August 19-25, 2004

theater

The Merry Wives of Windsor

COLD CASE: Ahren Potratz and Annina Jordan in a dead- in-the-water production of The Winter's Tale.

by Toby Zinman

It was clever to open when they did, with what they did. Just when Philly Shakes was economically wobbly, just when everybody had endured the last TV rerun they could bear, just before the Fringe and the season begin, a new theater troupe — Classic Shakespeare Company — comes to town, opening two shows in repertory: the hardly ever seen The Merry Wives Of Windsor and the only rarely seen The Winter's Tale. It was, as I say, clever.

It was, not, however, good.

There's a good reason Merry Wives is so infrequently produced: It's a silly play, full of shallow characters, written entirely in prose. There is little here of what we come to Shakespeare for — the depth of insight into human beings and the subtlety of expression of those insights. Instead, we get broad, coarse characterizations made broader and coarser by CSC's amateurish production.

Our beloved Falstaff — the great, lusty character from Henry IV who rejects the warmongering pomposity that ruled his world — has become a boorish oaf. Whitt Brantley essays this immense role with lots of padding around his middle and lots of stentorian volume in his speech. The merry wives, Mistress Ford (Annina Jordan) and Mistress Page (Madeline Reed), smirk a good deal, but never convey anything even approaching "merry." Almost all the other characters in the large cast are mean-spirited and spiteful; the plot — about would-be seductions — is filled with practical jokes of the unfunny variety. Nobody laughed.

Literary legend has it that Queen Elizabeth was so delighted with Falstaff in Henry IV that she commanded Shakespeare to write a play about Falstaff in love. And she further required that he finish it in two weeks. Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn't — there are scholars who argue that Shakespeare didn't write most of it, and there are scholars who argue that if he wrote it, it's as thin as it is because he wrote it for the court and its aristocratic audience, and not for the theater and his real audiences. Alas, not to mention alack.

A far more complex and darker play than Merry Wives, The Winter's Tale is a study of the destructive power of jealousy. A king (Ahren Potratz) falsely accuses his wife (Annina Jordan) of fooling around with his best friend (Paul Herbert), and irrationality takes hold, and he condemns her to death, along with their newborn baby. But this isn't Othello, and years later he will discover that both his wife and his daughter, Perdita, have survived. With these many preposterous turns of plot, the play depends on subtlety from the director and the actors. The king's jealousy has to start at some moment — it can't already be there before the play begins — and we have to feel the complicated motives. Although Potratz is far and away the most capable of the cast, he seems locked into one emotion at a time, and his exaggerated Renaissance-speak becomes more and more parodic as the play wears on. By the time the king is consumed with jealous rage, he should seem totally nuts, but Potratz is as he was, just as he looks — no older or chastened after 16 years of grief and repentance.

As the queen, Jordan seems unable to register any emotion — such unflappability in the face of outrageous slander, death sentences and a rescued child makes no human sense whatsoever. Lara Tansey as Paulina, the queen's friend and the most interesting minor role in the play because she is the only character who takes responsibility for her actions, disappointingly strikes only one note. Everybody else seems to recite their lines and make their gestures with the worst kind of falseness of stage acting — for example, men kneel to their king because the director told them to, not because he is terrifying and likely to run amok.

CSC is obviously trying hard, and two shows in rep are very difficult for a cast playing multiple roles, but, finally, Shakespeare requires more than well-meaning effort.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Winter's Tale Both through Aug. 29, Classic Shakespeare Company at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-569-9700