Friday Evening and Saturday Afternoon in Windsor Terrace: Brave New World Repertory's "The Merry Wives of WIndsor (Terrace)" at Our Lady's Field

We took the G train to Windsor Terrace early Friday evening to see the always-excellent Brave New World Repertory's production of The Merry Wives of Windsor (Terrace), brilliantly transporting Shakespeare's only comedy set in England to a very funny contemporary sitcom version of Brooklyn.

Unfortunately, a violent thunderstorm and downpour near the end of Act III halted the performance -- even Borough President Marty Markowitz in the audience couldn't control the weather -- so we returned in the heat of Saturday afternoon for the satisfying and wacky conclusion to this sharp production directed by John Morgan.

That we so enjoyed this production is a tribute to Brave New World Repertory, because it's definitely not one of our Shakespeare favorites. Reportedly written in just two weeks at the behest of Queen Elizabeth, who couldn't get enough of the Falstaff of Henry IV, it's got a dashed-off, kitchen-sink text that at least for us made it deadly on the page.

Onstage, however, a clever staging and a talented cast can pull off laughs if they do it right. Although there was more poetry in one scene in the Brave New World staged reading of As You Like It we saw at Prospect Park last summer than there is in the entire script of Merry Wives (literally: it's the Shakespeare play with the highest prose-to-poetry ratio), this ensemble plays it like the sitcom it was meant to be (and it's a spinoff of a sitcom, really, The Jeffersons rather than All in the Family).

Actually, this production is part The Real Housewives of Brooklyn and part the 50s sitcom of The Honeymooners, Sgt. Bilko or I Love Lucy, with the plots and subplots involving someone on the make trying to pull off a deceptive scheme, various counterplots of revenge and disguise, with the hapless antihero -- here, the track-suited, chain-wearing goombah Sir John Falstaff (Stuart Zagnit, with gusto to spare, matching his huge spare tire) -- getting his comeuppance through a series of comic humiliations just one beat ahead of making you pity him. Zagnit makes Falstaff lovable because under his bluster, he seems vulnerable, maybe even wounded in his take-charge buffoonishness.

The whole cast did a yeoman job, and it was nice to see again some of the actors from last year's As You Like It. As the two housewives who enact their revenge on this clown, Claire Beckman as Mrs. Ford (with her needlessly jealous hubby -- Kevin Hogan, whose own schemed are disarmingly dense and charming) and Christine Siracusa as Mrs. Page, are entertaining -- say, like Snooki will be in twenty years.

This play has an enormous cast of characters -- Shakespeare felt that one comic foreigner wasn't enough, apparently, so he has both a French doctor

and a Welsh priest (although Michael Kirby and Peter Zazzali play them with insouciance more as the stock vaudeville German and Irishman) -- and by the last part of the play, which we saw Saturday, an audience member's temptation is to stop trying so hard to follow everybody.

The Brooklyn accents and types on display here -- the toss-the-ball-around civil servants, the dim rich kid (Matthew Luceno, who made us laugh),

the pompous judge (William Brenner, so good in dual roles in As You Like It),

the girl everyone (and we mean almost everyone) seems to want (Catherine Mancuso makes Anne Page endearingly obnoxious), the well-meaning lowlifes and lots of others: well, when you mix everything in a blender, sometimes you get a delicious smoothie,

especially when the cast used the space of Our Lady's Field so efficiently that the movements were -- except for the thunderstorm, of course -- fairly seamless. It ain't subtle -- there's more shtick than you can shake a stickball bat with -- but it's all in service to the convoluted story rather than show-offy.

Caroline Ryburn is particularly good as a high-energy, ditzy Mistress Quickly, and the whole farcical melange worked for us in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Terrace).

Harold Bloom said that this comedy was the only play of Shakespeare's that the Bard himself seemed to hold in contempt. We think Will would have liked this production, and we're grateful to the Brave New World Repertory Theater and the Holy Name Parish (Father Jim Cunningham) for bringing it to the community.

Late Thursday Afternoon in Prospect Park: Brave New World Repertory Theatre presents "As You Like It" at the Oriental Pavilion

We were in Prospect Park for the second afternoon in a row - yesterday we were trekking with our friend of over forty years Paul Schickler, who lives nearby and despite having half a dozen grandkids can walk a lot further and faster in the heat then we can - to see a vibrant and imaginative staged reading of As You Like It by Brave New World Repertory at the Oriental Pavilion (what we natives call the Concert Grove).

As You Like It, derided by some critics as shallower than Shakespeare's more profound comedies, has always seemed to us in some ways his most capacious work apart from the major tragedies.

It's got many contrasts in it, between youth and age, the life of the court and the forest, the sunny, optimistic idealism of Rosalind that finds its overwhelmed opposite in the gloomy, "realist" pessimism of Jaques, same-sex and opposite-sex passion, and the turn-on-a-dime ability of humans to change, as seen by the sudden conversion of the play's two villains into noble and generous characters.

