July 2010 Theatre Review by Lawrence Bommer
Love's Labour's Lost
Never
has a lesser comedy enjoyed a lovelier setting: The beautiful Austin
Gardens of downtown Oak Park showcase a jewel-like revolving stage
depicting a vaguely Spanish arcade presiding over Regency-era
interiors. Fire flies punctuate the action after the sun
sets. Woodland scents mingle with Mozart’s music between
the scenes. It all guarantees enchantment, which is more than
Shakespeare’s courtly and artificial tale of impetuous love
rightly frustrated can always equal.
The risk of doing “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is seldom worth the reward. Nonetheless, Jack Hickey’s very game ensemble work very hard to delight when they can’t distract. It’s just so hard to warm up to this cold comedy, a word-crazed concoction that’s far more intent on impressing than entertaining. Hickey’s 18 players are saddled with a precious plot in which the young King of Navarre and three noble friends foolishly agree to flee the company of women for three years in order to simply study. No, they’re not gay.
This insult to nature, of course, must be punished--but Shakespeare wryly suggests that the men might have been right in the first place. When they fall for the Princess of France and her three confidantes, they’re more in love with love than with the ladies. As the title implies, the comedy ends without a marriage, just a promise that a year’s absence may renew their romance. But somehow you sense that these fickle vow-breakers will only use twelve months to launch as many sexual shenanigans.
When Chicago Shakespeare Theater produced “L.L.L.” eight years ago, Barbara Gaines set this divertissement in 1913, which implied that a year later the boys will find themselves at war. The women may have made a terrible mistake. That bittersweet menace is unavailable to Hickey’s unfailingly trivial action and occasionally inept comic business. Caught in the moment, these mayflies seem every bit as vulnerable as their brittle love.
As Biron, the cavalier who most mocks love and thus must suffer most, Joseph Wycoff splendidly rings his character’s changes. He’s matched but not mastered by Lydia Berker’s unnecessarily acerbic Rosaline. If the six other lovers seem as interchangeable as the quartet in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” they bring a saving energy to a comedy that’s much less playful. They keep the energy going, essential here so you don’t get mired in the Bard’s endless and sometimes tedious raillery with its quips, quiddles, conundrums, lost puns, neologisms, and foreign flourishes.
The clown characters in “Love’s Labor’s Lost” are often impenetrably obscure, the best excuse for the physical humor behind Bryan James Wakefield’s silly-ass Costard (a crowd-pleasing charmer indeed), Robert Tobin’s hulking Constable Dull, Richard Henzel’s hilariously bloviating schoolmaster Holofernes (a cross between Professor Marvel and Mark Twain’s scoundrelly Duke) and Stephen Spencer’s Don Adriano de Amado, a Spanish fop who seems to be Shakespeare’s personal revenge for the Armada. Charlie Cascinco has some richly sluttish moments as the always available Jaquenetta and Franette Liebow brings bracing dignity to the usually male role of the elderly counselor Boyet.
Alas, this—and not the play about Sicilian lovers celebrating a summer of combustible confusion—is Shakespeare’s real “much ado about nothing.” Oak Park Festival Theatre presents "Love's Labour's Lost" through August 21, 2010 in Austin Gardens. For more information on this show, please visit the Theatre In Chicago Love's Labour's Lost page.
About Lawrence Bommer
A
native Chicagoan, Lawrence Bommer has been an active free-lance
writer and playwright since 1975. For twenty years he wrote a
weekly column, "Opening Nights" for the Friday section of
the Chicago Tribune, where he also regularly contributed theater
criticism and feature writing. His work has appeared in
Stagebill, the Pulitzer-Lerner newspapers and The Advocate.
Mr. Bommer was theater editor for the Windy City Times since its founding until 1999; from 1986 a theater critic for the Chicago Reader (where he has also written for the "Calendar" and "Our Town" sections); Chicago Free Press, where he was contributing editor until the paper’s demise in spring 2010; Chicago Footlights, where he has been a regular contributor; and Plays International, where he is the Chicago correspondent. He has also contributed to the Hollywood Reporter, PerformInk, Screen Magazine, CitySearch, the Chicago Illini, Inside Chicago, Illinois Entertainer, the International Theatre Festival of Chicago newsletter, Plays International, CitySearch, Playbill Online, TheatreMania, CurtainUp.com and Chicago Enterprise. Mr. Bommer is a three-time finalist for a Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism in the "arts criticism" category. In 1991 he became a regular theater and, dance critic and arts writer for the Chicago Tribune. His commentary has also aired on LesBiGay Radio, WGN and on Milwaukee Public Radio.
As a playwright, Mr. Bommer's work has been produced in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Madison and, in Chicago, by the Organic Theater Company (Jonathan Wild [1979], Poe [1980]. Gulliver's Last Travels [1993] and by Lionheart Gay Theatre (Gunsel, The Tyrannicides, Killers and Comrades). Since 1976 Mr. Bommer has taught at the Francis W. Parker School and was a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1969 to 1975 (where he received his Master's degree in English), as well as a guest lecturer at the College of DuPage, Roosevelt University, DePaul University and the University of Chicago. Mr. Bommer is a member of the American Theater Critics Association and has been a member of the National Writers Union and the Dramatists Guild.