‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ brings sitcom silly sense & sensibility to Iowa City stage

IOWA CITY — Love’s labour’s not lost at Crooked Path Theatre Company. The cast and crew of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” are performing a free labor of love to bring this silly Shakespearean comedy to the stage.

They will trod the boards from Aug. 23 to Sept. 1 at The James Theater in Iowa City, which has become the troupe’s de facto home, Crooked Path’s co-founder, Patrick Du Laney, told The Gazette in a recent roundtable interview. He’s also pulling double-duty by directing this show and portraying the jealous husband, Master Ford.

Condensing the plot into a couple of sentences is nearly impossible. Think sitcom, soap opera, love triangles, scheming, smart women and clueless men.

Since that scenario isn’t exclusive to Elizabethan England, this production is being set in modern-day Iowa City.

“It is unlike any other Shakespeare play,” said Du Laney, 49, of Iowa City, a theater professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon. “There’s no magic, there’s no exotic locale. Windsor is the suburbs … and suburban things happen. … However, the costumes still have an Elizabethan silhouette. So what does a pair of Elizabethan breeches or pumpkin pants look like if they’re made out of Hawkeye sweats? That’s the visual vocabulary of the show.”

Turning Shakespeare on its ear makes it more appealing for current audiences, he added.

“Shakespeare takes the feelings that all of us feel every day, throughout our lives, and elevates it to poetry,” Du Laney said. “It is about everybody, but (Shakespeare) has been reassigned as this elitist, difficult, snobby, unapproachable, overprivileged piece of theater. And so I think a lot of companies, and ours included, strive to set it in a place that you go, ‘Oh, maybe this can be about me. Maybe I can relax.’

“This show is so stupid, so dumb. It’s somewhat apocryphal,” he said, “but the legend goes that Queen Elizabeth said, ‘Oh, I love that ‘Henry the Fourth,’ and I love that Falstaff. Wouldn’t it be great if someone wrote a play about Falstaff in love, and wouldn’t it be great if that play was ready two weeks from right now? Because there’s a party with the Order of the Knights of the Garter, and I really need that play to happen.’

“And when Queen Elizabeth dreams aloud, you do it. So allegedly, the play was written in two weeks and designed specifically to be like ‘wocka-wocka, out of here we go.’ “

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Strong women, weak men

“Basically, if Shakespeare wrote an episode of ‘Three’s Company,’ it would be this, and we’re really leaning into that,” Du Laney added. “It’s one of the few plays where the title characters are women — and the smartest characters in the play — so we are also leaning into that. This is a slightly feminist take on the show.”

Two of those smart women are Mistress Ford, played by Jessica Link, and Mistress Page, played by Caroline Price, both of Cedar Rapids. To flesh out their back story, Mistress Ford is imagined as a yoga instructor, and Mistress Page as a lawyer.

The men are “consultants and entrepreneurs, which basically means we play video games all day,” Du Laney said. “We have no agency in the play, and that’s good.”

The way Ford treats his wife doesn’t fly with modern audiences, so that aspect has been tweaked.

“We live in a different world now, and the world where you possibly threaten your wife with violence, even in a comedic tone, is not the world we live in anymore,” Du Laney said. “So we’ve sort of taken that idea and spun on its head, and now (Ford) is just a sap and just incredibly insecure about everything, but highly ineffective.”

Enter Falstaff, portrayed by Jason Alberty of Cedar Rapids. Having lost all his money, he sends identical love letters to the two wealthy wives, hoping to lure them into his arms and bank account.

Good luck with that.

He doesn’t know they’re best friends who talk to each other every day, Du Laney noted. “So they decided to take revenge on him, and shenanigans unfold from there.”

Audiences will see “a raconteur, a miscreant get his comeuppance,” said Alberty, 55, a freelance creative and adjunct theater instructor at Coe College in Cedar Rapids.

