King con Trinity woos the Merry Wives of Windsor BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Two things are puzzling. First, considering that Falstaff is regarded as the most beloved of Shakespeare’s characters, a Dionysian life force in the six history plays about Henrys IV-through-VI, it’s odd that The Merry Wives of Windsor, a comedy written around him, isn’t staged much. Oh, the Kevin Kline production in New York last year was well appreciated, but that was an exception.

The second mystery is how Fred Sullivan, Trinity’s resident joie de vivre interpreter and inducer, has never been tapped to play Falstaff. But both matters are being corrected January 30 to March 7, as Trinity Repertory Company presents Merry Wives and Sullivan gets to climb into a fat suit and cavort and letch, flagon in hand.

Historical rumor has it that Queen Elizabeth wanted to see Falstaff in love, so she ordered up the comedy. (The last opera by Giuseppe Verdi, an ardent Shakespeare appreciator, was Falstaff, which he added to a canon that included Macbeth and Otello.)

The Merry Wives of Windsor is the closest the Bard came to writing a Molière slammed-door farce, notes Sullivan. It is a model of well-constructed craftsmanship, according to Kevin Moriarty, its director, who has trimmed the text down to a brisk two hours. The story revolves around Sir John Falstaff, out of his element in the countryside, who has written the same love letter to two women he hopes to seduce. They discover what he’s up to and conspire to cause him mischief. Apart from the complications with outraged husbands, Falstaff’s sorry lot includes being cast into the Thames with dirty laundry, beaten while dressed as a woman, and beaten again by a gaggle of children costumed as fairies.

Sullivan has performed more than 70 roles at Trinity over 19 seasons. Moriarty, in charge of directing for the Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium MFA program, is a Trinity Rep Conservatory graduate. They spoke about Falstaff during a rehearsal break.

Q: Have you ever played Falstaff before, Fred?

Sullivan: I worked on some stuff from Henry IV in college, when I was a sliver of a man. For some reason, and I know not why, I have been assigned Shakespearean clowns for about 30 years. And this is the king of them all. That’s what’s so great about it.

I think it’s like Dickens with Macawber: Shakespeare can’t help but love him. How much I loathe that Harold Bloom, but what he tells us is that [Falstaff is] so human and he’s so multifaceted and so three-dimensional that you read yourself and people you love into him. And having played every pirate, drunk, and con man in the history of the world, this is like all of them wrapped into one. He’s the king of them. It’s a great, great character.

Q: In the Henry plays, Falstaff dismisses honor as mere show and dismisses the law as nonsense. What about those Falstaffs, the subject of so many dissertations, is brought to Merry Wives?

Moriarty: What all those elements have in common in the Henry IVs and this play is that Falstaff has an unbelievable zest and love for life, for the act of living. And that means the pleasures of a flesh, it means drinking, it means celebrating — the pursuit itself, the chase itself. The hunt is on!

The context is different. The Henry plays are dealing with a comic character in a war, and a country that’s breaking apart at the seams and all of that. And in this, there’s domesticity — a very stable society. This is much more like our society today, rather than the countries around the world that are in the midst of pure chaos. So the situation has changed. But I think what holds the plays together is that Falstaff will do anything to pursue living and life. And that’s unbelievably fun and funny, both.

Q: Kevin, I understand that as the director you focused on incidents and characters that surround this scalawag, cutting away what wouldn’t be clear to us.

Moriarty: Yeah. As Fred said, our goal really is to be as clear and immediate and direct and as true to Shakespeare’s stories and his language and his characters as is humanly possible. Without adding on layers of footnotes — or conceptualizations. We’ve gone through, and some of the minor characters [were eliminated] in the interest of time. It’s better if comedy is fast. (Laughs)

Sullivan: And it’s better if comedy is funny. We did two readings of the entire play. We did one last year with Kevin and Oskar, and we did one the first day of the rehearsal. We did the entire play, word for word. And we don’t blame any schoolteacher who looks at Act One, Scene One and goes (hands to cheeks): "Oh, my God!" Because it’s really dense, and hard, and the Welshman jokes are impossible.

Q: You’ve mentioned several advantages of this particular play, and more could be mentioned. But except for this last year, Merry Wives hasn’t been staged as often as some minor Shakespeare comedies.

Sullivan: I’ve never seen it done. I think they can’t get past the first two acts.

Moriarty: I think that, but I also think . . . [that as for] its literary value as a work to study and think about and write papers about and think about the larger world view and the psychology and all that, it doesn’t have the value in those terms that Hamlet does, or the Scottish play, or Lear.

Sullivan: But if the most produced comedy in the Golden Dozen are Twelfth Night and Much Ado and As You Like It, then you look at this one and you say, "Well, I think this one is denser, and he’s got all those Welsh jokes, and all those dated jokes, and there aren’t these kind of big, whopping, conflicted characters like Jaques or Malvolio that we’re attracted to." I think this version, which has made me rediscover and appreciate the play far more, kind of clears off the muck at the top of the pond, and you can see the clean blue water.