By Joel Applegate
William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is a difficult play in that there are no events that unveil a cascading plot, save for the arrival of a Princess and her comely entourage. It is a play of feeling and flirtation and pain in which the question is to woo or not to woo. And having wooed, what stands to be lost?
Guest directed by Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Terri McMahon, the student cast is uniformly confident and clear. Each of the sixteen deftly handle their speeches, with many excelling in ease and clarity of meaning, among whom are the King of Navarre (Dominic Zappala), The Princess (Kelsey June Jensen), Costard (Call Vabde Veegaete), Don Armado (Ryan Gando) and Berowne (Isabella Reeder).
I paid close attention to those speeches, testing whether my scholarship was up to grasping one of the most poetic of the Bard’s works. Perhaps my mind wandered a little over the more than ample black box three-quarter venue, noticing curious touches here and there, like in the costumes, made stylishly modern by Shannon McCullock. I’m still not sure why Don Armado sports patches on his flamboyant uniform, while his ‘aide-de-camp’ was dressed as a boy scout. (Did I just answer my own question?)
The set designed by Michael J. Horejsi is a clever literary metaphor tumbling from the ceiling and across the floor in a river of words. The wooing of all is abetted by this resource as each of Love’s supplicants in turn draws a scroll, or a sheet or a love letter from the stream, and the game of love moves into its next inning.
Credit goes to those several actors who effectively manage the tricky skill of accenting the Bard in Spanish and Russian (especially marvelous is Ryan Gando as the rakish Spaniard). There are a few roles gender-swapped here, as well, with Ireland Nichols as Moth (or Mote in some editions) and Isabella Reeder impresses us with her need to be in love – the most passionate and earnest in the cast – with the unattainable Rosaline played by Savannah Moffat.
Then follows the interplay between this royal retinue and the King’s men, who have famously vowed to sequester themselves in scholarly studies for three years. Though well-intentioned, the draw of the women quite soon deflates the men’s plans. The play gradually shifts in its delightful language from complexity to compassion, from gaiety to somber and from florid to frank admonitions to make no promises that cannot be kept.
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As implied by the title, Love promises no resolution (spoiler!), but the cast handles with equal skill the high literacy of the piece, the bawdy punning and, as it wraps up, gives the audience a poignancy that I found unexpected and moving.
The University of Utah’s Department of Theatre presents Love’s Labours Lost by William Shakespeare
William Browning Building, 115, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
October 20 – 29 7:30 PM Post-show discussion on Oct. 27, Matinees on Oct 28 and 29 2:00 PM
Tickets: $8.50-$18
Contact: 801-581-7100
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