Hark in the park: Shakespeare returns to outdoor venue

As origin stories go, this one has a kind of poetic geometry — almost as if Shakespeare had written it himself.

“It was a rainy night,” says Murray Ross, TheatreWorks founder and artistic director, of the company’s first outdoor production of Shakespeare in 1981. “It was wet and, I thought, cold. Not welcoming. I thought, ‘Well, 40 people will be there and we’ll just try and do the show.’”

About 700 people were waiting on the hillside of the park below the Fine Arts Center.

“There’s something here that people would want,” Ross says now. “There’s something that satisfies an appetite that we didn’t even know existed.”

The bubbly farce “The Merry Wives of Windsor” opens Thursday under the direction of Kevin Landis and starring Robert Rais as Falstaff.

TheatreWorks has produced more than 20 productions in local parks (about 500 performances all told). It’s been seven years, though, since TheatreWorks’ brought Shakespeare to a local park. The well-appointed Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theatre at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where the company moved in 2003, proved too seductive; it kept the Bard indoors.

“But there’s something about summer that calls for a different experience,” says Ross, who saw his first Shakespeare outdoors in Pasadena, Calif., when he was 10. “It can’t be business as usual. It wants to be special.”

And when Ross saw Rock Ledge Ranch, he was agog. (His word.)

With woods and a pond, the living-history farm and ranch offers a pastoral setting, of course, but there’s another distinct advantage for theater: In spite of being centrally located, there’s very little noise from traffic. It also offers a museum, picnicking and, perhaps most importantly, bathrooms.

“Oh, this is Windsor, Colorado,” he says, laughing.

As it so often does, TheatreWorks takes Shakespeare’s story to another time and place: Instead of Elizabethan England, the Rock Ledge Ranch backdrop prodded “Merry Wives” into 19th century Windsor, Colo., population 30.

The familiar TheatreWorks tent will house risers, company lawn chairs and probably some Shakespeare newcomers.

“There’s something so unintimidating about a tent,” Ross says. “I think people are intimidated by Shakespeare — Shakespeare with a capital S and very scary. But you’re outdoors and people are milling around and it’s so welcoming.”

He laughs. “That’s right. I’m in my tent preaching.”

Shakespeare in a tent is not all doublets and mistaken identities, though. There are moments when “you look outside and it’s raining and hailing, high winds are whipping through the thing and you’re thinking, ‘Gosh, I wish I was at the Bon Vivant.’”

But people still reminisce with Ross about the thunder cracking strategically during a 2002 performance of “King Lear.”

“There’s something wonderfully communal and special about it,” Ross says. “There’s magic.”

the merry wives
of windsor

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and Tuesdays through Saturdays through Aug. 28

Where: Rock Ledge Ranch Historic Site at Garden of the Gods, 3105 Gateway Road

Tickets: $10 - $30 reserved seating, with a portion going to the site; 255-3232, theatreworksCS .org

Something else: Children under 5 will not be admitted.

What’s it about? Sir John Falstaff, a knight down on both luck and cash, hatches a scheme to raise funds. He will seduce Mistress Ford and Mistress Page in an attempt to get at their husbands’ money. Falstaff, however, has overestimated his ingenuity; the two women compare their letters, and — finding them identical — hatch a plan of their own to make a buffoon of the knight.

As Mistresses Ford and Page pursue their sport, Falstaff is first hidden in a basket of dirty laundry and cast into the Thames, then later dressed as a woman and beaten. Finally, the women tell their husbands about their secret revenge, and all plot one last humiliation for the feckless Falstaff. As this is going on, Page’s daughter, Anne, is being courted by three suitors, only one of which she actually cares for: Fenton. Anne is included in the plans for Falstaff as they prepare for the final prank; the husband, Page, pulls aside the suitor, Slender, and tells him to elope with her that evening. Mistress Page pulls aside her favorite of Anne’s suitors, Dr. Caius, and says she wants him to elope with Anne. Anne makes plans of her own to elope with her beloved Fenton.

The wives and husbands eventually reveal themselves to the much chagrined Falstaff, who is forgiven by all. The suitors reappear, revealing that they mistook the masked Anne and mistakenly ran off with boys. Fenton arrives with Anne in their wake; the two have married, and Anne’s parents begrudgingly accept the fact.

From bardweb.net