Love’s Labor’s Lost is reputed to be one of Shakespeare’s toughest plays to stage (and it rarely is). The late 16th Century comedy has a simple enough plot – one guaranteed to tee up some adventures and misdeeds.
The ink is still wet on the sworn oath between the King of Navarre (Joshua David Robinson) and his three male devotees, binding them to forsake all contact with women for three long years while they devote themselves to earnest study and pious fasting. Lo and behold who should appear but the lovely, and playfully beguiling princess of France (Amelia Pedlow) and her entourage of three cleverly cunning courtiers. The men are instantly smitten—no, stricken with such insatiable desire for their chosen lady that they instantly devolve into a state of pure, highly melodramatic, self-torture. Burdened by their oaths, they pour out their hearts in letters, sonnets, poems and songs (as only the cultural literati could) composed in the secrecy of night, revealing each as a traitor in the light of day.
It’s pretty funny stuff, rife with gender reversals (the men lost in a desperate (dare I say hysterical) romanticism while the women coolly roll their eyes) and poking fun at the upper class ‘intelligentsia’ for valuing rote learning at the expense of simple joys, and by showing that that even the basest classes can wield words as weapons.
But (at the risk of my English degree being revoked) the language of Love’s Labor’s Lost is so inscrutable, so impenetrable—so chock full of archaic references and outmoded puns—that it seems nearly impossible to translate its more subtle barbs and naughty quips to a modern audience.
Yet somehow, director Vivienne Benesch (and her marvelous, uproariously funny, leave-it-all-on-the-stage cast) does that and more. Folger’s production manages to be not only shockingly funny—evoking consistent gasps and guffaws and yes, snorts from the audience—it is fast-paced, surprisingly joyful and ultimately one of the most successful renditions of Love’s Labor’s Lost I’ve ever seen.
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Benesch, in collaboration with dramaturg Michele Osherow, reimagines Navarre in the early 1930’s depression-era. Scenic Designer Lee Savage’s ‘castle’ is a cozily elegant, well-appointed library with dark, floor-to-ceiling wood shelves lined with leather-bound books and plush green carpet, all lit by the warm glow of green banker’s lamps and electric wall sconces. At its center is a grand wooden double-staircase leading to an upper balcony featuring a semi-circular stained-glass window.
Sound familiar? Folger patrons might instantly recognize it as a recreation of the library’s own Paster Reading Room (the Folger Library fittingly opened in 1932). Costume Designer Tracy Christen adds to the aura of quiet elegance, evoking the near desperate desire of a 1930’s upper class clinging to a fading grandeur. The princess and courtiers are draped first in long traveling dresses with smart jackets and accents: fur and beaded trims and jaunty little hats, and then in the iconic beaded flapper dresses of the age; the men in white dinner jackets or smart, slimly cut suits and jaunty bow ties.
This recasting of the action in the 1930’s gives it an air of willfully reckless, wantonly pleasure-seeking, unbridled fun that allows the cast to play with the language, massaging even the stiffest, most obscure passages into something flip and vibrant. The characters play with word pronunciations, contorting, comically elongating syllables or repeat words like mantras until they become nonsensical. Strings of synonyms become a kind of patter song of puffery—the speaker growing bolder with each iteration.
Folger Theatre’s Love’s Labor’s Lost closes June 9, 2019 Details and tickets
Costard (Edmund Lewis), painfully funny as the comic country-bumpkin turned handyman in Benesch’s production, chews on the word ‘remuneration’ with such relish and obvious delight (and in a lowbrow, workaday accent reminiscent of The Honeymooners’ Ralph Kramden) that the audience titters on cue with its every repetition. Don Armando (Eric Hissom)—the wily Spaniard soldier who has fallen for the flirty wench Jaquenetta (the marvelous Tonya Beckman, here styled as a 1930’s flighty, gum-snapping diner waitress) voices his character like a hilariously effete Hank Azaria, teasing the audience with his sibilant rolled r’s.
The cast is equally adept at physical comedy, pushing the boundaries of buffoonery. Hissom’s Armando is wonderfully, wildly, brazen. Strutting and swaggering about the stage he gleefully breaks the boundaries between the actors and the audience, at one point violently spearing an overhead stage light with his sword.
Zachary Fine, as Berowne—the last to be dragged into the King’s “no women” pact and the first to abandon it—is fearlessly funny as the libido-driven man lusting after the sharp-tongued and sassy Rosaline (Kelsey Rainwater). Fine seals the envelope professing his love to Rosaline with an exaggerated series of lusty-tongued licks, drawing a collective “ewwwwww” from the audience. The King (Robinson) and the other two pining men, Dumaine (Jack Schmitt) and Longaville (Matt Dallal), are unswerving in their swooning, weak-kneed portrayal of slavish love, throwing themselves on the ground in comic dismay and planting sloppy open-mouthed kisses on the theater’s supporting beams as stand-ins for their beloved (ewwww).
Folgers’ Love’s Labor’s Lost is an unexpected delight showcasing the transformative power of a visionary director and a stunningly talented and committed cast.
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Love’s Labor’s Lost by William Shakespeare. Directed by Vivienne Benesch. Cast: Josh Adams, Tonya Beckman, Louis Butelli, Matt Dallal, Zachary Fine, Megan Graves, Eric Hissom, Yesenia Iglesias, Edmund Lewis, Amelia Pedlow, Kelsey Rainwater, Joshua David Robinson, Susan Rome, Jack Schmitt, Chani Wereley . Scenic Design by Lee Savage. Costume Design by Tracy Christensen . Lighting Design by Colin K. Bills. Original Music and Sound Design by Lindsay Jones. Produced by Folger Theatre . Reviewed by Meaghan Hannan Davant.
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