Shakespeare's Tribe

Shakespeare’s brilliant but rarely-produced gem, Cymbeline, is receiving a wonderful new staging by the Marin Shakespeare Company (with a terrific new musical score by Billie Cox) that makes you wonder why this play is so rarely performed.

Tales of Reunion and Redemption

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s four late tragicomedies, collectively known as the Romances. (The others are The Tempest, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale.) Their essential quality is the way in which they seem to shift genre as they progress from darkest tragedy to hard-won, but happy, endings.

The full cast on Jackson Currier’s evocative set for the revelatory final scene. All photos by Lori A Cheung

The titular character of Cymbeline is the king of Britain during the time of Caesar Augustus, but he is a relatively minor character in the play. The protagonist is his daughter, Imogen, a role with such range and variety that it is known as the female Hamlet.

Enough Plot for Ten Plays

The plot is enormously convoluted, even by Shakespearean standards, but essentially traces her fortunes after she marries (over her father’s, and especially her wicked step-mother’s, objections) her poor-but-valorous childhood sweetheart, Posthumus, in preference to her cloddish step-brother, Cloten. For ruining Cloten’s path to the kingship, Posthumus is banished, makes his way to Rome, and in a self-pitying drunken episode is persuaded to wager on his wife’s fidelity. Through the trickery of a Machiavellian villain named Iachimo, he is convinced that she is unfaithful to him, so he puts a hit out on her.

Stella Heath as Imogen, the role called the “female Hamlet.”

Meanwhile, she secretly travels to Wales, where she believes she will be reunited with Posthumus. Once informed by a sympathetic servant that she has been lured there to be murdered, she goes into male disguise and falls into company with a long-banished courtier (now gone Celticly native) and the two young men he is raising as his sons. After additional plot twists and turns, she awakens from a Juliet-like artificial coma to discover a headless corpse next to her dressed in her husband’s clothes, at which point she has a famous freak-out scene. Against the background of a battle between the native Britains and the occupying Roman Legions (who have conscripted both Posthumus and Iachimo into their service) the circumstances are aligned for all to work out, but no character has access to all the facts.

The play ends with a wildly improbable, and therefore wondrous, final scene consisting of some thirty+ revelations, as individual characters slowly realize they know a crucial piece of information and steadily trump each other with escalating plot twists that take in deathbed repentences, mistaken identities, long-lost children, and finally (beautifully! magnificently!) forgiveness and reunion.

Marin’s version is streamlined, shortening one of Shakespeare’s longest plays into a comfortable two-and-a-half hour playing time. Some presentational moments of paraphrase of plot points apparently thought too obscure were unnecessarily colloquial, coming off as condescending instead of comic, but they did get us moved on to the meat of the show.

Overlooked Masterpiece

Cymbeline is shamefully neglected and under-produced, historically because plays with female protagonists were thought, incorrectly, to lack drawing power – ironically the very same debate currently raging over Hollywood blockbusters. At the moment that tide was finally beginning to turn, the sheer demands of size and scale of this enormous play began to make it undesirable in the increasingly impoverished circumstances of the American theatre. Marin Shakespeare, the little-company-that-could, is far and away the most programmatically adventurous in the Bay Area and seems completely undaunted by either threat.

As Imogen, Stella Heath brings the range and the stamina the part demands, along with an enormously sympathetic appeal. She is the glue that holds this production together, and is a great standard bearer for Marin in what is turning out to be “the summer of women” at Bay Area festivals. Thomas Gorrebeeck pulls off the theatrical tour-de-force of playing both the hero, Posthumus, and the antagonist, Cloten. His Posthumus is suitably hunky and believably gullible, diametrically contrasting with his rather unnuanced portrayal of the nuance-free dolt, Cloten – but scores the most memorable moment in the production when (in an incongruously inserted rock song) he proves he has the moves like Jagger.

Thomas Gorrebeeck pulling off his double roles as Posthumus (above) and Cloten (below).

The cast has several other standouts, including Davern Wright as the smarmy, and then astonishingly guilt stricken, Iachimo; Rod Gnapp in the wildly difficult role of the courtier-turned-mountain man Belarius; and the amazing local favorite Debi Durst, who may have the most expressive face in the Bay Area, and without whose astonished range of reactions in the final scene we might have been totally lost.

