FALLING IN LOVE WITH LOVE

“How many times do you get to Lear? Or Coriolanus?” says Jim Guedo, who’s directed both for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival in summers past. Or Love’s Labour’s Lost? “Nothing against As You Like It, but I’m more interested in the less-travelled Shakespeare. And Love’s Labour’s Lost goes under the radar.”

“Is it the bittersweet tinge of the ending?” Guedo muses. Love’s Labour’s Lost, after all, doesn’t have “the standard Act V comedy ending where everyone ends up getting hitched to the person they love, sings the Shakespearean song, does the period dance, and runs off … That’s the way the story’s supposed to go.” No, this early comedy starts with an absurd oath, a King and his courtiers, who swear to give up the company of women for three years — about 20 seconds before the arrival of a Princess and her ladies from France.

Guedo, head of MacEwan University’s theatre department, finds a resonantly modern spirit in an unconventional comedy that was a rare sighting until the early 20th century. “As audiences, we’re more in tune now with slightly off-balance, unresolved endings than audiences of the past,” he thinks. He compares it to the way fairy tales go off the rails in the second half of Sondheim’s Into The Woods.

The other striking, possibly daunting, feature of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which has more talk, and more of it rhymed, than any other Shakespeare play, is its verbal gamesmanship. The characters are fascinated with words, jokes, puns, rhetorical tricks. Guedo