Timon of Athens at the Theater for a New Audience

On entering the Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, viewers coming to see the Shakespeare Theater Company’s production of Timon of Athens encounter a thrust stage, at the center of which sits a long banquet table set on the diagonal. The table is adorned with gold plates, gold place-settings, and elaborate gold-filigreed chairs upholstered with cloth of gold. Underneath the table, the stage is lined with a large bolt of fabric that transitions from black to speckled gold to solid golden luster before curving into verticality, thereby cutting viewers off from the backstage while leaving a doorway-shaped point of entry and egress at its center. As the audience chamber continues to fill, and as two servants begin to polish and place chalices and cutlery, all gold, along the table, the curious viewer who looks upward sees a leafless tree—the production’s stand-in for the forest beyond Athens—suspended horizontally far above. And so it begins: under Simon Godwin’s direction, the second half of Timon of Athens literally hangs over the first.  

The production casts the bounteous Timon of Acts 1 and 2 under the anticipatory shadow of the protagonists subsequent bankruptcy and descent into hermetic misanthropy in a number of ways, though perhaps most strikingly through its casting of Kathryn Hunter as Lady Timon. Compared to Glenda Jackson’s 2019 performance of King Lear, in which the character Lear continues to be gendered male,…