Heart like a wheel Young love goes ’round in Verona BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Two Gentlemen of Verona By William Shakespeare. Directed by Mark Stuch. With Justin Blanchard, Drew Battles, Miriam Silverman, Joanna Cole, Mariah Sage Leeds, Aaron C. Andrade, Myxolydia Tyler, and Brett Greenberg. By Trinity Summer Shakespeare Project, around the state through August 1.

William Shakespeare hadn’t quite gotten his acts together when he penned his lackluster The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It was only his second comedy, written the year after The Taming of the Shrew.

But there is nothing dull about the zippy production of Two Gentlemen that the Trinity Summer Project troupe is taking around the state. These industrious young actors perform the trimmed, intermissionless 90 minutes with enough energy to light up a small hamlet, never mind an audience.

Direction by Mark Sutch keeps the action moving and the plot as clear as we can expect in a play where the cast needs nametags. (Cleverly, the names are of each amorous but sometimes inconstant lover’s current sweetie, emblazoned on a heart, ready to give the expression "change of heart" visual impact.) To orient us, the company assembles into a chugging choo-choo train, destination posted, when a character travels to the other city. An occasional finger-snapping song by musical director Amanda Dehnert ("Who needs a girlfriend when you’ve got a best friend?") pumps up the volume.

The two young gentlemen are friends Proteus (Justin Blanchard) and Valentine (Drew Battles). Valentine is sent off to improve his mind in Milan, while Proteus is glad to stay home, having sworn his love to Julia (Miriam Silverman). She doesn’t get much time to be won over by a love letter from him, since his father decides to ship him off to Milan also — but she soon follows, in secret.

By the time Valentine has been in Milan for a few heartbeats, he is in love with Silvia (Joanna Cole). His friend Speed (Mariah Sage Leeds) makes fun of him for sighing and carrying on, the way he used to make fun of Proteus for doing. There is a verbal sparring match between Valentine and Silvia, as she toys with him, having tricked him into writing an amorous letter for her — to himself, though he thinks it is to someone else.

Meanwhile, before Proteus departs from Verona, he and Julia exchange rings and vows — a solemnity quickly undercut when his foolish servant Launce (Aaron C. Andrade) chastises the dog of his master for not weeping at the sad tale he tells of leaving home himself. The playwright gives the buffoon the opportunity to use his shoes as puppets, so the character is good for at least one sight gag. But the poor guy is so underwritten that when he tells us that a milkmaid has stolen his heart, we don’t even get to see her.

Soon comes the tricky part for us. Preliminarily, Proteus’s ardor for Julia cools in a blink when he lays eyes on Silvia’s picture and hears his friend’s praise of her. (To Shakespeare and Elizabethan audiences, the fickleness of young love was a given, with no preparatory character development needed to make an abrupt change of heart plausible.) But that’s easy to take, accustomed as we are to Romeo’s pre-Juliet puppy love. However, Proteus turns all squinty-eyed, ready to betray his friend and see him banished, lying about him to the Duke (Myxolydia Tyler), Silvia’s father, so that he can win her hand. You’re right. Malignancy, however well motivated, isn’t very funny.

Well, Proteus doesn’t turn into a frothing Iago on us — although that might actually make this comedy work better, with Proteus parodying villainy with over-the-top, hand-rubbing glee. But no, he just plays unscrupulous, without even the benefit of a lounge lizard smirk, martini in hand. His explanation to himself is that "even as one heat another heat expels/Or as one nail by strength drives out another/So the remembrance of my former love/Is by a newer object quite forgotten." I think Dehnert’s opening song says that more succinctly, when the company croons the variation, "Who needs a best friend when you’ve got a girlfriend?"

Poor Julia — remember Julia? It’s only toward the end that we see her, disguised as a boy, trailing after her ignoble nobleman. She ends up being escorted through a forest by a knight who promptly flees when bandits show up and kidnap the page. By this time Valentine is leader of the outlaws, having pretended willingness to join, not wanting to be killed. Things are set up for Proteus to rescue both his disguised fiancé as well as Silvia, and then show his true colors as he begins to force himself upon the latter. Valentine, observing all this in hiding, saves the day, and Julia realizes what a cad Proteus is.

Believe it or not, all is forgiven by the end. The behavior of Proteus is chalked up to ill humors rather than bad character. But don’t worry — the young Trinity summer troupe runs fast enough to distract us from the weaknesses of this shaky apprentice work by an eventual master.