Welcome to the new era

Two Gentlemen of Verona is Shakespeare’s buddy comedy, his warm-up act, or to put it even more plainly, just not one of his greatest.

This makes Sarah Rasmussen’s accomplishment all the more impressive, because I enjoyed her production of Two Gentlemen – her debut as the Jungle’s new Artistic Director – to the point that I did not realize how inane the plot was until I sat down to write this review.

As one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, Two Gentlemen is in many ways one of his most accessible. The plot is shockingly predictable: two friends fall for the same woman, a spurned ex-girlfriend dresses as a man, there’s a band of outlaws in the woods… all of the typical Shakespearean elements are there, but with none of the more intricate devices that appear in his later comedies, like sleeping potions or double-crossed mistaken identities. The humor is broad, the emotions are right out there, and the psychology is pretty surface-level.

But Rasmussen does a lot with a thin script. She starts by making smart design choices, never hesitating to go just a little bit over-the-top. The set and lighting, by Andrew Boyce and Barry Browning, are in shades of pink with accents (paintings leaning against the wall, hanging lanterns) to set the mood. It doesn’t look gaudy, just kind of absurd – which exactly suits the mood of the play.

Moria Sine Clinton’s costume designs are also luscious, trimmed with lace details and well-balanced pleats and ruffles. Lenne Klingaman, as Sylvia, gets to wear some particularly gorgeous dresses. Whatever you want to call Sylvia’s final-act travelling outfit (dress? cape?), it is both dashing and elegantly-draped. The costumes create a plausible sense of luxury, which is an important counterbalance to the cutesy vibe of the set.

Local Talent

Like Joseph Haj’s directorial debut at the Guthrie, this production is a transplant from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and it is staged with the same tried-and-true finesse of Haj’s Pericles. However, unlike Haj, who imported his original Oregon cast to the Guthrie, Rasmussen has entirely re-cast the show with mostly local actors (except for Klingaman and Christiana Clark, who has been both a local performer and also appeared in the original OSF production).

The show doesn’t suffer one bit from its new cast, since Rasmussen has essentially gathered a who’s-who of some of the best talent in the Twin Cities. As the titular two gentlemen, Christiana Clark and Mo Perry create strong, distinct characters with a believable friendship. Their love interests, played by Maggie Chestovich and Klingaman, could not be more different: Chestovich plays Julia as hilariously adolescent, and Klingaman’s Sylvia is a self-confident woman who knows what she wants. I don’t often walk away from a Shakespearean comedy with such a distinct sense of character from the romantic heroes.

As one might expect from such names, the supporting cast (including Shá Cage, Barbara Kingsley, Wendy Lehr, George Keller, and Andrea San Miguel) is uniformly top-notch. George Keller performs with her dog, Bear, in the role of Crab. Bear, who is both giant and remarkably calm, delivers a show-stealing performance, since there is no bad moment for a massive canine yawn. Keller and Bear also have impeccable on-stage chemistry.

All Women

If you haven’t noticed – or haven’t read anything else about this production anywhere – Rasmussen has assembled an all-female cast for this production. She claims that the casting allows us to re-think our assumptions and expectations about gender roles, but I don’t really buy it. Shakespeare’s play doesn’t deal much with gender norms, so there isn’t actually much room for subversive reinterpretation. The characters are also played and costumed very much according to their originally-written genders. There’s no attention being called to the way gender is performed, the way you might expect from a drag king, and there is no ambiguity about which gender the main roles are supposed to be.

So I wouldn’t say that the production does much to subvert traditional gender roles, but that doesn’t mean the all-female casting isn’t a great thing, both for this production and the theater community. There’s no reason women shouldn’t get to show off their comedic skills and play whatever juicy roles they want. Since Rasmussen hasn’t shied away from multi-generational casting either, her production allows fourteen skilled female actors to showcase their talent in roles that highlight their skills perfectly, regardless of age. We are lucky to get to see them all in one place.

In Conclusion

After Haj’s Guthrie debut, I thought I could tell that he was a thoughtful director who could make smart choices in staging and interpretation. He has created an impressive production of Pericles that I highly recommended – but because the production was fully imported (and because the Guthrie is such a behemoth), it is harder to tell what direction he will take the Guthrie during his tenure as Artistic Director.

Rasmussen leaves me with fewer questions, both because of her use of local talent and because of the way she has planned the rest of her season. In a talk-back panel session at the University of Minnesota in December, Rasmussen emphasized that she is thinking hard about whose stories are being told and by whom. Without being heavy-handed, she is walking the talk.

Two Gentlemen isn’t a ground-breaking story, but it’s told hilariously by the best possible cast, and the rest of the season’s programming continues to involve groups that are under-represented in theater. If they’re all produced at this high a level, the Jungle is in very capable hands.