Liz Lauren
Core company members Colleen Madden and James DeVita help elevate the show.
If you were Lauren Gunderson, the most produced living playwright in the U.S., you would write a play, of course. Fulfilling a commission for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, she wrote The Book of Will, an unabashed love-fest honoring Shakespeare’s plays, the company that first brought them to life, and the actors from the King’s Men who gathered and published the scripts after the playwright’s death. Seizing on a historical footnote, the play illustrates how close the world came to losing the complete works altogether. It notes the tenacity and foresight of Shakespeare’s original superfans, whose efforts made the First Folio a cornerstone of Western literature.
The show begins with a young thespian (an adorable Josh Krause), haltingly delivering one of Hamlet’s great speeches — sort of. One generation removed from the author and the original script, his couplets are cobbled together, clumsily replacing poetry with awkward phrases that rankle the ear.
This insult gives the King’s Men — the remaining members of Shakespeare’s company — reason to drink, grouse, rail and mourn. Henry Condell (James DeVita), John Heminges (James Ridge) and Richard Burbage (La Shawn Banks) are incensed by those who would steal Shakespeare’s plays and perform them incorrectly in front of audiences who don’t seem to notice. Burbage goes on a tear, turning the pub into his own Globe and performing a greatest hits montage that brings down the house. It is one of the finest scenes in the play.
But in between remarkable scenes that bookend the play, the audience has to sit through a lot of pedestrian dialogue and cheap laughs that the King’s Men would have abhorred. Shakespeare in Love proves that you can have a great deal of fun with Shakespearean conventions while telling a smart, witty fictionalized origin story. Gunderson’s script falls far short of that film in plotting, language, depth and character development.
DeVita, Ridge and Tracy Michelle Arnold (as Heminges’ wife, Alice) all pour their combined talent into amping up the urgency of collecting Shakespeare’s plays and publishing them for posterity, but their obstacles are unremarkable and are resolved quickly. In the absence of a real villain, Triney Sandoval’s unscrupulous publisher character, William Jaggard, fills in, but even the underhanded money-grubber comes around without much cajoling. There is little emotional reward for learning about the vagaries of Elizabethan copyright customs.
For comic relief there are also no twins, mistaken identities, fops, cross-dressing, bumbling locals or hidden love stories; there’s just David Daniel’s Ben Jonson. The poet laureate is drawn as a well-dressed, pompous, long-winded drunk. (Remarkable costume design by Holly Payne.) Daniel bathes in the part and clearly has fun as the inebriated and lascivious writer who is doomed to spend eternity envying his friend William’s astonishing talent and cursing his early death. But it is disappointing when the best dialogue Gunderson can come up with involves four-letter words and extending a middle finger to the sky.
Instead, the moments of light that penetrate most of the short, opaque, utilitarian scenes of the play come from within each viewer’s mind. When Melisa Pereyra speaks fondly of Lady M., Colleen Madden declares she likes Much Ado About Nothing, and DeVita pines for the script of Pericles, we are reminded of past APT performances that were superlative and ephemeral.
So don’t expect a play that can compete with the poetry of the rest of APT’s season. See The Book of Will simply to raise a glass to Shakespeare and the plays we have enjoyed in Spring Green since 1979.