The English Channel  It takes chutzpah for a playwright to
tackle Shakespeare not as a topic or a template, but as a flesh-
and-blood historical character. Robert Brustein—the polymath who
founded Yale Rep and American Repertory Theatre, taught drama
and reviewed it for The New Republic—has the requisite stature
and fearlessness, no question. But while The English Channel,
Brustein's play about a sticky patch in the Bard's early career,
contains a store of delicious, allusive wordplay, what it
fatally lacks is freshness and friction.  We meet young Will
(bestubbled, diffident Stafford Clark-Price) in transition
between his beginning efforts, mostly histories and farces, and
the towering masterpieces to come. When he's not scribbling his
deathless sonnets, he transcribes—in what passes for a running
gag—stray comments from his oddly quotable visitors. "If music
be the food of love, play on," arrives courtesy of Hal (Brian
Robert Burns), a flouncy nobleman and sometime patron to whom
Will addresses several poems