Billie Cox has added a set of original songs, using Shakespearean lyrics, with a generally pleasing Celtic quality that seem both authentic and efficient. (A few less impressive modern digressions were not to my taste – the most egregious of which was the insertion of “That’s Amore,” with both original lyrics and then a reprise with a set of juvenile alternative lyrics that fell flat, but those moments passed quickly while the impact of some lovely ballads and love songs lingered.) Jackson Currier’s set is the best that this generally spectacle-eschewing company has utilized for years, and Tammy Berlin’s costumes are more than serviceable.

Transcendence After All

Robert Currier’s direction was generally sound and inventive. The opening expositionary moment of the show, usually a dull recitation of facts, featured a stroke of genius: the staging included a bed rolling across the stage as its inhabitants (Imogen and Posthumus) were introduced. He also moved huge crowds about the stage, not just efficiently, but in ways that pictured the complex story clearly.

Davern Wright as the Machiavellian Iachimo after having smuggled himself in Imogen’s bedroom in a trunk.

His control of tone was shakier, as he seemed particularly concerned not to let the early parts of the show become too serious although their tragic threat is exactly what makes the final dodging of death and destruction work. As a result, many of the antagonists seemed comic stereotypes instead of credible obstacles. The real loss of the evening is that the combat, staged by Richard Pallaziol, seemed under-rehearsed and amateurish compared with the rest of the production.

However, whatever quibbles I have with the progress of the show cannot diminish the overall accomplishment, especially the transcendent final scene. With the still-stinging pain of Charleston on our minds, one could not help but think of the powerful moment of forgiveness offered by those grieving families when Posthumus – faced with similar villainy – uttered the beautiful line, “Kneel not to me./The power I have on you is to spare you,/The malice toward you to forgive you. Live,/ and deal with others better.”

Cymbeline

July 3 – 26

Marin Shakespeare Company

Seen July 3, 2015

Absent Father

Christopher Marlowe was a fast living, young dying contemporary of Shakespeare’s who broke away from the medieval tradition of sing-song alliterative verse and almost single-handedly ushered in the golden age of Elizabethan drama. He was a revolutionary genius, perfecting and popularizing blank verse, a muscular new meter which Ben Jonson called “Marlowe’s mighty line.” He is revered as the “father of English tragedy.” Why, then, are his plays so infrequently produced?

(Doctor Faustus is Marlowe’s best-known work and, I concede, produced more often but still not quite cracking the levels of even minor Shakespeare, but his other plays have essentially dropped from the repertoire in America.)

Although my usual “beat” is the Bay Area, I sought some answers at a recent preview performance in Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Theatre for a New Audience is currently offering a rare production of Marlowe’s first great hit, Tamburlaine. How rare? Tamburlaine has not been professional produced in the city during my lifetime, last gracing the boards there in the mid 1950s.

The Polonsky Shakespeare Center, home of Theatre for a New Audience

Directed by Michael Boyd (recently stepped down from the helm of the RSC) and starring John Douglas Thompson, the production was illuminating about both the thrill and the danger of reviving Marlowe.

Marlowe’s play, now called Part I, was the hit of the London theatre scene in 1587, and he quickly penned a sequel, Part II. TFANA is presenting a sleek cutting which combines sections from both plays, and bills it as Tamburlaine, Parts I & II. Thoughtful editing by Boyd brought the scope of this evening down to four hours (inclusive of intermission), but that length alone is at least one impediment to more frequent performance. The sheer scale of the material is daunting to both the production company and the audience alike. Whatever compromises were necessary to bring the material down to this length, however, fear of controversy was certainly not a guiding factor as I shall explore a bit more later.

Historical Fiction is not a New Genre

Tamburlaine, like most Marlowe plays, has as its central figure a driven, charismatic anti-hero who refuses to accept the limitations placed on him. Tamburlaine is historical fiction, dramatizing the story of the self-made Tartar Emperor, Timur the Lame, who started life as a poor shepherd and eventually conquered the remnants of Genghis Khan’s empire.

In Part I of the play we watch him rise to power through a combination of fearlessness, charm and treachery, brilliantly conveyed by John Douglas Thompson in the title role.

