'Love's Labour's Lost' Midst Rock 'n' Raga

STRATFORD, CONN.--Well, I never thought I'd live to see the day: Love's Labour's Lost without a yawn. The production that Michael Kahn has directed for the American Shakespeare Festival is outrageous, irreverent, and scurrilous. It is also--almost throughout its entire 130 minutes--inspired, captivating, over-whelming, brilliant, vigorous, dazzling, uninhibited, stunning: a total theatrical triumph.

Before I indicate how this has been accomplished, let me suggest some of the problems. The celebrated critic Hazlitt began his comments on the play with these words: "If we were to part with any of the author's comedies, it should be this." Certainly the work ranks near the bottom in the Shakespearean canon.

We know that it was performed before Queen Elizabeth and her court in 1597. But there is good evidence that this was a revision of an original written in 1588, which would make it the earliest of Shakespeare's plays to survive. Regardless of its date, it betrays an author who was dramaturgically unsure of himself.

Actually, it is nearly devoid of plot and action. The King of Navarre and three lords swear to set up a monastic "little academe" in which for three years they are "to fast, to study, and to see no woman." But a princess and three ladies-in-waiting soon arrive on a diplomatic mission and they all fall in love. The news of the death of the princess' father forces a post-ponement of the four betrothals for "a twelvemonth and a day." The End.

It is the only play in the canon to take place entirely in one location. And it is maddeningly rigid and sym-metrical in structure--less a drama than a formal and artificial Elizabethan pavane (in a couple of years he would wisely loosen up his predictable precision when he undertook the similarly structured As You Like It).

Furthermore, Love's Labour's Lost is the most topical of all the plays. In it Shakespeare parodies the euphemistic style of John Lyly (who is today not exactly a widely read author), and lampoons a number of the verbal fads and affectations of the late sixteenth century. It is stuffed with what its leading character, Berowne, describes as "Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise./Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,/Figures pedantical." And there are hundreds of puns, many be-labored mercilessly. How many of today's theatregoers relish extended puns on long-obsolete terms for a male deer of the second, third, and fourth year? Or puns that require the knowledge that 'suitor' was pronounced 'shooter' and that 'parson,' 'person,' and 'pierce' were homophones? How many of you are familiar with words like kersey, farborough, caudle, inkle, thrasenical, and placket? You do know 'half' and 'capon,' but not in their meaning of 'wife' and 'love-letter.' And there is a parade of obscure proper names, Elizabethan slang, malapropisms, and sentences in both good and bad Latin. All of this makes the play an absolutely fascinating goldmine for the student of language in his den, but now it is hardly conducive to excitement on the stage.

Nor are we done. Shakespeare took the names of the king and lords from four actual participants in the contemporary French civil war. And he made reference to an intellectual coterie that included Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, the 9th Earl of Northumberland, Matthew Roydon, and George Chapman--of whom you're lucky to have heard of more than one.

Theatregoers of today can reasonably be expected to show familiarity with the stock characters of the old Italian commedia dell'arte, from which Shakespeare took the five low-comedy figures that Berowne ticks off as "The pedant, the braggart, the hedge-priest, the fool, and the boy." Respectively, Holofernes corresponds to the dottore, Armado to the capitano, Nathaniel to the pantalone and parasite, Moth (a wit) and Costard (a dimwit) to the comic servants (zanni). But it seems that Shakespeare also had in mind here poking fun at such now-forgotten men as Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Hervey, and John Florio.

It must be remembered that the play was not written for the usual public audience, but for a highly sophisticated court assemblage that could pick up the verbal and personal allusions. As Granville-Barker said of the play, "It abounds in jokes for the elect. A year or two later the elect themselves might be hard put to it to remember what the joke was." The "year or two" has now stretched to almost four centuries. It is easy to see why--uniquely among the plays--this one was never revived after Shakespeare's time until 1839, and not successfully revived until Peter Brook's production of 1946, which I did not see.

I have, however, seen two mountings of the work since then, and it was a trial to sit through each of them. They led me to conclude that the obstacles to performance posed by this uneven hothouse script were simply insuperable. Now Michael Kahn has proven me wrong. How has he done it? First, by casting aside caution and bardolatry. He has cut the text (and I do miss Costard's use of "honorificabilitudinitatibus," a genuine medieval Latin term, employed by Dante, that for centuries was cited as the longest known word); he has substituted a few words; and he has not been above adding some lines of his own.

But Kahn's main solution lay in finding modern-day equivalents for Shakespeare's topicalities and fads. I am by nature a purist, and do not condone tampering with works of art. But this is one of the rare exceptions. The purist approach does not work; Kahn's does. It's as simple as that.

Kahn has enormous help from Jane Greenwood's huge virtuosic wardrobe of oft-changing costumes, and from the up-to-date music and songs by Frangipane & Dante. I would also have to mention the name of every single player in the cast, all of whom, major and minor, are unfailingly entertaining both aurally and visually. I will at least cite here the stylish skill of Lawrence Pressman in the play's fattest role, that of the witty and skeptical lord Berowne.