Falstaff is a knight, so that’s his only job. But in this setting, he is “sort of suburbanly slumming it,” Alberty said.

“He’s here in town. He’s run out of money, and he doesn’t want anybody to know that, and he has come across these two lovely women who have a lot of it. And so he assumes this is his way toward financial security. If he can seduce these two women, he will be financially secure,” Alberty said.

Falstaff “thinks he can do anything,” and is “overjoyed” when not only the two women respond to his letter, but a third one does, as well.

“He’s a hog and a mutt,” Alberty said, adding that Falstaff “gambled, ate and whored” his way to poverty.

A veteran actor of classic and comedic roles, from Cyrano to Batman’s Penguin on local stages, Alberty is delighting in this character, where once again, art does not imitate his life.

“If it weren’t for the fact that everyone I run into stereotypes me as Falstaff, I would say it’s a breath of fresh air,” he said. “But I do enjoy him. I think he is one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters. … He’s just so funny, and he seems not self-aware. But I think he’s more self-aware than people maybe give him credit for.”

The women, however, know what he’s up to and turn the tables on him.

After Mistress Ford merely greets Falstaff on the street, he misinterprets that as “a key to move in” on her, said Link, 46, who recently dazzled audiences as the Wicked Witch in Theatre Cedar Rapids’ production of “The Wizard of Oz.” By day, Link works at the Cedar Rapids Public Library.

While Mistress Ford is dealing with that, she’s also dealing with her husband, who is “insanely jealous” for no good reason.

“So it’s kind of like, ‘Let’s just laugh at all these men and their stupidity. Let’s get one up on them. Let’s exert our power in a humorous and completely innocuous way.’ And so then she just gets to have a lot of fun with her best friend, making fools of men who are doing a perfectly fine job of it all by themselves,” Link said.

“Don’t tick off the Real Housewives of Windsor,” added Price, 44, a theater professor at Cornell College.

“Mistress Page does not like her reputation to be challenged,” Price said. “And the idea that this man could be trying to woo her and be damaging her reputation is awful. And then on top of it, to find out that not only is he trying to woo her, but her best friend, is just, ‘Are you kidding me? This is not OK.’ She is very much about justice, and we are going to make sure that there is justice.

“There’s something about her need for revenge that I completely understand and I relate to on an inner level,” Price said with a laugh. “So that’s where I completely relate to my character. And there’s something about the law and making sure that we teach lessons and make sure people learn things.”

Price, who has a master’s degree in acting and studied classical theater, also is enjoying the chance to exercise her brain through working the Shakespearean language.

“It puts me in a completely different mind space,” she said.

Crooked Path’s path

Du Laney and husband Chris Okiishi dreamed up Crooked Path Theatre Company before the pandemic, to fill a niche by offering the classics Du Laney loves, and the large musicals that Okiishi loves to turn into small ones.

“That’s the niche we fill. We’re the small musical, and we’re the surprising classicals,” Du Laney said. “We’re trying to give good actors more opportunities in town, particularly for classical theater.”

They began in 2015 by occasionally rolling out shows in found spaces, like an interior design storefront and Iowa City’s East Side Recycling Center. Since then, they also have taken shows to Mirrorbox Theatre in Cedar Rapids and The James Theater in Iowa City,

“Merry Wives” opens the company’s third full season, wrapping up rehearsals at the ICON Arts Academy in downtown Iowa City. Du Laney is building on a model of taking the whole summer to work on a show at a more leisurely pace, allowing for vacations.

“I think Shakespeare is best when it’s slow cooked, because the language is difficult,” Du Laney said. “You want to be able to spend some time with it and let the words happen to you, let the language happen to you. … If I can help it, I will never do it any other way again.”

Link is reveling in the experience.

“There’s just this joyous element,” she said. “And being in the space with a company that works so well together and has a lot of fun together, and to be welcomed into that space, is just a delight. It’s like summer camp, and that’s a lot of fun.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com