Love's Labours Lost

I spent last Sunday night swathed in the fragrance of blooming roses, lost in the pageantry of love’s sweet delight. And that was only before 11:00, while I was watching OSF’s production of Love’s Labours Lost!

Shakespeare wrote a linguistic feast, and the Festival has given us a surfeit of visual beauty as well. I’ve always found Shakespeare’s poetry in this play like walking through a rose garden, and it’s as if I found my psychological twin in scenic designer Christopher Acebo! He filled the space with roses: they grew out of the stage, they drifted from the sky. Thanks to costumer Christal Weatherly, they even emanated from the characters! OSF’s Love’s Labours Lost is a pageant of poetry, both aural and visual!

“Pageant,” incidentally, is one of those words that bring out the dramaturg in me. If I were a Soviet sleeper spy, it would be the word that activates my mission to overthrow capitalist empires or something. So let’s talk a little about pageants.

There are places that Love’s Labours Lost is a sleeper, and not of the Cold War espionage variety. Those places are where Shakespeare uses stage techniques that resonated with his audience, but are foreign for us. The masque and allegorical presentation of the Nine Worthies were entirely familiar to 16^th Century Brits. They were used to miracle and mystery plays that presented Bible characters and allegories of different vices and virtues. And they were generally fun! Imagine a life with no TV, no internet, hardly any books. You spend your day breaking your back in a field, or making gloves in a poorly-lit room surrounded by the smell of other people’s shit. Your entertainment is Christian mass and miracle and mystery plays. Your attention span is longer since you don’t have Youtube, and you want to spend as much time watching spectacles as possible anyway before you get back to your miserable life where you only bathe once a year.

It’s kind of fun to imagine, but it’s not our culture. The pageantry we’re used to is J-Pop and The Nutcracker. So while the audience my have been thinking about whether or not they remembered to call the dog sitter during the girls’ little joke on the boys, and what kind of ice-cream they ought to buy after the show during the Nine Worthies, they were there and enjoying it when Dumaine (John Tufts) started singing and dancing his love letter, and they were practically clapping along when the boys came out dressed as Muscovites to Tschaikovsky’s familiar strains.

Is Love’s Labours Lost a labour to behold, hopelessly dated and fit only for the most self-despising culture vulture? No! It’s a beautiful play, as beautiful as an evening walk in a blooming rose-garden. It certainly has potential to become dramatic drivel on stage, but in the hands of OSF’s expert artists, Shakespeare’s poetry lives and breaths and engages our 2011 audience as much as a four-hundred year old play can.