McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton kicks off its 2026-27 season with All the Devils Are Here. This award-winning one-man off-Broadway show was created by its star, Patrick Page (Hadestown, The Lion King, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark), and his breadth of knowledge is impressive.
As is his talent, both as playwright and actor. Page starts us off with the Mystery Plays of Shakespeare’s youth. While the Mystery Plays did have a character representing Vice, he was a personification of a concept, not a person with whom the audience could identify.
Page uses characters from Shakespeare’s plays to illuminate how The Bard examined the nature of evil. Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice are exemplars of the outsider’s desire for vengeance — one a victim of racial prejudice, the other of religious prejudice. Aaron revels in revenge for its own sake, confirming the audience’s prejudices. But Shylock, in the soliloquy that starts “Hath not a Jew eyes?”, equates his people to their oppressors through their shared humanity, refuting the premise behind the prejudice. Shylock thus adds a more human face to what would otherwise be a standard portrayal of evil.
Other portrayals of nuanced evil follow. King Claudius in Hamlet has committed fratricide and wants to repent but knows if given the chance he would do it all again. Edmund, bastard son of the Duke of Gloucester in King Lear, feels it is not his fault that the class standards of legitimacy have robbed him of his rightful position. Iago in Othello displays what are now considered the red flags of a psychopathic personality. And the Macbeths show how easily two people can convince each other into heinous actions.
Yet at the end of his career, Shakespeare gives us Prospero in The Tempest, who, although wielding powerful magic and having all his betrayers in his power, chooses the more difficult path of mercy and forgiveness over vengeance. Shakespeare’s way, perhaps, to show that all his characters have the option to choose good over evil — and, by extension, so does every human.
Page, under the direction of Simon Godwin, does a masterful job of moving from narrator and guide to portraying the many characters of Shakespeare’s plays. He does this on the stark set designed by Arnulfo Maldonado, lit mostly in blood red by Stacey DeRosier.
To use an old phrase, All the Devils Are Here is crackling good entertainment. It presents an interesting theory with support from the works of arguably the greatest playwright in the English language. I cannot more strongly urge you to head to Princeton to experience All the Devils Are Here.
The play is presented in the Roger Berlind Theatre at the McCarter Theatre Center on the campus of Princeton University through Aug. 30. Page appears after each performance for a brief Q&A session with the audience. For more information, or to purchase tickets, go to mccarter.org.
