Though performed by the expert actors and PTP/NYC veterans Alex Draper and Pamela J. Gray, the play is so stolid it's a relief when Judith finally goes for the decapitation.
The expert actors, portraying four grasping London suburbanites and an unexpected visitor from foreign parts, never once demand that you root for them or even like them.
The men wear latter-day Westminster business suits, and the expert actors inside them convey all the thorny ambivalence of having to bow to sweeping skirts.
With expert actors like those guys at the Donmar, it's not about choreographing, it's not telling them how to move … It's just noticing things about their choices and giving them some more physical options to take.
It is not hard to think of cases of creatures who might act exactly as though they were in pain, for example, but who actually were not: consider expert actors or brainless human bodies wired to be remotely controlled.
A sort of Thelonious Monk of make-believe, Wilson takes twelve expert actors and some bleacher seats, and (with a scenic ace in the hole by the set designer John Lee Beatty as his finale) conjures up a bright and barbarous Middle America.
Because of this, it's no wonder that David Fincher turned Fitzgerald's unique short fiction into a full-length film, rife with dazzling visual effects and expert actors, namely Brad Pitt as the title character and the ever-so-talented Cate Blanchett as the central love interest.
These are not stock figures certainly – stock figures don't claim to be "more Puerto Rican than a crucifix on the rearview" – but not as richly textured as they might be, though the more expert actors, like Rubin-Vega and Matt Saldivar, as an affable Cuban American artist, can do a lot to mitigate this.
Routinely paired opposite callow, less expert actors like Keanu Reeves, Ashley Judd and Ben Affleck, Mr. Freeman in particular can be relied on to provide counsel and ballast to even the most lightweight genre exercises, along with a sense of purpose and moral seriousness.
She asks the big question: "Did Shakespeare write boring gibberish with no relevance to our world of Tinder and peri-peri fries – or does it just look, sound and feel that way?" She interviews experts – actor Simon Russell Beale and director Iqbal Khan among them – and finds that the Swan of Avon was more than "just a bald man who wrote with feathers".
