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Shakespeare - whoever he was - caught the zeitgeist of Elizabethan England pretty well. How did he do it? Soon after his arrival in London, in 1586, he began to pop out roughly two plays a year regularly. Between acting and writing, he had to be out among the groundlings that were his audience at the Globe; if he used some sort of notebook to scribble down observations or names and bits of dialogue that caught his imagination the way F. Scott Fitzgerald did, we might have some insight into his working method. As it is, so much is in dispute about Shakespeare, from his rightful portrait to the cause of his death, that his plays figure almost as their own cosmology. 

The Merry Wives of Windsor, this season's Heart of America Shakespeare Festival offering, has always been a curious counterpoint to the rest of his plays. Majority opinion hews to the idea that he began the comedy in 1586 or so, interrupted it to pen Henry IV, Part 1, then returned to it many years later, emphasizing the brawny John Goodmanesque figure of Sir John Falstaff.  This was due to Falstaff's popularity in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Queen Elizabeth I's supposed pleasure in the portly character. The play was registered in 1602, and appeared in his First Folio of 1623. Still, as with other Shakespearean mysteries, the whos and the whys remain locked to us (which makes the detective work all the merrier). 

The matter of the plot is fascinating: it is his only work set within his lifetime. The historical plays that made his name early on, the brooding tragedies that came after The Merry Wives of Windsor (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth)- not to mention fantasy-laden final plays such as The Tempest, mostly mined material adapted from others and from past time periods. For this play, scholars believe Ser Giovanni Florentino's 13th century stories and the Roman play Miles Gloriosus were recycled. In particular, the Roman plotline of a soldier manipulated by slaves reappears with Falstaff: coming to Windsor with his men to dine and discovering not one but two attractive women to woo for their purse-strings. He is then out-tricked by them. Yet the Elizabethan milieu and the clear upper- versus middle-class theme must have sounded a different chord to audiences. And a host of scholarly theories for various characters, such as Pistol's high-flung speech (supposedly a jibe at the actor Edward Alleyn, of a competing troupe) only add to the comedy's layers. 

For this production, director Sidonie Garrett leans toward the visual--more Coen Bros. immediacy than the traditional Laurence Olivier subtlety. Working in an outdoor setting, Garrett must insure the last rows get the punch line before the front half is laughing at the next joke. The actors cavorted and drew on their characters' already exaggerated roles. It is a wise choice; of all the works, this is the lone Shakespeare play to be written primarily in prose, which does not shimmer forth from the stage the way his verse does.

The play opens with Falstaff (Phil Fiorini), Pistol (T.J. Chasteen) and the rest of his entourage, after some words with a justice over their hellacious activities, sitting down at the home of George Page (David Fritts). Falstaff's interest in Mistress Page (urgently played by Karen Errington) and then, in Bernie Madoff fashion, in another dinner guest, Mistress Ford (Jan Rogge), advanced by a duplicate love letter given to them, is turned on him by an angry Pistol, who acts as the play's whistleblower. As in The Kansas City Rep's recent French farce A Flea in Her Ear where two women friends collaborate on a fake letter to determine whether one husband is cheating, the women here collude to get the best of Falstaff and their husbands.

All the duplicity, games, outsized plotlines (Falstaff is tricked into hiding in a dirty laundry basket, and in the end tricked again by the wives and other characters disguised as fairies, who poke him with tapers), and witticisms make for more froth than real drink of substance. What Shakespeare had in mind for his audience is sometimes obscured by the foppery (at one point, Fiorini's Falstaff does a pinwheel on the stage floor à la Jerry Lewis). The presiding spirit is one of mocking the classes, a jab thrown by writers everywhere since Rome; it may be true that Shakespeare was one of Elizabeth's favorites of the court, but in this play, as in all of his work, one never forgets that Shakespeare never forgot his beginnings. (His noblemen often suffer like Everyman.) The snap that his tragedies hold for us centuries later is missing in The Merry Wives of Windsor: it is probable that he knew it, preferring to gain timeliness over timelessness.

Phil Fiorini's Falstaff (in his beard and build, he resembles something of the British actor and author Simon Callow) is more debauched rogue here than the lovably inebriated Obi-Wan Kenobi adviser of the Henry plays. He (literally) bounces off the other characters. It is a larkspur of a role, which Fiorini gets right more than not: after all, Falstaff is not Hamlet. A noogie to the head of one of his underlings and a physicality verging on slapstick can become one mannerism too many for us now, after hundreds of thousands of Zero Mostels, Sid Caesars, and Skippers and Gilligans; but it fits the part, so Fiorini gives it his brow sweat. 

After all this time, performing Shakespeare is no easier. Finding the rhythm and catching the meaning is like trying to put oneself into a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bob Dylan song. Practice makes perfect sense; but in reality, it is an all-enveloping feeling, which comes and goes with the attention given to the work. John Updike's phrase for Shakespeare's plays--"parades of wonder"--is reinforced by each viewing. Whoever he was, where there was a 'Will' there was definitely a way.

REVIEW:
Heart of America Shakespeare Festival
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Runs through July 5^th at 8:00 p.m.
Southmoreland  Park
47th Street and Oak, Kansas City, MO 64112
Admission is free with free "will" offerings gratefully accepted
For information 816-531-7728 or online at www.kcshakes.org

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.