First came the opening 'movement piece'...
While not possessing the cultural baggage of "Othello" or "The Merchant of Venice," "All's Well That Ends Well" is a play that receives scant revivals, and has relatively few vocal supporters. As directed by Shana Cooper at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, it tells the story of lowborn Helena (Alejandra Escalante) seeking the love of Bertram (Dante Jemmott) who, despite the compassion of his mother, the Countess (Ora Jones) for Helena's class-bestriding love, finds Helena's love abhorrent for socio-economic reasons, and presumably others to which Shakespeare does not allow us access. The text's unassuming, melancholic tone is dominant in Cooper's production, and in another interpretation could be called Chekhovian, though that would be lending this version too much credence. While spoiler warnings for early modern plays feel hilariously quaint, it bears comment that the play ends after a classic "bed-trick," much ring-swapping drama, and finally Bertram accepting Helena after numerous acts spent evading her both physically and emotionally ("men would LITERALLY rather go to the Florentine wars than" blah blah blah), having realized past oaths have backed him into a matrimonial corner. The title becomes a line of Helena's dialogue, explaining to us that no matter what unpleasantries we might experience along the way, as long as everything ENDS WELL, the story can receive its just deserts (a useful lesson for much of Shakespeare's comedies and their exclusionary endings).
Cooper repeatedly uses movement vignettes (choreographed by Stephanie Martinez) to highlight emotion and establish place, I guess. A movement sensation seems to be sweeping the American theatrical nation, as directors apparently call on such choreographers/designers to create pieces that will tell the story through non-verbal means. Sadly, such usage rarely moves beyond rehearsal-room-level exploration, and one feels like they are watching a production's homework before it's ready to take the final exam. The movement in Cooper's "All's Well..." feels perfunctory and unilluminating, and one resents it for its apparent claims to profundity though obvious lack thereof.
For those casually familiar with "All's Well..." as a script, Cooper's textual omissions are in fact missed. The lack of intimacy between the Countess and the elder Lafeu (William Dick) loses an opportunity for a sweet, golden-years romance rare in the Shakespeare canon, and the cutting of the scoundrel Parolles' (Mark Bedard) damning accusations against the Second Lord (Patrick Agada) neglects a necessary dark corner of the play's universe. Jammott's Bertram is neither fish nor fowl, neither growing-pained adolescent nor well-matured cad: the central coupling of Helena and Bertram is thus rendered neither a redemptive conclusion at the end of a romantic odyssey, nor a pairing so problematic as to be fascinating on its own meta-theatrical terms. He's just a kid who sucks, and while love cannot choose its origin, the characteristic discrepancy between our two "lovers" is rendered more laughable than troubling.
The characterization of Parolles here, too, feels like a swing-and-a-miss. Bedard enters the stage as an immediately creepy proto-pickup-artist, with a certain degree of wit, but far too much stranger-danger for total charm to emerge. A Parolles we love to hate for recognizing our own cowardice and rapscallion tendencies would have been a useful lever against a production that largely teters in blithe respectability, giving the audience neither a full meal nor leaving us starving, but renders a puzzling play unsatisfying for reasons exterior to the script's inherent genre-based issues. When Parolles is unmasked as a coward to his fellow soldiers through a gulling plot of fake kidnapping, the resulting scenes should be hilarious and unnerving, as we question how much better we would do in his place. Cooper's staging of these scenes (on a thrust not often kind to her mid-center duologues) never achieve the release that make Parolles' "trial" fun and ultimately cathartic.
I am about to make an abysmally unfair statement, and say Cooper's production of Shakespeare's autumnal "problem play" feels unenergetic, lacking enthusiasm from the cast and production team. Such an aspersion is egregious on many counts, most foundationally being I did not sit in on rehearsals, production meetings, design runs, tech rehearsals, and am thus, on a purely social level, unable to account for the level of 'enthusiasm' for the play possessed by any single artist within its orbit. However, the personal intention of such artists becomes moot when the public-facing object results in a production that never rises to the task of making a case for this rarely-seen late Shakespeare comedy, nor succeeds in finding any notable protein amongst the drama's corporeal being. One sadly reaches the end of the show understanding the drama's relative lack of notoriety, and unconvinced such a classification is undeserved. CST's "All's Well That Ends Well" is unlikely to offend any camp, which turns out to ultimately be a shame, because I think Shakespeare wanted us to reach this story's conclusion appalled at how often fiction caters to and bends around the orbit of undeserving men. Such possibilities are unexcavated in Cooper's timid reimagining.