John Douglas Thompson as Tamburlaine. Photo by Gerry Goodstein

Tamburlaine is already a successful marauding bandit when the play begins. When the King of Persia (Paul Lazar) sends his disloyal brother (the wonderfully slimy Saxon Palmer) to suppress his piracy, Tamburlaine deftly turns him by elaborately promising to support a coup. Once it is successful, he instantly reneges on his promise by disposing of his new sponsor and taking the crown for himself. (One of the recurrent motifs in Marlowe is the distance between what is said, albeit with rhetorical brilliance, and what is actually done. How depressingly relevant does that remain today?)

It’s All About the Wordplay

He kidnaps the daughter of an Egyptian king, Zenocrate (Merritt Janson) on the way to her wedding, and vows to make her his wife, but delays to test her even after it is clear that she has fallen in love with him. The bulk of Part I is taken with his conquest of the Turks. His verbal duels with Bajazeth, their emperor, (Chukwudi Iwuji giving the best performance in the play) are the high point of the night – Elizabethan trash talk that thrills. Marlowe doubles down on the delight by setting Zenocrate in debate against the Turkish empress (Patrice Johnson Chevannes) in a parallel smackdown.

Chikwudi Iwaji as Bajazeth. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

After Tamburlaine succeeds in his conquest, he tortures the captured Emperor and his wife, by using the former as a footstool and the latter as a household slave forced to watch her husband’s humiliation. Because of the stunning performances it is a degradation that we feel keenly, but accomplished with a theatricality in which we revel. When the formerly arrogant, but downtrodden, couple commit suicide we feel the first stirrings of Marlowe’s tragic capacity.

With striking contemporary relevance, the play is set in a period of intense religious struggle between Christians and Muslims. Thompson is at his best as Tamburlaine when he conveys the warrior’s contempt for the superstitions of both factions – daring everybody’s heavens to strike him down for trampling over anyone in his way.

Boyd’s direction is deft throughout Part I, showing us the brutality of conquest but always avoiding associating it too closely with his protagonist. The most visually astonishing scene of the first act was seeing the assassination of the Persian king, in mid-sentence, as he simply begin to drip blood from multiple wounds invisibly inflicted. It was chilling.

Seneca Redux

It is a play with Senecan levels of violence – again thematically modern but risky. Character after character would die from similarly disembodied causes, or more horrifyingly when a young boy, played by an impassive Ian Saint-Germain, would appear with buckets of blood that he would pour over them. (I strongly suspect that the half-hour intermission was necessary, not because we needed the break, but because that is how long it took to mop up literally gallons of stage blood.)

Part II is more intense, and more piercing in its look at all involved. It begins as the Muslims temporarily ally with the Christians to neutralize the rising protagonist, but (as Tamburlaine knew it would) their truce breaks down. The Christian king is persuaded that he is not bound by his sacred oath because it was given to non-believers. His betrayal is rewarded with almost instant defeat and death, but it gives Tamburlaine the break he needs to divide and conquer.

The focus shifts to Tamburlaine’s training of his three adult sons to succeed him, a lesson in brutality so unrelenting that he kills one of his own sons for insufficient viciousness. It is, significantly, the only murder we see him commit with direct agency and in front of us. The shift of sympathy away from him is palpable, as is our guilt for having been so charmed in the first place. The contemporary implications of the play, that underdogs we consider our allies and have armed can spin out of control once they get the upper hand, becomes inescapable.

Tamburlaine’s rise continues unabated, but its limit is foreshadowed when his beloved Zenocrate dies, despite his order for troupes to attack heaven and prevent it taking her. He turns bizarre as he decides not to bury her, but carry the embalmed body with him on his campaigns. Thompson’s nuanced delivery of his mental decline is brilliant – so carefully and subtly unleashed that we understand how those around him might not have noticed until it was too late.

Cruelty and Swagger

He conquers four more kingdoms, and in the most famous scene in the play, forces their captured kings to draw his chariot. It is this iconic moment, a perfect combination of cruelty and swagger, that made Marlowe’s reputation.

Tamburlaine then attacks Babylon, hanging its governor from the walls and ordering the troupes to shoot him dead for target practice. When a group of virgins is sent by the city to implore mercy he has them impaled, followed by ordering the drowning the entire population of the town, and then ordering their holy book, the Koran, burned – which is performed onstage. (It is that latter point that led me to say that whatever choices Boyd made in cutting the play, avoidance of controversy was not one of them!)

