Theater: 0 for 2

Born beside the Avon, Shakespeare appears to be dying beside the Housatonic. The theater at Stratford, Conn., offers what it likes to call the American Shakespeare Festival, but it is the grubbiest of cultural snack bars. By comparison, the picnics on the lawn are lavish and tasty feasts.

From year to year, the resident company maintains scant visible continuity. It is more like a pickup band that has mislaid, or never had most of its instruments. So lax and disorganized a company is ill-equipped to do poor plays that it cannot salvage, or difficult plays that it lacks the skill and style to illuminate. Yet this season the Stratford company has elected to perform one of each kind—a rare example of Shakespeare’s desultory hack work, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and one of his most difficult and exacting dramas, The Tempest. In baseball lingo, the company is batting 0 for 2.

Tradition has it that Elizabeth I asked Shakespeare to write Merry Wives because she wanted to see Falstaff in love. If so, the Queen served the realm poorly, and Shakespeare served his genius even worse. He demeaned his own creation by reducing Falstaff to a dirty old man with not a trace of Sir John’s effulgent wit or great humanity. His amorous pursuit of Mistress Page (Jane Alexander) and Mistress Ford (Tobi Brydon) is implausible in its lust and petty in its greed. As played in pillow-stuffed, pillow-weight fashion by W.B. Brydon, Falstaff exists only to be mocked and tricked by these ladies and dumped ignominiously into the Thames in a laundry hamper. And to what end? Apparently to cater to a rising middle class that placed great stress on fidelity to one’s spouse.

The Tempest is another matter—a play like the final turn of an hourglass in which the sands of life and the playwright’s life in art are spilling simultaneously toward an elegiac terminal serenity. Here, in the person of Prospero, Shakespeare tells about the nature of the artist and his magic powers. Prospero can summon the sprite of the imagination, Ariel (Jess Richards), to do his bidding and can control the dark id-monster of animalistic instinct, Caliban (David Hurst). The ultimate purpose of art, Shakespeare seems to say, is to impose order on both chaos and inspiration, to knit earth and sky together at the calm horizon line of reason.

There is a tension in that task, one that even the greatest artist cannot sustain indefinitely. Buffeted by the storms of life, shipwrecked on the enchanted but treacherous island of self, the man within the artist finally has to relinquish his hard-gained mastery. That is the moving point of the “Our revels now are ended” speech, which closes with the words: “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep.”

Foul Play. The stuff of dreams is not to be found at Stratford. The island in this production is noisy and garish enough to be Coney. Ariel might be a ballet boy languishing in precious poses, and Caliban is a gargoyle of grunts and howls. As for Morris Carnovsky’s Prospero, he is a pontifical judge on sedate leave from some high bench, but scarcely an intrepid voyageiir in the vortex of existence, and of art.

In any production, the final arbiter is the director. Michael Kahn (Merry Wives of Windsor) and Edward Payson Call (The Tempest) concentrate on horseplay, swordplay, and foul play, or foot play, arm play, and hand-and-wrist play. But of true drama they seem to have not the remotest inkling.