Critical Essay | Critical Review by John Simon

Critical Review by John Simon

SOURCE: A review of Twelfth Night in New York Magazine, December 29, 1980, pp. 63-4.

Nowhere in the western world, I daresay, do the classics fare as badly as in our theater. I don't know whether it is the teaching or the learning—more properly the lack of teaching and the unwillingness to learn—that is to blame. In any case, American theater seems to be equipped only for the latest American plays; there is no sense of other times and other places—as what follows shockingly demonstrates.

The Circle Repertory is about as good an institutional theater as we have, possibly the best; but only for contemporary Americana. Now, alas, we are getting Twelfth Night, staged by the playwright David Mamet as Friday the thirteenth. Start, if you will, with the costumes of Clifford Capone: unlovely, uninventive, and, on top of that, inconsistent. While most characters wear dull modern clothes—Orsino's men in...
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