He defiantly denies that any divine punishment will come from it, and it is ambiguous how closely related his final illness is, although its onset begins within a few lines of the desecration. Tamburlaine has died by the end of the scene, unconquered, but leaving behind an empire that will fall apart as quickly as it was built.

The Challenges of Marlowe

What did I conclude after seeing the production? First, Marlowe’s blank verse is muscular, unfashionably so to those who are used to Shakespeare’s more extensive employment of variations. It might be that Boyd’s cutting left too many peaks without enough valleys between them, but it was a difficult to be so constantly attentive to such unrelenting energy. I rather think that Marlowe presents special challenges this way, however.

Second, the themes of the play are amazingly current, but it takes a deft touch to convey them without getting sidetracked into controversy. (For example, can you convince an audience to excuse the burning of a sacred text in front of them, even the pretend burning, by emphasizing the burner was equally contemptuous of all religions? Boyd does, but it is dicey.)

Marlowe is tough – raw and edgy. His plays can be Titus Andronicus-level violent. Set and costume designer Tom Piper and special effects designer Jeremy Chernick emphasized this with white costumes in a basically black Elizabethan courtyard colored only by dripping, splattering, pooling and flowing blood.

The Elizabethan Courtyard arrangement of the Samuel H. Scripps mainstage

Tamburlaine is not particularly sexual, although there is a scene in which one of his generals threatens to rape the conquered woman he loves when she does not return his feelings, but that is exceptional in his plays. Edward II, by contrast, focuses squarely on the homosexual liaisons of the king. And in all of them religious controversy abounds. Marlowe’s atheism is evident throughout this, and other, plays.

The plays present immense logistical challenges to any company without unlimited resources – which is essentially all of them in America. Boyd covers dozens of roles with a cast of twenty, and most of the time the doubling is so thematically motivated that you not only suspend disbelief, but understand the play better because of it. I was a little perplexed by his double casting Zenocrate with the final antagonist Callapine, however, because the actress kept having to leap uncomfortably between the two roles, where all other actors in the production finished each part before moving to the next. A different convention seemed to be employed for her, not altogether successfully, but that is a minor complaint about an overwhelmingly successful production.

Courage and Capability

If I had to state a position, I’d suggest that it is not content that prevents the plays from being produced more often, but difficulty. There are very few companies capable of taking on a Marlowe play.

All the more reason that you should see this production, because TFANA has the courage and the capability! The cast is outstanding, including many actors in lesser parts not singled out above, especially the chameleons Matthew Amendt and Caroline Hewitt. It officially opens this week and runs through Dec. 21.

Tamburlaine, Parts I & II
Theatre for a New Audience
Brooklyn, New York
Nov. 5, 2014

Performing Gender

Lisa Wolpe is, according the playbill of her current solo show, Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender, America’s reigning “Shakespearean Drag King.” It is no surprise, then, when she enters the stage with a flying leap in male persona and immediately starts into the balcony scene: “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

Lisa Wolpe, actor, director, and writer

That was what I was there to see, and I dare say most of the rest of the audience, too – Lisa Wolpe doing her internationally acclaimed cross-gender performance of Shakespeare. First impression: Her Romeo seemed a bit, what, contrived? Mannered. No, Constructed. That’s the word. I immediate thought that he was a bit too artificially created as he pondered the light breaking through the window and my heart sank just a little… and then Wolpe gracefully slipped into Juliet. Charming, but also – to exactly the same degree, although in opposite technical ways – constructed.

It took a second for me to realize that that, of course, was her point. Adolescent self-invention is a series of poses, assumed (and often quickly discarded) identities, and painful attempts at self-definition. Watching Wolpe alternate Romeo and Juliet foregrounded the awkward self-consciousness of both young lovers. Wolpe remembers exactly what it was like to try to create oneself as a teenager, and brings that knowledge to the performances. We watched her characters struggle to invent appropriate outward expressions of their inner lives – and while we saw how arbitrary the role models for doing so really are – the scene was about so much more than that. Wolpe delivered about the most nakedly honest representation of adolescent love I’ve ever seen. Best moment: Juliet’s “What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor face, nor (suddenly blushing and mumbling) any-other-part-belonging-to-a-man.” Genius.

I was looking forward to seeing how this foregrounding of gender role construction was to develop over the evening, but in truth, once established it did not have to be repeated, and wasn’t.

