“The Taster”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - August 2010

The Taster is a play about…um…well, everything. Sort of. Suffice it to say that there’s a whole lot going on here, and in two different centuries and countries. The same fix actors play all the roles, and sometimes people from different times and places are on stage at the same time. This is not as confusing as it sounds.

In 21st century New York City Henry (Tom O’Keefe) a former investment broker who has been wiped out in the recent economic downturn, slaves away at translating a play from the medieval Basque or Euskara language, growing ever more distant from his wife, Claudia (Maureen O’Flynn), a professional opera singer.

In the Basque country (a region spanning northeastern Spain and southwestern France in the early 16th century, we see the characters enact Henry’s play about Octavio Pillars (Rocco Sisto), a taster to King Gregorio (O’Keefe). Octavio tastes for poison, of course, in order to thwart any assassination attempt on the King, who is more preoccupied with the fact that his Queen, Mariana (O’Flynn), who he loves deeply, has not born him an heir and therefore must be put aside in favor of a more fertile consort.

The King’s meals are brought to Octavio in his cell three times each day by the servants Estaban (Robert Biggs) and Guillaume (Zachary Krohn). In the 21st century storyline Biggs plays Bernard, a former Harvard professor of Henry’s, and Krohn gets a few lines as Claudia’s unnamed accompanist (you are actually hearing a recording of Larry Wallach on piano).

O’Flynn, who is a professional singer in real life, is heard live and in recorded form singing an old Basque folk song Zeru goiko izarrek whose lyrics translate thusly:
The stars in the sky
The flowers in the fields
Do they need
My love
Our song together?

Basque is a very ancient language which nearly became extinct recently. It sounds like nothing else because, well, there isn’t another language like it spoken today. It is the last remaining pre-Indo-European language in western Europe. How does Henry come to know it well enough to translate it into English? Well, it seems that his major at Harvard was linguists, not economics or business, which could explain why he is ultimately more successful at the former than the latter.

But still, things are looking about as bleak for Henry and Claudia’s marriage as they are for King Gregorio and Queen Mariana’s. In both cases characters played by Sisto (he makes a brief appearance as a nutritionist named Syd in the 21st century storyline) intervene with solutions centered in the body, specifically in the oral characteristics of taste and speech.

The Taster is all about the senses. While it is easy to point to the mouth – the orfice we use to ingest nourishment and with which we articulate our thoughts – and the ears, with which we receive spoken information, this play is about the harmony and the interdependence of the bodily functions from thought to speech to hearing to understanding to response. From hunger to feeding to the vital functions that food fuels in the body. Translation stands as a metaphor for the alchemy necessary for people to hear and receive information across the barriers of time and language.

Octavio, the taster, has the perfect harmony. This draws people to him. He comes up with a solution to the King and Queen’s dilemma, but not without upsetting that harmony.

Shakespeare & Company commissioned this play, it’s second from Berkshire County-based playwright Joan Ackermann, who first collaborated with director Tina Packer back in 2005 on The Ice Glen. I interviewed Ackermann and Packer about this play, among many other topics, back in May for an article for The Women’s Times, and at that time I couldn’t piece together their separate remarks about The Taster.

Ackermann spoke of the play as an oral play, about voice and food, and its language as rich and sumptuous. The Basque folk song mentioned earlier in this review really opened her creative floodgates and informed the texture and tone of the play, and she was thrilled that O’Flynn was going to sing it. She found the play thrilling to write, with a vigor and momentum of its own that just carried her along on its coat-tails. She expressed excitement about the leap she had been able to take with this work into non-linear playwriting and what that change might free up for her in her future writing.

Packer summed The Taster up neatly by saying it was about “language and the human spirit…about what feeds the human spirit then and now.” Needless to say, Packer’s job as director was to find the heart of the play and build her production around that. As I looked at the play from her point of view I was reminded of two, conflicting, quotations:

“…man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.”

– Deuteronomy 8: 3 (KJV)

“What keeps mankind alive?
….Food is the first thing. Morals follow on.”

- Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, trans. Ralph Manheim & John Willett

The Taster is lands solidly in the biblical corner, but human history and biology tells us that Brecht is right. The Deuteronomy quote, which Jesus refers to in two of the gospels, is the tale end of a reminder to the Israelites of how God fed them with manna when they were hungry, but if you go back and read how unready they were to listen to the word of God before they were fed you can see what Brecht is talking about.

The Taster does come from a place of physical need, but concerns people with vast spiritual and emotional hungers.

Ackermann has stated that she wrote this play for O’Flynn and Sisto and indeed it is hard to imagine two more perfect performers for these roles. Sisto infuses Octavio with a deep core of wisdom and peace that centers the show, allowing all those who are weary and heavy-laden to come unto him. I personally find Sisto a remarkably handsome man, but my companion looked blankly at me while I expounded on his actorly and masculine virtues and then said, “Oh, you’re talking about the older man.”

Okay, so we’re all getting older and my taste in men is apparently aging along with me. Yes, Sisto is now that older handsome man in the cast. O’Keefe is the young hunky dude, and my eyes are no so elderly that I don’t see his appeal as both a performer and a person. I enjoyed his performance last season as the savior Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure and I found him touching and likeable again here.

I am not quite sure what Ackermann envisioned as the purpose of Biggs’ 21st century role. He was part narrator and part fortune-teller…there are moments when this script, as Ackermann allowed it to carry her along, where becomes too wrapped up in itself.

When I spoke with Packer back in May, I asked her how The Taster fit in to the overall vision for the 2010 season, and she replied that this play looked at theatre and life from two different eras just as her Women of Will did. Now, having seen The Taster and the short form of WoW, and in preparation for seeing the complete five-part version of the latter next week, I thought about this statement. I have been doing quite a bit of reading about England in Shakspeare’s day in the ensuing months, and I have learned that it is almost impossible for a modern person to really understand how people lived and what was considered “normal” life back then. Religion, politics, hygiene, morality, mortality, friendship, marriage, communication, transportation – everything was completely different. In order to get to the similarities you have to get down to the very basics. What keeps wo/mankind alive? We do not live by bread alone.

There is a larger set for this play than I think I have ever seen on the Founders’ Theatre stage, which makes an interesting statement about the value Shakespeare & Company places on this production. The handsome set, designed by Yoshi Tanokura, suffices for both 16th and 21st centuries, but I have to say that I never saw an NYC apartment with doors like that! There is a fascinating backdrop of a medieval manuscript. Govane Lohbauer has done her usual excellent job on the costumes, and Christopher Thielking has designed appropriate and seamless lighting. Scott Killian shouldered a large burden when he took on the sound design for this show, as what we hear is as important as what is said.

Seeing The Taster is a very dense experience, and, whether you enjoy it or not, it is definitely food for thought (there’s that “F” word again!) I came away wishing to own a copy of the script (I don’t, yet) so that I could look at and absorb all of Ackermann’s ideas about what keeps mankind alive. I also came away feeling slightly over-stuffed. I wonder if a judicious pruning of 15-20 minutes wouldn’t render this a truly perfect play.

Yes, I used the word “Perfect.” There is greatness in these words and if you can’t quite see the forest for the trees just now removing just a few samplings ought to expose the standing timbers. This is a play that I would like to see again, and certainly to read. If you enjoy hearing beautiful words beautifully spoken (and sung) by beautiful people, you had better book your ticket now!

Click HERE to see a gallery of production photos.

The Taster plays in Founders’ Theatre on Shakespeare & Company’s Kemble Street campus in Lenox, MA, from July 29 through September 4. The show runs two hours and twenty minutes with one intermission and is suitable for ages 10 and up, Ticket prices range from $15 to $85, along with a host of discounts including Student, Senior, Military, Teacher, and Rush discounts, plus Group rates. The popular Full-Time Berkshire Resident 40% Discount also applies. NEW this season: Premium Tickets, where ticket price includes special early seating, a sumptuous glass of wine and decadent dessert. Contact the Box Office at (413) 637-3353 or boxoffice@shakespeare.org to order tickets or learn more about discount availability, or simply order tickets from www.shakespeare.org. Founders’ Theatre is wheelchair-accessible and air conditioned.

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