A Shakespeare 'All's Well,' More Romance Than Comedy

As romantic heroes go, Bertram in "All's Well That Ends Well" is a dud. He's vain, gullible and takes no interest in the thoroughly winsome Helen. So why is she so stuck on him?

The answer, in director Joe Banno's quirky and meditative production for the Washington Shakespeare Company, is that she just is. Literally. Fiercely. She is stripped down to her fancy 1930s undergarments (this is pre-World War II Europe) and clinging to him like a tree frog, arms around his neck and legs locked around his waist. And all before the Shakespearean dialogue properly begins.

"How understand we that?" an old lord asks once Bertram's family has gathered. Chuck Young delivers the line with a sidelong glance at the half-undressed Mundy Spears, a Helen prowling on all fours across the long dining room table toward Parker Dixon's reticent Bertram.

As a disarming tactic, Banno's opening fantasia certainly turns the trick. Not only does it endow Bertram with an obvious (if inexplicable) magnetism, but its low-key dreaminess and puckish use of foreign-language tapes -- banal English phrases repeated in French -- signal a dry tone with hints of the surreal. It's not anything goes, yet with due consideration, anything indeed just might go.

That makes it possible, for instance, for the Fool (Nathan Weinberger) to mechanically drop his trousers and climb into bed with Bertram's mother (Cam Magee), a countess who's only half-scandalized as he delivers his riddles as dryly as a clerk. And if Parolles, the conniving dandy who somehow draws Bertram into his sphere of influence, is rendered as a full-blown Falstaffian buffoon, the lack of subtlety is made up by Ian Armstrong's fine pompous clowning.

Still, Banno (who contributes music reviews to The Washington Post) reasonably works the play less as a comedy than as a romance, with death and redemption and improbabilities buffeting the characters toward the title's promised happy end. Helen wins Bertram by curing the ailing king of France, and the king won't accept Bertram's "no" as he grants our heroine her conjugal wish. Bertram complies, but then rushes straight toward war -- the Italian front, we gather, as the intermittent foreign-language tapes offer amusing new phrases.

Parallel traps drive the longish second half, with Parolles getting set up by rivals while Helen arranges her "bed trick" (the in-the-dark masquerade that lets her consummate her marriage while her husband thinks he's with someone else). This unraveling is more about plot than personality; "All's Well" is not a particular heyday for actors, which is surely among the reasons it's staged less frequently than most of Shakespeare's comedies.

Spears makes a lively and vulnerable Helen, and the rest of the cast is generally functional, if not flashy. The actors sand down the mannerisms and hew to Banno's cello-y mood, adding the odd rimshot as they glide amid the stark black-and-white design at the Clark Street Warehouse. The two-tone conceit largely extends to Melanie A. Clark's costumes, too, creating an either/or world without making a special fuss about it.

Set designer Hannah J. Crowell's immense gat-and-moll mural on the back wall seems to promise something in an aggressive Weimar noir, but this isn't the kind of show that dives all the way into anything. Its calling card is the nicely understated sound design of moody music-box jingles and cabaret melodies, plus the odd bilingual blurt from the comic language tapes.

"The mark . . . of Banno," a local actor commented melodramatically afterward, about the show's measured liberties. Just so, and in this case, a very droll mark indeed.

All's Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Joe Banno. Lights, David C. Ghatan; sound design, Christopher Baine. With Kim Curtis, Joseph Thornhill, Jay Saunders, Stephanie Roswell, Lindsay Haynes, Jay Hardee and Lynn Sharp Spears. About 2 1/2 hours. Through Dec. 7 at the Clark Street Playhouse, 601 S. Clark St., Crystal City. Call 800-494-TIXS (8497) or visit http://www.washingtonshakespeare.org.