SEELEY LAKE – Lively hit tunes from the 1960s and a bright pink stage greeted the large audience that assembled their chairs and blankets on the Double Arrow Lodge grounds Aug. 1 for the 2019 Montana Shakespeare in the Parks' (MSIP) presentation of "The Merry Wives of Windsor." The music and colors were the first hints that this production of the play would not be set in Renaissance times. It has become an accepted practice to set Shakespearean plays in more modern time periods.
In a phone interview, MSIP Executive Artistic Director Kevin Asselin said, "It's a great way to keep Shakespeare alive by investigating ways in which he's relevant today to our societal issues, our political issues, to our demographics, to the way in which we live and also to create a greater amount of accessibility... especially for our young people."
While some contemporary productions choose to translate the Shakespearean text into completely modern English, occasionally even slang English, most-like the MSIP production of "Merry Wives"-primarily retain the Elizabethan text with occasional modifications of particularly difficult passages.
Judging by the audience reaction, the production succeeded very well. The crowd erupted with laughter when the MSIP troupe took liberties with the Elizabethan passage in the laundry basket scene. In the original scene, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page make plans to humiliate their duplicitous suitor Falstaff by tricking him into concealing himself in a "bucking" [dirty laundry] basket.
The wording is strange to modern ears: "Look, here is a basket; if he [Falstaff] be of any reasonable stature, he may creep in here. Throw foul linen upon him, as if it were going to bucking; or –it is whiting-time-send him by your two men to Datchet-mead."
MSIP side-stepped the unfamiliar terminology and references by having Mistress Ford simply instruct her servants to dump the contents of the basket "into Lake Alva." The audience roared at the familiar reference. They did the same with the substitution of states-Montana, Wyoming and Wisconsin, etc.-for unfamiliar British locations.
In another scene where one of the minor characters started singing a song, MSIP substituted Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" and the audience spontaneously started singing along.
On the other hand, laughter and clapping made it obvious the audience had no trouble understanding Mistress Page's Elizabethan English when she said, "Why, I'll exhibit a bill in the parliament for the putting down of men." Nor later when she said, "I will find you twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man."
And if the crowd reaction wasn't evidence enough that the Renaissance play adapted well to a 1960s setting, comments after the play confirmed it.
Shelley Liknes from Lincoln said, "Unbelievable! And so humorous. Weaving modern times into it so everybody identified. They were really good."
Linne Eustance said, "Fantastic! I like the comedies. The interaction with the crowd. The movement. The costumes. I like that take on more modern times – the 60s – those dresses were right out of my junior high times."
Beneath the over-the-top slapstick, soap-opera humor of the play, however, runs a more serious thread. Asselin noted that "Merry Wives" director Marti Lyons chose the 1960s because that period experienced a burgeoning of the Women's Movement, reflected in turn by today's #Me-Too Movement.
The MSIP play ends on a provocative note. Throughout the play Master Ford believes that, given the opportunity, his wife will be unfaithful to him. Disguised as Mr. Brook, he pays Falstaff to try to seduce her, purportedly because if she is promiscuous with Falstaff, she will be the same with Brook. Ford/Brook's actual plan is to shame his wife by catching her in a scandalous act. Yet when all deceptions are revealed in the end and it is deemed Falstaff has been sufficiently humiliated and thus forgiven, Ford/Brook says to Falstaff, "To Master Brook you yet shall hold your word, For he tonight shall lie with Mistress Ford."
While the men think this a clever turn of phrase and go off laughing, Mistress Ford stands alone on the stage, perhaps with a tear in her eye. Rather than being praised by her husband for her faithfulness and virtue, she has become objectified, "meat" for his sexual gratification.
Asselin said he hopes the play, especially the ending, provoke what he calls "windshield conversations," which he defines as "the conversation you have when you get back to the car with your family and you drive home. I'm always interested in ways that we can keep the plays alive beyond the performance."
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