STAGE REVIEW : ‘Venus and Adonis’ Takes Stage at the Gem

The Garden Grove City Council members who have been reluctant to grant the Grove Shakespeare Festival its $83,000 budget request this year (they’ve approved only $20,000 so far) might consider stopping by the Festival’s Gem Theatre where Benjamin Stewart is performing Shakespeare’s epic love poem, “Venus and Adonis.”

At first, they might think a solo actor dressed in black reading a long poem on an empty stage would precisely confirm their worst fears about the festival. Too high-brow. If they stay to listen, however, they’ll find that Stewart’s work is a perfect fit with the kind of thing an interesting Shakespeare festival should do: explore all the author’s writings, not just the plays.

If another of the festival’s jobs is to introduce a new audience to and excite them about the writings, “Venus and Adonis” does that nicely. Not only was it Shakespeare’s first published work, but the tale of Venus’ affecting and futile attempts at seducing young Adonis is a rich sampler of Shakespeare’s comic and tragic impulses. No play of his travels such a distance from light to dark as this poem.

Stewart’s accomplishment is to retain the poetry, while making it a text for performance. He enters from the upstage shadows (designer David Palmer’s pool of light suggests a sacred space in a hostile world), reads the poem’s dedication to the Earl of Southampton, all the while looking as though he’s not sure if he should continue. What will the money-lenders and city fathers think of this?

Within moments, though, Stewart leaps headlong into this adventure in elegant verse that is shot through with erotic humor. Stewart’s Venus only accentuates the comedy since, for all her intelligence and wily experience, she ends up seeming like a woman trying to squeeze love from a rock.

Stewart makes her into a powerfully endearing character--quite a feat, considering that Shakespeare never conceived “Venus and Adonis” for the stage. Adonis is normally tongue-tied in her presence, and we get the sense that he’s attracted but afraid of being smothered.

The actor embellishes the verse with physical accents (he gets down on his hands and knees like a wrestling referee while describing Venus tumbling with Adonis on the grass), and gives each line and word equal weight. Listen how, in the last, wrenchingly sad passages, he provides Venus with a spirit of resurrection as she absorbs the tragic loss of her would-be love. Far from poetry on a page, this is theater about a woman who knows how to survive.

Performances are at 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, on Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., through July 23. Tickets: $12. Information: (714) 636-7213.