The Theatre for a New Audience’s staging of The Tragedy of Coriolanus deploys multimedia effects to augment Shakespeare’s drama about an elitist hero undone both by his pride and the fickle unwashed masses he expected to lead. His story in short: Named for a city he single-handedly captures, Coriolanus loves Rome but not so much his lowest citizens during its earliest times as a rowdy republic. After the “mutable, rank-scented many” bounce him out, Coriolanus joins up with his greatest enemy, the warrior Aufidius, and marches back intent to destroy Rome.
Entering the auditorium of the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where the revival opened on Saturday, spectators will observe a Jumbotron-type, four-faced video cube hovering above a red-and-black thrust stage. Angled against orange drapes, other large video screens combine into the shape of a classical building; its lower level marked by graffiti and crude posters. Designer Afsoon Pajoufar’s functional setting and Avery Reed’s costumes vaguely suggest a not terribly distant future.
Amid such purposefully unattractive visuals, a 14-member company mostly rattles and shouts through a respectful two-act edition of Shakespeare’s fascinating study in power games and public faces. The significant change to the text by director Ash K. Tata is a decision to present Aufidius as female. Such a switch in gender loses the story’s homoerotic aspect. Instead, the director and actors trace an uneasy collegial relationship between Aufidius and Coriolanus, although their brief fight scenes as sharply staged by J. David Brimmer might hint otherwise.
In the press materials, Tata speaks about using multimedia to depict how the play’s events can be fractured by multiple interpretations, saying: “Our production is asking: what does it mean for our political processes to also be mediated — whether by the news media or by what AI generates memes about what is fact and what is fiction?” It’s a smart concept for Shakespeare’s ever-timely drama. The trouble here is how the curiously tepid streams of live and video images credited to projection designers Lisa Renkel and Possible register mostly as mild distractions rather than deliver significant visual illustration and commentary. (During a duller moment, I wondered whether a kiss camera would project our faces across all of those screens and hoped it would not linger upon the stranger drowsing in the seat next to me.)
Generally, the acting proves spotty. Possibly that thudding, bass-heavy sound design by Brandon Keith Bulls, icy music by David T. Little and an intermittent yellowish atmospheric haze undermines performances. A less than charismatic McKinley Belcher III is a handsome though mostly stolid Coriolanus; speaking the blank verse, he tends to hit the cadences hard. The greater disappointment is the director’s slack, unimaginative shaping of the crucial scenes involving those so-swayable Roman people, who collectively become the drama’s motivating force. Clad in East Village mufti, they’re noisy but scarcely suggest a dangerous Roman mob. Perhaps it would have been wiser to invest more in additional actors and their rehearsal than in tech.
Certain actors do nobly by their characters. Roslyn Ruff quietly provides an elegant, usually cool as steel presence as the hero’s redoubtable mama Volumnia. The chuckling Jason O’Connell lends Menenius, their family counselor, the genial air of an older gentleman given to day drinking. A coiled, intense Mickey Sumner depicts Aufidius with transatlantic accents and an edgy sense of menace. Late in the story, Kevin Alicea, Jack Berenholtz and Pomme Koch deliver a quick, slam-bang comedy interlude as the kitchen help amazed by the “strange alteration” in affections between the formerly sworn enemies they now are serving at dinner. Their brief, bright scene strikes those vital sparks of humanity that much of this production lacks.
The Tragedy of Coriolanus opened February 14, 2026, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs through March 1. Tickets and information: tfana.org
