Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival's 'Love's Labour's Lost'

They keep modern theater’s production trappings — electric lighting, female performers — while preparing as the Globe Theater actors may have (no one knows for sure). The actors rehearse for only three days without a director or designers. They arrive with their lines learned, find costumes in PSF’s storage, and use the set and lighting left over from an earlier production (in this case, Steve TenEyck’s sleek designs for Julius Caesar, which are also used, with a few oceanic alterations, for PSF’s kids’ show, The Little Mermaid). Together, they work out entrances and exits, fights, dances, and songs.

Hedging their bets

Artistic director Patrick Mulcahy’s wisdom shows not only in making this bold choice, but also by casting those who will thrive in a situation that might be overwhelming for actors who need someone to tell them what to do, or who don’t play well with others. PSF manages year after year to assemble actors who make ensemble magic.

Despite Mullen’s wise editing, they can’t hide the fact that Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, with a trying-too-hard tone and ideas that Shakespeare executed better in later works. Spencer Plachy plays King Ferdinand of Navarre, who, with friends Longaville (Akeem Davis), Dumaine (Ryan Hagan), and Berowne (Zach Robidas), pledges to study intensely for three years with a minimum of sleep and food, and no women.

Moments after signing their pact, Marnie Schulenburg, as the princess of France, arrives for an official state visit with three ladies in tow: Patti-Lee Meringo’s Maria, Stephanie Hodge’s Katherine, and Mattie Hawkinson’s Rosaline. The boys’ vows are discarded and the couples pair off without effort, doubt, or suspense. This leaves time for lots of clowning around, not only for the lovesick octet, but also for Anthony Lawton as English-fracturing knight Don Adriano de Armado, who loves the same wench (Jacquenetta, played by Beth Egan) as Costard (Mullen). Shakespeare also throws in a comic academic, Holofernes, played by ukulele-strumming Peter Schmitz, who leads a funny play-within-the-play that foreshadows A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s “Pyramus and Thisbe,” right down to the aristocrats’s heckling.

What we know doesn’t hurt us

If we didn’t know about the “Extreme Shakespeare” approach, this Love’s Labour’s Lost would still be an enjoyable production. Costumes look like they were grabbed from a theater’s costume loft by actors enjoying their freedom (though the quartets of men and women clearly collaborated in their choices). The set seems accidental yet adequate, and every inch is used effectively.

The biggest issue is that some comical characters overindulge in ways that a director, mindful of the play’s story and crafting its pace, would resist. But when a talented actor like Tony Lawton riffs and pratfalls overlong in tortured Spanglish while wearing a huge pink coat, why complain? The younger actors — mostly DeSales University students, such as Justin Ariola, Peter Danelski, and Marcel Logan as servants and clowns — seize opportunities to shine, and they certainly do. That it’s all very new to the actors shows in the efforts I spied by some to avoid breaking into laughter.

The play’s airy delights, summarized in the prince’s line, “Are we not all in love?” shine through, as does the combination of hopefulness and melancholy at its end, when the happily-ever-after is interrupted and a sequel (Love’s Labour’s Won, written about, but lost to us) promised. As this company of actors ably shows, that lovely ending foreshadows great plays to come.

Call it a little rough around the edges. Caution theater companies not to try this at home. Nevertheless, at PSF, it’s a great way to see a rarely produced Shakespeare play.