Liz Lauren
As Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, Deborah Staples (l.) and Colleen Madden are expert dissemblers.
In Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, gracing the outdoor stage at American Players Theatre this summer, the English hamlet is transformed into a scene of classic Americana — a small-town summer celebration at the turn of the century, where The Music Man’s Harold Hill might have stopped to sell band instruments. Against this background of a simpler time, the squabbles and romances of mostly middle-class folks do not amount to much. The offenses are petty, the insults mostly imagined and the ne’er-do-wells are invited to dinner after their deeds are exposed.
There was a theory in dramatic lit circles that Merry Wives of Windsor was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I because she was crazy about the character of Falstaff, who appears in the two Henry IV plays. Allegedly she wanted to see the enormous rogue in love, and she gave the Bard two weeks to complete the new script. True or not, it’s easy to see why this backstory stuck.
Merry Wives is primarily a showcase for the boisterous hedonist Falstaff, as he schemes to both line his purse and satisfy his baser desires by approaching two upstanding women of Windsor, proposing illicit trysts. In this frothy comedy, naturally, hilarity ensues, as Falstaff, the wives he propositions, their husbands and the husbands’ compatriots engage in deception upon deception to expose jealousy and knavery of every kind. The play feels hastily plotted and packed with gags that are purely meant to entertain, while showing (over and over again) that the women of this town are much smarter than their male counterparts.
In the secondary plot, the lovely young Anne Page (Aidaa Peerzada) is pursued by a bevy of men, but she and her parents are at odds about who shall have her hand. Thankfully, love wins out when Fenton, played handsomely by Nate Burger, joins with Anne to play a trick on the tricksters, and the couple are married in secret.
In this town full of characters, there are many charming performances. Sarah Day plays the local busybody Mistress Quickly with bawdy glee. She acts as a go-between and advocate for virtually all of Anne Page’s suitors, sweet-talking her way into conversations with cookies and winks. Robert Doyle is a hilariously awkward milquetoast, Master Slender, who can barely speak to Anne, let alone propose to her. As the flamboyant French doctor who also vies for the girl’s love, Jonathan Smoots is entertaining, with an accent and affectation akin to Pepe LePew. And as Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, Deborah Staples and Colleen Madden are expert dissemblers, manipulating the men around them for their own amusement.
But the show belongs to Brian Mani as the rotund and mischievous knight Falstaff. He revels in the role, patting his generously padded belly, waddling from his tankards of sack to his imagined amorous encounters with laughable overconfidence in his prowess as a lover. Though he is a much more experienced schemer than any of the residents of Windsor, Falstaff lets his appetites and his fantasies get the better of him repeatedly. For all his character’s bombast, Mani plays him as a charming but misguided rascal, who is happy to come to dinner, even if the joke is on him.
Under the direction of Tim Ocel, Merry Wives of Windsor is a perfectly pleasant and often entertaining play that adds up to a merry evening.
