Sunday Afternoon in Prospect Park: The 23rd Annual Clubhouse Jamboree with Jellybean Benitez at the Music Pagoda

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Sunday Afternoon in Prospect Park: LiL Ray presents The 21st Annual Clubhouse Jamboree at the Music Pagoda

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Sunday Afternoon in Prospect Park: EBE Ensemble presents "The Comedy of Errors" at the Music Pagoda

This afternoon the sun came out and the rains held off, and we got the fun of seeing this season's Shakespeare at the Pagoda in Prospect Park, with the talented EBE Ensemble presenting another terrifically entertaining show, a cleverly staged, laugh-filled production of The Comedy of Errors, directed by Elyzabeth Gorman.

We came slightly late -- after all these years, finding the Music Pagoda is still a bit challenging to us -- and didn't get a program, but we know from the EBE Ensemble website that the cast included Whit Leyenberger, Dylan C. Digel, David Jenkins, Thomas Muccioli, Josephine Ganner, KC Wright, Jordan Douglas Smith, Jessica Loudon, Noam Tomaschoff, Eric Alba, Olivia Hayes, Allyson Boate and Andrews Landsman.

So the only cast member we recognized was the company's artistic director, Eric Alba, whom we'd seen before as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and Brutus in Julius Caesar. Here he was one of two comic cops in a Sun Belt police officer's uniform playing one of Officers, Jailers, and Headsman.

Gorman's production uses informal contemporary costumes, nothing truly out of place in contemporary Brooklyn, and the more tedious parts of the text are thankfully dispensed with so that the comedy moves very fast and with a lot of laughs.

The two sets of twins -- the Antiphilos of Syracuse and Antiphilos of Ephesus and their slave Dromios -- are dressed almost alike and look pretty similar, but the actors taking the roles managed to imbue each character with a distinctive personality and particular comic tics.

Saturday Afternoon in Prospect Park: The Bent Quill Players present Molière's "A Doctor in Spite of Himself" at the Music Pagoda

This afternoon we were lucky enough to see The Bent Quill Players' boisterously funny production of Molière's A Doctor in Spite of Himself at the Music Pagoda at Prospect Park. Directed by Eli Thacker Taylor and featuring a talented cast, the play caused us to laugh out loud at least half a dozen times, and we're normally a lot more dour.

This was the fifth play we've seen at the Music Pagoda in the past couple of years, and it's a wonderful setting, leafy and comfortable and low-key. Today there was little of the noise competition from elsewhere we've noticed in the past (just a couple of times we heard the dim hum of a motorized scooter).

It's best to bring a blanket or towel to sit on, because the ground isn't that grassy in the best of times, and we'd suggest leaving early to give yourself enough time to find the Music Pagoda; the signs aren't that clear, even when you locate the place on the park map, and as many times as we've been here, we always manage to make at least one wrong move and have to backtrack on the paths to the site.

Last year we saw our first Bent Quill Players production, in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights, where they presented Susanna Centlivre's 1709 comedy The Busybody, which was absolutely delightful. Today's Molière play featured the same high-quality acting and fast-paced and innovative direction, with more accomplished musical accompaniment and probably more hearty laughs. (Interestingly, Centlivre wrote her own take on Le Médecin Malgré Lui, titled Love's Contrivance, so obviously the two playwrights share similar sensibilities.)

As the Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature notes in its entry on "comedy of intrigue":

The Doctor in Spite of Himself [1666], which begins as a farce based on the simple joke of mistaking the ne'er-do-well woodcutter Sganarelle for a doctor, gradually becomes a satire on learned pretension and bourgeois credulity as Sganarelle fulfills his role as a doctor with great success. The Doctor in Spite of Himself, which begins as a farce based on the simple joke of mistaking the ne'er-do-well woodcutter Sganarelle for a doctor, gradually becomes a satire on learned pretension and bourgeois credulity as Sganarelle fulfills his role as a doctor with great success.

The Bent Quill Players used Aurand Harris's sharpened 1968 adaptation of Moliere's play in a cleverly directed production. Like all the other plays we've seen at the Music Pagoda, they employed both the raised stage of the pagoda itself and the space in front of it (and around the sides, especially well-used during fast-paced, hilarious chase scenes). The well-crafted and whimsical original music was created by Patrick Metzger, who on banjo was joined by Tamara Jaton on violin and Curtis McMurtry on saxophone, to provide some moments that perfectly highlighted the comic business of the actors.

