Theater Review |
Even playwrights of genius have their off days. And on one such a day, William Shakespeare completed his stage comedy "All's Well That Ends Well," which Seattle Shakespeare Company is now bravely undertaking at Center House Theatre.
Wedged between the far superior "Twelfth Night" and "Measure for Measure" on the Shakespeare timeline, "All's Well That Ends Well" is verbose, heavily contrived and introduces us to a couple of fairly unsympathetic romancers.
Helena (portrayed by Sarah Harlett) is a "poor physician's daughter" intent on marrying the higher-born Bertram (Connor Toms) — despite the class gap, and Bertram's total resistance.
One of the more conniving yet emotionally tone-deaf leading ladies in the Bard's canon, Helena sweetly but shamelessly ropes in her mark with various subterfuges over the course of the play. Bertram, meanwhile, abandons his bride on their wedding night to soldier and seduce in sunny Italy.
"A man noble without generosity, and young without truth," is how 18th-century Shakespeare critic Samuel Johnson described Bertrand. But Helena is no prize either.
Director Stephanie Shine has her work cut out for her, given the queasy morality on display here. And then there's the plot (inspired by a story from Giovanni Boccaccio's compendium of bawdy tales, "The Decameron"), which plods along, then gets hyperactive.
As the would-be lovers, the fresh-faced Toms and game Harlett (a top-notch comic actor, strapped into a drab ingénue role here) connive and lie — albeit with incongruous sincerity.
Two pleasant musical interludes frame the play's early scenes in France, and its latter segments in Tuscany.
And Seattle Shakes regular Paul Morgan Stetler scampers about adorned with bright silk scarves (as the text suggests), and scares up a few laughs as the foppish fool and cowardly braggart Parolles.
Not all the actors in the ensemble deliver the dialogue's couplets crisply, but Marianne Owen's wise, maternal countess is a model of lucidity — as are Stetler, Toms and Harlett.
And Stetler is adept at the verbal jousting required of Parolles ("words," in French) — as when he expounds on virginity, as "peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin."
But "All's Well That Ends Well" needs a bolder, more illuminating approach than the straightforward style Seattle Shakes adopts.
Sludgy with repetition, light on character development, the play relies on sudden turnabouts of fate and affection to further its ends. And it leans on creaky devices like the "bed trick" — a fanciful act of sexual entrapment in Boccaccio's repertoire and Shakespeare's. (The latter also used it in "Measure for Measure.")
"All's Well" does get an attractive physical setting from designer Kurt D. Walls, with green faux marble floors and sienna-toned architecture. Tiana Covolos is responsible for the pleasing, Regency Era-style costumes.
Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com
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