The Comedy of Errors, and: The Winter’s Tale (review)

It was both auspicious and appropriate that the Riverside Theatre Shakespeare Festival chose two of Shakespeare’s shipwreck-themed plays for its summer 2008 repertory season. For, shortly before the plays were set to open in mid-June, severe flooding along the Iowa River led to the loss of the festival’s lovely quasi-Elizabethan open-air venue on city park land adjacent to the riverbank. The set was hastily struck and moved to higher (and drier) ground inside a local high-school auditorium, and the festival proceeded as planned. (Despite this heroic effort, the company’s main warehouse space in which its scene construction shop had been housed did fall victim to the flood waters.) That the company was taking their misfortune in stride was well indicated by the graphic design of the festival’s souvenir t-shirt, which depicted a hapless Elizabethan gentleman in a rowboat along with the caption, “Exit, pursued by a flood.”

In its nearly decade-long existence, the festival has grown into a strong regional site for Shakespearean production, taking advantage of local theatrical training programs such as those at the University of Iowa and nearby Cornell College, and attracting actors with experience in regional theatre centers such as Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Kansas City. For the 2008 season, the festival drew on a combination of returning veterans from previous seasons and actors making their debut with the company in filling the twelve most important roles in each show. Minor roles were taken, and in all cases ably performed, by student “interns” from regional academic theatre programs. The festival is family-friendly, and under normal circumstances stages brief “green show” performances before the actual show in order to familiarize younger viewers with the basic plot design of the relevant play. At the same time, the festival takes its interpretive work seriously, as was well demonstrated this year in its delivery of a simultaneously humorous and thoughtfully executed Comedy of Errors and a dramatically effective if somewhat uneven Winter’s Tale.

Both productions used the same basic bi-level set design featuring a raised platform extending across the rear of the proscenium stage and accessible from either end by means of staircases. Flanking each side of the platform were two tall but relatively slender tower-like structures, or pedestals, which actors accessed by means of ladders placed behind them. The set remained uncluttered for the most part during The Winter’s Tale, with the notable exception of the sheep-shearing festival in act four, for which bundles of wool were placed about the stage. For Errors, a variety of rather large barrels, boxes, and other shipping containers covered most of the upstage area, bringing Ephesus to life as a port city. The Errors set also featured a large clock face installed at the central and highest point of the rear-stage platform. The hands of the clock spun intermittently to remind the audience of the passage of the hours during the play’s neoclassical...