Bawdy Bards Gamm’s raucous Beard of Avon BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Beard of Avon By Amy Freed. Directed by Tony Estrella. With Steve Kidd, Casey Seymour Kim, Chris Byrnes, Jim O’Brien, Sam Babbitt, Wendy Overly, Karen Carpenter, Ben Johnson, Richard Donelly, and David T. Howard. Set design by William P. Wieters. Costume design by David T. Howard. Lighting design Matt Terry. Original music by Charles Cofone. At Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through June 19.

If every literate person in the late 16th-century who has been accused of writing one or more of the works of William Shakespeare had actually been capable of doing so, there would be as many libraries around today as there are McDonald’s to hold the output.

Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon plays heartily with that old attribution question, and the team at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre not only run with the ball, they have a rowdy old-time scoring goal after goal.

The play picks up most of the clues against single authorship, but this is no doctoral dissertation gussied up with an occasional gag. As though not wanting to offend the Bard himself, this is first and foremost a comedy, as bawdy and raucous as a throng of hooting groundlings.

We start out in Stratford-on-Avon, where young Will (Steve Kidd) and wife Anne (Casey Seymour Kim) are hosting a gaggle of traveling players who have just delighted them with an evening of low comedy at the guildhall (a running sight gag is a sausage emerging from a codpiece). Anne is an older woman who had seduced Will as a youth into marrying the first woman he slept with. But he has been straining at her domestic leash. "I have great thought-like things within my head," he laments, and we know his imagination is already in London.

Whether we’re familiar with Shakespeare are not — but especially if we are — we have great fun following this country bumpkin’s education. When actor-managers Henry Condel (Chris Byrnes) and John Heminge (Jim O’Brien) instruct him in acting, sawing the air with a hand and grimacing to indicate emotions, we hear echoes of Hamlet instructing the traveling players what not to do. Later, when he is impressed with the ornate verbiage of a courtier’s description of a storm, Will is overwhelmed and says that, gosh, all he’d be able to come up with is something ridiculous like "Howl, howl, howl!" — which, of course, is Lear’s great cri de coeur in the storm scene. Will joins them as an actor apprentice, shaking spears in battle scenes.

Kidd is on-target as a callow country boy overwhelmed by the sights of the city and stimulated to rough but poetical soliloquy in his awe. And Kim is her usual hoot as the irascible Anne, casually kicking out the walking stick supporting tottering Old Colin (Sam Babbitt), who keeps tumbling to a heap. But this production would not have half its emotional impact without the towering menacing presence of Richard Donelly as Edward DeVere, black from boots through soul to wig as the 17th Earl of Oxford. Lord Oxford is written here as comically villainous, casually skewering a singer who displeases him but lamenting because his writing, it has been said, "lacks tenderness of feeling."

A proposal is put to Shakespeare, that he be the front man for a bloody, John Milius-type movie of a play, Titus Andronicus, that Oxford cannot lower himself to acknowledge authoring. And so it begins. The loquacious lord has a trunkful. A collaboration ensues in which Shakespeare is provided a clunky draft and gives it a polish, adding characters and soliloquies and poetic passages at will. ("I see a hunchback — fill it out!") Much head-scratching has gone into the historicity of this literary fantasy, and the play assigns the sonnets to Shakespeare — although Oxford takes credit in court by demurring only weakly.

There is plenty more happening here on the nonliterary level. Anne comes to London and, in the Shakespearean tradition of a costume change implausibly transforming identity, seduces him for a week as a Cockney trollop. Wendy Overly gives us a very funny Queen Elizabeth, stumbling under the clothes rack she has to wear, letting us glimpse the girl within the Virgin Queen. Ben Johnson stands out as the lover of Oxford, self-deprecating as the "girlish earl" but fully inhabited enough to be moving at a later death scene. Karen Carpenter does well as both a court lady and a boy actor who plays female roles, and especially when her crystalline voice sets the proper meditative mood for a couple of scenes.

Tony Estrella has directed this all to guide us through the hilarious subtext as well as text. (When a seated Will turns and finds he’s facing Oxford’s crotch, a homoerotic gong is struck and echoes with sympathetic vibrations throughout the play.) Add to that opulent costumes and a simple but effective pine plank double stage, and The Beard of Avon is an admirable end to the 20th season of this local treasure of a theater.

By the way, I have an idea about a play. See, you have this lowly patent clerk who did poorly in school, but he comes across this short, cryptic equation scrawled in an old math book . . . .