Timon of Athens

Chicago Shakespeare Theater

(312) 595-5600

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Timon of Athens is “surely Shakespeare’s most cynical play,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. When the titular nobleman suffers a hard financial fall, the most difficult lesson he learns is that other people cannot be counted on for generosity, even toward a person who’s been unfailingly generous before confronting his time of need. Director Barbara Gaines’s contemporization of this work was a bold move, given that her Timon, a Wall Street futures trader, is “clearly intended to be the kind of figure whose name adorns lobbies and theaters.” Unfortunately, we never learn exactly how to read him. Was he “a great man let down by the lousy world?”—or was his generosity born of narcissism?

Ian McDiarmid points us firmly in the direction of the latter, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. The Scottish actor plays Timon with “coolly arrogant panache,” making it fairly clear that we’re to view him as a “vain, self-centered fool” deluded enough to think that the sharks who surround him will come to his rescue. Gaines’s depiction of the pre-2008 financial world is astute and vivid, helped enormously by set designer Kevin Depinet’s ultramodern corporate offices and ticker crawls. Even so, Depinet “keeps an eye-popping visual ace up his sleeve for the top of the second half,” when the setting shifts to a deserted shore and “the ex-tycoon becomes a crazed, Lear-like beachcomber.” High-concept versions of Shakespeare don’t always succeed, but once this one gets rolling, “you’ll feel it like a sucker punch.”