Stratford Festival does its best with talky 'Timon'

BY MARTIN F. KOHN

After the first act of Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens' at Stratford, one wonders why it's staged so rarely. Stephen Ouimette's imaginative, modern-dress production looks like something out of 'The Great Gatsby,' sounds a little like disco night at some trendy club and feels a bit like 'Waiting for Godot.' It's stylish, it's got attitude, the characters are sharply delineated, and their motivations are clear, all of which make the plot easy to follow: Timon, an incredibly wealthy man whose friends desert him when he runs out of money, leaves home and, shades of King Lear, stands out in the rain and rails against the failings of humankind"