All's Well That Ends Well

All's Well That Ends Well is a play that refutes its title, a disagreeable "dark comedy" about a group of people that even the Elizabethans must have found hard to like. It is filled with endless talk of the sort that verges on self-parody. Its complicated plot lacks both adequate motivation and suspense, and its moral is that the end justifies the means. One can sympathize with the magnitude of the challenge that director Allen King accepted. Even if the result cannot be considered a success, individual performances, a few scenes, and much of the technical side of the production are surprisingly good.

Amy Singewald, as the aged Countess of Rousillon, sends her young son off to the French court and reacts to his priggish follies with precisely the right air of elegantly detached concern. Anthony Dawson, as the old lord Lafeu, looks and moves as an old man should; in delivering what could be Polonius-like lines, he shuns both casualness and sententiousness. Peter Johnson, as young Count Bertram's follower Parolles, burlesques his role into an amusing Falstaff figure.

Maeve Kinkead plays Helen, one of the Countess's ladies in waiting and ultimately Bertram's wife. Her voice--an oddly throaty soprano--takes some getting used to, and she occasionally slips into unattractive facial expressions. But she accomplishes her main objective--making Helen's infatuation with Bertram and her long-standing fidelity to him even after he deserts her seem like more than calculated perverseness. One may not see what she sees in her beloved, but one accepts her devotion as genuine and is tempted to condone the questionable strategems she employs to win him back.

Robert Egan, the jester who chaffs with Helen and the Countess, affects an implausibly insouciant air, but derives more humor from his quibbling lines than one would have thought modern audiences could appreciate. Guy Kuttner, in another comic role, spatters the stage with grunts and gutteral gibberish as he pretends to be translating some esoteric tongue; for all its lack of subtlety it's a funny bit.

Dan Chumley's Bertram, on the other hand, is a puzzlement. Thoughtless and rash Bertram may be, but it is difficult to see how he can be the whining child that Chumley would have him in the first two acts. And when he reappears later on, sporting a silky little mustache, he displays a bluff heartiness that keeps ringing false. We are not prepared for Bertram's last petulant falsehoods and final acceptance of Helen in the last act simply because we do not get a real sense of his growing maturity.

A similar misapprehension about the nature of a character seems to underlie Natalie Bider's Diana, the chaste teenager with whom Bertram thinks he is sleeping (while in fact Helen has substituted herself.) Diana's shift from a scatterbrained ingenue to a wordly wise young woman seems less the product of growth than of failure to choose one consistent interpretation of the role.

Richard Backus, as the king of France, looks much too young but has an impressive and resonant voice. If only he took care not to slur phrases and to avoid the Shakespearean sing-song jog that it is so easy to fall into!

As one might expect from the play's poverty of invention, the strongest scenes are the comedy episodes for which King has been able to develop his own non-Shakespearean business. The mock capture and interrogation of Parolles has, with the aid of a few concealing branches become almost a Marx Brothers' episode--fast, illogical, and packed with visual gags.

It is such scenes as the ambush and the parade of the French army that demonstrate the necessity--and King's neglect--of elementary blocking. Throughout most of the play, characters walk onstage, speak, and leave without being given actions to perform. Perhaps King felt that since any movement would basically be arbitrary, it would be better to avoid movements altogether. This strikes me as a seriously misguided decision, since among other things it makes the scenes that absolutely must be planned out seemed rigidly choreographic.

A small but rather decorative set--featuring a superflous canopy resembling the top of a disembodied four-poster--was designed and effectively lighted by William Schroeder. Edith Shroeder's and Thalia Boyajian's simple, colorful costumes and William Sleator's pleasant incidental music both made modest contributions to the evening.