And Much More than Gender

Instead the balcony scene soon segued into new – unexpected – material. Wolpe shared the tragic story of her family – losing both parents at a young age – both apparently suicides. Her father, a traumatized WWII veteran, died when she was a toddler, her mother a decade later, but not until after entering into a disastrous, abusive second marriage.

When Wolpe transitioned back to Shakespeare, as Hamlet, she had already established that her connection point to the role was a shared longing for a lost father – to which, it turns out, gender is fairly irrelevant. Her Hamlet is gendered male, but it hardly registered, since it is the searing intensity of her identification with Hamlet’s loss that powered the performance forward. It was an astonishing realization of the emotional and psychological complexity of the role, as fulfilled as any I have ever seen, but not about Hamlet’s self-constructed gender.

Her alternating of Shakespearean performances with personal revelations continued throughout the evening, as did her alternating male and female characters. Playing the falsely accused queen, Hermione, in the trial scene from The Winter’s Tale, the approach seemed unlike any performance of the role I have ever seen. This Hermione was not the dignified and articulate noblewoman, certain of her innocence, we usually see. This Hermione was disempowered, defeated and disintegrating right before our eyes. It was a shockingly incisive portrait of a domestic abuse victim. The only surprise in the revelation that it was based on her mother was the deftness and concision with which it was handled – a single sentence inserted as an aside into the middle of the monologue itself.

It did not take long to become clear how passionately Wolpe cares about empowering women’s voices (especially those that are elsewhere suppressed or ignored) on stage. The fact that she refuses to be limited to channeling those strictly through female characters is telling, but so if the fact that she does not channel them strictly through male characters, either. Gender is a tool, not a trick, in her creative arsenal.

Her performances have a lot to say about the range of human experience, and the manner in which gender can provide agency, but the striking power of her characterizations derives from the fact that the container is never more interesting the contents. I rather frequently lost track of the fact that Wolpe was jumping back and forth across gender boundaries, but I never, for a second, stopped realizing that I was watching a great artist at work.

Lisa Wolpe as Hamlet. Photo by Michael Lamont

Cross-Gendering, but not Re-gendering

She has probably more experience played cross-gendered Shakespeare than any actor in America, so perhaps it is that she makes it look so easy and unremarkable that allows us to forget that it is, in fact, technically difficult and still (unfortunately) controversial. She never takes the easy “non-traditional casting” path, however, of re-gendering the character. No Prosperas, Queen Lears, or Macbethanys for her. Part of her exploration of acting and characterization is delving into the gender roles, assuming the agency that both male actors and characters are more freely granted, not just claiming the lines and scenes to ease the under-representation of women in theatre.

As the evening progressed her performances cherry-picked some of the very best of the canon, included Henry V and, fascinatingly, Shylock. The reason for the latter choice became clear as her family story began to focus more and more upon recovering her father’s astounding history – the only member of a German Jewish family to survive the holocaust, decorated war hero (fighting with a Canadian regiment), self-appointed avenger executing hundreds of captured German soldiers, and finally haunted PTSD victim taking his own life.

We drifted further and further from seeking perspective on the performance of gender on stage and in life, and began directly to explore the tragic consequences of inhumanity.

A Work-in-Progess, but What Work!

Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender is still a work in progress, and as a solo show it has some dramaturgical difficulties, not the least of which is that the longer into the evening we get the less it is focused on its titular subjects. Wolpe is not yet a world-class author, which is only apparent because she is a world-class actor. The most polished parts of the evening are the scenes and monologues from plays that she has starred in and performed in their entirety. She is still crafting the personal narrative that introduces and surrounds them.

But as a showcase for an actor of genuine brilliance, for an artist insightfully deconstructing gender roles, and for an activist empowering women’s voices, it is a great vehicle. Seeing Wolpe work is watching alchemy in action – that particular magic by which an actor transforms herself into someone totally different while simultaneously revealing her deepest self. She is a living treasure. The show is now touring. See it if you can.

