Indy Bard Fest sets a crown upon its 2021 season with 'Elizabeth Rex'

Putting the chief titan of world theater onstage as a character is nervy in itself. And it's a key to Indy Bard Fest's daring in ending its current season with "Elizabeth Rex," in which the festival's namesake figure interacts with the title character, Queen Elizabeth I.

The need of either Shakespeare or the Virgin Queen to carry all the dramatic weight themselves is cleverly

Holly Hathaway Thompson in "Elizabeth Rex."

elided by Timothy Findley in making a fictional figure, actor Ned Lowenscroft, the chief provocateur of the action.  He is a principal actor in the Lord Chamberlain's troupe, members of which are housed temporarily in a royal barn because of a curfew imposed on the nation the night before the 1601 execution of an accused traitor, the Earl of Essex. 

After a command performance of "Much Ado About Nothing," the barn-bound actors, the playwright, and their wardrobe mistress receive a surprise visit from the Queen, conflicted about the death sentence she has imposed. Ned is wasting away from venereal disease, his bitterness compounded by the need to hide his sexual orientation and base his onstage stature on his excellence at playing women.

"Elizabeth Rex," as presented at the Theater at the Fort through Sunday, is an adaptation of Findley's play by director Glenn L. Dobbs and two others.  Not knowing the original, I can only assume the adaptation was undertaken to suit the director's feeling for what is most essential about the play, which received its premiere at the 2000 Stratford Festival, and its suitability to Indy Bard Fest's resources.

What is most crucial to the production is the look and sound — really, everything — of the Queen herself, played to a royal turn by Holly Hathaway Thompson. Problems of identity are central to the portrayal, as Elizabeth, unmarried and the daughter of the willful serial monogamist Henry VIII, is forced to support her rule with pretensions to masculinity and all its conventional baggage of power and warrior elan. (It's a deliberate irony that the play is called "Elizabeth Rex," as the Latin word designates a male monarch.) What's worse, smallpox has deprived her of any female allure: her face is disfigured and she's lost most of her hair. The cosmetically whitened face and auburn wig are iconic. 

Both Elizabeth's situation in life and her appearance make any stage presentation of her inherently operatic, as was her arts patronage. Indeed, Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) composed three operas with Elizabeth as central, or at least crucial, character. The trilogy was revived decades ago with great success for Beverly Sills, the American diva, playing the Queen. One part of the trilogy, "Roberto Devereux," specifically deals with her relationship with the Earl of Essex.  

Ned Lowescroft (Jay C. Hemphill) is nursed by a colleague.

Elizabeth had both personal and political reasons for disappointment with her putative lover. The personal regrets loom larger in "Elizabeth Rex," and are enmeshed in her thwarted sense of female identity.

Given a tortured vitality in Jay C. Hemphill's performance, Ned draws out of her an almost therapeutic realization of who she is and the need to come to terms with her hidden love.  But the wheels set in motion by her death sentence on Essex cannot be stopped.

The operatic breadth of this production is creditably represented. The acting brims with larger-than-life energy, given highly stylized hyperbole down to some of the minor roles. There is music and a variety of offstage sound, and the lighting has deft chiaroscuro touches. The costuming is detailed and occasionally grandiose; compromises with period practice are understandable, especially among the men.

With its bales of hay strewn about and its rustic appearance, the set reinforces the irony of a powerful monarch's coming to terms with who she is among wandering, low-status, patron-dependent theater folks. Even though it's her barn, Elizabeth's initial appearance there (delightfully staged) and much of her subsequent behavior indicate she's out of her element.

Eric Bryant plays William Shakespeare, conceived  by Findley as a scrupulous observer of whatever scenes play before him. What else would Shakespeare be? And of course he's working on his next play, currently looking for clues to shaping the character of a certain Egyptian  queen. He's involved at a few crucial points in his own sovereign's dark night of the soul, but Findley and this production adhere to the enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare's personality insofar as it's known. His religious and political views are rather obscure, except that he wisely sided with the Tudor narrative on English history.

Character roles are boisterously and endearingly  played by Matthew Socey as Luddy, Alan Cloe as the past-his-prime thespian Perry Gower, and Susan Yeaw as a near-blind wardrobe mistress whose Cockney candor and garrulousness had me thinking of Angela Lansbury in "Sweeney Todd." Nikki Lynch had the requisite dignity and self-possession as Lady Mary Stanley, the Queen's attendant. Matthew Walls displayed the right suggestion of Irish feistiness as Jack Edmund, the actor playing Benedick in  the comedy just presented to the Queen. 

In the first scene of "Elizabeth Rex," he puts up with a hissy fit from Ned over an onstage mistake. The show is off to the races immediately: the successes and failures of the sock-and-buskin life turn out to reflect life's vicissitudes as well, even if on a different level of consequentiality. "Elizabeth Rex" is a costume drama that manages to insist that how we play the hands we're dealt is a character-defining task faced by life in all eras and at every level, from monarchs to commoners. It's a truism the Bard never failed to find new ways to explore.