Theater Review—

Town Players Take A Stab At ‘Problem’ Shakespeare

By Julie Stern

All’s Well That Ends Well is one of what are called Shakespeare’s “problem plays.” That is, unlike his popular comedies such as As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s Dream, you don’t get to watch the build-up of a conventional romance between a delightful heroine and an admirable hero. Nor, as in one of his “witty couple” comedies such as Much Ado About Nothing or The Taming of the Shrew, do you get to see the kind of bickering match between two strong personalities who just don’t realize how much they suit each other until the last act.

Instead you have a play about forlorn young orphan who is madly in love with an absolute jerk, a young man who behaves like a cad and annoys every adult in the play as well as in the audience. When she finally tricks him into a forced marriage, we are supposed to accept the idea that he finally sees the light and that they will live as happily ever after as Kate and Petrucchio or Orlando and Viola.

Well, it’s a problem. However, Ruth Anne Baumgartner – who over the past few years has made a point of demonstrating that the Town Players can do Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration comedy, and that furthermore audiences will come to see them do it – has chosen to stretch the envelope a little farther this time.

It’s a noble effort. Using her typically intelligent program notes to teach a short lesson, Ms Baumgartner stakes her claim that Shakespeare’s “problem” plays are actually forays into an unprecedented realism, investing the characters with psychological depth and exploring issues of morality and behavior that earlier comedies simply brushed off.

Bertram, the unpleasant youth around whom the play revolves, is indeed a jerk. However, Ms Baumgartner feels that this is simply the callow jerkiness of adolescence – the kind of attitudes most of us indulged in at some point and are now unwilling to remember. Indeed, she argues, his problem is that he isn’t old enough legally to operate as a man, in a man’s world, and so he acts like an obnoxious college sophomore.

Here’s the plot: When his father dies, Bertram inherits the title of Count Rousillion. He wants to go off to war to fight for the King of France against the Duke of Florence, but first he has to get the king’s permission to do so because he is too young.

Meanwhile, Helena, the orphaned daughter of a non-aristocratic physician, has grown up in Bertram’s household as his mother’s ward. She is madly in love with Bertram, and wants only to marry him. He is not interested. She’s a kid, after all, and she’s too low class for a Count like him.

The King of France is languishing from a wasting disease. Using her father’s skills, Helena cures him. As a reward, he tells her she can have any young man she wants for a husband. Of course she chooses Bertram. He is outraged, but the king insists.

They are married, but Bertram sends her back to his mother’s house, vowing that the marriage will never be consummated unless she can do two impossible things: get the ring off his finger, and get herself pregnant with his child.  (This tale is borrowed loosely from Boccaccio’s Decameron.)

Meanwhile, Bertram goes off to Florence, vowing that if he can’t actually be a soldier he will have a great time chasing the local ladies.

Of course we all know, as sure as Katharine Hepburn was always going to end up with Cary Grant (onscreen, anyway), that Helena, who is no dummy – after all, she did cure the King – will eventually get the man she wants, and the devil is just in the details.

Elise Bochinski makes a gallant heroine as Helena, resolute in her determination to get what she wants, and Aaron Kaplan is properly sophomoric as Bertram. I also liked Amanda B. Goodman as Diana, one of Bertram’s apparent conquests who forms a sort of Thelma and Louise-type alliance with Helena. When sisterhood gets powerful, boys get the surprise they deserve.

Rob Pawlikowski dominates the stage in the role of Parolles, a “parasitical follower of Bertram” that is, a blustering old soldier who offers to lead him into debauchery, and whose comeuppance provides much of the comic turns in the second act. However, perhaps he overplays it a little, as if he were doing Falstaff to Prince Hal, until it almost seems that the whole play is more about him than anyone else.

Keegan Finlayson and Matthieu L. Regney do a particularly good job as two French brothers who serve the king, the kind of guys Bertram would like to hang out with and be like. George Lang is a wily old lord and Leslie Van Etten Broatch is extremely patient and self-controlled as Bertram’s long-suffering mother. Doug Miller makes a believable king, who is very happy to get his health back.

(Performances continue weekends through August 2, with curtain on Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 pm. A matinee is also scheduled for Sunday, July 27, at 2 pm. Tickets are $12 for the evening shows, $10 for the matinee.

Town Players performances are presented at The Little Theatre, on Orchard Hill Road in Newtown. Call 270-9144 for reservations or additional information.)