STAGE REVIEW : A Testy ‘Timon’ at the Old Globe

Carol Channing used to remind her audiences that while she was singing about diamonds, other girls were out there doing the work.

It’s the same with American Shakespeare. Joseph Papp is always announcing some new scheme to do the entire Shakespearean canon. Meanwhile, other theaters get on with it.

As an example, San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre continued its Festival ’88 season on Wednesday night with the rarely performed “Timon of Athens,” the Globe’s second production of it in a dozen years.

By the time Shakespeare got to writing this one (roughly 1607), he was beyond pleasing the public, and possibly beyond pleasing himself. (“Art not a poet? Then thou liest.”) His mood is as bitter as that of his hero, a fatuous millionaire suddenly reduced to a filthy hermit.

Imagine the Book of Job without a happy ending. Timon’s only pleasure as he skulks in his hole--literally that, in Cliff Faulkner’s design--is to expound on the falseness of the world. Men are “beasts subject to beasts.” Women’s role is to give them the pox. The only God is that “bright defiler” gold.

All the other characters in the play also run on malice, except for Titus’ loyal and not very interesting servants. It’s an even bleaker world than “Endgame’s.” Beckett’s characters at least have each other. Timon can’t stand company.

The Globe’s 1977 production presented Timon as an oil-rich Arab gone bust. Here he’s a Renaissance magnifico who seems to have fallen into a time warp. How else to explain that junked auto in the second act?

A bolder director wouldn’t have tried to explain it. Robert Berlinger makes the play a play-within-a-play, set in Beckett’s wasteland. Luckily, not too much time is spent with this device.

Jonathan McMurtry plays Timon. Shakespeare’s character is a man of extremes. McMurtry isn’t. His best work in the theater has been in the middle zone. Yet this works well for the play in a house as small as the Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

Rather than being blown away by Timon’s fulminations, we listen to them--and wince, sometimes, to see how well he makes his case. The suggestion is that the world is bad enough to push even a placid man to fury.

But Timon doesn’t lose his wits. He won’t give the gods that satisfaction. He sees his situation and takes pride in selecting the words cruel enough to suit it. Rather than shouting down the roof, he pronounces his sentence on himself and his fellow man calmly. No hope can have no fear.

Sometimes there’s even humor. “An honest man!” McMurtry says of a servant, rolling his eyes to heaven. “No more, I pray!” (Or, in the modern phrase--My heart can’t take it.)

Earlier McMurtry and Tony Amendola, as the ultra-cynical Apemantus, fall into a billingsgate contest that suggests two street bloods seeing who can out-”signify” the other. It’s the only time in the play when Timon forges a bond with anybody.

This “Timon” doesn’t harrow the soul. But it does provide an acute portrait of a civilized man suddenly turned misanthrope--whether by ill fortune, old age or poor health. Anyone who has ever cared for an aged father will recognize McMurtry.

Julian Gamble is also strong as Alcibiades, no less egocentric than anyone else in the play, but, as a soldier, at least representing some kind of order.

Richard Ortega, Chuck Cooper, Richard Frank and Dierk Torsek are among the men not too proud to put their feet under Timon’s table in times of prosperity, and Robert Phalen is his trusty steward--a token part, alas. By this point Shakespeare, or whoever wrote this play, wasn’t trusting anybody.

Plays at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m., through July 24. Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tickets: $14-$24; (619) 239-2255.