Details:

Lisa Wolpe’s Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender

Presented by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival

Presidio Officer’s Club, San Francisco

Oct. 25, 2014

A Phoenix from the Ashes

The good news this summer is that Santa Cruz Shakespeare, the new company sprung from the ashes of the defunct Shakespeare Santa Cruz, is here at all. (The old SSC collapsed last year when its primary patron, UC-Santa Cruz, decided – after 32 years – to withdraw support.) The great news is that the new company is not only excellent in and of itself, but demonstrates considerable continuity with its predecessor and perhaps – after a series of events worthy of one of Shakespeare’s romances – what was lost has been found again.

The full cast sing a celebratory hymn in Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
Photo by rr jones.

The controversial decision to close Shakespeare Santa Cruz was just one painful effect of the widespread devastation caused by the billion-and-a-half dollar cuts to California’s higher education systems since 2008. This particular loss, however, struck a chord with its loyal audiences, who rallied to save, if not the company itself, the accumulated artistic capital of this beloved summer tradition.

Funders in the local community in Santa Cruz and the Bay Area artistic community pulled together to resurrect this acclaimed artistic resource in a new, independent form. In record time a new non-profit was created, an infrastructure was reinvented, and sufficient funding was raised to mount a season. All this is cause for great celebration.

It would be churlish to criticize the initial efforts of such an heroic effort for artistic insufficiency, so I (and my critical colleagues, I think) are grateful that no leeway is needed. The two mainstage offerings of the summer (As You Like It and Merry Wives of Windsor) can stand on their own.

Merry Wives When It Is about the Wives

Conceptually,  Merry Wives is the most interesting. Although chosen as a vehicle for Richard Ziman (whose portrait of Falstaff in the Henry IV plays in recent years has made him a local celebrity) the real interest comes from director Kirsten Brandt’s feminist reading and inventive staging set in the 1920s.

Merry Wives is a lesser work in the canon. Almost entirely in prose, it looks like a play hastily assembled and perhaps never advanced beyond a first draft.

The ‘Merry Wives’ (Julia Coffey and Greta Wohlrabe) fool Falstaff (Richard Ziman) into yet another trick in Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Photo by Shmuel Thaler.

The plot is an exceedingly thin and repetitive regurgitation of the famous commedia dell’arte get-in-the-bag lazzi in which an obnoxious man is tricked into hiding is a container “for his own protection” and then beaten by his alleged protectors. In MWW, Falstaff attempts to seduce two different (married) women by sending them identical proposals for assignations on the same day – apparently unaware that they are best friends. The women (repeatedly) pretend to accept and then in slapstick incidents punish the very-slow-to-get-the-picture Falstaff for his unwanted advances, while one also gets in some licks against a suspicious husband. The other gets her own comeuppance from a daughter who ends the play by becoming a wife to the man of her own choosing against the plotting of her mother for a very bad candidate.

In most modern productions the play is not very funny, because there are only so many ways a fat joke can be told and Falstaff is much less engaging in this play than he is in the histories. Brandt has launched the gender politics into the foreground, refocusing the play on the titular wives instead of Falstaff. Her leading actresses, Julia Coffey (Mistress Ford) and Greta Wohlrabe (Mistress Page), find the genuine humor in women who are tired of being underestimated and can run circles around the men in their lives.

Carly Cioffi (as Mistress Quickly) and Maribel Martinez (as the enterprising daughter, Anne Page) round out the cast of clever women. The director and her cast found astonishing depths in characters that are generally played much more superficially.

And Also There Were Men

The male cast was more than capably played – but given the conception of the evening – necessarily seemed more one-dimensional and less engaging. Ziman’s Falstaff was not the centerpiece of the evening, but he gamely took all his slapstick licks and summoned up his dignity at the end. The strongest performance was probably that of Mark Anderson Phillips whose jealous, “mansplaining” Master Ford was delightful.

Falstaff (Richard Ziman) is fooled yet again by “Master Brook”- Master Ford (Mark Anderson Phillips) in disguise in Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Photo by Jana Marcus.

Kit Wilder (the Welsh parson Hugh Evans) and William Elsman (the French Doctor Caius) led the supporting actor contingent with loving charm.

The 1920s setting gives the set designer Eric Barker, the costume designer B. Modern, and the lighting designer Kent Dorsey a specific and recognizable period in which to work – and they all find magic in it.

B. Modern’s costumes, especially, reflect the perfect expression of women who are finding their freedom in times when men don’t yet “get it.” The best sight gag of the night is, however, Falstaff’s “disguise” as a garish and hugely rotund female fortuneteller.

