In San Diego, summer means Shakespeare. This year, there are a pair of comedies to enjoy under the stars at The Old Globe's Lowell Davies Festival Theatre.
A problem play
There are a handful of Shakespeare's works that are referred to as the "problem plays." Typical examples are "Measure for Measure," "The Merchant of Venice," "The Winter's Tale," "Troilus and Cressida" and "All's Well That Ends Well." The designation reflects the ambiguous tones of the plays, which can seem mostly comedic but can take dark turns or arrive at their happy endings through sometimes dubious means. If you want to think about this in more contemporary terms, go see Celine Song's "Materialists," which delivers a rom-com but with serious references to death and aging.
"All's Well That Ends Well" is about Helena's unrequited love and the lengths she will go — including faking her own death — to win her beloved Bertram, who professes that he hates her.
Peter Francis James, known by his colleagues as PFJ, is directing the play, and he sees another reason that "All's Well That Ends Well" is a problem play.
"I think the essence of it is that this is a first draft," PFJ said. "This was never performed in his lifetime. It just shows up in the complete works without any production history. My sense is that Shakespeare wrote it, got out what he was feeling, and then put it in a drawer. And by the time he came back to it, he was writing 'King Lear' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' and went, 'Do I want to look at this again?' The answer to which was, 'No, I want to write the next one. I'm past that.' So I think anyone who produces it is basically finishing the play."
And that was exciting to PFJ.
"Part of it was just the sense of it being unfinished and the opportunity to finish it with the actors, to really give them license to go looking," PFJ added. "It's very interesting because I think we really are looking at a first draft, and in that way, it's just gold, because you're seeing his mind not completely in that polished phase, but in the feverish writing phase."
Love and mistaken identity
If "All's Well That Ends Well" is a problem play that does not get produced very often, then at the other end of the spectrum is the beloved comic standard, "A Comedy of Errors." There is nothing ambiguous in this dizzying comedy of love and mistaken identities. Modern sitcoms can trace their roots to the ridiculous and joyous shenanigans of the Bard's play.
James Vasquez understands both the beats of a sitcom and the cadence of blank verse. Last year, he delivered a "Merry Wives of Windsor" that was patterned after the "I Love Lucy" 1950s sitcom. For "A Comedy of Errors," he is jumping a few decades ahead for inspiration.
"It's set in the 1990s here on the West Coast, and really celebrating all that great music from the 1990s," Vasquez explained. "The music is really coming in and playing a big part, underscoring a lot of the big moments in the scenes."
But amidst all the comedy, Vasquez points to "little nuggets in the story that are going to send people out thinking about what's going on in our world today. We're discovering a lot of comparisons in the story to what is going on with our borders right now in this country. We're discovering a lot of comparisons to just relationships and how people are interacting — or not interacting — with each other today."
Vasquez has a lot of connections to the play and to The Old Globe. He heard his first lines of Shakespeare as a 12-year-old at The Globe's Camp Orbit program and was hooked. Plus, he has directed a pair of abridged versions of the play with children.
Vasquez recalled that initial introduction The Globe gave him to the Bard: "At 12, not really understanding what was necessarily being said on stage, but hearing the musicality of it, hearing the rhythm, hearing the height of the language and the importance of the language, struck something in me and turned something on that I wanted to know more about. Now, years later, to have directed what is going to be my second Shakespeare out on that stage, where I saw my first Shakespeares, is a pretty exciting full circle. It doesn't get better than that."
Celebrating 90 years
Built in 1935, San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre was modeled after Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. It was built for the California Pacific International Exposition for the purpose of presenting abridged versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Fortunately, after the expo closed in 1937, it managed to remain a viable theater and continued to grow over the decades. But one of its missions has been to produce the Bard’s plays annually. Last summer, The Globe completed Shakespeare's canon with its epic production of the "Henry 6 Project."
Thanks to The Globe, I am only one play away from completing my own Shakespeare canon. I only need to see "King John," which The Globe staged when I was 8 years old and my parents deemed me too young to see history plays! But I have vivid memories of seeing such actors as Christopher Walken (in "A Comedy of Errors"), Paul Winfield ("Othello"), William Marshall (Blacula as Othello), Victor Buono (as Falstaff), Christopher Reeve, Jeffrey Combs, Tim Matheson (as Romeo — and all of us junior high school girls swooned when he bared his butt on stage), Barry Bostwick, Stephan McHattie (a brilliant Hotspur), Marsha Mason and so many more. So I am incredibly grateful to The Globe for providing me with more than a half-century of Shakespeare plays, and for proving the relevance and deep humanity of a playwright who has been dead for more than four centuries.
"All's Well that Ends Well" closes this Sunday, and "A Comedy of Errors" opens July 27 and runs through Aug. 24. Both plays are outdoors at the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre. So go brush up your Shakespeare!
