CHICAGO — Of all the women in Shakespeare, Helen in “All’s Well That Ends Well” is perhaps my favorite. Courageous, determined and delightfully verbose, she’s more like a character in a Jane Austen novel.
Low-born Helen — she is merely a physician’s daughter, heaven forfend — fights off any and all attempts to diminish her prospects in love. To snag her guy, she reinvents herself as a healer, sneaks into his bed, arranges to get pregnant, travels halfway across Europe, risks life and limb and, all this time, delivers some of Shakespeare’s most beautifully penned observations about relationships, mortality and life itself.
“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven,” she observes, striking one of the great blows for rational thought anywhere in Shakespeare.
A feminist interpretation of the play would lament how much of Helen’s talent is wasted on the questionable object of her affections, boring Bertram. But that was Shakespeare’s point. If ever a 17th century play made the case for women as leaders in need of a bigger canvas, this is that play. And Helen is the reason.
I yak on at such length because the lead performance from Alejandra Escalante in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s spring mainstage production is so utterly delightful. Escalante achieves that rare feat (especially by classical actors from out of town at this particular theater) of both standing out and melding into the ensemble. She’s got pace, energy and all of Helen’s requisite vitality, but what makes the performance so notable is how present and spontaneous she appears. Helen creates her world in this play by grabbing her own destiny and we see freshly minted Helen coming up with improvised plans in real time. Or so Escalante makes it feel. Especially when working with her sidekick, Diana (Emma Ladji).
Ladji’s work here is strikingly generous: her witty character is enamored of her pal and Ladji gives her a wry sense of humor and a delightfully bemused quality. Her beau, played by Dante Jemmott, takes longer to come around, of course, but Jemmott charts his journey toward an understanding of love. Even the great Francis Guinan, playing the grumpy King of France, demurs to this life force. Grumpily.
Director Shana Cooper’s production, which opened Friday night and also stars the skilled players Ora Jones, Mark Bedard, William Dick and Elizabeth Ledo is an elegant affair, richly designed by Andrew Boyce, with a classy set of costumes from Raquel Barreto. I’ve seen a spate of rehearsal-room Shakespeare, or other such deconstructions, and it’s invigorating to see this show focus instead on a rich, fresh pallet, conceptually contemporary but not anachronistically so. It makes great use of fabric and music and a kind of gentle sway rolls over the whole evening, wherein the language feels fresh and crystal clear. Cooper is a conceptualistic and I thought this show worked immeasurably better than her recent “Lady From the Sea” at Court Theatre, mostly because the gestalt is less pretentious and the director’s ideas better aligned with the text.
“All’s Well That Ends Well” is generally seen as much as one of Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays as a comedy and it typically attracts ambitious directors (I still remember Mary Zimmerman’s 1995 production at the Goodman Theatre). Challenge one is finding the right tone and making the play’s ultimate resolution feel organic to its world, even if it’s an optimistic take on reality. In simple terms, this play is about a young woman’s determination to find life, whatever the circumstances.
You get that vibe in the first scene, a funeral. Already, two fathers are dead and the King of France is not feeling great, so all of Helen’s determined activities in service of her own destiny are immediately placed in that context. As I watching, I kept thinking about all the young people who are born to familial sorrow of some kind of another, and who have to move forward from there. This is their play.
Love often begins at funerals, of course, since those events (like this play) put everything in context of mortality. We’re only her for a while, Helen realizes, so you might as well go after the lover who only looks out of reach. Go, girl.
As the Countess observes in that first scene: “Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none.”
Good advice. To borrow a corporate cliché from this time of nervous recovery: “now more than ever.”
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(Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.)
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Review: “All’s Well That Ends Well”
When: Through May 29
Where: Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Courtyard Theater on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $49-$90 at 312-595-5600 and www.chicagoshakes.com
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