timon of Athens on the festival's outdoor Elizabethan stage. Relatively unadorned even in the putative splendor of the early banquet scenes, the stage is completely bare during Timon's later self-imposed exile. The focus of action shifts then to a coffin-sized sandbox recessed in the floor at the very front of the stage, where Timon scrabbles for his roots and finds the buried gold. The production eschews classical “weeds of Athens” in favor of richer, more colorful costumes of antique Middle Eastern design, to evoke an Athens that is the commercial crossroads of a larger ancient world still informed by the Homeric code of hospitality.

Metropulos, regarding Timon as a Shakespearean work-in-progress, takes some liberties to fit the text to the OSF stage and find a straight storyline for her actors. A few examples may stand for dozens of small rearrangements designed to quicken the pace of the play's notoriously minimal action. Metropulos pulls forward Timon's entrance and the news of Ventidius' imprisonment (1.1.97) to precede the Poet's exposition of his Fortune's Hill allegory (1.1.64), so that a dramatic problem engages our interest earlier. Again, she eliminates Apemantus' encounter with the fool (2.2) and alters the sequence of Timon's visitors in the wilderness, delaying Apemantus' appearance there until after that of the three bandits.

The production begins with the festival's typical crowd-quieting “prologue,” in this instance a short pastiche of lines from the play to introduce the notion of a universally loved and honored Timon before the Poet and Painter begin their play-opening conversation. Metropulos gives these interpolated lines (beginning with the Poet's “See, magic of bounty …”) to the two strangers who appear briefly in Shakespeare's 2.2, casting women in the roles and expanding the parts to establish the strangers as a kind of chorus. The two women reappear from time to time as observers of the action, silently witnessing the fallen Timon's curse on Athens (4.1) and looking down on Alcibiades, in the play's final moment, as the stage goes dark.

The production eliminates the masque of the Amazons but fills the void so left in Timon's banquet by the entrance of a pair of courtesans instead of a troupe of dancing ladies. Apemantus' railing (“What a sweep of vanity comes this way!”) and Timon's invitation to join the banquet are directed at these two, who exit with Timon and Alcibiades at the scene's conclusion, in the general frenzy of reciprocal gift-giving. (The text leaves Timon and Apemantus alone at the end, Alcibiades having made his exit earlier.) Metropulos conflates these two invented courtesans with Timandra and Phrynia, the mistresses of Alcibiades whom we usually meet only in 4.3, when Alcibiades stumbles across Timon in the wilderness. Their earlier introduction in 1.2 thus implies that the courtesans have been gifts of Timon to Alcibiades—a notion not inconsistent with the play's themes of commodification and exchange. Perhaps unintentionally, though, the manner of their collective exit in 1.2 implies Timon's participation in a post-banquet private party with Alcibiades and the two courtesans, an impression a little at odds with the physical isolation and fear of intimacy that underlie David Kelly's carefully drawn characterization of Timon.

Throughout the initial banquet scene, we are very much aware that Timon takes care to preserve his “personal space,” visibly shrinking from the embrace offered by Alcibiades on his entrance. There is a childish shyness in the special affection that Timon has for Alcibiades and Apemantus, the latter played in this production by and as a woman. The single, striking instance of physical closeness experienced by Timon in the play comes not in the convivial feasting of Timon's heyday but in the bitterness of his exile (4.3), when the churlish philosopher, in a Lear-like tirade, upbraids Timon for imitating him. This shouting match modulates briefly into a different kind of exchange, signaled by a series of stichomythic lines at 4.3.234, after Apemantus grasps Timon from behind in a chokehold to enforce his attention to her words. After Apemantus says “I love thee better now than e'er I did,” the recalcitrant Timon seems momentarily about to relax into this physical contact, but the pair quickly recover their prickly antagonism. Apemantus jumps up and kicks Timon at “If thou didst put this sour cold habit on / To castigate thy pride, 'twere well; but thou / Dost it enforcedly.”

Tamu Gray roots her strong Apemantus' “opposition to humanity” in philosophical cynicism rather than psychological misanthropy. Both she and Timon derive their asperity ultimately from disappointed idealism. This peeks through in the quick smiles of approval that Apemantus shoots her star pupil during his exposition on friendship in 1.2 (“We are born to do benefits”) and after his “beast” speech (4.3), when she says: “If thou couldst please me with speaking to me, thou mightst have hit upon it here: the commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.” Although the production underscores the concurrence of Timon and Apemantus in this recognition, Metropulos has excised the political dimension of the play's conclusion.

The production retains the scene (3.5) in which two stonily impassive senators (here, one male, one female) deny Alcibiades' appeal to spare the life of a fellow soldier. But Metropulos cuts 5.2 (the senators' fearful anticipation of Alcibiades' attack), 5.3 (the soldier's discovery of Timon's epitaph), and most of 5.4 (the senators' pleading for Alcibiades' mercy) and gives the senator's lines in 5.1 (the senators' pleading for Timon's help) instead to the two strangers. Skipping over the senators' comeuppance, the production thus moves us almost instantly from Timon's final demise to Alcibiades' reading of Timon's epitaph.

The strangers exit midway through Timon's last speech (5.1), at “let my grave-stone become your oracle.” After uttering his last words (“Sun, hide thy beams; Timon hath done his reign”), Timon turns and walks upstage through the scrim, making his exit into a sudden glow of white light. The two strangers, the faithful steward, Apemantus, and Alcibiades enter, and Alcibiades kneels to find and read Timon's buried epitaph. His last words are not the text's ominous “Let our drums strike” but the earlier half-promise of “And I will use the olive with my sword, / Make war breed peace, make peace stint war.” Like the illuminating glow that hints at a final peace for the misanthropic Timon, the production's moderating of Timon's questioning of political power seems to ameliorate what can be one of Shakespeare's bitterest tragic endings. …