 Into the Woods

As You Like It was, by contrast, a much more staid and traditional production but situated in probably the most beautiful setting in the world for this play – The Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen, a redwood paradise – it too was delightful. Scenic designer Michael Ganio and lighting designer Kent Dorsey made the most of this natural environment featuring it with spectacular combinations of light and shadow that drew audible gasps from the audience when curtains were drawn that revealed the vista.

Duke Senior’s forest court (SCS acting interns), Duke Senior (Richard Ziman) poke fun at the “melancholy” Jaques (Allen Gilmore) in Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
Photo by rr jones.

Using a repertory cast for the summer, AYLI utilized the same personnel as Merry Wives, but often to vastly different effect. Julia Coffey, who proved such an excellent farceur as Mistress Ford, here expertly plays the much more emotionally complex leading woman, Rosalind. The contrast could not be higher, not least because she spends most of this play in convincing disguise as a young man. She is in the woods because she has been banished by her usurping uncle, Duke Frederick. She flees to the forest with her cousin Celia, disguising herself as protection against outlaws. If there are any such ruffians, however, we never see them. The forest is occupied by her father (the overthrown Duke) and his orderly, nostalgic courtiers. A recent arrival is a young nobleman, Orlando, who is also fleeing an inhospitable home, in his case running from a treacherous older brother.

Rosalind and Orlando have met before, when he unexpectedly won a wresting match with her in the audience, at which they fell for each other immediately. In this production Dan Flapper places the emphasis on Orlando as both extremely inarticulate and overly romantic. When the couple again meets in the woods, Rosalind has already assumed her male alter ego, Ganymede, which allows her to covertly tackle the problem that his worshipful and idealized courtship (he is posting bad love poems on trees) is less engaged than what she has in mind.

She undertakes to disabuse him of his poetic attitudes through “love lessons,” her male self impersonating her actual self in a series of scenes of dizzying complexity.

Rosalind playing her alter ego Ganymede (Julia Coffey) schools the love sick Orlando (Dan Flapper) in the ways of wooing in Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Photo by Jana Marcus.

Flapper and Coffey have outstanding chemistry as the central couple. The courtship is less engaging that it is in some productions because Flapper’s Orlando never loses sight of the fact that these “love lessons” are just pretense and his real love is, he believes, elsewhere. (I read the play to suggest that Orlando finds himself developing very real feelings for Ganymede, which he neither understands nor controls.) In Mark Rucker’s production, however, it is Rosalind who loses sight of the game, kissing Orlando in an inappropriate moment from which he recoils. Still, the sparks are no less intense for this reversal.

Greta Wohlrabe plays Rosalind’s cousin Celia, and it is fascinating to see her paired with Mark Anderson Phillips playing Orlando’s repenting older brother Oliver. (In Merry Wives, they played Mistress Page and Master Ford, respectively.) Here, their chemistry rivals that of the main couple and their giddy humor becomes infectious.

Co-artistic director Mike Ryan plays the court jester, Toucstone, settling into country life with clarity and precision. It is a very difficult role, composed mostly of indecipherable old jokes, but he makes us understand.

In some ways this production was uneven. Richard Zinman doubles as both the usurped and usurping Dukes, but with no visual distinction and so little physical or vocal changes that he seems more like one character in two moods that contrasting brothers. With no other doubling of note in the cast, this proved a confusing convention. Allen Gilmore plays Jacques, the forest philosopher, as genuinely depressed and even his “seven ages of man” speech fails to land. William Elsman, a terrific and dependable actor, got some good laughs as the endlessly rejected country bumpkin, Silvius, but seems strangely miscast. (He seems perpetually used for egomaniacal roles in this company, like Doctor Caius in Merry Wives, but is actually a remarkably handsome and articulate actor who would have made a fine Orlando.)

By far the most original touch in the production was that Orlando’s faithful old retainer, Adam, (played by Marcus Cato) was given a prominent – and interpolated – death scene just before intermission. It was a darkness that would not return, however. Understandably, this summer the focus is on the miracle of the phoenix, and not on what is lost.

As You Like It, directed by Mark Rucker
Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by Kirstin Brandt

Santa Cruz Shakespeare

Reviewed on July 20, 2014, Running through August 10

Tickets: $16-48

Info: santacruzshakespeare.com