We were impressed with the black, white and gray costume design of company co-founder Meaghan Cross as well as the cleverness of the props, which were farcical and outlandish enough to deflect and lighten what might otherwise be somewhat uncomfortable moments for an audience sensitive to physical violence in general and spousal abuse in particular.

The comedy works on several levels, most broadly as slapstick farce (what the little kids can appreciate) as well as quite sophisticated and still sharply relevant satire, as Sganarelle's delicious commentary on his success as a Catch-Me-If-You-Can medical fraud (here in another translation):

I find it the best of trades; for, whether we are right or wrong, we are paid equally well. We are never responsible for the bad work, and we cut away as we please in the stuff we work on. A shoe maker in making shoes can't spoil a scrap of leather without having to pay for it, but we can spoil a man without paying one farthing for the damage done. The blunders are not ours, and the fault is always that of the dead man. In short, the best part of this profession is, that there exists among the dead an honesty, a discretion that nothing can surpass; and never as yet has one been known to complain of the doctor who had killed him.

Molière himself played this part, and today Alessandro King gave a wonderfully modulated performance as the increasingly less reluctant and more assured fake physician, managing to seem at once the dopey, lazy woodcutter and the sly trickster who gets the better of his social betters and everyone else foolish or desperate enough to believe in him while he convincingly plays both the woman-chasing lout and the cupid reuniting thwarted young lovers. Like many of the performances, King's was both broadly comic and surprisingly touching.

The ensemble of Meaghan Cross, Norah Elise Johnson and Katharine Tool in their French chambermaid outfits and Owen Scott as a kind of slightly sinister Cabaretesque MC did yeoman's duty keeping the somewhat loose plot strands together. Leah Weingart, as Martine, Sganarelle's wife who is as much a trickster and ultimately a softy as her good-natured husband, seemed simultaneously feisty and, in the end, well worth giving up fantasy for.

Last year, in The Busybody, Nevan Scott expertly played the father of the ingenue, determined to keep her from marrying her true love in favor of a more wealthy potential son-in-law. Here he employs a slightly more intelligent version of the same character type in his portrayal of Geronte, keeping apart his daughter Lucinde (a charming, insouciant faker of muteness, Jillian Nicole Barrels) and her stolid, handsome young boyfriend, played deftly by Nathan Wiley. All three actors prove surprisingly good at physical comedy, as does the entire cast, as the play turns from satire to Keystone Kops-style hijinks.

Hico Oshiro as the excitable Lucas and Marri J. Wright as Valere are the pair of Geronte's hyper-excitable servants who forcefully enlist Sganarelle into the medical profession, and in the role of Jacqueline, Lucas's wife and the object of Sganarelle's lust, the droll Giverny Petitmerment is clearly the only one onstage who's clear-headed and intelligent enough to understand exactly what's going on at any one time. Eli Thacker Taylor's direction

Compared to Molière's more trenchant "major" comedies, like The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The School for Wives or The Imaginary Invalid (which we saw a great production of way back in 1980 right here in Park Slope, in one of the Seventh Avenue churches, with our friend the playwright Judd Lear Silverman playing Cleante), some might consider A Doctor in Spite of Himself to be a slightly lesser effort.

We've never thought so (we liked the play enough so that in 2002 when we were asked to write -- for a cool thousand dollars -- an autobiographical essay for Contemporary Authors, we called it "A Writer in Spite of Myself"), and today in Prospect Park, under Eli Thacker Taylor's expert and multi-layered direction, the Bent Quill Players had us even more convinced that presented right, it's a first-rate comedy of its time, and yeah, of our own time, too.

If you can get to Prospect Park tomorrow (Sunday, May 1), you too can enjoy the fun of this classic French comedy, which is appropriate for all ages -- the kids around us were really entertained by it -- at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. It will also be playing next Friday, May 6, at 4 p.m. and next Saturday, May 7, at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Saturday Afternoon in Prospect Park: A Festival of Fools presents Calderón 's "Life is a Dream" at the Music Pagoda

We were at the Music Pagoda in Prospect Park for the third Saturday afternoon this summer, and we were delighted with what we saw: a poetic, elegant and surprisingly bracing production of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Spanish Golden Age drama, Life is a Dream (La vida es sueño), by A Festival of Fools.