All this comes through in the staged reading we saw, starting at 5 p.m. today. Seated around a center stage area in the elegant Oriental Pavilion (when we were last here, it was for the end of the Turkey Trot race on Thanksgiving morning) by the cast, wearing violet and lavender As You Like It/Brave New World Repertory T-shirts and accoutrements that suggested the roles they were playing.

We've attended staged readings before, and they're tricky, being not quite a fully-formed production of a play, but more than an actors-in-their-seats plain reading (at these around Manhattan in the 1980s, we were sometimes asked to read aloud the stage directions, a necessity when the characters don't move). But this version by producer/director Claire Beckman (the assistant director was Ezra Barnes; stage manager, Danielle Buccino) seemed to work perfectly and bring out the best in both actors and text.

It felt quite natural that actors sat among us (in black chairs rather than the white ones) when not onstage, or at other times, stood in character outside the pavilion - which, by the way, made for a terrific theater, with its long sightlines and cooling breezes.

The actors of Brave New World handled carrying their highlighted editions of the text with aplomb and eventually the paperbacks became mostly invisible, though as someone who for decades has taught Shakespeare in lit classes, staged readings for us have the virtue of stressing the primacy of the text.

And, boy, Shakespeare has some of his best-known lines here, from Jaques's "All the world's a stage" speech (but the play's spirit suggests that's not entirely true) leading to his "seven ages of man" - Kevin Hogan, who was a wonderful Jaques, looked straight at one of the kids in the first row when he discoursed upon "the whining schoolboy with his satchel" - ending with our final fate:

second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

- but that too is subverted by the arrival of Adam, Orlando's ancient servant - played movingly by Eleanor Ruth - whose moral strength, loyalty and courage are unimpaired by age and infirmity.

Harold Bloom called Rosalind Shakespeare's most fully-formed female character, and she dominates the play. Franny Silverman made a wonderful Rosalind: witty, wise, resourceful, sunny, and so brilliant she outshines even her beloved Orlando (played here by Joe Salgo with a boyish, romantic earnestness). Rosalind also is funnier than the clown Touchstone (a sprightly John Edmond Morgan), who's accompanied her and her cousin Celia (a very charming and ardent Catherine Mancuso) into the Arden Forest, where almost all of the action takes place.

This pastoral patch of Prospect Park (no, we didn't mean for all the alliteration, but we'll let it go) was, uh, perfect for staging Shakespeare's most pastoral comedy. The strains of composer Amanda Gookin's cello (we saw her also use what looked like a foot tambourine at one point) and Dave Hall's guitar and truly lovely voice as Lord Amiens on Shakespeare's songs were a key to making this staged reading come alive for the audience.

Regretfully, we missed Brave New World Repertory's Tempest on the Coney Island boardwalk last year (here's a video from the production), so we're very glad we got the opportunity to see this As You Like It on a beautiful but warm late afternoon turned early evening.

This Ditmas Park-based company, all of whose members live in the borough, has this as its mission statement:

Brave New World Repertory Theatre draws from Brooklyn's rich artistic community to create dynamic and engaging theatre on the Brooklyn side of the bridge. Founded by a group of local theatre professionals, the company produces classic and neglected works, as well as new works by its members. Brave New World Repertory Theatre provides its actors, directors, designers, playwrights and stage managers the opportunity to work in and for their own community.

We enjoyed this a lot; there were obviously a lot of people working behind the scenes, as well as the company members selling T-shirts and refreshments at today's performance. Other actors we didn't mention before but who did admirable work today were a very fine William Brenner in the dual ducal roles of Duke Frederick and Duke Senior; Scott Voloshin as Oliver; and Karl Greenberg as Le Beau and Silvius, who played off neatly with Cynthia Babak as Silvius's love, the shepherdess Phebe who prefers the beautiful "boy" Ganymede (actually Rosalind in disguise).

Also, Nixon Cesar as the caring wrestler Charles and the Second Lord at the end; Christine Siracusa, who as the country wench Audrey, was a delight and sparked John Edmond Morgan's most sparkling moments as Touchstone;

and Stephen Sheffer, also funny as the clueless bumpkin William (funny that Shakespeare took his mother's maiden name for Arden Forest and his own given name for the play's dopiest character).

We also have to mention that Eleanor Ruth, in addition to her stellar work as Adam, like William Brenner in particular, used her voice and bearing beautifully to play another character, in her case two, the old shepherd Corin and the country cleric Martext. Shepherdesses were played by Dilya Kurbonova, Kimber-Lee Alston and Christina Offley.


Although the play very definitely rejects the false romanticism of courtly love - the male-disguised Rosalind tells Orlando that "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love" - it ends with the celebration of four weddings, and then the epilogue, strangely, with Rosalind (again, Franny Silverman was pitch-perfect) - or the actor playing her (and it was a boy back in the day) stepping out of character as if to assure the Elizabethan audience that the heroine's daring subversion of society's highly constrained role for women was just a performance.

As You Like It is famously the first citation for the phrase "too much of a good thing." We're sure lots of people who've seen good performances of the play have used wordplay with the phrase, so we won't. Brave New World Repertory was really good today in Prospect Park, though.