The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Love’s Labour’s found By E. Kyle Minor
Lesser-known Bard play frothy but still has parallels to today
Since hopping aboard Elm Shakespeare Company as its producing artistic director three years ago, Rebecca Goodheart has deferred directing a summer production in favor of running the company and expanding its education department. Until now, that is. Goodheart stages her first Elm production — Shakespeare’s comedy “Love’s Labour’s Lost” — beginning Thursday at 8 p.m. in Edgerton Park.
“It’s so good to be back in the saddle,” said Goodheart, sounding as if absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder.
“I directed, you know, just tons,” said Goodheart, who has, in fact, directed 30 professional productions regionally in addition to 20 educational ones. “Then it’s been a couple of years that other things took precedence. So it is really so much fun.”
In “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which runs Tuesday through Sunday through Sept. 2 (music starts at 7:30 p.m., show at 8), Goodheart chose one of the Bard’s seldom-seen plays. At the center of this rom-com is the King of Navarre and three of his courtier pals who earnestly swear off fleshly pleasures to concentrate on self-edification through contemplative celibacy. Yet the Princess of France arrives with three courtiers of her own, diluting the lads’ resolve surer than free pizza at a diet convention.
“‘Love Labour’s Lost’ is being done more and more,” said Goodheart, who has not previously directed the play. “I think plays have seasons in the zeitgeist, and this seems to be plucking some strings, you know? It’s showing up. And it resonated with me. So I’m curious about why. Why is it coming back in popularity?”
Theatergoers have often nicked “Love’s Labour’s Lost” as Shakespeare Lite, not as flavorful or filling as, say, “Comedy of Errors,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” or “Twelfth Night.” Nor is it overtly political. Yet Goodheart, who sets her production between 1915 and 1922, finds more
“I think plays have seasons in the zeitgeist, and this seems to be plucking some strings.” Rebecca Goodheart, director
than enough substance to grab “Love’s Labour’s Lost” by the neck and shake out more than enough choice language, laughter and love to sate contemporary audiences.
“My first two years here, we went to sort of tried-and-true,” Goodheart said, citing last summer’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Midsummer” the year before that. “And we got some pushback. Our audiences were very clear that one of the things people like about Elm is the fact that we do plays they don’t get to see other places. That was in the back of my mind, you know, as opposed to choosing ‘As You Like It’ or ‘Twelfth Night,’ of course, which we’ve done recently.”
Goodheart’s genuine affinity for “Love’s Labour’s Lost” derives from the play’s rich and patterned language, replete, as it is, with classic rhetorical devices such as parallelisms, contrasts and balance, and word play.
“I’m going to geek out for 30 seconds,” said Goodheart. “So there are 276 rhetorical figures. And those rhetorical figures are just like in figure skating, with fancy patterns, right? And this play uses that more than any other play. It’s why people accuse it of being ‘artificial.’ That’s the thing I’m really excited about. My experience is that when you train actors to literally use those word patterns like basketballs or hockey sticks, and play live games with each other on stage using those words, suddenly everything on stage becomes intelligible.
“Because it wasn’t written to be read: it was actually written to be spoken. And there’s a logic, a sense in the rhythms, the sounds, the patterns that we, as audience members, hear in a different way that is very, very difficult to read. Is it romantic froth? I think that yes, it is. It’s not a political statement play at all.”
Having said that, Goodheart added that the play still resonates today.
“You mentioned ‘Me Too,’” she said. “The women in this story are looking for agency. They come for a diplomatic mission. They say to the (men) over and over again, ‘Don’t break that oath! We take that oath really seriously!’ And the guys all say, ‘We can’t help it! You make us break it!’ All of the excuses that guys make, or some guys make. At the end of the play, these women say ‘No! We told you we were here on business.’ There’s a cost to the men for not listening to the women.
“That is what resonates in our world. One of the things we’re finding is the men (in the play) have a different relationship with oaths than we do right now. People lie all the time. Facts actually get to the place where they don’t even matter. (But) these men, even though they break their oaths, take them very seriously. Ferdinand wants to be a good ruler. He wants his country to be known throughout the world for its intelligence and its wisdom. They’re also doing it for fame.
“The desire to be a good ruler is why they do this. However, they’re out of sync, and I think all comedies, just like all tragedies, come about because the live chain of being gets broken. What happens very early on in this play is that Biron says: ‘But like of each thing that in season grows. So you, to study now it is too late…’ So he actually points out that we’re out of time. This isn’t the right time to be doing this — we’re no longer in school. Our focus should be on something else. He also says: ‘Flat treason ’gainst the kingly state of youth.’ What we should be doing is being young rulers and figuring it out on our feet.”
Goodheart and her cast enjoy how the play explores “what is real leadership? What is spin? What is hypocrisy? All of which resonate in our world. So, though it is an apolitical play, Shakespeare never gives us just fluff. Hopefully this play reminds us of the importance of listening, the importance of compassion and generosity, and the importance of fighting hypocrisy.”