'Equivocation' works on many levels

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Cecil (Jonathan Haugen, right) explains to Shag (Anthony Heald) that the play needs to be the official version.

When the priest Henry Garnet was tried in 1606 for his involvement in the previous year's Gunpowder Plot, a hot issue was that of equivocation. The Jesuit strategy enabled Roman Catholics being questioned under oath by English authorities to conceal the truth — a thing that could be hazardous to their health — by clever dissimulation, thus slipping between the horns of the dilemma of whether to lie or die.

This is what the drunken porter In "Macbeth" refers to when he says, "Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven."

Equivocation was despised by English Protestants, who associated it with the English Jesuits in Europe they saw as the instigators of numerous plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, a Protestant, and later James I.

Although Garnet had opposed the Gunpowder Plot, in which Robert Catesby and other influential English Catholics nearly blew up Parliament and King James I of England, he was hanged on May 3, 1606, at St Paul's. Witnesses said spectators pulled the priest's legs as he writhed in the air to give him a speedy death and spare him more prolonged attention from the executioner.

In Bill Cain's play "Equivocation," which had its world premiere Saturday night in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Angus Bowmer Theatre, the man doing the pulling on Garnet's (Richard Elmore) legs is Will Shagspeare (Anthony Heald), the playwright for the theatrical cooperative The King's Men. Shag was commissioned by Robert Cecil (Jonathan Haugen), the power behind King James I (John Tufts), to write a play propounding the government version of the events of the plot. The King himself wrote the first draft.

"We don't do politics," Shag says. "We do histories. True histories of the past."

Cecil, who can make or break powerful men at his whim, tells Shag he will write the play. It will be the official version. And it must have witches, because the king is fascinated with witches.

But why Shag? Because, Cecil says, his works will last. People will still be reading them in 50 years.

The funny exchange encapsulates several of the most salient features of Cain's darkly comic new drama, which has been imaginatively directed by Bill Rauch. Yes, this is revisionist history, based on one of the choicest conspiracy theories of all time. And Shag will play a central role in the aftermath. And while Cain's highly theatrical play is in its heart as serious as death, it is also, much of the time, very funny indeed. A scene of actors rehearsing "King Lear" and not getting its nihilism is itself worth the price of admission.

Shag's research leads him to Tom Wintour, or Winter, (Cain uses the real names throughout) also played by Tufts, who tells him the real story. Essentially, Cecil orchestrated a set-up so that he could crack down on prominent Catholics and confiscate their property. Tom, who has been tortured to near death, plays Deep Throat to Shag's Woodward and Bernstein.

Which leaves Shag with an existential crisis: lie or die. He cannot in good conscience produce the play the king wants, one that will unify England under a false founding myth: that reckless people of the old faith, Catholicism, wantonly attempted to blow up the nation's heart and soul, and the king survived only by the grace of God. But if he were to tell the naked truth the play would be flung aside and he would be tortured and killed.

This seems to me the weakest point in the play, since the real playwright in fact wrote oceans of words in support and flattery of the monarchy with no sign of any qualms whatever. But of course good history is not necessarily good drama, and vice versa, a fact for which the plays of Shakespeare himself are Exhibit A (consider for example "Richard III").

Cain's conflation of high drama and suspect history is just one of the ways the play is quintessentially Shakespearean. Let's count some others. It's about a death plot against a king. It's violent (a drawing and quartering, a beheading and two hangings). It has plays-within-a-play (maybe as many as five, I lost count). It has a beautiful young woman (Christine Albright as Judith, Shag's daughter) who speaks truth to power and makes fools of the men. It has a sub-plot (involving Shag and a secret). And while it purports to be about an earlier time, it resonates deeply with the present.

In the play's funniest conceit, Shag slips off Cecil's hook only because Judith has saved a play he thought he'd thrown away. It's one that's about killing a king and blaming others and it has witches and equivocation. The abbreviated reading it gets here is a comic masterstroke.

In the end, like such later works as "The Tempest" and "The Winter's Tale," the play's movement is through anger and loss to pure love. Four of the play's six actors play numerous roles, morphing from one to another on Christopher Acebo's abstractly Globe-like set with just enough life to make the characters credible. The direction takes us seamlessly from reality to fantasy, dungeons and trials to play rehearsals.

The play has perhaps a bit of murk near the end (it's listed at two-and-a-half hours but runs nearly three), but that's a minor quibble. "Equivocation" is one of those major theatrical experiences that succeeds on so many levels it deserves to be widely produced for years to come. Just as Shakespeare proved you could stage towering dramas and still please the groundlings, "Equivocation" says that challenging new work can come out of regional theater.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.

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