All’s Well That Ends Well and Macbeth

Notwithstanding thematic elements that have marked All’s Well That Ends Well as “problematic”—including a prominent bed trick—the play has a fundamentally comedic arc, driving towards resolution in marriage. In this light, it stands far removed from Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and bleakest tragedies, which ends with the main character and his wife dead after leaving Scotland in ruins. Yet the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) productions of these two plays that I saw on back-to-back nights shared a great deal in common. They coursed with comparable energy, both reflecting the now characteristic approach of the company, which has extended its formerly seasonal “Actors’ Renaissance” throughout the year. Both productions were conceived not by directors but by principal performers: Brandon Carter, John Harrell, Chris Johnston, and Zoe Speas, all of whom were credited in the program as actor-managers. On alternating nights, they appeared in All’s Well That Ends Well and Macbeth, with an emphasis on the choices of individual actors and an animated, rapid-fire delivery style. The stagecraft was thoughtful but spare. Neither spotlights nor gels were employed, since the ASC’s indoor space always keeps the house lights up. Such music as there was came primarily from the players, before the first scenes and then during interludes. Despite a scattering of shortcomings during each show, the sustained intensity not only kept the audience engaged but also emphasized Shakespeare’s language, which was presented with care, nuance, and precision.

As in the ASC’s 2020 Othello, before the start of All’s Well that Ends Well several cast members took to the stage to perform contemporary songs that commented on Shakespeare’s story. Fittingly, the lyrics of the four numbers all addressed uneasy relationships, anticipating Helena and Bertram’s zig-zagging journey towards consummating their marriage and settling down together. Aside from the actors, there appeared on stage only an open travel trunk, which was overflowing with clothes and would soon become multivalent. As Meg Rodgers (Helena) and Sam Saint Ours (Bertram) sang a duet for unhappy lovers, “July” by Miley Cyrus and Leon Bridges, while staring intensely at one another, every other cast member walked up to the trunk and took something from it—a bandana, a shirt, a jacket. This meta moment drew the audience into the world being evoked on stage, and it anticipated the centrality of disguise in the play, in relation to Helena posing as Diana and various soldiers impersonating enemies in order to expose Parolles as a coward. As the action commenced, the trunk became the central focus of Helena in mourning: she wept as she sifted through the few items still left within, which clearly represented the meager inheritance left by her father.

The downbeat mood did not last long, as the production quickly rolled out a great deal of fun that carried on until the ending. Parolles (Chris Johnston) was a boorish clown who had difficulty with entrances and exits, nearly walking face first into walls beside doors more than once because he was not paying careful attention to where he was going. In addition to drawing chuckles, Johnston’s choice was fitting for a character who neither sees clearly nor understands his place in the world. The ailment of the King of France (Jeremy L. West) was presented not as life-threatening but merely an intestinal issue. Attendants in his court frequently grimaced at his flatulence, struggling not to reveal disgust at their better. After the monarch was cured of his gassiness by Helena’s ministrations, the pair came to center stage and executed a festive dance arranged by Summer England. West grinned madly and went over the top with his exaggerated kicks, in an ebullient celebration of his health that made the house laugh. Meanwhile, the Countess (Zoe Speas), though self-possessed in comparison with several other flamboyant characters, was not above reveling in witty exchanges with her Steward.

The hub of the show, however, was not its various comedic characters but its leading lady, around whom everyone else revolved. As Helena, Rodgers was charming, capable, and vivacious, embodying a character ASC Mission Director Ralph Cohen dubbed in the program “one of [Shakespeare’s] strongest heroines.” Helena’s magnetism made Saint Ours as Bertram look more than a bit dense for failing to appreciate her, which is arguably an inherent feature of the script but was amplified here. Saint Ours leaned into his character’s immaturity, making him distracted and fidgety, with a voice pitched high to accent his youth. Besides Saint Ours’s good looks, it was tough to figure out what Helena saw in Bertram, though Rodgers convincingly played her passion straight rather than—as has been done in some versions of the comedy—as naïve infatuation.

The best quality of this production was its uninterrupted intensity, which resulted in speedy but crisp delivery of lines. In the mouths of the major players, Shakespeare’s words resonated as lived experience, as if they were happening in the moment to real people. By the final scenes, as the

Parolles (Chris Johnston) and Helena (Meg Rodgers) in All’s Well That Ends Well. The American Shakespeare Center, 2021. Photo by Lindsey Walters, courtesy of the American Shakespeare Center.

plot drove toward resolution, this intensity became difficult for some to keep up, and a handful of line cues had to be called. In fairness, this was opening night, and the possibility of actors needing support had been brought up during pre-show announcements. Actors wanting a prompt barely missed a beat to interject a quick “prithee,” which for many listening probably blended in with the rest of the lines. These few hiccups did little to slow the momentum of Helena’s briskly unfolding, international scheme to win her man.

In the final scene, with Helena back in France and victorious in her quest to claim Bertram, the trunk was rolled back on stage. Now it served as an emblem of homecoming, of journey’s end, related to Bertram’s understanding of his place after his misadventures abroad. For Helena’s part, she asserted control of her marriage, with a response to Bertram’s final profession of love that registered as a warning: “If it appear not plain, and prove untrue, /Deadly divorce step between me and you” (5.3.315–16).

