Through Sun 4/24
When we sat down in the Hanna Theatre last Saturday, we had some vague memories of what Shakespeare put his characters through in Love’s Labour’s Lost. King Ferdinand of Navarre and his three friends vow to eschew the company of women and study, study, study for three years. Appropriately enough, a towering two-story book case filled with books and banked with ladders fills the Hanna’s proscenium arch. They’ll sleep only three hours a night, eat only one meal a day. What could possibly go wrong?
Lord Berowne (Christopher Tocco, who manages to project a wealth of emotions over his very thick and apparently genuine beard) is skeptical of such an extreme oath, not least because the French king’s daughter is scheduled to visit soon on an important matter of state.
Ferdinand (Jonathan Dyrud, whose irresolute manner serves his character well) has scarcely rationalized away the problem of the visiting princess when the deafening blast of a police whistle announces constable Anthony Dull (Tom Ford, very dull and very funny in a highway patrolman’s uniform) and his prisoner, Costard (Juan Rivera Lebron, costumed in grimy mechanic’s coveralls with one large central breast pocket. He couldn’t get two love letters mixed up in that one pocket, could he?) Wading through Dull’s malaprops and Costard’s verbose evasions, we learn that there’s been some hanky-panky with Jaquenetta.
Shakespeare makes Jaquenetta a dairy maid but Maggie Kettering plays her wearing a hotel maid’s uniform and pushing a vacuum sweeper. She has few lines but who needs lines with Kettering’s bored, knowing expression and her e-cigarette? Yet more proof that there are no small parts.
Ferdinand decrees that Costard shall be held for one week in the custody of Don Armado, a boastful Spanish knight, and so we meet David Anthony Smith, who quickly begins to exploit his plum comic role. Armado’s page boy, Moth, is played by delightful Robyn Kerr in a derby hat and a Jamaican accent.
Meanwhile, back at Ferdinand’s park, the princess of France and her three attending ladies arrive to a hip-hop fanfare. (The dresses! The walks! Erin Partin, Laura Welsh Berg, Christine Weber and Heather Thiry must have been practicing in those high heels for months.) So now we have four noble women and four noble men. Everyone will fall in love and be married, right? How else does Shakespeare ever end a comedy; all’s well that ends well, right?
But this is an unusually witty and contrary group of women, and as the audience bursts into fresh peals of laughter as the four women land one zinger after another, we see that they will not be easily won. Some say that something profound happened to Shakespeare at about the time he wrote LLL, that ever after his heroines became independent and passionate, more three-dimensional and fully human. Perhaps that was when he met the Dark Lady of the sonnets, with whom Rosaline shares her dark looks as well as her ready wit.
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Berowne is smitten much as Shakespeare might have been and you could have heard a pin drop as he declaimed his love.
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.
It is fortunate that the women are not quickly won, for that affords an opportunity for the schoolmaster Holofernes (Dougfred Miller) and the curate Nathaniel (M. A. Taylor) to spit box, the four lords to dance disguised as Muscovites, a play within a play titled The Nine Worthies, and the song The Owl and the Cuckoo, all winning in this production.
There’s some loose talk to the effect that LLL is somehow minor Shakespeare and seldom produced but Charles Fee, producing artistic director calls LLL “a great comedy written at the height of Shakespeare’s powers.” He adds, “There’s almost no play of Shakespeare’s that didn’t fall out of favor, but LLL has been back in favor for a good 60 to 70 years being produced all over the world.”
We liked both the play and this Great Lakes Theater production and we recommend it. It runs through Sun 4/24. Tickets are $15 – $70; students $13. Call 216-241-600 or go to greatlakestheater.org.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]Cleveland, OH 44115