Wednesday, February 09, 2000
A fine-tuned 'Alexander' could be great
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
One can't help but admire the ambition of Nicholas Korn's Alexander the Great: Part One. It's the first entry in a planned trilogy about the man who conquered most of the ancient world by the time he was 32 and then was murdered by a lover.
Mr. Korn is playwright, director and producer of Alexander as it premieres with his Stage First at the Fifth Third Bank Theater through Feb. 20. Already it has been extended a week.
Mr. Korn is performing two jobs too many on this epic adventure. More than anything else, Alexander points up how desperately Cincinnati needs a play lab with an exciting professional director, a dramaturge to polish and prune work with potential, and capable actors to perform it.
It's a wonderful thing to have this need; it wouldn't have been an issue five or even three years ago. Now there are enough promising playwrights working here to demand a well-funded, first-rate workshop series so the writer can analyze the work and make it everything it can be.
Mr. Korn the director indulges Mr. Korn the playwright, and Mr. Korn the producer had to go in search of 15 performers, none of whom are really good.
Even the strongest — Daniel Cooley in the title role and Michael Schneider as a noble but doomed warrior — never completely persuade us that they believe they're in ancient Macedonia.
Alexander: Part One has the potential to be a great yarn. Youthful Alexander, willful and arrogant, is at exactly the age to be a threat to his father, temperamental King Philip (Aaron Simms).
Meanwhile, his mother Olympias (Karen Vanover) has long proclaimed that it wasn't her husband who impregnated her but a god, which gives Philip a perfect out to banish her, disown his son and find himself a young new wife.
Also powering the action are battles, impressively staged by Gina Cerimele-Mechley, and behind-the-scenes strategies that echo Shakespeare, but happily find their origins in fact.
There's the vengeful plotting of the queen and a base murder of Schneider's noble warrior by a jealous favorite passed over for promotion. There's the epic telling of Alexander's legendary triumph over the Thebans and well-handled debate among Athenians on the advantages and disadvantages of democracy.
There's a lot here to like.
But if Mr. Korn the playwright were conferring outside himself, with a director or a dramaturge, they'd probably tell him: great material, good story arc, well-outlined, but too many of the scenes are too much alike. Each needs its own dramatic thrust, its own purpose within the larger play.
They definitely would have told him that the first act is way, way too long (an hour-and-a-half), made exhausting by too many mini-climaxes. So many little dramatic jabs lessen the power of the would-be knock-out punch he finally delivers.
They would coax him into admitting his script makes points repeatedly and could safely be trimmed back without losing any meat.
It's always exciting to see intelligent new work, but Alexander deserves a far better production than this one.
Alexander the Great: Part One, Stage First Cincinnati, Fifth Third Bank Theater, Aronoff Center for the Arts, through Feb. 20. 241-7469.
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