Loves Labors Lost with the Boise Bard Players

Or: Horn Dogs and Ladies Fair

Loves Labors Lost is an absolute bear. Nominally a comedy it’s humor relies principally on puns that (probably, it’s debatable) slayed in the fifteen hundreds but are rather inscrutable today. It’s a brave actor who can line up a score of latin jokes and serve them one after another to the audience. The plot (nerdy King (Taylor Hawker) and his nerdy court swear oaths of asceticism and are immediately shown up and out by The Princess of France (Elke Meyer) and her girl gang. Meanwhile the academicals get uppity and a Spaniard spaniards) does not help; a company has to bring the fire and the electric charge and, to keep the blood moving, certain  witty viciousness because the stakes are so d*mn small. That or come laden with a buttload* of bits.

The Boise Bard Players, loftily setting their cap at this ursine play have bits aplenty and the enthusiasm to kick and drive any donnish humor through the goal post of intelligibility and a hearty laugh from the audience. A jousting of wits between two of the Princess’s attendance Katherine (Athena Hoxsey) and Rosaline (Tiara Thompson) takes a riff on the multitudinous meaning of “light” and “dark” and make each zinger zing.  Or the redoubtable scholars, Holofernes (Luke Massengill) and Sir Nathaniel (Mat Bunk), to whom fall the lions share of latin jokes spice them up with high pitched shrieks of outrage and mercilessly iambic pentameterly correct poems. There’s also a brave juggling of hats that keeps the over-story of the play fresh and zesty: Massengill and Bunk also double as Longaville and Dumaine, hapless, lovelorn lords  lead by the heart into crazy scrapes, while Hoxsey tempers the arch and high class  Katherine with the saucy maid Jacquenetta. Even the Princess doubles as snack ready Constable Dull.

The center of this is the ongoing duel between Rosaline, France’s foremost wit, and Berowne (Asa Warnock), the court’s philosophical japester. Berowne is a notoriously difficult and delicious role; a mix Benedict’s swagger and Jaques’s weariness, shot through the heart by Cupid’s arrow and set to stumbling. Warnock treads the line with delighted revelry, spinning about and collating over the stage, while Thompson, in expert patter-fast conversational Shakespearian continues to put her suitor, and all other comers, on their posteriors with wry grace and admirable clarity.

For all its posturing on male pride and longing, Loves Labors Lost (as a script) comes alive when the Women show up. Despite King Ferdinand’s attempt at scholarly utopia his counterpart and her attendants are streets ahead. Hawker and Meyer have a mirrored sense of fun and wit throughout the play: his eyes glittering with fun and stepping out his decrees, her gleefully cackling and summoning her troops to make mischief. But in the plays sudden fifth act genre change and tone skid (a famously difficult moment to master), it is the Princess who steps up to the plate as a true lover and a true ruler while the King is left floundering (which Hawker portrays admirably). While Berowne and the rest are made animals by their desires, the girls can have their fun and their frolic too as mindful masters of their own hearts. Moreover, the call of their stations, beyond the fields of Navarre, find none of them wanting. It’s a side of the play that keeps it, for all its weird comedy and hurtful snipes, a thing that is worthy of its four hundred plus year place in the cannon and which the Boise Bard Players hit just right.

*Far from a vulgarity this is a legitimate term of measurement meaning carrying at least 450 liters worth of humorous bits.