Nosegays Cyrano de Bergerac and The Comedy of Errors in the Berkshires BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Cyrano de Bergerac By Edmond Rostand. Translation by Lowell Bair. Adapted and directed by Julianne Boyd. Original music by Ray Leslee. Lyrics by Mark St. Germain. Fight choreography by Michael Burnet. Set by Michael Anania. Costumes by Natasha Landau. Lighting by Jeff Croiter. Sound by Randy Hansen. With Christopher Innvar, Heather Ayers, Dylan Fergus, Mark H. Dold, Peter Rini, Rufus Collins, John Tillotson, and Michael Burnet. Presented by Barrington Stage Company at the Consolati Performing Arts Center, Sheffield, through August 28. The Comedy of Errors By William Shakespeare. Directed by Cecil MacKinnon. Set by Kris Stone. Costumes by Arthur Oliver. Lighting by Lap-Chi Chu. Sound by Jason Fitzgerald. Dance and movement by Susan Dibble. With Jonathan Epstein, Mel Cobb, Michael Milligan, Tony Molina, Dan McCleary, Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Anne Gottlieb, George Hannah, Jason Asprey, and Ariel Bock. Presented by Shakespeare & Company at its Founders’ Theatre, Lenox, in repertory through Septembe

Looks are deceiving in Cyrano de Bergerac and The Comedy of Errors, both of which are currently being subjected to spirited attacks on Berkshires stages. In Edmond Rostand’s 1897 account of the heroism, heartbreak, and headache of the 17th-century Gascon swordsman with the soul of a poet and the proboscis of an anteater, the profile-challenged hero’s words prove more seductive than the visage of the beefcake soldier whose epistolary courtship he ghostwrites. And in Shakespeare’s early tour de force of wordplay and slapstick, two sets of identical twins who don’t know about each other carry mistaken identity to wit’s end. At Barrington Stage Company, Cyrano is getting all the sentiment and swashbuckling it can handle, plus a battle scene worthy of Les MisŽrables. And at Shakespeare & Company, the Bard’s comedy is pushed through the rabbit hole into an Ephesus as skewed and surreal as its colorful slant edifices, where the citizenry promenade to Cape Verdian rhythms and there’s a smell of banana peels and witchcraft in the air.

For any troupe, Cyrano is a treacherous undertaking, not just because of the large cast and the required swordplay but because the romantic melodrama can easily seem as corny as Kansas in Arras. The hero is stubbornly noble, both in his dashing exploits and in his refusal to the death to reveal himself as the author of the prose that won Roxanne and thus besmirch her image of the dead GQ pin-up she thought she loved. Moreover, this cleverer and saner heir to Don Quixote, whapping out metered verse extempore while whacking away at a dueling opponent or dining out on masochistic adoration of the beauteous Roxanne, can seem so larger-than-life as to be laughable. He’s like Zorro with a literary degree and a crush bigger than his nose.

At BSC, director Julianne Boyd has adapted the old warrior horse in such a way that it loses some of its floweriness while retaining its flamboyant spirit, right down to the hero’s last-breath caress of the only thing he loves better than Roxanne, his "panache." Performed in the main by two strolling string players, the score by Ray Leslee (composer of the doo-wop musical Avenue X, which hardly prepares you for mandolin serenades) adds a romantic dimension without hitting you over the head. And Christopher Innvar, who’s reminiscent of the young Frank Langella in the role memorably assayed by stars from JosŽ Ferrer to Steve Martin, not only fills Cyrano’s plumed hat and fabled nasal contours but is credible in both his savored suffering and his derring-do. Moreover, fight choreographer Michael Burnet — cast against ability as the insolent fop Valvert, who insults Cyrano in the first scene and gets his velvet rosettes clipped for it — has drilled the cast into some impressive fencing, nowhere better than in the smoky siege in which helmeted Spanish soldiers sweep up on ladders to attack the starved, barricaded Gascons, who’ve been served up as sacrificial lamb by their nasty commander, the Count De Guiche, but heroically refuse to lie down on the plate.

At the end of the day, this is still Cyrano de Bergerac, a literate fairy tale in which the pen proves mightier than the countenance if not the sword. And even in Boyd’s adaptation, it’s a little wooden at the outset. But beginning with classical drama’s second-banana balcony scene, when Cyrano leaves off coaching the lamely expostulating Christian (a sincere and not ignoble Dylan Fergus) and speaks for himself from the shadows, sending Roxanne into multiple aural orgasms, things move swiftly.

