All's Well.......but

I was surprised and disappointed last night that the Classical Actors' Ensemble production of All's Well That Ends Well did not draw a bigger crowd, especially with the excellent reviews it received in several Twin Cities newspapers last week. Just because something's good doesn't mean people show up. Sometimes people show up in droves for bad things. Take our baseball team, for example. The Twins are bad this year, very bad, and people show up in mass even through hail storms and tornado sightings. The beautiful new stadium is of course mainly responsible for the record-setting crowds, but the open-air venue in such a climate as ours, coupled with a losing team, may not keep the fans rolling in for long.

The Twin Cities are well stocked with theater venues, and this theater company is only in it's second year, so large audiences are probably not to be expected. The company may not last in the lovely 1912 building it inhabits, but the Classical Actors' Ensemble is a classy and creative new addition to the theater scene here in the Twin Cities.

Last night I saw the play again, and my friend Pat and I ran the concession stand together. After the play was over, the actors came back on stage and took questions from the audience. Some of the comments and questions were excellent. All's Well That Ends Well is categorized as one of Shakespeare's "problem plays" because it is a mix of comedy and drama. Some in the audience admitted that though they liked the production, they found it's description as a problem understandable as to why it is not one of Shakespeare's frequently performed plays. The audience too was amazed that not only could the actors act, many of them could sing and play instruments in polished musical interludes between scenes. Harry chose to gently dance around the audience last night as he neither sings nor plays an instrument but can do a nice fox-trot.

I was also cheered to learn in this after-play dialogue that the actors' first two weeks of rehearsal involved sitting around a large table dissecting the lines in the play, figuring out the language, and understanding the vocabulary, all of which showed in their execution of their lines. I say cheered because as I have stated before, Shakespeare to me is like a foreign language: it sounds beautiful, but more often than not, I don't understand what is being said. Someone in the cast said exactly the same thing. She said it takes time and effort to appreciate the language and the poetry. Whew! I guess I am not so stupid after all, just uneducated.

Shakespeare creates characters who are not only complex, but embarrassingly human. We now have psychological names for the characters he created: sociopath, narcissist, compulsive liar, character disordered, etc. He was somehow able to understand the complexity of human nature 400 years ago without the benefit of the DSM-IV. Who has not met a woman like Helena who for whatever reason, falls for the wrong man? My friends Merrie Jean and Pat, who attended the play last night, found Helena to be a very aggravating heroine. I, of course, well known for my romantic love-life disasters, found Helena to be endearing. A strong, intelligent woman, but when it came to men, really stupid. I told my friends not to be so critical, even the women of Jane Austen, a few centuries after Shakespeare, continued to have few roles beyond wife and mother. Jane, of course, chose neither role, perhaps so she could be free to write great novels.

Who has not known a Bertram, the man of Helena's dreams? The people who, finding they have been coerced into a bad situation, proceed to show the world their complete lack of decency and sensitivity? Who among us has been lucky enough to have a mother-in-law who sides with her daughter-in-law when her son behaves like a real jerk? Now that is an unusual woman you don't run into everyday. Then we have the king nursed back to health by the savvy and intelligent Helena, only to use his good fortune to boss people around and make them fearful and miserable. And Parolles, the amusing chameleon-type human being, who somehow manages through lack of character to get himself out of life's predicaments with a sort of grace all because he is fashion forward. I've known a few of these types in my time.

Life often presents situations that do not always end well, and most of us know this; but we try desperately to find happy endings anyway. As Thoreau said, most people live lives of quiet desperation. The genius of Shakespeare is perhaps his ability to understood human nature better than anyone and then put these characters on stage for us to laugh at, to criticize, to feel pity for and to be confounded by. Shakespearean characters turn up all the time in our lives: at work, at the mall, and in our own families. Maybe the problem plays make us uncomfortable because life really is one problem after another, with comedy and tragedy all mixed up together, sometimes all in one day.

One's personal pursuit of happily-ever-after can bring out the worst in in each of us, especially when our pursuit butts up against someone else's pursuit. The Americans went so far as to write the pursuit of happiness into their constitution, characterizing it as an inalienable right. Shakespeare would have recognized it as a chimera which can make a real mess of things.