Double your bard
The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Two comedies, each quite funny, share the same actors—as is the custom of this summer stage tradition. But neither the comedies nor the actors are at all identical, which makes things much more interesting.
Merry Wives of Windsor is the only comedy Shakespeare set in his homeland. Most productions come crammed with period costumes recalling Olde England. Merry Wives is also Shakespeare’s most “everyday” comedy and one of his lightest, as it involves no royals, no supernatural interventions, no twins separated at birth. It’s about marriage and infidelity, familiar topics that never go out of date.
Director Lynne Collins smartly swaps the English countryside for North Carolina after the Civil War and changes some food references to possum and gumbo. The concept works, Confederate sabers, Southern gallantry and hooped skirts having evolved from Elizabethan styles.
Collins adds flourishes: Falstaff (a carpetbagging Yankee, played by Gary Wright) sings a lusty adaptation of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” thrusting his hips to give the line about “his terrible swift sword” ribald emphasis. Wright makes a younger-than-average Falstaff, rotund but still limber enough to do a cartwheel. It’s the Fat Knight played for laughs, with his selfishness displayed for all to mock. He isn’t menacing or even particularly smart.
Mistress Page (versatile Karyn Casl) and Mistress Ford (leading lady Rebecca Dines) display girlish vigor as they lure Falstaff into trap after trap. Casl’s Southern drawl, heard oft this season, works best in comedy. Bearded, balding A.J. Schuermann does a fine slow burn as the outwardly patient Master Page (a sturdy Confederate vet).
But the best comic performance comes from Ted Barton as Master Ford, a husband driven mad by the suspicion that his wife is having a fling with Falstaff. Barton’s a scream as he tosses dirty laundry and races around the stage, hunting for his rival.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the other hand, is a play that opens with a threat: A tyrannical father threatens to have his daughter put to death unless she marries the man he has chosen. Elsewhere in the play, lovers, both human and supernatural, quarrel and make relationship mistakes—it’s funny, but romantic disaster is never far away.
Director Sands Hall plays Dream for contrasts. The repressed human characters wear buttoned up costumes in formal 16th-Century style. But the spirits of the Faerie realm are dressed as sensuous gypsies in more revealing, colorful garb. Hall also shifts gears in dramatic terms. Some scenes play as antic comedy, and other times Hall slows down the pace and conjures a mysterious atmosphere that lets the script’s poetry come through. This is reinforced through sound design (Spanish guitars, gypsy violins).
It’s a good Dream—the problem is that this festival has staged Midsummer Night’s Dream three times in the last eight years. It’s time for Lake Tahoe Shakespeare to branch out beyond the present tight rotation of comedies.