What I learned. . .
The most important lesson, I think, was that an audience as new to Shakespeare as is GRSF’s, is completely up to the challenge of a play with poetry as elaborate as that of Love’s Labour’s. It is, of course, all about specificity and clarity. . . always knowing what you’re saying, being on action, and having enough command of technical skills to serve up the journey of each character’s heart in a way that is easy for an audience to understand.
I think people dismiss Love’s Labour’s as the work of a young playwright showing off and strutting his linguistic stuff. But there is a very tender heart at the center of the action, and ultimately the play is about love suspended, rather than love resolved – unusual for a comedy by Shakespeare.
We stressed the rhyme scheme much more than I’d done in other productions of the play and were far more deliberate about rhyming couplets than at first I thought would be possible for an audience’s ears to sustain. But I learned that so much of the fun lies in the characters’ – especially the men’s – self-conscious awareness of their dexterity with language. It became a game unto itself – for the actors, for the people they were playing, and for our audience. And terrific to watch the women outsmart the men at every single turn.
I also learned that one reason Shakespeare gave the King of Navarre such a long speech about terms and treaties and conditions in the first scene of the play is that it made it possible for the Princess of France -- simply by standing in close proximity and listening with all her might – to fall completely in love with him, thus setting in motion so much of the rest of the action. One of my great pleasures was watching Doug Scholz-Carlson and Tarah Flanagan discuss politics while becoming royally and Royally smitten with each other night after night.
A further pleasure was getting to revisit the work Gregg Coffin and I had done on Love’s Labour’s at PCPA Theaterfest a number of years before the GRSF production. Gregg’s contribution as composer and musical director was indispensable; his delicate, wry, and cinematic style – coupled with his bone-deep understanding of Shakespeare’s plays was an invaluable joy.