The Red Bull Theater Company Presents Coriolanus

Laura Kolb (Baruch College) 

Walking into the Barrow Street Theatre to see Coriolanus is a lot like going to vote. In part, that’s a conscious choice on the part of the Red Bull Theater company, who have taken over the space for their election-season production of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy. The walls in the entryway are plastered with VOTE HERE signs, their message repeating in multiple languages, big black arrows insistently pointing the way toward the stage—signs identical to the ones that cropped up all over New York on November 8. In part, though, it’s the space. On the first floor of Greenwich House, a multi-purpose community center, the theater is a big rectangular room with movable chairs arranged in neat blocks around three sides of a modest stage platform. The whole thing looks earnest, clean-but-shabby, temporarily rearranged—not unlike the school cafeterias and senior center basements where we line up periodically to vote. We are in Shakespeare’s Rome, and we are in an American polling place.

The play centrally dramatizes an election gone awry. In the second act, Caius Martius Coriolanus, war hero and Rome’s savior against the Volsces, stands for consul. The Senate approves him wholeheartedly in a scene that pointedly invokes American political theater: a cloud of red balloons falls from the ceiling, recalling the moment of Hillary Clinton’s official nomination earlier this year, while Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t…