[In the following review, Brustein examines the New York Shakespeare Festival production of All's Well That Ends Well directed by Richard Jones, noting that Jones's tragicomic approach emphasized the play's dark and serious tones.]

After a spirited Measure for Measure in July, the New York Shakespeare Festival produced a haunting All's Well That Ends Well in August. Much of the credit for these triumphs, surely among the best productions yet seen in Central Park, must go to JoAnne Akalaitis, who first conceived of pairing two of Shakespeare's most difficult problem plays with directors imported from England (the Texas-born Michael Rudman is an English resident). Akalaitis was not allowed to enjoy the fruits of her planning, having been removed from her job last spring, but she deserves a valedictory salute for helping to bring the Shakespeare Marathon to its maturity.

All's Well is the third American production directed by Richard Jones, who staged La Bete on Broadway in 1991 and a less succesful production of Bulgakov's Black Snow with my own company last December. From his previous work in theater and opera, Jones was known as a stylist with a special flair for farce. Recently, he has been applying more tenebrous tones to his palette, and his All's Well, though not without its giddy moments, emerges as an unusually somber experience even by the standards of dark comedy. Always a strong visual director, Jones has provoked a stunning design from the English artist Stewart Laing, whose costumes and setting create an atmosphere of surreal disorientation.

Wide-screen movies broadcast on cable T.V. are often provided with a “letter-box” format, which elongates the width of the screen and narrows the height. This is a letter-box version of All's Well That Ends Well. The set sits in a horizontal opening that spreads across the entire expanse of the stage, with huge doors on either side, madly skewed and raked. This allows for continuous lateral motion and, with the aid of traveler, uninterrupted scene changes. It also provides room for a few spectators to look down on the action from upstage, sometimes joining the scene by waving green flags.

The design is essentially an abstraction. On a sea-green backing, marked by an aqua blue strip, hangs a white Rothko-like panel with a Donald Judd-like sculpture in the center that doubles as a mirror. When the action moves to Italy, the panel divides to reveal a lovely Tuscan countryside, decked with burnt umber fields and a tiny medieval town reminiscent of Robert Wilson's miniature future cities. Washed by Mimi Jordan Sherin's sea-change lighting, the visual impact is ravishing. With this design, Laing takes his place alongside such brilliant young English designers as Bob Crowley and Anthony Macdonald.

When the audience enters, a row of candles are flickering on stage, in front of a long table bearing the shrouded body of a man. The body seems to be laid out on a bier, and is guarded by a diminutive figure in black (played by a child) wearing a death's-head and carrying a scythe. But death is just waiting, not stinging, and this is no corpse. It is the King of France, languishing from a fistula, and when he is carried offstage by black-clad carriers to the accompaniment of vibrating chimes and tinkling triangles, the miniature death's-head ominously follows. This figure will appear and reappear throughout the action. Jones has made disease and death the central metaphors of the play.

The decision seems entirely appropriate since not only is the King ailing but the play culminates in the resurrection of a “dead” woman, much like The Winter's Tale and Pericles. Helena will return from the dead to claim her reclacitrant husband. Before dealing with her own life-and-death problems, however, Helena must resurrect or resuscitate the King with a remedy she has inherited from her father, a famous physician. As shrewdly played by the Irish actress Miriam Healy-Louie, Helena is a shy, passionate, red-headed scholar in spectacles, lonely and abandoned, befriended only by the maternal Countess of Rousillon (endowed by Joan Macintosh with magisterial elegance).

Contrasting with images of death and disease, embodied in emblematic black, are images of innocence, embodied in white. In the cure scene, it is innocence that medicates disease. Helena, first seen wearing a white robe covered with a black cardigan, is a virgin in the shadow of death. If she fails to heal the king, her life will be forfeited. As she describes the secret remedy while the Countess braids her hair, the King is carried in on his long table by uniformed officers who turn his body to prevent bed sores and hover over him like figures in Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson. She climbs on the king's table, facing him on her knees; he sits up, head bowed. When the lights come up after a blackout, the two are merrily dancing, while the courtiers applaud and stars sprinkle from the sky.

