Why They Keep Playing Merry Wives of Windsor at Ashland

We’re at Ashland, Oregon, at the Shakespeare Festival, for some theatre. It’s high-quality decompression for us: a straight shot up the expressway from home, and not much to do when we get here except see some plays and wander around the streets shopping for tchatchkies.

We’ve been doing this for years, and I must say, these guys –the players—maintain a consistently high level of craftsmanship. And there is a lot to be said for repertory companies: you learn to do some stuff when you work together over and over that you can’t do on the fly.

Odd thing, though: I’d say that over the years, one of the things they have been least successful at is—Shakespeare. They do, say, 10 plays a year of which maybe four are Shakespeare himself, the rest other stuff. The Shakespeare is rarely bad, but it is hard to think of any one Shakespeare performance that was ever knock-down wonderful. One possible exception: Henry V with Dan Donohue back in 2000—maybe the best Henry V that I ever saw (and see also on Merry Wives of Windsor below). But so many times you get the sense they are being spooked by it all—uh oh, we are playing Shakespeare, we hear footsteps. They feel they need to clutter it up with stageplay, as if they didn’t trust the text to carry itself.

On the flip side, one thing they’re really good at is farce. This perhaps makes sense. No doubt that farce is hard, in particular because it requires so much coordination, verbal and physical--just the sort of thing a repertory company ought to excel at, and this one does. So also they do well with battle scenes, swordplay.

I get some support for this point as an inference from their choice of plays. They seem to have a weakness for Two Gentleman of Verona--one of Shakespeare’s weakest scripts. But it has a dog, and as the proprietor tells Will in Shakespeare in Love the audience does love a dog (and Ashland has an honorable tradition of stunningly talented dogs).

Another favorite here is Merry Wives of Windsor. To my mind, this is a much-misunderstood play. Shakespeare purists look down their nose at it--no pretty verse. But the point is that Shakespeare, over his career, tried everything. MWW is farce, and played as farce, it can be wonderful—and has been produced at consistently high quality in the Ashland high-quality farce shop.

Afterthought: So far, the only thing we've seen this week is Cyrano de Bergerac with a Richard Howard who, with 18 seasons, must be the grand old man of the company. It's an absurd play and it goes on 'way too long, but Howard is a total pro and this was, I must say, one of the best things he has ever done. As we recall, the first time we saw him, he was the guy who walked buck naked across the stage in Curse of the Starving Class. He was good then. He's matured. He kept his clothes on.