A party scene from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, directed by Simon Godwin, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s new artistic director. Godwin cast award-winning actress Kathryn Hunter in the title role and included many other women in the production. Photo by Henry Grossman

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Timon of Athens is the much-anticipated first production by Simon Godwin since he joined the Shakespeare Theater Company as artistic director last year.

It is a restaging of the play performed in 2018 under his direction at the Royal Shakespeare Company and earlier this year off Broadway as a co-production with Theatre for a New Audience.

In this play, which Shakespeare originally wrote for only one female character, a prostitute, Godwin cast nearly half of the roles with women, including the title role as well as a greedy senator, a faithful servant, and the aristocratic rebel leader Alcibiades.

Acclaimed actress Kathryn Hunter, who is known as the first woman to play King Lear in 1997, reprises her role as Timon from the RSC production. As she told the Guardian a decade ago, “If an audience can accept that an actor is a king from the distant past, why can’t they imagine that a woman has made that transformation?”

The storyline, unlike many Shakespeare plays, is straightforward. The play opens with a lavish party, all actors decked out in gold, courtesy of Soutra Gilmour, scenic and costume designer, in a way almost as gaudy as their flattery.

The Painter (Zachary Fine) and Poet (Yonatan Gebeyehu), among others, make it hilariously clear why they are attending: for the free giveaways.

Timon lavishes gifts on her guests, not to win them over, but due to her confidence that they share her devotion. “We are born to do benefit,” she says, “and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends?”

Tellingly, she also bestows money without thought of return: to allow her faithful servant to pursue matrimony above his station, and to support the cause of the dashing rebel Alcibiades, played by Elia Monte-Brown with a modern swagger.

But Timon’s steward lets us in on a secret: Her fiscal house is not in order. He has urged budgetary restraint, but she refuses to listen, just as she refuses to see the insincere praise that surrounds her.

When the money and gifts vanish, “men shut their doors against a setting sun,” says the philosopher Apemantus, played with world-weary urbanity by Arnie Burton. They literally shut their doors against her requests for aid.

Now cloaked in white and full of rage, Timon throws a shocking, final vengeful dinner party for her false friends before leaving Athens and removing herself from society.

Fatal flaw revealed

The second half of the play finds Timon in a solitary encampment, where she struggles to meet her daily needs for food and shelter.

In her disillusionment, she hates humankind so much that when she finds gold while digging for edible roots, she does not choose to use the new fortune to return to society.

Even the loyalty of her former steward — whom she calls “the one honest man” — and the warmly physical sparring between Timon and Apemantus cannot dull her misanthropy. As she encounters, in turn, her faithful steward, thieves and rebels, she offers them the money while urging them to kill and starve Athenians without mercy.

Hunter is a small, very physical actor whose movements and raspy voice embody Timon at her most foolishly munificent and contemptuous.

There’s no catharsis, no epiphany for Timon. She has experienced the extremes of wealth and poverty, of love and hatred toward humankind.

Yet it seems her fatal flaw that she is not able to recognize and accept what Apemantus calls “the middle of humanity,” including the loyalty of her servants and grudging fondness of Apemantus. This point, though, becomes clear to the audience during this tragedy.

Engaging production

As a rarely staged and less familiar work of Shakespeare and his co-writer Thomas Middleton, the language in this play challenged me at times, but the staging of the play intimately embraces the audience from the start.

Even before the lights dim, Timon’s servants, the stylish Helen Cespedes and John Rothman, set the table for a feast and offer audience members canapes.

The audience hears buoyant Greek music from a trio of talented musicians (including Greek singer Kristen Misthopoulos), who remain on stage. Actors march down the aisles, and Apemantus declaims from a perch above (and behind) the audience.

The humor that Godwin and fellow editor Emily Burns mine from the text (a joke about worms, for instance) keeps the audience engaged.

With its fresh casting and inviting accessibility, Godwin and Burns have transformed this sometimes bleak, sometimes speech-heavy play to a more expansive reading that rings true today.

The play, with a run time of two and a half hours, runs through March 22 at the Michael R. Klein Theatre at the Lansburgh. Ticket prices range between $35 and $120. For tickets, visit shakespearetheatre.org or call the box office at (202) 547-1122.