'Shakespeare,’ Baby
Arena’s Production of Ludwig Play a Comic Romp of Movie Culture
by Carolyn Cosmos

Ken Ludwig’s new play, “Shakespeare in Hollywood,” at the Arena Stage, resembles the champagne that was served at its Sept. 12 premiere-a tad intoxicating, with comic sparkle and a slight bite. It’s a whimsical alternative to eating your veggies in a desperately serious world.

This screwball comedy, based on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” is set on a Hollywood sound stage and centers on German director Max Reinhardt’s attempt to make a movie of “Midsummer” in 1934. The virtues of slapstick and literate wit in lockstep were not lost on the audience on the play’s opening night at Arena, where they toasted the actors with laughter throughout the evening.

In his latest endeavor, Washington-based Ludwig-who has written award-winning theater such as “Crazy for You” and “Lend Me a Tenor”-has penned a comic romp that’s deftly treated by director Kyle Donnelly and her cast. They’ve created a celebratory sendup of movie culture and stage craft that careens with lightning speed from lyric verse to pratfalls to bawdy screwing around. It skewers both the egotism and haplessness of high art and the ignorance and money grubbing of lower Hollywood-although high art fares much, much better in the end.

The play has some serious undertones-occasional intimations of the illusions, imaginings and dreams behind art, and the irrational follies of love-that were largely provided by the original playwright in 1595. Although not deep drama, Ludwig’s bubbly story has pacing wit, particularly in his and director Donnelly’s transfer of quick, contemporary film editing style onto the stage.

In the opening scene, director Reinhardt, also a literate and principled artist, is confronted with the narrow-minded nature of Hollywood, which notes his accent, makes light of Hitler, and has to be told that Shakespeare is dead. A hip-swiveling idiot starlet demands that her lover, Jack Warner, the studio chief (deftly depicted by Rick Foucheux), give her a starring role in a respectable film or “you’ll never touch these hips again.” Enter Shakespeare and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Reinhardt is played with immense presence by Washington’s own Robert Prosky, of stage, screen and television’s “Hill Street Blues” fame. Alice Ripley, who’s starred on Broadway and in Kennedy Center productions, gives dipsy starlet Lydia Lansing kinetic panache, at one point hurtling halfway across the Arena stage. Although her performance is a bit over the top, Ripley generates lots of laughs.

Shakespeare, as his play’s title suggests, mixes illusion with reality and combines dreams of fairyland with worldly wedding plans. He also offers a ridiculous play within a play where he mocks “Romeo and Juliet,” which was probably written at about the same time as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Ken Ludwig goes one better than the Bard, embedding Shakespeare’s dream-ridden house of mirrors in a play about making a film that is in turn about a play.

It should come as no surprise then that a supposedly real Oberon, king of the fairies in “Midsummer,” and Oberon’s servant Puck also turn up on the Arena stage. They take parts in the Reinhardt movie with Oberon (Casey Biggs) romancing Reinhardt’s innocent leading lady Olivia Darnell (Maggie Lacey). Meanwhile Puck (Emily Donahoe) dons sunglasses, becomes a cool dude, chases the ladies, and enjoys his sudden and totally undeserved fame.

Oberon and Puck bring magic and mischief to the Hollywood screen scene, and Ludwig’s plot features a meddling mixup originally depicted by Shakespeare: Puck gives a flower that makes all the wrong people fall in love with the first person they see. Ludwig, however, ups the number of love-addled victims, and the resulting chaos of disastrous attachments fuels much of the slapstick and mayhem in the second half of the play.

These odd couplings include a random array of heterosexual and homosexual ties, a character in love with a man wearing the head of an ass (Shakespeare thought of this first), a man in love with his own mirror image, and true love cruelly and comically cast aside for irrational attachment.

It all works out in the end-of course. Oberon and Puck serve as comic vehicles for “outsider” observations, puns, malapropisms and Ludwig’s cultural critiques. The evening’s best performance is turned in by Biggs as Oberon, who effortlessly shifts from Shakespeare’s soaring poetry to contemporary comic repartee, pulling it all off without embarrassing himself.

Everett Quinton is an acrobatic marvel of mugging, horseplay and farcical fooling as he portrays the villain, movie censorship mogul Will Hays. However, Ellen Karas’s overly shrill and fussy Louella Parsons lacked assurance on the opening night, while David Fendig, playing the movie’s romantic lead, failed to project star appeal and seemed an unlikely partner for the lovely Olivia.

If you know your Shakespeare, you can make a parlor game of this play, which is littered with lines from, and allusions to, an array of the Bard’s works. It also offers whole swatches of speeches from “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” that are surprisingly affecting thanks to smart direction and the superb Biggs. The play is also full of populist stereotypes, and some may be offended by the “dumb blond” starlet, but it’s a heck of a romp and a literate tipple at the same time.