Kahn has transferred the play's locale to present-day India. On entering the theatre, the audience is greeted by Will Steven Armstrong's lovely exotic setting. High above the stage are two long straight trumpets suggestive of the ceremonial karna of the Hindus or the rag-dung of the Tibetans. Hanging from these are some delicate translucent Indian drops. There are two basic pillars on the mosaic floor, and some potted plants. (Later three bronze fish that light up will be dropped in.)

On a slightly raised platform a musician (Jeff Fuller) sits improvising, in an appropriate raga, a preludial alapa on his sitar. Gradually a number of young men enter, wearing leis of orange and yellow flowers, and assume yoga positions. As bowls of incense waft their frangance, the sitar is joined off-stage by the traditional tambura drone and tabla rhythms.

As the house lights go out, a howling mob in the rear charges through the audience. Fans scream. Unshakeable photographers, like the Italian paparazzi, click their cameras. The reason? Berowne (in a mod green and lavender outfit), Longaville (Ted Graber), and Dumaine (Anthony Mainionis) have arrived, with Air India tote-bags slung over their shoulder, intent on making a retreat--just like a trio of Beatles. The King (Charles Siebert), bearded, barefoot, and white-gowned, is their chosen guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, speaking in a foreign accent. The constable Dull (Rex Everhart) is in khaki uniform with a sergeant's chevrons on his sleeves.

Armado (Josef Sommer), the handsome and bombastic Spaniard, is funny when he swings his sword about with disregard for anything in its way, and just as funny when--saying, "Rust, rapier"--he kisses and resheathes it. Costard (William Hickey), his rival for the affections of Jaquenetta, wears red sneakers, striped pants, and an orange jacket with slogan buttons on the front and "Make Love Not War" embroidered on the back. When Dull drags him off, he yells, "Police brutality!"; and, soon after, he calls Armado a "Fascist Hindu!" Jaquenetta herself (Zoe Kamitses) turns out to be a yellow-stockinged blonde in a red and purple miniskirt, with sunglasses perched on her head and a transistor radio glued to her ear. Later she proves adept at swinging her hips and popping bubble gum on the downbeat.

The Princess (Diana van der Vlis) makes a spectacular entrance riding a Honda montorbike in a sliver lame pants-suit with a blue choker and helmet. Rosaline (Denise Huot), in a navy blue suit and white boots, also arrives on a Honda (which, at the opening performance, nearly sailed over the footlights and into the audience), while the other two ladies, Maria (Kathleen Dabney) and Katherine (Marian Hailey), appear on foot. The Princess' courtier Boyet (Thomas Ruisinger), in a blue jacket with yellow handkerchief, white ducks, bow tie, and black-and-white shoes, is a U.S. Southerner with a duly droll drawl.

Moth (Bryan Young), Armado's "pretty knavish page," is dressed in white with turquoise beads and sash. At the point where Shakespeare merely indicates the title of an unidentified song, Moth grabs a hand-microphone, and the amplification system fills the theatre with an entire jivy song about love. The harmony is purely triadic, but the chords progress in fresh unpredictable directions that out-Beatle the Beatles. This blaring number lends sacrastic humor to Armado's verdict, "Sweet air!"

Not to be outdone by Moth, Longaville, when it comes time to read his sonnet, picks up the hand-mike and turns the poem into a rock 'n' roll number with off-stage singers and orchestra. Following suit, Dumaine, flipping the microphone cord like a boa, caresses himself and gyrates as he belts out his rock sonnet while the other men provide a snap-fingered accompaniment--a number that deservedly stops the show.

The schoolmaster Holofernes (Stefan Gierasch), barefoot, bowlegged, and wearing a huge diaper and silver-rimmed glasses, is a middle-aged Gandhi with traces of a Bronx accent. His sidekick Nathaniel (Ken Parker) has trouble reciting without beating his right hand in time with his sing-song delivery.

In one hilarious scene, the four ladies wear bright orange and green costumes and hold mirrors backed with the same material. Behind them, four effeminate hairdressers--two platinum blonds and two brunets--are working on their coiffures, whereupon Boyet arrives in a bathrobe of the same material.

When the four nobles appear disguised as "Muscovites," they have white satin trousers and tall black-fur headgear with chin straps, and disport amusingly like a quarter of Don Cossacks. The messenger of sad tidings, Mercade (Barry Corbin), turns out to be an ambassador complete with chest decorations, attended by a pair of underlings carrying umbrellas and the indispensable attache cases.

The two parts of the play's concluding song are sung by two different trios drawn from the comic personae. And finally the stars can be seen twinkling in the darkening sky, as the object of love's labour is not lost, but only postponed.

Scholars may very likely be scandalized by Kahn's breathtaking production. But then they too are among the people Shakespeare was satirizing in this play. Disraeli had a point when he proclaimed, "Success is the child of Audacity.