Party gras Trinity basks in the heat of the knight BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Merry Wives of Windsor By William Shakespeare. Directed by Kevin Moriarty. Set by Beowulf Boritt. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Jeff Croiter. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. With Fred Sullivan Jr., Ian White, Nehassaiu deGannes, Brian McEleney, Phyllis Kay, Stephen Berenson, Janice Duclos, Rachael Warren, Dan Welch, Mauro Hantman, Keith Jochim, Barbara Meek, Paul L. Coffey, and Brian Houtz. At Trinity Repertory Company through March 7.

Chekhov’s adage that you shouldn’t introduce a gun on stage unless you intend it to be fired might be applied to cream pies in the deliciously over-the-top Trinity Rep production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Relocated to a modern apartment building called the Windsor, the staging encompasses an outdoor café where fluffy triangles of pastry are consumed amid Falstaff beer signs. A Windsor-centric rewrite of the Afroman tune "Because I Got High" ends with Nym’s triumphant assertion that "revenge tastes better than pie when you’re high!" So, no surprise, the fat knight gets his ultimate comeuppance not from fake fairies wielding tapers but from a pie in the face. And that’s after the squirt-gun assault but before the rockin’ group sing of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun." It’s clear that Harold Bloom is not at the helm.

Actually, Shakespeare scholar Bloom despises The Merry Wives of Windsor for its diminution of his beloved Falstaff, whom the Bard’s only Elizabethan-England-set comedy transforms from a witty Life Force into a "gross watery pumpkin" in Hugh Hefner’s bathrobe. Bloom might actually view director Kevin Moriarty and his comedically adroit deconstruction crew’s romp through Windsor as a subversive attack on sub-par Bard. Certainly one cannot argue, as I did with Trinity’s equally hilarious productions of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, that priceless poetry is being sacrificed to broad comedy.

There isn’t a lot to The Merry Wives of Windsor beyond sadistic farce and fat jokes, and Trinity runs with those. But instead of adding an opera score in the manner of Verdi or Nicolai, the energetic troupe throws in fourth-wall-breaking anarchy and MTV-worthy musical interludes, all on a set by Beowulf Boritt that you could move into. A towering brick cutaway manse equipped with a working fire escape and overhanging trees, it features contrasting first-floor digs for the contemporarily oriented Fords and antique-loving Pages. Upstairs, Falstaff and his compatriots party hearty in an orange-shag-and-leopard-skin-dominated pad with two Windsor elevator boys and the "Host of the Garter Inn at Windsor."

There is a probably apocryphal story that Shakespeare wrote Merry Wives in a hurry, to satisfy Queen Elizabeth I’s request to see Falstaff, the sack-driven honor debunker of the Henry IV plays, in love. Composed almost entirely in prose and filled with arcane humor that has hit the cutting-room floor here (along with several major characters), the play centers on the elderly, avoirdupois-encased Sir John Falstaff’s attempts to seduce the wives of two upstanding Windsor citizens, less for the downright lust of it than as a way to the wallets of their husbands, one of whom turns out to be a jealous maniac. The other is the father of beauteous Anne Page, the three-way fight for whose hand forms the subplot.

At Trinity, Fred Sullivan Jr. plays Falstaff as an aging, jocund playboy in what looks like Gwyneth Paltrow’s fat suit from Shallow Hal. Over that the bearded, beer-toting rascal wears a number of over-the-hill-hipster ensembles including leather jackets, a Henry IV T-shirt, and jeans large enough for the Windsor condo board to move around in comfortably. For his first lascivious call on Alice Ford, in which he strikes coquettish poses of clownish delicacy before straddling his way up the chaise toward his prey, he sports a dapper suit, the besmirching of which, when he famously hides out in the laundry and gets carted to a "muddy ditch" by the Thames, is not left to our imagination. Director Moriarty, moving some lines from act three, scene five, brings the failed adulterer — wet, silt-caked, and moaning — up from a sewer manhole like Jean Valjean.

Shakespeare purists will object to having even second-best Bard severely trimmed, tossed into the contemporary Cuisinart, and flavored with Cyndi Lauper. I can’t say that I miss the Elizabethan ethnic jokes or the German horse thieves (though Keith Jochim’s Maurice Chevalier–esque Dr. Caius is amusing). And, yes, Moriarty goes too far, having Pistol presage the lighting of a joint with "O for a muse of fire." Is this Merry Wives or Saturday Night Live? On the other hand, in a production that has shaved all extraneousness from the show’s two main plots to give them their head, it’s pretty audacious to pull things up short for the elaborately choreographed, tongue-in-cheek musical numbers.

It helps that the Trinity Rep actors are such accomplished madcaps. Apart from Sullivan’s turn, which includes a "Where’s Waldo" act behind the Fords’ arrases that a blind child could penetrate, the stand-out performance is by Brian McEleney as the jealous Ford, crying on audience shoulders and then taking his "horn madness" to fanatical heights. It’s a wonder the bowdlerizing Moriarty didn’t throw in a few lines from Othello.