Theatre in Review: Volpone (Red Bull Theatre/Lucille Lortel)

That Volpone is a tricky one, and not just because of his suave and swindling ways. If Volpone, the character, is hard to pin down, the play that bears his name can prove just as elusive. My only other experience with Ben Jonson's scathing assessment of the world's greed and concupiscence was at the National Theatre sometime in the '90s. It starred Michael Gambon in the title role, with Simon Russell Beale as Mosca, but it was an event more to be admired for its technical prowess than to be enjoyed for its hilarity. Jonson was a skilled satirist, but his bilious view of life has a way of choking off laughter. Unlocking the play's humor while honoring its gimlet-eyed point of view can be a daunting task.

So it is with the current revival at the Lortel. The considerable good news is that Jesse Berger, the company's director (as well as Red Bull's artistic director), continues to find actors who are ready, willing, and able to negotiate the difficulties of Jacobean theatre. His company is an especially distinguished one. But that doesn't stop this revival from being spotty, its moments of very real amusement surrounded by passages that are more effortful.

Stephen Spinella makes a most antic Volpone, arranging elaborate bedroom tableaux that depict him as ready to expire at any minute and gasping his lines between asthmatic exhalations and bursts of phlegm. These at-death's-door performances are so convincing that a quartet of sycophants is all too ready to lavish him with gold-plated gifts in hopes of being named his sole heir. Once these worthies depart, Spinella's Volpone is possessed of an adolescent's energy, leaping around the room in glee and hatching plots that allow him to appear -- in disguise -- in public, the better to get a gander at another man's toothsome wife. It's an impressive performance in many ways -- the actor handles Jonson's verse with ease. (Opening a trunk filled with gold, he croons, "Hail the world's soul, and mine," in a moment of voluptuous surrender to vice that this production could use more of.) If anything, Spinella's smiling, gamboling jackanapes may be a little too frisky; it is missing a certain acrid authority, a feeling that he has looked into the dark heart of man and returned to tell the tale.

The same is true of Cameron Folmar's Mosca, Volpone's endlessly inventive lieutenant. It's an exhausting role, as Mosca races from one grasping fool to the next, keeping them all on the hook, disavowing yesterday's assertions in order to spread new disinformation. Folmar is never less than proficient -- his Mosca is a real smoothie, switching gears with ease as he leaps from lie to lie -- but again, one looks in vain for that extra twinkle in the eye, that certain knowledge that all humanity is greedy, grasping, and thoroughly beyond redemption.

Volpone and Mosca are the most dimensional characters; otherwise, Jonson dealt in savage caricatures, and the supporting cast sometimes struggles to find the humor in them. Among those who succeed is Alvin Epstein as the doddering old businessman Corbaccio, crossing the stage with the speed of an ailing sand crab, his deafness ensuring that he will get each point about five minutes after everyone else. Even better is Tovah Feldshuh as Fine Madam Would-Be, the massively vulgar English gentlewoman whose great lady mannerisms are dispensed with the instant she leaps into bed, ready to offer Volpone her own unique brand of sexual healing. Feldshuh, who at times appears to be doing a wicked spoof of Judi Dench, knows how to turn her character's covetousness into glitteringly stylized comedy -- she gets one of the biggest laughs of the evening when she sets off to catch her husband in the arms of a Venetian courtesan, pausing only to ask Volpone, "I pray you, lend me your dwarf." (Isn't it time to mount a production of The Way of the World, with Feldshuh as Lady Wishfort, or The Rivals, with her as Mrs. Malaprop?)

Less successful are Rocco Sisto as Voltore, a lawyer, who uses his professional skills to prosecute the innocent, and Michael Mastro as Corvino, an insanely jealous merchant who nevertheless turns his innocent wife over to Volpone. The scene that follows, Volpone's attempted rape of Celia, falls flat, partly because contemporary audiences are less likely to be amused by the spectacle of forced sex, but also because in some critical way Berger's production doesn't get at the play's dark heart, its view that there is no mortification that people will not endure in the pursuit of riches. (The only innocent characters, Celia and Bonario, Carbaccio's son, are so colorless they barely register.) The action unfolds on John Arnone's delightful period-style setting, which makes use of sumptuously painted drops -- although, at the performance I attended, one of them, a show curtain painted to look like a period etching of the Grand Canal, proved intractable, and the show had to be halted for about ten minutes to fix it. (Spinella got a well-deserved laugh when, just after the action resumed, his first line was "Well, I am home, and all the brunt is past.") Clint Ramos' costumes are glittering period creations, loaded to the limit with beading and embroidery; Feldshuh's all-red outfit makes her look like Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts. Peter West's lighting casts a bright, sunny glow over all sorts of dark doings.

Swiftly paced and reasonably funny, this production is best seen as a vest-pocket Volpone, delivering the play without fully realizing its scalding vision of humanity. Because it is such a rarity on our stages, drama students and anyone with an interest in Jonson should pounce. For anyone else, this is a slightly tougher sell.--David Barbour