Review: LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST at Independent Shakespeare Company In Griffith Park

It’s the Bros and the Sassy Ladies out in nature sporting their BRIDGERTON best, uttering words of love, passing the hat and hawking the occasional Independent Shakespeare Company (ISC) hoodie at intermission. Yes, summer has arrived, and ISC has broken the seal on its 22nd season of outdoor Shakespeare with a rollicking production of LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST adjacent to the grounds of the old L.A. Zoo in Griffith Park. Led by Brent Charles and Jacqueline Misaye as the most prominent of LLL’s four (!) sets lovers, director David Melville’s performance is a delicious mix-up of romance, hijinks and buffoonery, often overlapping. Melville himself plays the randy Clown, Costard, but he leaves the more serious labors of love to others.

Most notably to the men - Ferdinand, King of Navarre (played by Pierre Adeli), and the attendant lords Longaville (Isaac Ybarra), Dumaine (Patrick Batiste) and Berowne (Brent Charles). These three lords have taken the monastic if deeply unwise vow to spend three years living purposefully and chastely with the King, concentrating on scholarly matters and eschewing the company of women. Our manly quartet is a  goodly mixture: including Adeli’s rough, decidedly un-regal King (channeling Jack Black), Batiste’s human toothpick of a Dumaine, Ybarra’s smaller scrappier Longaville and the aforementioned Charles, a dashing figure in his burgundy topcoat whose aviator shades only enhance Berowne’s coolness.  The recitation of the various vows elicit a chorus of fraternity-like “Yes!” grunts. Point made: these boys will be boys as well as scholars.

Until they will be neither. The arrival of the Princess of France (Melissa Chalsma) with her three attendant ladies throws Navarre’s plans into a tizzy. The Princess has arrived with a political errand, which can’t be ignored, and her ladies Maria (Carene Rose Mekertichyan), Katherine (Asha Noel Iyer) and Rosaline (Jacqueline Misaye), have each previously caught the eyes of Longaville, Dumaine and Berowne respectively. It's the perfect storm of love

Because of the no women edict, the ladies can’t enter the court of Navarre, so they are housed in a tent at the edge of the court and are permitted to hunt and otherwise roam the grounds. Advisor Boyet (William Elsman), who shares the Princess’s puckish taste for mischief, is only too happy to help the ladies turn the men into Cupid-struck jackasses.

With ISC still performing in the copsed-off hillside by the zoo cages until the permanent space is complete, Scenic Designer Maya Channer configures the central performance area as a square of greenery surrounded by the audience and performers entering and exiting from every possible direction. It's a picturesque setting; remember to bring picnic stuff. 

On the comic side, the doltish Spaniard Don Armado (Bernardo De Paula) is besotted by the lowly Shepherdess Jaquenetta (Diana Reyes) who has been fooling around with Costard (Melville). Shakespeare also tosses in a curate Nathaniel (Erik Valenzuela de Campos), a long-winded schoolmaster Holofernes (Daniel DeYoung), the strategically talkative constable Dull (Victor M. Frausto) and Armado’s page Moth (Natalia Echeverria) who, apart from Berowne, might be the smartest character in the entire play. Or at least the wittiest.  

As love letters are dispatched, mixed up, and read aloud by the wrong people, the high-born lovers and the purveyors of low comedy start to enter each other’s orbits. The guys have a grand old time in a set piece that has them disguising themselves as Muscovites to woo the ladies. Melville stages a climactic group scene that is part dance, part rager, everything but a food fight, before things take a turn for the somber.

Between eight lords and ladies, and the Armado-Jaquenetta-Costard triangle, there is a whole lotta loving going on in LOVE’S LABOUR’S and perhaps one too many couples to keep track of. Melville’s company keeps things light, with plenty of broadness especially when the former frat boys turn into wooers. Nathaniel, Holfernes, Moth and Costard doing their play-within-a-play atics as the Nine Worthies is similarly a hoot.  

The physically distinct Ybarra and Batiste do their level best to keep Dumaine and Longaville from being interchangeable while Iyer and Mekertichyan bring plenty of charm both to their characters and, breaking the fourth wall, to usher in intermission. As the Princess, Chalsma negotiates the shifts from playful exasperation (“God bless my ladies! are they all in love”) to eagerness to get in on the action, to the realization that she too might be susceptible to these tender feelings. And kudos certainly to Melville who – playing a clown - can deftly wring laughs out of the most deadpan of line deliveries, with or without his head and hands in the stockades.

Even with this a play as character-stuffed as this one is, it’s easy to forget how heavily it pivots to Berowne. Not only one the man be a trickster, he’s a man discovering love for the first time and the person tasked with explaining to his fellow lords how this course is to be pursued. Leave aside the love musings of bigtime wooers Orlando, Benedick or Romeo, Shakespeare gives Berowne a 75-line monolog poetically untabgling  the workings of love:

“From women’s eyes, this doctrine I derive:

They are the ground, the books, the academes,

From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire."

Whether playing the role of wooer, instructor or ringmaster of the revels, Charles is credible and charismatic along all facets of Berowne’s journey. When the question comes back, “Shall we resolve to woo these girls of France,” the ground has been laid. Laborious or otherwise, it’s a resounding affirmative.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST plays through July 27 in Griffith Park. 

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