Heather Ayers is a pretty, bubbly Roxanne who’s not so initially shallow as to render impossible a conversion. Mark H. Dold is crisply oleaginous as De Guiche; Rufus Collins is imposing as the loyal LeBret; and John Tillotson makes a lovable ally as the versifying pastry chef Ragueneau, here as round and fluffy as a cream puff. And who but a diamond-hard heart won’t fight back a tear when Cyrano, having been ambushed in the cranium by a piece of lumber, shuffles off this mortal coil with stoic slowness, still shadow-fencing with lies and stupidity, still chewing his crumbs from the feast of love, but finally, satisfyingly, blowing his cover?

You don’t think anyone will ever blow the cover off The Comedy of Errors, which if it bore any resemblance to reality would be cleared up and over in 10 minutes. Based on Plautus’s Men¾chmi, and possibly the Bard’s first comedy (the first recorded performance was in December of 1594), it’s a raucous separated-at-birth tale in which, in classic fashion, a long-severed family is miraculously reassembled. But not before an orgy of multiple mistaken identities that more often than not result in Punch-and-Judy pummeling of one sort or another.

The play is set up in the first scene by the sad tale of Aegeon, an unfortunate "merchant of Syracusa" who has put ashore at Ephesus, where because of the animosity of the two towns he’s sentenced to die unless he comes up with a cash ransom. As he relates it, the poor guy lost in a long-ago shipwreck one of his infant twin sons (both named Antipholus) along with one of a set of twin infants (both called Dromio) he’d bought to grow into valets for his boys. The wreck also separated him from his beloved wife. Then, five summers back, the son and the servant he did raise went in search of their brothers, only to go missing themselves, their disappearance spurring him to scour Greece and Asia. Of course, the longer-missing twins live here in Ephesus, and their bookends have recently arrived as well. It just takes everybody two hours of confusion, bafflement, hurt feelings, and even botched exorcism to figure that out. You might think it would dawn on the searching set of twins that they’d found what they were looking for. But then there’d be no comic spaghetti for the Bard to kick around the plate and tie in knots.

"Every why hath a wherefore," says Dromio of Syracuse, but you can’t prove it by The Comedy of Errors, which is as close as Shakespeare comes to a baggy-pants romp. Although much of it is written in verse, there’s more clowning than real poetry in the play. At S&C, director Cecil McKinnon combines her Shakespeare experience with her stints at Circus Flora to create a racy, racing fun-house world that takes seriously Ephesus’s reputation for sorcery and then throws in whimsy. Without explanation, folks travel in a spinning teacup straight out of Disney World; periscopes and Slinkies pop up out of the black-and-white diamond-patterned stage floor (echoed in the black-and-whiteness of the Antipholi and the Dromios). And there are little opening and shutting windows through which faces briefly appear, like those of the wisecracking denizens of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In — though the humor is closer to that of the Three Stooges, combined here with a sort of dance fever in which everything pulses to a catchy beat and sort of undulates from pratfall to pratfall. It’s fast and fun, if without much interior logic.

Some of Shakespeare & Company’s big guns, having honed their chops on the likes of Lear and Coriolanus, enjoy a high-energy, low-rent gambol that does not entirely ignore the cruelty nested in the play, where most of the "errors" lead to drubbings — particularly of those put-upon punching bags the Dromios. S&C fields two irresistible clowns in stalwart Dan McCleary and newcomer Tony Molina, who race about fetching bags of lucre and ends of rope with puppyish mania. George Hannah and Michael Milligan get the straighter-man duties of playing their upbraiding masters — though Milligan puts some goofball lust into his receipt of the other Antipholus’s wife’s misdirected ministrations (and there’s little question that he and Elizabeth Aspenlieder’s assertive Adriana have done more than "dine" together). Aspenlieder ameliorates Adriana’s shrewishness with wifely hurt. And Jason Asprey creates a loopy sketch of a goldsmith who delivers a gold chain to the wrong Antipholus, employing an accent in which the word "chain" becomes the last name of a certain politically incorrect Asian detective.

These skilled players milk all of Shakespeare’s occasionally belabored word play and then some. "Words are but wind" is the quote inscribed on the poster for the production. But McCleary’s Dromio of Ephesus delivers the line as "Words are butt wind," putting a fart gag in the Bard’s mouth that he didn’t know he wrote. Certainly in this crazy play, words, along with vaudeville japes older than Homer, are part of the maelstrom. But there’s also Jonathan Epstein’s bewildered old Aegeon to add a touch of distressed humanity to the storm, like hurricane victims on the TV news devastated by what’s blown away. Only in classical comedy, though, do you get it back.