WIN OR LOSE, IT’S ABOUT LOVE

Wow! Whoever wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost was a comic genius. The wordplay, the multi-lingual puns, and the send-ups of characters stumbling over their own foolishness are endlessly entertaining—except that many productions of this play by William Shakespeare fall flat. The sometimes obscure (to us) Elizabethan references and word usage require precise comic timing to convey their humor to modern audiences.

This production by the up-and-coming Lanes Coven Theater Company hits every one of those marks. Director Justin Genna performs the alchemy needed to transmute those jokes into laughs, laughs, and more laughs, extracting every ounce of humor from this play that has confused many while earning high praise from the likes of American literary critic Harold Bloom. The shimmering production that emerges from Genna’s skilled direction offers an evening of precious delight.

The ensemble of men who swear off the company of women in order to devote themselves to study are the fools at the center of this play, and Evan Turissini, as King of Navarre, along with his bros Longaville (Nate Oaks) and Dumaine (Alex Strzemilowski), play off well against one another. But it’s David Keohane as Berowne, the ambivalent member of the buffoon quartet, who really shines. These four make even a scene of silent reading funny.

The vow, signed by these four, apparently applies to every man in the immediate neighborhood, including Don Adriano de Armado (Michael Lopez Saenz), a Spanish visitor to the court, and Costard (Debra Wise), a country bumpkin.

The vow to avoid women doesn’t last long. The arrival of the beautiful Princess of France (Lily Narbonne) with her comely serving women (Eryn O’ Sullivan, Naomi McLeod) quickly forces the men to violate their oaths and promptly fall in love. As always in Shakespeare, class divisions are respected, with the king falling for the princess and his companions fittingly smitten by her ladies-in-waiting.

If you’re doing the math, you’ll note that we seem to be one woman short—filling that gap is one of Genna’s clever surprises. Other surprises include well-chosen but brief present-day asides, as when the king mutters “Get a grip,” after a flirtatious exchange with the princess, or when the “wench” Jacquenetta (seductively played by the sinuous Graciela Rey) murmurs “Awkward!” There is an uproarious scene in which the four men disguise themselves as dancing Muscovites. The biggest surprise might be the performance of the Nine Worthies (a medieval collection of three pagans, three Jews, and three Christians meant to exemplify chivalric ideals), which the men arrange to entertain the ladies and which turns out to be a lip-synch dance fest of rock and hip-hop love songs around the theme of doing “anything for love.”

I cannot end this review without returning to Debra Wise. Wise has been a mainstay of Boston theater—co-founder of the Underground Railway Theater and former artistic director of Central Square Theater. She has appeared in numerous local productions. Her portrayal of the rabbi in Central Square’s Angels in America was especially memorable, but that was a relatively minor—though important—role. A playwright as well as an actor and director, Wise has won numerous awards for her work over several decades. But I will long treasure her performance as Costard, the illiterate “rustic” who is arguably the moral—if hilarious—center of this examination of the pitfalls of masculinity. In her portrayal of Costard, Wise pulls out all the stops to mock the aristocrats and their pretensions with her face and verbal emphases. While she may fill the traditional role of the fool, she succeeds in revealing—along with Shakespeare himself, of course—the foolishness of self-deception, especially when it comes with wealth and power.

Love’s Labour’s Lost
Lanes Coven Theater Company
Windhover Performing Arts Center, 257R Granite St in Rockport, MA
ends on July 27, 2025
for tickets, visit Lanes Coven