SOU Theater building, courtesy of SOU
I saw the 8 P.M. showing of SOU Theater’s The Merry Wives of Windsor on Saturday, March 1st. The performance is another reimagination of a Shakespearean classic, this time a comedy. While the play itself was written as set in the fifteenth century, the Director thematically revamped it by placing it in Pennsylvania, in 1933, right after the end of Prohibition. The music is bouncy, and the fashions are traditionally American, which creates a bustling, suburbia environment. The brochure invokes American Gothic. Even so, the play itself is composed almost entirely of original Shakespeare.
It’s mostly “about”, to the extent that it’s about anything, a disreputable knight named John Falstaff (Liam Thompson) who has fallen on hard times. Coming to Windsor, Falstaff cooks up a plan to woo the wealthy matriarchs of the Ford and Page households (Julia Gibbs and Violet Love). The merry wives immediately figure out what Falstaff is up to, and put into motion an elaborate plan to punish him for his audacity by leading him on. Ironically, this arouses the suspicions of Mrs. Ford’s jealous husband (Shane Howard), who is obsessed with and terrified of being a cuckold. Most of the play’s laughs come from Falstaff’s continued humiliations and Ford’s terror and rage at his wife’s (staged) infidelity. Meanwhile, three suitors compete for the hand of the Pages’ debutante daughter, Anne (Miyabi Saito).
I had no familiarity with the play at all prior to seeing it and had a little trouble figuring out what was going on in the beginning, but it didn’t take me long to catch up. Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford are good friends and generally upstanding citizens, but they are going awfully far to mess with a guy they could just as easily ignore, to the point of endangering what they’ve already got. Their schemes aren’t stupid at all, but wrenches are constantly being thrown in the works. Perhaps the merry wives just have too much time on their hands.
Falstaff isn’t morally admirable or competent or brave, but he has a greasy, slightly desperate and insecure hustler vibe that endears him to the audience. Also, there’s a limited amount of times you can watch a guy get beat up with a rolling pin before you feel a little sorry for him. Similarly, there’s something very honest about Mr. Ford’s angry and fearful monologues to the audience, and it’s more than a little satisfying when he and his wife get everything straightened out.
Falstaff’s tribulations at the townsfolk’s hands reminded me a lot of Malvolio’s suffering in Twelfth Night, another Shakespeare comedy, where the steward is subjected to endless pranks designed to bring him down a couple pegs. Unlike Malvolio, however, at the play’s end Falstaff finally cuts a break. When he admits to his bad behavior, the Pages and Fords invite Falstaff for wedding celebrations, and the play ends with the cast executing a ruthlessly practiced and carefully coordinated dance number.
The play’s a very good one even by SOU Theater standards, which makes its short debut especially tragic, running from only February 27th to March 2nd. This was partially because of internal problems in the play’s production, like lost rehearsal time, and the snow barrage that closed Ashland down for a week in February. But Merry Wives is very good while it lasts, and probably my personal favorite play I’ve seen at SOU.