It's been ages since we read this play, first haltingly in Spanish, then in 1980, after we were a fellow at the MacDowell Colony along with poet Edwin Honig, we read his 1960s free verse translation. The play seemed interesting but contrived. The main plot concerns Segismund, who at birth is locked in a tower by his father, King Basil of Poland, as a Oedipus-like precaution against a seer's foreseen trouble, but suddenly this "human monster," first seen raging like an animal, is released, drugged, told he's a prince and observed to see how he responds.

Segismund immediately behaves like a tyrant, thoughtless and unbearably cruel. He's told it's all been a dream, wakes, sleepwalks, seems to dream more and in the end he comes to understand that all of life is a dream and makes a speech saying that whether you're awake or dreaming, you need to live as fully as you can. It's essentially a philosophical play, and there's a subplot involving Rosaura, a jilted lover who, like Segismund, has been cheated of her birthright, and a lot of complications involving thwarted and hoped-for romance and rival claimants to the throne of Poland.

On the page, we always found the plot confusing and pretty unbelievable although we took it as a metaphor, a philosophical argument disguised as a weird story. It's to the enormous credit of A Festival of Fools and this production's director, Amanda Thompson - and also in large part to the incredibly deft new translation (with gorgeous meter and natural rhyme) by LIU-Brooklyn professor G.J. Racz - that you don't think, "This makes no sense" as you watch the play.

Instead, you're just swept along with them in the utterly believable action.

The audience was crowded onto the floor of the first couple of steps on the music pagoda itself, while most of the action took place slightly above us; only in the last twenty minutes did we turn the other way, to the battles on the ground below. This was an excellent use of the facility but for us, it led to some uncomfortable neck craning as we looked upward to the actors much of the time. (We came to the play with a bad stiff neck that had kept us awake and on Advil the night before, so this might be just our problem.)

The troupe worked superbly together, but Tim Bungeroth was especially amazing as the fierce, savage Segismund as he raged, wailed, sneered, and slowly is transformed into a compassionate and philosophical ruler. It's a subtle performance.

As Rosaura, whom Segismund recognizes as something of a kindred spirit in both her initial disguise as a man and then later in womanly dress, Claire Nasuti is spirited but gentle, never letting her anger at her mistreatment at others' hands, entirely extinguish her ability to take small pleasures where she can find them.

Kaitlyn McGuire Huczko gets about ninety percent of the play's laughs as Clarion, clowning and joking and mugging, sprightly and cynical and cowardly - yet in the play's most ironic twist, the one character who seems all along to believe in life as a dream, as mere illusion, ends up its most tragic victim. This was a full-blooded performance that added a lot to the show.

As Basil, Quincy Ellis is splendidly good-natured and ineffectual even when he attempts to be a wise ruler; like the other characters, he's a foolish dreamer given to misinterpreting events and accepting them too easily at face value.

As his niece and nephew (from different sisters), the sometimes-suitors, sometime-rivals, Stella (Hannah Corrigan) and Rosaura's beytrayer Astolph, Duke of Moscow, manage also manage the difficult of feat of seeming noble and blockheaded at once.

Rounding out the main characters, Clotaldo, the king's loyal lieutenant, is played by Michael DeSantis, who lends the role grace and wisdom despite his somewhat unfathomable early cruelty to both Segismund and Rosaura.

As the lady in waiting and the hapless servants/soldiers, Ariel Francoeur, Sam Maxwell and David Rysdahl are all fine, more victims of the foolishness of the dream world - which is to say reality.

The fight choreorgraphy is the usual superb work of Jared Kirby, who also did most of the Hudson Warehouse productions we've seen; assisting Amanda Thompson as director is stage manager Ricky Hutchins; there was effective original music by Brian Kirchner and accompaniment by Teddy Lytle.

John Guare called Life is a Dream his favorite exploration of "the quintessential theme -- the human mind coming to consciousness" whose lesson is that "poetry is a visceral response to events, not some aerosol spray-on fantasy of fancy chat." With this production, A Festival of Fools manages to present Calderón's philosophical drama in a manner that highlights its magnificence as well as its entertainment value. La vida es sueño, de seguro.

You can appreciate this play without knowing all that much about it. You'll get it immediately. It will be at the Music Pagoda at 2 p.m. tomorrow and also next Saturday and the following Sunday.