Summary 
Modernized to contemporary Las Vegas club culture, with dance beats, lounge singers, lap dancers, and martinis the milieu of businessman Timon. After three denials from failed friends, the midnight-blue urbanity becomes the blaze of desert heat, with a misanthropic Timon raging Lear-like against ingratitude. Suitably schizophrenic and expertly conceived, with a powerhouse lead performance.
Design
Directed by Stephen Ouimette. Set by Lorenzo Savoini. Costumes by Dana Osborne. Lights by Bonnie Beecher. Sound by Todd Charlton. Choreographed by Nicola Pantin.
Cast
Peter Donaldson (Timon), Bernard Hopkins (Flavius), Robert Persichini (Lucius), Ron Kennell (Lucullus), Roger Forbes (Sempronius), Dan Chameroy (Ventidius), Tom McCamus (Apemantus), Sean Arbuckle (Alcibiades).
Analysis
Piano chords erupt into a thundering club-beat as a modernized Timon of Athens begins on the black-box Patterson stage. The set throbs with bass and drums and pulses with light like an urban dance club, while young gentlemen - Timon's poet, painter, jeweler, and merchant - lounge in dark suits, smoking cigarettes and sipping from martini glasses.
Director Stephen Ouimette focuses on the contrast between wealth and generosity versus poverty and misanthropy. The long first act, lit in midnight blue, is sleek and urbane, replete with handsome attendants serving Timon's party-goers champagne and hors d'oeuvres. During the 1.3 "masque," a Las Vegas-style lounge lizard croons upstage while scantily clad female backup singers - "shut up, just shut up, shut up" - gyrate and give lap dances to guests downstage. The mood borders on the sordid, and the concept works well, especially in contrast to a stark second act that plays in blazing sunshine, with Timon emotionally battered, dressed in T-shirt and suspenders while living within a hole he has burrowed in the desert.
Peter Donaldson plays Timon, the only fully drawn character in the play, with schizophrenia: a dapper and sophisticated businessman in the first act, surrounding himself with dubious friends that cling to his extravagant generosity, he becomes an angry but borderline-insane misanthrope in the second act, crawling among the desert rocks like an animal. The dichotomy works, much to Donaldson's credit, with both sides compelling and neither extreme too exaggerated.
The only other character of substance is Apemantus, presented as an anti-establishment college professor in jeans and boots, wearing long hair and wire-rimmed spectacles. Apemantus blows a raspberry to the sycophants at Timon's party in 1.2, sitting at the edge of the stage and drinking water and gnawing carrots while the others wine and dine, and he visits Timon's rock-strewn hole in 4.2 upon a bicycle he rides onstage.
During Timon's parties, three white drapes hang upstage from the fly like marble columns. The drapes lift to become a tennis court tent during 3.1, in which Timon, like Jesus, receives the first of three denials from a trusted friend. Lucullus bounds onstage in tennis whites, wielding a racket and a towel - "say you saw me not" - and during 3.2 Lucius is given a pedicure and a facial by three sexy attendants in short skirts, pumps, and sunglasses, while he reclines with pieces of cucumber over his eyes. Sempronius completes the denials in 3.3 within his tailor's shop. After Timon is shown with bandages across his wrists as if he has attempted suicide, he greets his supposed friends at another banquet. Flanked by candelabra, Timon flings water at his guests before dousing the stage with gasoline, and servants prevent him from setting fire to both his home and his former friends.
Like King Lear, Donaldson's devastated-by-ingratitude protagonist strips himself of his clothing and staggers in near-madness into a thunderstorm, followed by his loyal fool, in this play the financial advisor Steward. The second act, laden with Timon's diatribes, does not carry the same dramatic impact as the first, but Donaldson shines, alternating raging misanthropy with sour humor. With the white drapery behind him criss-crossed into the wings of an angel over his head, he shouts at Alcibiades ("give them diseases!") and flings the man's coins back from the pit. After a mirage in which Alcibiades' soldiers become sexy dancers and the serving crew appears in the desert with trays of food, Timon shouts down bandits ("do villainy!"), flinging coins after them as they flee the sound of incoming helicopters.
Ouimette fills the production with striking visual moments, from Timon tossing a gift of car keys to a guest in 1.2 to a party-goer performing a whirling-dervish break-dance routine. During the bleak scenes in the desert, Timon observes the bandits with just his head emerged from his grave-like home, and Timon tosses a green apple back and forth with Apemantus while they debate humanity's shortcomings.
The text relies on Timon and this production relies on Peter Donaldson, whose Timon "relieves" himself offstage when asked for support by the desperate senators in 5.1, then lies down on his back to sunbathe (and die). When Alcebiades' troops arrive, it is with the sound of bombs, missiles, and gunfire, and the soldier shouts orders into a megaphone. But even as the production grinds to its close, a little too long with its point already made clear, Ouimette's startling conception and Donaldson's powerhouse performance still resonate.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.23, No.1, Spring 2005.