All’s Well That Ends Well at OSF

Or: Handkerchiefs

On the chilly night we set down to see Tracy Young’s All’s Well That Ends Well at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, my companion Greer Dubois, a dramatic scholar (in both senses), introduced me to their theory of Gimmick Shakespeare. So much of the bard’s work in America, they posit, is just an inert skeleton for the actor or director to feather with their own creativity, private jests and modern interjections, turning Twelfth Night’s Antonio into Captain Jack Sparrow or stabbing Isabella to cut the knotty silence at the end of Measure for Measure. The verse is shoveled through, the plot inert. Makes for an evening of laughs but all those bits should have been threaded into their own show and not welded cavalierly onto a fourhanded year old play.

Tracy Young is well known in our corner of the world for taking the classics and bedazzling them (sometimes beyond recognition) with her sly glimmers that are always harvesting an abidance of laughs, though sometimes shining out something more powerful. The verse languishes, the plot is perhaps less toothsome than is required to really catch our attention, and the magical heart surgery component is … weird. But the laughs are genuine, and the play takes surprising turns for those both familiar with and new to the story. But most of all we get to see a couple of fine actors make absolute fools of themselves (in the best way) so we don’t have to.

Helena (Royer Bockus) loves Betram (Daisuke Tsuji); she draws him lovingly in her private notebook, pines and spruces over his imitate departure to serve the king of France (Kevin Kenerly), and saves every crumpled handkerchief he gives her in brotherly kindness, unaware that he and his ignorance is the source of all her woe. Betram, fo this part, longs for adventure, egged on by his hanger-on the swaggering but ultimately unimpressive Paroles (Al Espinosa), hoping to make love and war in equal measure. But they are both soooo youuuuuuuuung. Tsuji charmingly pratfalls and flops over in despair at the least little thing, allowing a thorny character some more redemption by being so cute and clueless we can almost (almost) forgive him for slut-shaming a foreigner, Diana (Brooke Ishibashi), in court.

Bockus, wanly stoic beneath a mop of pink hair, swims through Helena’s verse, taking the hairpin turns of growth of Helena with the appropriate, two-wheels-off-the-ground speed. With her theme song (We Belong by Pat Benatar) putting the spring beneath her feet, she turns from an awkward lust-heated teen hiding in her oversized cardigan to a confidant budding physician who goes toe to toe with the chilly and volatile King of France (Kenerly, well at home in Shakespeare, calling our attention forward with his blizzard winds of text), complete with impressive dance moves and zesty instruments produced from thin air (they even get a Bruno Mars inspired dance number together). Though she runs out (as all Helena’s frustratingly do, Curse you Shakespeare!) of lines around act five, her follow through, a quirky kid growing up fast, remains clear right through the ending.

Young has solved a particularly thorny problem by the plays end where Bertram, who has thoroughly proved himself less than heroic by any standard, must place his hand beneath his spouses foot, confining both of them to an uncertain and strained marriage. Rather than forcing him to love her, Helena provides Bertram with proof that she has outsmarted him on the field of love and warfare (a fact as Dubois pointed out, they being much more observant about such things that your easily pleased reviewer, a shadow story to Paroles’ fall by severe military hazing) and he had best respect her as the victor of the field. Returning her cache of crumpled handkerchiefs to wipe her husband’s tears of shame and gratitude (“My eyes smell onions!” one of the bard’s best lines) she sets the stage for the growth of something into friendship and maturity. It’s an ending that’s well played to by gimmicks, the asides and pop-up references. I wish the production had trusted in their source a little more, and made use of all the tools and treasures All’s Well could offer them and their audience, but I remain convinced that all the trappings could not have fit as well on any play of their own devising.