The reward she elects for curing the King is to choose her own husband. All of the court bachelors (including a 10-year-old-child) appear before her, but she demands the hand of the Countess of Rousillon's son Bertram. It is Bertram's mean rejection of her (he finds her “base”) that poses the major problem of the play, for why would this accomplished woman set her cap for such a soulless snob? Despite his contemptous treatment, she persists in her chase. Her eagerness to cast off chastity makes Parolles' rebukes to her virginity (“it is too cold a companion … away with it. … Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese”) seem superfluous. By order of the King, Bertram is married in the Elizabethan equivalent of a shotgun wedding. (Shaw, praising Helena's aggressive pursuit, made her a model for the “unwomanly woman” Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman.) The wedding takes place in a slow march, just prior to everyone's departure for war. Helena poignantly expresses regret that she has chased Bertram from his native land (he can't wait to leave). She nevertheless undertakes to follow him to Italy, a pilgrim with a crook and a backpack.

Much of the second part is dominated by the antics of Parolles, a “notorious liar” and braggart soldier on the pattern of Pistol and Falstaff. As played by a goateed Michael Cumpsty, Parolles spends much of his time in front of a mirror, admiring his bright blue beribboned uniform. As the courtier Lafeu remarks, “The soul of this man is his clothes.” By the end, this sartorial fop will be reduced to filthy long johns. Captured and blindfolded by his own soldiers speaking gibberish and pretending to be the enemy, Parolles instantly spills his guts about all the secrets of his camp. It is a scene reminiscent of Falstaff peaching on Prince Hal, but Parolles does not have the wit to extricate himself from charges of cowardice.

Bertram's lusty passion for Diana Capilet provides the means by which Helena can meet the conditions he has made for continuing their marriage—possession of his wedding ring and evidence of marital consummation. For like its companion piece of the summer, Measure for Measure, All's Well accomplishes its climactic reconciliation through sexual deception (the Park's 1993 season might be called “The Bed Trick Repertory”). Waiting for Bertram, having substituted herself for Diana in the dark (she brings her own pillow and sheets), Helena lies on the same table that bore the body of the King, observed by the same diminutive figure of death.

And death is an attendant when the victorious army returns to France. Jones interpolates a scene in which the Countess of Rousillon has become sick and languishes on the table; instead of ending well, the play concludes in melancholy. Diana comes to accuse Bertram of seducing her, as Isabella accused Angelo in Measure for Measure, but discovers that Bertram is equally disposed to libel a decent women (he calls her “a common gamester to the camp”). The “dead” Helena appears, rising through a trap, not only alive but quick with child. The entire stage turns blue. She and Bertram vow to love each other “ever ever dearly.” But even this admittedly unconvincing hymeneal is dampened by the dying Countess, who is borne off stage in a slow-motion Robert Wilson-like procession, trailed by the figure of death.

Most of the acting, in addition to the standout performances of Healy-Louie and Macintosh, is strong and deep. Herb Foster is commanding as the King of France, Graham Winton properly sulky as Bertram, Patrice Johnson appealing as Diana Capilet, Patricia Kilgarriff decisive as her mother, Bette Henritze poignant as the Countess' companion and Henry Stram authoritative as the elderly courtier Lafeu. Cumpsty's Parolles, though well spoken, is more of an egotist than a braggart, a musical comedy star on the order of Robert Goulet. And Rocco Sisto's Lavatch, played as a bourgeois in a white-feathered fedora, lacks true eccentricity. The only genuine comedy is provided by the chorus—courtiers, waiting women and soldiers drilled within an inch of their lives—whether simultaneously lighting clay pipes during the interrogation scene or returning from Italy with identical suitcases. Still, comedy is not the point of Jones's production. His approach is more akin to Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedy, a style that skirts perilously close to disaster without falling off the edge.

Let me say a word, too, in praise of Jonathan Dove's original music, as performed by some fine instrumentalists under the direction of Alan Johnson. The continuous underscoring of mostly mournful melodies enhances the funereal proceedings at every point (except during the unmasking of Parolles, when it seems inappropriate). The doleful music accomplishes the same function as the surreal set and the ethereal acting style, which is to shut out both the bucolic spendor of the Park and the urban grit of the city, and plant the audience in a wholly invented atmosphere. Even with jets and helicopters roaring over our heads, we are persuaded of worlds we never imagined.