Have a great life, lovebirds!Ĭolorado Shakespeare Festival Producing Artistic Director Timothy Orr intentionally assigned both hot potatoes to female directors (Carolyn Howarth and Wendy Franz) who both took liberties with the text that empower Shakespeare’s women to deliver some of the most damning assessments of the offending men. She fakes her death, sleeps with him in disguise and gets pregnant, so he is then forced to either marry her or face charges of seduction and abandonment. Or for Bertram, the mean-spirited philanderer who is ordered to marry her. At least not for Helen, a doctor’s daughter who falls for the wrong guy. In “All’s Well that Ends Well,” it doesn’t – end well, that is. And yet, Shakespeare would want us to want them to be reunited in the end. This year, that means taking on two of the Bard’s more obvious problem plays in the #MeToo era – “ Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “ All’s Well That Ends Well.” In the former, a scoundrel named Proteus is called out of town and instantly leaves his intended behind, saying, “I will forget that Julia is alive.” He then doggedly pursues his best friend’s girlfriend, fully unaware that Julia, in disguise, is right by his side throughout the play, witnessing his unforgivable lechery first-hand. Take the 65-year-old Colorado Shakespeare Festival, which prides itself on regularly rotating throughout the entire Shakespeare canon, so – no dodging. It seems being the greatest writer in the history of the English language still counts for something – although you can’t help but squirm from time to time watching his problem plays play out. In Colorado, Shakespeare is on stage everywhere from Boulder, home of the second-oldest summer Shakespeare Festival in the county, to Colorado Springs to Longmont to Centennial. With everything from classic novels and TV shows to Broadway musicals now being reconsidered through a more enlightened (less patriarchal) lens, Shakespeare would seem to be a major candidate for culture canceling. Shakespeare has written some of the greatest female characters in the English language, but when it comes to being woke in 2022, the Bard is, at best … a restless sleeper.
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