All’s Well That Ends Well
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No one would argue that All’s Well That Ends Well is major-league Shakespeare when it comes to richness of language; its quirky surges of poignance and hilarity are to be found more between the lines than in them. Happily, that’s where the focus of this Goodman production lies. Though in the past I’ve found director Mary Zimmerman inclined to substitute attitude for feeling, here she’s assembled a group of actors whose emotional expressiveness and idiosyncratic approaches to their roles amply make up for occasional technical weaknesses. With Julia Gibson’s pugnacious, insecure, charming, wonderfully fallible Helen at its center, Zimmerman’s staging offers the thoroughly contemporary story of a smart woman who makes a series of foolish choices, first falling in love with a youth who’s obviously unready for a serious relationship, then trapping him into marriage. Juxtaposed with the tale of Helen’s heartbreak is a subversively satiric portrait of “the wanton way of youth”–the inclination of young bucks to pursue women and war alike as escapes from commitment.
Helen, a doctor’s daughter, has since her father’s death come under the maternal protection of the warm, wise Countess Rossillion; the countess’s son Bertram is the object of Helen’s adoration, yet she fears to make her feelings known–in part because of the class difference between them, but here more because of her low self-esteem. Helen is an ambitious, plucky kid, however–one of the most engaging aspects of Gibson’s performance is the struggle she sets up between self-doubt and impulsive self-assertion–and she hits on a way to snare Bertram. Knowing that the king of France is mortally ill (the play was probably written within a year of the death of Queen Elizabeth I), Helen offers to cure the monarch using a treatment her father taught her; in return, she asks the king to grant her the husband of her choice.
Elegantly costumed in mid-1600s fashion by Nan Cibula-Jenkins (Thebus’s Countess could have walked right out of a Van Dyck painting) and evocatively framed by Riccardo Hernandez’s set–a rust-colored, stuccoed, bilevel house whose walls part to reveal a sprawling blue sky–All’s Well That Ends Well is by no means a definitive reading of the Bard. Some viewers will wish for a more heroic style, more poetic line readings, more symbolically significant staging, and so on. But Zimmerman’s interpretation makes emotional sense. It speaks to our age’s skepticism while reaffirming our need to believe in redemption; and it reminds us that Shakespeare wrote about people, with all their capacity for error and for change.
