Three men walk into a bar.
No joke.
That’s how Lauren Gunderson’s play “The Book of Will” gets underway.
After a short, comic bit where an eager actor (wide-eyed Conor Sheehan) bungles Hamlet’s “To Be” speech, it’s 1623. The scene quickly shifts to a London pub where three aging actors lament the death of their friend, Will Shakespeare, and complain about the younger generation. Hack performances of the Bard’s brilliant plays appall them. Before they leave, the famous Richard Burbage (a compelling Paul Laakso) delivers a chilling, grown-up version of Hamlet’s soliloquy.
Such is the set up for Gunderson’s contemporary take on how and why Shakespeare’s plays were saved from oblivion.
If you go
WHAT: “The Book of Will,” a play by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Mona Wood-Patterson.
WHEN: 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday.
WHERE: Merely Underground, 789 Tech Center Drive.
TICKETS: $32 and $36. Performances sold out, sign up for waiting list.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit www.merelyplayers.org or call 247-7657.
Last weekend, Merely Players opened Gunderson’s puzzler. Director Mona Wood Patterson has assembled a velvet-brocaded cast and crew to unspool the mystery of how John Heminges and Henry Condell (Stephen Bowers and Matt Bodo) conspire to find and publish the Shakespearean canon.
The stakes are high. In Shakespeare’s time, scripts were not owned by playwrights but by the companies that staged their works. A performance was simply an event that charged admission to pay expenses. Consequently, scripts were pilfered, pirated, scattered and lost. “The Book of Will” is basically a salvage-story brimming with uncertainty.
Balancing Gunderson’s realistic dialogue with scattered Shakespearean quotations succeeds because of the cast’s dedication to clarity. Nothing slips away. Even bits of contemporary slang fall into place as easily as figs in cream.
Director Wood Patterson balances simplicity with high theatricality as in two sets of parallel scenes that chart how the friends clinch both publishing and patronage. In addition, brief mimed conversations efficiently suggest collaboration. Nothing is extraneous and everything moves the story along, even the modern feminist tropes of wifely persuasion.
To underscore the triumph of finally publishing the folio “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, Tragedies,” a most astonishing theatrical moment emerges. Cast members roll out a handsome wooden printing press and enact an elaborate dance-celebration to music of the period and then music of our era.
It’s unlike the Denver Center’s premiere in 2017, where a brass fanfare let loose sheaves of printed pages from the rafters to cover the stage.
Choreographed by Zach Chiero, Merely’s illusion is fundamentally celebratory, almost Dionysian. It also reminds us that Shakespeare’s words and works are for the ages – his and ours.
Charles Ford’s broad, half-timbered set simultaneously evokes London’s Globe Theatre, an English pub, drawing rooms, a publishing house and the street. The players move easily from pub to stage to apartments. Costumer JoAnn Nevils’ period vests, doublets, boots and britches bring an air of Elizabethan prosperity to the production. Credit Stage Manager Selena Trujillo for steering a ship with dockets of moving parts so that light and sound effects could underpin the playwright’s and director’s intentions. Kudos to the entire crew for quicksilver timing.
Although sold out, sign up for the waiting list. Pre-play chats, 45-minutes before curtain time, are excellent, if underpublicized. Running time is 90 minutes.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.
