TN Shakespeare Company Presents ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, Now thru 12/20

Embracing the joy and mystery of the season, Tennessee Shakespeare Company's fairy tale staging of William Shakespeare's heroic comedy All's Well That Ends Well continues its eighth performance season: Celebration 400.

All's Well That Ends Well will run December 10-20 in Dixon Gallery & Gardens' Winegardner Auditorium and will honor the company's founding Board member and namesake of its Education Fund, Mrs. Barbara B. Apperson.

The production is sponsored by Virginia Apperson and Pete Williams III, Chip and Brooke Apperson, John and Lacy Apperson, Margaret and Owen Tabor, Rose M. Johnston, John and Katherine Dobbs, and Independent Bank.

Directed by TSC Founder and Producing Artistic Director Dan McCleary (most recently at the Dixon: Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet), All's Well That Ends Well is a seasonal fairy tale of faith, forgiveness, and love in this production that will gravitate toward toward the play's mysticism. Young Helena goes on a hero's quest in search of love; and, armed with the healing power of her deceased father, she conceives of an astonishing plan that breathes life into all around her and wins the heart of the boy.

All's Well That Ends Well features a professional, Equity ensemble from around the country and Memphis.

Returning to TSC are Isaac Anderson* (Romeo and Juliet) as Parolles, Brian Sheppard* (Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew) as Lavatch, Stuart Heyman (As You Like It, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew) as LaFew, Joey Shaw* (Romeo and Juliet) as the King, and Michael Khanlarian (As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Twelfth Night) as Dumaine I.

New to the company this season are Lydia Barnett-Mulligan* as Helena, Bradley Karel as Bertram, Sarah Brown* as the Countess, Jeanna Juleson as the Widow, Caitlin McWethy as Diana, and Heather Roberts as Dumaine II.

The design team includes Memphians Rebecca Bailey Klepko (costumes), Brian Ruggaber (scenic and properties), Jeremy Allen Fisher (lighting), and Barry Gilmore (music arranger/live hammered dulcimer and strings). The stage manager is Melissa A. Nathan*, with assistant Ashley J. Nickas.

Inspired by the artwork of Maxfield Parrish, the production features a neo-classical design found only in the imagination, including flowing costumes of era-less antiquity that combine to create a time of both structured and earthly beauty.

The story launches itself from the recent deaths of two fathers, prompting the King of France to take the only son (Bertram) of one of the fathers as royal ward in his Parisian court. Six months earlier, the only daughter (Helena) of a famous physician is made ward to Bertram's mother (the Countess) when her father dies. The two teenagers, Bertram and Helena, have grown up and lived together, prompting both, though Helena with far greater articulation, to fall in love with each other.

The King is dying of a fistula, and he has recently waived off all doctors in accepting his death. Helena, with the Countess' admittance, flies to the Court to heal the King with her father's mystical powers. In so doing, she receives whatever she wishes from the King. She chooses for a husband Bertram, who is made to marry Helena against his spoken wish. Angered at being made to marry while a minor and also forced to stay home from the Florentine wars, Bertram and his strutting braggart of a friend Parolles escape to the battlefields and Italian women, leaving behind what would seem on the surface to be an unbreakable riddle for Helena to solve if she ever hopes of gaining him as a husband.

Journeying to Italy by herself and in disguise, employing newfound confederates Diana and her mother there, manipulating a bed trick with Bertram and announcing her own false death, Helena sets the stage for a final act before a confused King that blossoms with rebirth and presages the redemption of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale.

The nucleus of the story is taken from a nearly 300-year-old Italian book of novellas titled The Decameron by Boccaccio. He creates a book that treats on multiple aspects of love as written by seven young women and three young men over ten days while in seclusion outside Florence to escape the plague. Shakespeare, however, invents most of the supporting characters who lend both gravitas and comedy to the main theme, and, in the case of Parolles, a singular sub-plot of shame and redemption.

"We are celebrating William Shakespeare's life this year in the 400th anniversary of his passing, and so my first considerations of the play are those that help us appreciate the man during the time he is writing it," says McCleary. "What I find personally astonishing is the period during which he was likely creating this play (1602-1605) he also was writing or circling around his masterworks of Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. All's Well would seem to be no kin to these creations in that it focuses on young love, a female hero, a fairy tale, and humorous conceit. But to me, it seems an artistic oasis to Shakespeare in his period of male tragedy. In All's Well, he explores the female hero's journey (as opposed to the male journey), which by definition requires not death to define achievement but rather resurrection, redemption, faith, and forgiveness. It clearly has a thematic resonance for Shakespeare because these components would inspire his final outpouring of plays, referred to as Romances, but featuring the redemption of the older men by the younger women, often the plays' daughters.

"All's Well offers a rare text, which I hope no one would find the need to modernize or simplify, and clowns and conceits that are immediately recognizable and genuinely funny. The play doesn't quite work for us if we don't, from the outset, endow the young lovers with genuine love for each other - although, as we know, a teenaged boy is not nearly so far along in his emotional and articulate expression of love as is a girl. And while some scholars choose to find problems with the drawing of Bertram, the boy who flees love and forced marriage in an effort to find freedom, honor, and beauty, I cannot. Shakespeare draws a boy many of us might personally recognize were we in his situation, while also deliberately allowing the women to be the main characters. This means they are, by necessity, more fully realized. Our production embraces these non-traditional creations."

To post a comment, you must register and login.