'Troilus' Is Played With Aplomb

By PETER BELLAMY

The Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival has achieved a near miracle in making William Shakespeare's tragic "Troilus and Cressida" not only playable, but consistently entertaining and engrossing.

As seen at Lakewood Civic Auditorium, where it is the Festival's fifth and last production of the season, the play's lack of unity, dearth of quotable lines, far-fetched story and overlong battle scene are more than counterbalanced by quickness of pace and a series of brilliant characterizations.

This seldom-produced drama has been seen only once before in Cleveland when the Eldred Players of Western Reserve University offered it in 1947. It may not be produced here for another generation, but those who see the present production may take satisfaction from the fact that it is in many ways a brilliant one.

THE PRODUCTION. is vastly superior to that at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Canada, in 1963. It plays down bombast in favor of sharply etched human portraits. It realizes all the humor and irony the play has. It is played to the hilt.

Written against the background of the Trojan War, which it shows as horribly needless and wasteful, the play tells of the bitter affair of Troilus and Cressida.

To ring true, its Cressida must be a totally convincing

sex-trap, an insatiable opportunist who takes her sexual fun where she finds it and is not averse to fraternizing with the enemy. Marla Lennard, so wholesome and healthy in "As You Like It", fills the bill admirably.

She is attired, for the most part, in a low cut, gold-trimmed bra and below her bare midriff is a goldtrimmed see-through skirt. She is sensual and sinuous. Her movement and utterance of words is designed to inspire male lust. Her constant. confident flaunting of her body suggests that love, indeed, "is a generation of vipers

NICK DEVLIN, a young man of charm and good looks, is the eternally hotblooded, mentally blind, jealous male. Like so many illogical males he burns with a desire to kill Cressida's subsequent lover instead of the faithless oversexed wanton.

Robert Allman as Pandarus is a magnificently dirty old man and would-be voyeur, whose sexual thrills are all vicarious. His portrayal is highly amusing, withal somewhat effeminate. Some of his gestures are reminiscent of Edward Everett llorton.

Harold Cherry is by turns funny and revolting as the clown. With his warts and club foot he suggests Quasimodo in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." He is forever inveighing against the lechery and corruption rife in the Greek camp.

AS ULYSSES. Timothy

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Taylor is a wily, sophisticated man, who employs some of his noblest lines to play the conceit of Achilles against that of Ajax. The latter is played by Roger Fawcett as a dumb, self-loving, bull-like soldier. It draws some of the play's loudest laughter.

Clad in a stunning lime tunic over a blue skirt with turquoise train, Janine Saxe is also something for the boys as Helen of Troy. Stephen Scott is a forthwright, virile Hector. Norma Joseph is suitably hysterical as the prophetess of doom, Cassandra, whom nobody will believe. Paul Orgill is an aloof King Agamemnon.

Daniel Chodos is maddeningly arrogant and irritating as the homosexual lover of Achilles The latter is

played by Thomas B. Mar-

kus as a monumental villain. Robert Browning is another handsome, rash young man, as the Paris caught in the toils of Helen of Troy.

Larry Carra has directed this play with complete sureness. Otherwise, I never saw so many different hairstyles on one stage.