IndyShakes' 'Love's Labor's Lost': Life as self-denying seminar shows what love's got to do with it

Ferdinand, King of Navarre, and his lordly attendant Berowne practice avoiding women while a couple of visiting French huntresses regard them mockingly in the background. (Company publicity photo)

The artificiality of the King of Navarre's decision to create and maintain a small group of male attendants abjuring the company of women gets a broader cultural grounding through the images and practices of yoga in Indianapolis Shakespeare Company's production of "Love's Labor's Lost."

This orientation poses both opportunities and problems for the show, which opened Thursday night at the troupe's wonderful home of Taggart Memorial Amphitheatre at Riverside Park. Some of the satirical thrust of Shakespeare's comedy gets redirected toward yoga and its cross-cultural vogue from the late 20th century into our own time. 

The focus on overgrown and elaborate language is thus somewhat reduced, yet, on the plus side, the King's peculiar decision seems less abstract and willful when given a culturally relevant rationale. Yoga lends the project useful visual elaboration in movement and stageworthy presentation, especially effective in an outdoor production. 

But it perhaps skirts the difficulty of communicating the tangled punning and other wordplay, mixed with topical references totally beyond our ken. We are all a bit like the constable Anthony Dull in keeping up: He pays attention to others' words, but confesses to understanding little. "Love's Labor's Lost" rewards reading if you're patient enough to keep jumping into the footnotes of whatever edition you have. Fortunately, it plays well even without advance familiarity in a production as fun-loving as this one.

Claire Wilcher directs the show with considerable cast attention to the gaudy parade of verbiage, but sometimes I wished for more consistency and verbal revelry. You'd love to hear the pedant Holofernes lip-smackingly savoring his decorative Latin phrases, and the practical wit of the Princess of France and her entourage is crucial in forcing the collapse of Navarre's experiment, so I wish their giggling sorority-sister bonding hadn't been quite so prominent. It tended to obscure their superiority to the men (with the exception of the clear-sighted Berowne). 

Most of the Princess' reality-based wisdom came through well in Betsy Baier's portrayal, however. The other young women had abundant vividness and energy as played by Maria Souza, MJ Rawls, and Jaddy Ciucci. But more evident is the hypocrisy of the three men (the other two  ardently played by Kerrington Shorter and Carlos Medina Maldonado) who have signed on with the King to devote themselves to study, giving up all sensuous pleasures in favor of mantras and mindful meditation. 

Berowne is the character worth hanging onto as central to "Love's Labor's Lost"'s meaning. This skeptical participant in the King's plan is an eloquent guide to enjoying the play across its full arc. He has been taken by some commentators as the veiled voice of Shakespeare himself — always a risky conclusion to make about the guarded Bard. 

In the insightful portrayal of Zachariah Stonerock, Berowne's behavior rests upon the bedrock of common sense, even as he is swept up like the other men in infatuation with the visiting Princess and her three single ladies. He ends up being the last one exposed in violation of the severe pledge. On opening night, the discovery scene among wooden chaise lounges of the king's and his lordly attendants' secret wooing was delightful.

Signs of uneasiness with obscurities in the text popped up: Wilcher allows some insertion of non-Shakespeare language in a few places, mostly toward the end. This can be justified in part because of the emerging consciousness that the characters know they are in a play. Thus, you have the four men briefly going over how well their outlandish disguises in the second act went, and then there is Scot Greenwell as Dull commenting on the difficulty in dragging offstage a deer carcass  (the result of the Princess' archery prowess). 

The oddest one of these insertions was the briefest, and Thursday it got a burst of laughter from the audience. Jen Johansen as Holofernes objects to the raillery her (his?) impersonation of one of the Nine Worthies gets from the men. (She also juicily played the hugely contrasted role of Jacquinetta, a country wench.) The guys heckle Holofernes' turn as Judas Maccabaeus, slandering that hero as Judas Iscariot.  The disruption has her sternly upbraid them: "This is not generous, not gentle, not humble." The added insertion was "'K?'" As florid as Holofernes is, such a teen colloquial tag did not strike me as true to the schoolmaster's character, and certainly not to his style. 

Style is the definition of this character and one other in a way that anticipates modernism.  Don Armado is a Spanish nobleman living on the estate of the king,  played here with the right air of authoritative self-delusion by Shyendra Chandrasenna. Bill Simmons, costumed in extravagant bad taste that suits his character, projected Don Armado's grandiloquence at every turn.  He rasped and leered in florid tones, often posed in open stance like a peacock in full display mode. 

Holofernes and Don Armado are the play's foremost exemplars of a personal style that subsumes any substance. What they have to say is deeply embedded in how they say it. They are part of the playwright's mockery drawing upon his contemporary John Lyly, whose fast-change mixtures of verbal expression and syntactical intricacy I held on this blog ten years ago to have a literary representative for our own time in the poetry of John Ashbery.

Minor characters of distinctive personal style and little substance are Costard, "a clown" as he's represented in the dramatic personae, and Nathaniel, a curate thoroughly devoted to Holofernes. Daniel Martin is exuberant as the sly underling at court, and Charles Goad fills out capably Shakespeare's portrait of a sycophant. 

Besides his dimwitted yet occasionally droll requirements to be Dull, Greenwell is painstakingly officious with a touch of snark as attendant to the French ladies. I don't know what to make of Boyet's black-and-white costume with the floppy hat, which looks like something out of the Met Gala. You couldn't take your eyes off it. It's the tour-de-force of Guy Clark's costume designs, right up there with his Don Armado creation.

A design triumph of equal stature is Todd Mack's bright, virtuosic sound, though the accompaniment to Moth's famous songs at the end obscured the text. In that role, Devan Mathias' spoken lines as Armado's page were always crisply delivered and street-smart. Finally in the design department, an honorable mention goes to Nick Kilgore for the look of the stage, throughout which the themes of both imposed austerity and aristocratic leisure are nicely upheld. Across this scene Laura  Glover's lighting lent magical, balanced richness, especially in the second act as the night sky participated.

Despite a few discordant notes as I took in its premiere, this production has an overall degree of commitment, integrity, and flair that both honors the young genius of Shakespeare and puts this early comedy across well in 2023. 

The show is certainly generous, even if not gentle or humble. But that's as it should be, 'K?