Like All’s Well That Ends Well, the American Shakespeare Center’s Macbeth was preceded by several contemporary songs obviously related to the tragedy, including Gin Wigmore’s “Kill of the Night” and Prince’s “I Would Die for You.” Again, the actors took on the extra task of delivering these numbers with considerable gusto. Once the production was underway, it too was executed at breakneck speed, if anything at a tempo surpassing that of All’s Well That End’s Well. Perhaps because the company had already been running Macbeth for months, none of the hesitations that crept into the comedy appeared here. Its velocity was irresistible. Rodgers, who did so much heavy lifting in All’s Well That Ends Well, was not in a leading role yet still conspicuous. She displayed versatility as Lady Macduff, Donalbain, and the 1st Murderer. But Johnston and Speas as the Macbeths were the beating heart of this production of the Scottish play.

In a press release, Johnston described the tragedy as “a freight train” (“ASC Actors’ Renaissance Summer”). He might have been referring to its gravitas, though his performance as the title character exuded the power of a locomotive as well. From his first entrance, Johnston crackled with energy, making him credible as a formidable soldier capable of putting down—and then launching—a rebellion. It was hard to reconcile his power and surefootedness with the fumbling, craven Parolles he had portrayed the night before. Johnston’s energy level somehow ratcheted up when he was with Lady Macbeth. Speas burned with fire of her own, although she did more to modulate it, as when pausing a beat before calling on otherworldly powers to remove the qualities associated with her sex, making her malice—at least early on—more deliberate and pointed. Before the murder of Duncan, the couple exhibited palpable chemistry. Macbeth hung on his wife’s every word, and his yielding to her dark exhortations was comprehensible (albeit entirely unjustifiable) in light of this absolute devotion.

Macbeth (Chris Johnston) and Lady Macbeth (Zoe Speas) in Macbeth. The American Shakespeare Center, 2021. Photo by Lindsey Walters, courtesy of the American Shakespeare Center.

In the second half of the play, the raw power that pulsed through the first half was at once both magnified and complicated. What surged through the Macbeths was no longer just hunger for power but a gestalt of self-recrimination, paranoia, and rage. The morning after the murder, blood spatter remained visible on Macbeth’s hands. It was unclear whether this was by design or a technical oversight. Regardless, the effect was favorable. The traces of blood accented the clumsiness of the criminals, foreshadowing the likelihood that the Macbeths would be called to account while literally undercutting Lady Macbeth’s claim that the couple could easily wash away the evidence—and ignore the consequences—of a regicide. At intermission, Speas sang Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” though depending on how one viewed the dynamic between husband and wife, it might have been more precise to have Johnston rather than Speas croon “I’m a fool to do your dirty work.”

Whatever the case, in the second half of the show, the partnership between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth came apart. More than once, they were blocked to accentuate the growing rift between husband and wife, with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth exchanging words from opposing ends of the stage. In his famous speech in response to news of his wife’s death, Macbeth started blustery but halfway through shifted, Johnston conveying with his body language the utter devastation of one who has lost the center of his world. Nevertheless, he soon recovered his soldierly swagger as the return of Scotland’s rightful heir obliged Macbeth to turn his thoughts back to war. His final confrontation with MacDuff (Jeremy L. West) brought the drama to an exciting close, with an extended sword-fight lasting several minutes that managed somehow to be both brutal and elegant. Johnston kept the stakes high until close to the end when confronted with MacDuff ’s revelation that he “was from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripped,” and the tyrant collapsed in on himself once more, this time for good (5.8.15–16).

As in All’s Well That Ends Well, the heightened intensity of this production did a great deal to make it compelling. Still, the intensity did not serve every aspect of Macbeth equally well. After a promising entrance from beneath the stage that aligned with his meditation on Hell, the Porter (Nic Sanchez) was forgettable. Neither particularly funny nor ominous, he was there and gone, tumbling through his lines without conveying that a terrible crime against nature had occurred. In addition, during the first half of the show, the witches would have benefited from a few more moments before the audience. Shrouded in funerary white so as to look eerie, they rushed on and off stage too quickly to be magical, delivering clipped lines, which were sometimes hard to hear due to a poorly calibrated wind effect that marked their entrances and exits.

Later, when a freshly crowned Macbeth revisited the witches of his own volition—sans wind effect—the moment was far better, weird in the best sense. In this scene, the witches were attended by spirits: members of the ensemble wearing featureless masks. They transformed into the line of Banquo after Macbeth insisted on gazing into the future. Each suddenly popped up from a crouch into a ramrod straight position, almost like vampires rising in coffins, before donning imaginary crowns. The coordination in the choreography was exact and unsettling, as were the expressionless visages that made these figures a manifestation of a history bigger than any individual, regardless of his strength of arms. When Macbeth was finally defeated in battle, the witches put one of these featureless masks on his lifeless body and conveyed it offstage. It was a nice touch, as if Macbeth’s personhood had been displaced and he had become merely another faceless victim of fate. Notably, the mask did not adorn the “cursed” prop head resembling Johnston that MacDuff carried on stage before announcing the liberation of “the time” (5.9.21).

It is common today, given financial realities in the arts, to see actors simultaneously tackling multiple parts in multiple shows, even at well-established theaters. In fact, the team appearing in All’s Well That Ends Well and Macbeth was doing Henry V at the same time (see Matthew Davis’s review in this issue). Far less common today is seeing a consistent level of vigor, quality, and understanding across shows run concurrently by the same artists. That was precisely the feat executed by the American Shakespeare Center this summer, and I wish I could have seen the actor-managers interpret a history play alongside a comedy and a tragedy. Based on what I did have an opportunity to witness at the Blackfriars, my expectations would have been high—and I think they very likely would have been met.