Ten thirty. That’s 10:30 a.m.—not a respectable hour for theater people. Still digesting my morning coffee, I’m sitting in Shakespeare & Company’s mainstage theater amid a respectable, if compact, crowd of theatergoers. It’s the first of seven performances on the troupe’s schedule for today, and I’m here for a 12-hour marathon that will take in five of them.
The Ladies Man is a new play fashioned on an old framework. It’s Charles Morey’s mélange of stock characters and situations from several plays by the father of French farce, Georges Feydeau. It’s a frantic, door-slamming sexcapade that begins with erectile dysfunction and a white lie, then spins out of control in a cascade of misunderstandings, mishaps and mistaken identities. It depends on rapid-fire dialogue and split-second physical timing, and delivers on both. There’s only one jarring note in this clockwork production. Most, but oddly not all, of the Parisian characters talk in phony (and very uneven) Frawnsh acsawnts—an unnecessary and annoying frill.
1:15. “Be ye all pirates, me maties? Say ‘arrrr!’” “Arrrr!”
It’s the audience-participation warmup for The Mad Pirate and the Mermaid in the Rose Footprint, a circular, peaked tent open to the air, decked out now in ship’s rigging. Written by company member Michael Burnet and performed by an energetic gang of young graduates from the company’s training program, this free show is S&Co’s first production explicitly for children and families, delivered in two one-hour segments. This swashbuckler has a plot of Shakespearean complexity, replete with a good and a bad brother and three sets of identical twins, as well as a dancing foam-rubber shark and a saucy blonde mermaid who talks like Paris Hilton.
2:30. Time for a lunch break on the terrace outside the Founders’ Theater. The hilltop location affords a view of expansive lawns, woodsy glades and some of the dozen or more old buildings that dot the property, which was once a boarding school and later headquarters of a religious cult.
3:30. The Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre is an intimate, rough-hewn space in S&Co’s spanking-new Production and Performing Arts Center. It debuted last week with the premiere production of The Goatwoman of Corvis County by first-time playwright Christine Whitley. The title character, Charlotte, is celebrated for her healing powers with goats (it’s set in rural Tennessee), but she harbors a narcissistic need to “look good” and have pretty things—like all the dresses, shoes and baubles she’s bought with the money she embezzled from the charity consignment shop she manages.
Keira Naughton is superb in the role—feisty and flirty, single-minded and utterly self-absorbed. But the play doesn’t really work, mainly because the character is utterly unsympathetic, and the playwright gives us no inkling of how she got that way, nor any reason to care if she goes to jail or not.
7:15. Part B of The Mad Pirate has just ended—it all comes out happily, by the way—and up on the terrace three students in the summer intern program are performing a scene from The Two Noble Kinsmen. This is one of the nightly Preludes that showcase the students and give audiences gathering for the evening performance a foretaste of the Bard’s lilting language.
8:00. As the day began, so it ends—in France, where Alls Well That Ends Well takes place. This is one of the “problem plays”—not a tragedy because it ends happily, but definitely not one of Shakespeare’s sunny comedies. Like Measure for Measure, it’s about a virginal woman, wronged by an arrogant man, who uses a bedroom trick to, in this case, get her scornful husband to accept her as his wife. It’s a difficult and rarely produced play, with some sharply drawn scenes and one of Shakespeare’s great comic characters, but with arid passages, far-fetched plot twists, and an incredible turnabout to get to a happy conclusion.
Director Tina Packer, the company’s founder and guiding spirit, brings a sometimes reckless panache to solving such knotty production problems. Here she’s added songs—10 of them—with lyrics adapted from Shakespeare and medieval troubadour ballads. A nifty idea, with two problems: Bill Barclay’s original music for them ranges from minstrelsy to blues and rock ’n’ roll, none of it remotely reflecting the Napoleonic era Packer has set the play in; and the singer, Nigel Gore, has neither the voice nor the musical chops to pull it off. Clutching an old-fashioned radio mic, he looks like an aging crooner and sounds like Billy Bragg with a sore throat.
Which is too bad, because the unaugmented production is pretty good. Although Kristin Villaneuva, in the central role, lacks the physical presence and vocal power to fully convey Helena’s determined spirit, there are some marvelous performances. Not least of these is Kevin O’Donnell’s as Parolles, the bewigged and beribboned technicolor dandy whose comically extravagant manner hides a coward’s heart—as his French name tells us, he’s all words and no substance.
11 p.m. Homeward, stuffed and stated with a banquet of words and images, some tastier than others but all of them nourishing. Wait a minute! I missed Othello, the other Shakespeare in the company’s season. Oh well, I’ll be back next week.•
Shakespeare & Company runs six plays in repertory through August 31. 413-637-3353, www.shakespeare.org.
Marathon Man
