Live Arts’ latest offering is a vigorous and charming production of Amy Freed’s mess of a comedy about the Shakespeare authorship question, The Beard of Avon.
As the play opens, Will Shakspere (Adam Smith), an ignorant country bumpkin who’s nevertheless dreamy and, in his own way, articulate, is stuck in a loveless marriage to Anne Hathaway (Ronda Hewitt) in Stratford-upon-Avon, and flees to London to pursue the theater—as an actor, and not a writer. There, he soon crosses paths with the middle-aged Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (Michael Horan), who’s found time between bouts of philandering and hanging out with the girly Earl of Southampton and generally messing up his life to compose a trunk full of plays that, as a nobleman, he mustn’t deign to present to the public under his real name. After he enlists Will to be his “beard,” or front-man, he discovers that the hayseed has a natural facility with the English language and encourages him to improve the plays any way he can. Eventually, Will has a flood of unsolicited plays from others besides De Vere to lend his magic touch to, including one from Queen Elizabeth (Linda Zuby, who by day is C-VILLE’s business administrator), until, in the world Freed has concocted, the Shakespeare canon is a collaborative effort on a massive scale. Anne, meanwhile, in typical Shakespearean comedy fashion, decides to disguise herself as a man and head to London to pursue her husband. There, she further transforms herself into a harlot and seduces him (and Oxford as well), before heading back home to await Will’s retirement from the theater.
The Beard of Avon
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The production, complete with live period music and top-notch scenic and costume design by Grady Smith and Tricia Emlet, suffers through some rough spots in the first half. Because Freed is so adept at aping Elizabethan language and parodying Shakespeare’s work, her play has the potential to be as baffling to a general audience as any of the Bard’s comedies. Director Betsy Rudelich Tucker stops short at times of fully communicating the layers of humor lurking beneath Freed’s fireworks. Things get rosier in the second half, which is anchored by the sharp comic timing and inventiveness of Hewitt, Horan, Zuby, and Chris Patrick, who, as well as playing two other small parts, imbues the famous Elizabethan actor Richard Burbage with an overwrought yet strangely compact energy.
Anyone who’s touchy about anyone fiddling with the orthodox notion that Shakespeare was none other than the Stratford-upon-Avon glovemaker’s son need not boycott the play. In the process of taking the Shakespeare authorship debate one step forward by putting the Earl of Oxford into the picture (to “Oxfordians,” myself included, the strongest candidate for the “real” Shakespeare), Freed gleefully takes it 10 steps backward by piling up the possibilities and suggesting that any debate can only lead to incoherence—mirrored by how the play itself limps to a muddled conclusion and a feeble stab at profundity. Ironically, it’s the “anti-Stratfordians” who will bristle at how no amount of assertions that the play is fiction and not fact can hide the sense that it feels based on a CliffsNotes version of authorship-debate research. That it leaves out some of the more hotly contested parts (mainly centered around the notion that Queen Elizabeth was no more a virgin than Paris Hilton) is understandable. But Freed’s portrait of Will Shakspere as a gentle, wimpy soul (no trace of the keen and sometimes ruthless businessman and grain dealer that emerges from the records) who’s a bastion of humanity amidst an insane aristocracy, and her portrait of Oxford as a smarmy, soulless creature, buy so completely into deep-rooted and wrong-headed stereotypes that the play is more like a dinosaur than a cutting-edge romp.
Oh well. A funny romp it is, and one that the increasingly stellar Live Arts handles with skill and panache.