[In the following review, Mikesell evaluates Sarah Megan Thomas's 2003 Thirteenth Night Theatre Company production of Love's Labour's Lost at the Tribeca Playhouse in New York.]

Sarah Megan Thomas, Producer, Artistic Director, and Birona (aka Berowne) in this production of Love's Labor's Lost, released the following “mission” statement: her company “aims to increase the accessibility of theatrical performances by exploring classical theatre from contemporary perspectives,” and it “encourages its audiences to discover connections between the generations of ‘then’ and ‘now’. …” Love's Labor's Lost is an excellent project for the company, being verbose and knotty even by Shakespearean standards, with a rather uneventful plot that postpones the expected weddings at play's end. The Thirteenth Night Company has admirably met the challenges presented by this play.

First off, director Kit Thacker has moved his Love's Labor's Lost into the “now” with its setting in some postmodern watering spot for the wealthy, perhaps on the Riviera. An azure sea, complete with the sounds of breaking waves, forms the backdrop for both indoor and outdoor action, with a sliver of moon hanging stage left. (The rest of the simple set includes transparent curtains and a long sand-colored sea wall with a small thrust.) The characters, too, have timewarped to the present. This transposition is apparent, for instance, in the costumes, such as the interestingly asymmetrical designer dresses, spike heels, and dangling jewelry of the aristocratic women; in the “coffee” break taken by Dull and Mote, who pass a joint back and forth as they sit staring out to sea, uttering some lines from a cropped and reshaped 4.2 (the pot smell came from incense or herbal cigs, right?); and in the marked presence of a walkman, a fixed part of Costard's costume.

In this setting, 1.1 is transformed: four women dance their way through a long night, with strobe lights marking their deterioration from prinking to partying to puking (yes!); it is during a grey hungover dawn that the princess announces the ascetic vow.

Women? In 1.1? Thacker's most dramatic alteration is a gender switch straight down the cast list, which now names the Queen of Navarre, Birona, Prince, Rostine, Armada, Jaques, and so on. Mote, Dull, and Costard, with names unchanged, are also women. (Holofernes and Nathaniel have been excised altogether.) How did this cross-gendered production work? Brilliantly. Oh, there were problems—repeated references to the “fair” hunters did not work for me, though the guns sure seemed right in male hands.

Romantic love as it is examined in this Love's Labor's Lost is lodged firmly within a female sensibility. The significance of this strategy is apparent in Armado's change to Armada, accompanied by some judicious line cuts. Gone is the swagger defining “The Braggart” in Shakespeare's cast list. Vivian Font's luscious Armada bounces onstage in hair curlers, face cream, and sunglasses, with hardbound dictionary in hand (in deference to the study goals set by her betters). Rolling out cascades of words in a pronounced Spanish accent, she settles into her beach chair (the Riviera, remember?) with a dryly attentive Mote hovering to remove curlers and cream and to apply makeup in broad swathes. (Adding a blaze of green eye shadow to coincide with “green wit” is a typical visual gag.) Armada is in love—exuberantly, charmingly in love; she is silly, yes, but she seems in some ways the most self-aware of all the love-stricken characters populating the play. She catches the warmth, hope, and fear that underlie youthful romantic love. Armada plays brilliantly against Matthew Wilson's shy, rather dim Jaques, who, with disbelieving joy, laboriously decodes the letter misdelivered to him.

The Queen of Navarre and her retinue underscore this decidedly female view of love. But first, a moment of homage to the brilliant ensemble work of the aristocratic quartets, male and female alike. They convey an easy intimacy, manifested through casual physical affection and caresses (arms draped across one another's shoulders and hugs among the women, and back-slapping, handshaking, and crotch-joking bonhomie among the men) and, from both groups, bursts of uproarious laughter. The friends in each quartet have clearly known one another long and well, an intimacy that provides a thought-provoking counterpoint to their reserve about the state of their hearts.

The shattering of this secrecy, engineered, of course, by Birona, is a high point in this consistently strong production. Thacker sends each woman in turn dashing to center stage for her agonized confession of forbidden love, then retreating to rapt eavesdropping on the others. Thus are four separate consciousnesses merged into a collective speaking picture of love as a ravishing, halting awakening, with the women's reserve seemingly coming not so much from the irrelevant—in this production—vow of asceticism as from the awkwardness of first love filtered through a decidedly female awareness. This focus is beautifully captured in the final scene when (as Shakespeare has it) the King and his fellow lovers plead that the women not return to France, dead King or no. Here the princess and her fellow lovers interlace these same lines with gestures and tones of nervous uncertainty, with a quintessentially female veiling of desire. Wonderful.

As for the men: they are fine—their acting is excellent, with George Burich as a voluble, friendly Rostine and Michael X. Izquierdo as an interestingly diffident Prince. But the beloveds play a secondary role in this Love's Labor's Lost. The fuzzy animal Halloween masks the men wear for the humorous “Moskovite” scene are emblematic of the distance the production keeps from their consciousness. This production is about women in love. The men popped over from France to be the objects of their love.

Then there is Costard, dragged onstage in handcuffs by the phlegmatic Dull (who jangles the empty cuffs from her wrist thereafter). This is Costard's costume from top to toe: Pippi Longstocking ponytails; tight black top with the obligatory strip of flesh at the waist; pink panties with dangling garters covered by a gauzy mini-mini skirt; black mesh stockings under pink warmers pulled over spike heels. And, of course, the walkman with earphones. Nicole Stewart's Costard gyrates and writhes to the music that (thankfully) only she can hear, squeals, and whines, comically, endearingly. She isn't a “clown” in this production, though she is hilarious. She is an adolescent everywoman, needy and strong, in her ordinariness a foil for the more self-conscious and mannered aristocrats.

Other notable performances include Natalie Gold's Boyet, serious in a pinstriped suit, who offers a wonderful comic turn as she searches, silently, desperately, and, at length, through the innumerable pockets of her briefcase for the nonexistent pretext—oops, contract—that has brought the prince to Navarre. The minute she departs, the waiting men burst into backslapping, kneebending laughter—and politics is vanquished, its thirty seconds finished. Was I misapprehending, or does this Boyet entertain a secret longing for the Prince, one he acknowledges? Finally, Thomas has all the required charisma and force as the nonconforming, manipulative Birona, though her function as commentator would have been more powerful had she and Thacker cut a quarter of her jackhammerfast lines so we could have properly attended to the rest.

Thacker's earnest “Director's Notes,” which don't begin to capture this effervescent production, explain that the news from France at play's end “puts the actions of all the characters into the context of death.” But this offstage death has always seemed less a moment of memento mori than Shakespeare's gimmick to delay the inevitable weddings, an appropriate delay after we've witnessed so many hesitations and so much cautiousness in the pursuit of love. Thacker, whose onstage touch is sure, leaves his lovers each paired up in a comforting, caressing embrace. It feels right that these two sets of intimate friends tentatively—if momentarily—disperse into four couples learning to know each other.