Theatre--Review (Acting Unlimited at Theatre 810)

What fun it is to watch a theatre develop its groove. Theatre 810 has developed into a lovely intimate space that caters to intricate little gems of plays or one-act collections. Since the beginning of the year, Theatre 810 has hosted David Ives’ Lives of the Saints )a collection of seven one-act plays), PG-50 (three one-act plays), the double-billed Krapp’s Last Tape and The Zoo Story, and A Woman’s Journey, two one-act plays. Add to this mix The Complete Women of William Shakespeare, a collection of two one-act plays devoted solely to the women of Shakespeare’s life. It’s a cavalcade of femininity on the stage and an opportunity for the women of Acadiana to show their acting chops.

The first play, Second Best Bed by Tim Kelly, is the stronger of the two plays, mostly due to its compact, poignant and funny story concerning Shakespeare’s will. A gathering of gossipy women has converged on Anne Hathaway’s house to discover not the contents of the will—this they already know—but the reaction by Shakespeare’s widow that she has been left only one item: the second best bed. The humor is evident as the play begins—the maid calls the vicious gossip-mongers a bunch of geese—but the revealing tenderness is what people absorb, for the ending is not what it seems.

The second play, When Shakespeare’s Ladies Meet by Charles George, begins nicely enough but its raison d’être—to milk as many jokes from what would happen should Shakespeare’s fictional women converge to give each other advice on love—tends to get old after a while. The audience experiences some hearty laughs upon seeing Juliet (Romero and Juliet), Portia (The Merchant of Venice), Desdemona (Othello), Ophelia (Hamlet), Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra), and Katherine (The Taming of the Shrew) exchange witty banter and actual Shakespearean lines. Three performances are noteworthy from this play. Monique Arabie brought just the right touch of loving innocence and naiveté to the part of Juliet, and Erin Claire Couvillion was delightfully batty as the doomed and detached Ophelia. Jan Corzo, however, played Portia as a shrill shrew, an odd choice that was jarringly out of sync with the rest of the cast. Her noisy, strident performance needed some restraint because Portia’s intelligence does not equate with harsh braying.

On the technical side, the two plays win some and lose some. The set, borrowed almost completely from Walter Brown’s considerable collection and Duncan Thistlethwaite, is perfect as always, and it brought back warm memories of William and Judith. I question not the use of a photograph on the table in When Shakespeare’s Ladies Meet, but only its extremely modern look; it stands out in a most distracting way. The costumes were all pitch perfect except for one: Ophelia’s lavender and silver outfit, while gorgeously stunning and sparkly, clearly is a Mardi-Gras-style outfit that stood out for the wrong reasons. Also there were too many extraneous characters on stage during the latter play: three witches, two women both stage right and stage left, and three fairies. They were unnecessary characters who had little stage business other than to distract from the six ladies on stage. The three witches were particularly egregious in this manner, upstaging the story with their toiling and boiling. And why put the maid (played nicely by Laura Blum) on stage for the prerequisite introduction of turning off cell phones and pointing out exits? It gives the impression that a seasoned actress like Laura made a mistake and entered too early.

Kate Schneider has made a promising directorial debut with this collection of one acts, and has utilized the intimate nature of Theatre 810 to great effect. The plays will continue this weekend as well as next, with Friday and Saturday evening performances at 7:30 and Sunday Matinees at 3:00. Call 484-0172 for tickets to this delightful pairing of Shakespeare’s women.
---Vincent P. Barras