While we're on marriage...

Ben Brantley has a review of All's Well That Ends Well in The New York Times:

Daniel Sullivan plants a hot kiss smack in the middle of his captivating production of the thorny All’s Well That Ends Well for Shakespeare in the Park. Acts of osculation have of course been known to sweep people off their feet, but Mr. Sullivan ingeniously uses this one to ground his audience and to stabilize an uneasy play. You see, no one watching this comedy, which opened at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, is likely to have felt comfortable with the progress of its central romance thus far. That’s between Helena (a wonderful Annie Parisse), our resourceful heroine, and Bertram (Andre Holland), the unworthy object of her affections, who has just wed her against his will. Now this arrogant titled twit— who doesn’t know a good thing when he sees it— is rushing off to war, before even consummating the marriage, and poor Helena is reduced to begging him for a farewell lip-lock. So he kisses her. But contrary to what happens in any other production of All’s Well that I’ve seen, he keeps kissing her. And when he breaks away, he looks seriously, and perhaps even pleasantly, surprised. Bertram still runs away from Helena, and probably still believes he despises her. But we know that something important has occurred— a recognition of a deep affinity— and that impression will stay with us, despite subsequent evidence to the contrary.
That awareness is crucial to our believing in the titular promise of All’s Well That Ends Well. A prickly mixture of fairy-tale optimism and real-world pessimism, this strange comedy has consistently alienated even bardolators during the five centuries since it was first performed. After all, who wants to see a smart and personable woman like Helena keep humiliating herself by running after a cowardly skirt chaser like Bertram? “I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram, a man noble without generosity,” wrote Samuel Johnson.
But Mr. Sullivan has shown a special knack of late for resolving Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays by finding cohesion within their seeming inconsistencies. His interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, staged in the Park last summer (and on Broadway later that year), showed how the disparate lives of Portia the heiress and Shylock the usurer were cut from the same corrupt cloth.
Now he has come up with an approach to All’s Well that is worldly while holding onto a bright, sustaining glimmer of romantic hope. If his capitalism-conscious Merchant belonged to the age of the Goldman-Sachs hearings, his All’s Well reflects the summer of Anthony Weiner and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a time in which sexual scandals involving men in power have repeatedly made headlines. But for Mr. Sullivan, as for Shakespeare, the cynicism in such a perspective does not mean that love cannot, on occasion, prevail.
Unlike many latter-day stagings of Shakespeare, this All’s Well (which runs in repertory with the equally problematic Measure for Measure) doesn’t force the contemporary parallels. Like last year’s Merchant, the production is set not in the present but in the Edwardian era, exquisitely summoned by Scott Pask’s set and Jane Greenwood’s costumes. (The verdant-green, park-scape-matching ball gowns in the opening sequence are stunners.) We feel we are witness to a final sylvan idyll before a war that may well change everything, like the one described in Juliet Nicolson’s Perfect Summer, her chronicle of England in 1911.
This formal world on the edge of transition is the perfect context for Helena, a warring mix of servility and spunkiness, whom George Bernard Shaw saw as a precursor to Ibsen’s New Woman. The orphaned daughter of a brilliant physician, brought up by the kindly Countess of Rousillon (Tonya Pinkins, who combines warmth with majesty), Helena shared a childhood with Bertram, the Countess’s son. She knows the young count is socially far above her, but she loves him and, despite her humility, is determined to win him.
Ms. Parisse (best known to mainstream audiences for her seasons on the late, lamented Law and Order) embodies the conflicted sides of Helena with fine-handed persuasiveness. On the one hand, this Helena is an “I’m-not-worthy” doormat; on the other, she is a smart woman who is never happier than when exercising her intelligence. We watch her grow in confidence when, using her father’s medicines, she takes it upon herself to cure the ailing King of France (a winningly crusty John Cullum). The success of this cure earns Helena the prize of choosing whomever she wants to marry from the court. Guess who that is. The sullen Bertram agrees to the match under pressure, but quickly bolts for the Italian front with his constant companion, the obnoxious, vainglorious Parolles (Reg Rogers, recreating his turn as the posturing John Barrymore figure in The Royal Family, with an added touch of Borat). While abroad, Bertram pays court to Diana (Kristen Connolly), a lovely maid of Florence, whom the enterprising Helena uses to trick Bertram into having sex with her.
I know. Ugh. But Mr. Sullivan makes the notorious “bed trick” scene more palatable than it usually is by having it echo broader themes. Bertram is blindfolded for his coital encounter with his wife (whom he believes to be Diana). And we have only just seen the fatuous Parolles blindfolded for a prank in which his fellow soldiers expose his cowardice by making him believe he has been captured by the enemy. (The mock interrogation scene, wittily led by Carson Elrod, is a high point.)
Bertram has been blind from the beginning, of course: to Helena’s virtues as to Parolles’ vices. This production makes it clear that he has been given a chance to see (not that he won’t backslide before evening’s end). Mr. Holland’s performance emphasizes Bertram’s selfish immaturity, but he speaks his introspective lines with a dignity that suggests he may eventually grow in moral stature.
Not that he could ever match Ms. Parisse’s emotionally full and complex Helena. The principal actresses— including Ms. Pinkins, Ms. Connolly, and Caitlin O’Connell (in two roles)— are more assured than their male counterparts here (though I enjoyed Dakin Matthews’s acerbic statesman and David Manis’s Andy Devine-like clown). Mr. Rogers’s overly aspirated Parolles (every consonant slaps you in the face) needs to be more fully integrated, and Mr. Holland doesn’t yet project the stature of the military hero Bertram becomes.
Yet this slight imbalance in casting is of a piece with the play’s larger view of the sexes. Let’s face it: men will be cads. And Ms. Parisse, Ms. Pinkins, and Ms. Connolly exude a wise, resigned acceptance of that idea that may help theatergoers better understand famous philanderers’ wives like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Silda Wall Spitzer. This production still manages to suggest that true love can and does exist between good women and flawed men. This improbable fact of life is cause for wonder (an element beautifully underscored by Tom Kitt’s stirring music and Peter Kaczorowski’s lighting). “They say miracles are past,” Mr. Matthews’s character rejoices early in the play. He’s talking about the curing of the king. But the real miracle, according to this illuminating All’s Well, is that love keeps happening between men and women.