Review: JANE ANGER at Shakespeare Theatre

The fun of Jane Anger starts right away when Amelia Workman, brilliant in the title role, breaks the fourth wall and starts a conversation with the audience. Calling herself a born genius, she lures the audience into 1606 when London was having one of its frequent outbreaks of bubonic plague and Shakespeare was working on the script for King Lear. Anger had written a pamphlet called "Defense of Women" in 1589 when Shakespeare's career was just getting started. There's no evidence that they knew each other, but, of course, by 1606, everyone knew him. Using both actual and alternative facts, playwright Talene Monahon imagines that they had a connection.

Monahon's strongest trick lies in her use of 21st century, idiomatic English; juxtaposed with Scenic Designer Kristen Robinson's calm, wood-panelled Elizabethan room and Costume Designer Andrea Hood's proper 16th century attire, the modernity of the language sets the tone (funny), drives the comedy (farce), and rules the sending up of everything and -body. Spoken in various (perfect) British accents with hilarious (American) inflections by the team of four actors, the script's the thing. Best rat jokes since Pizza Rat went down the subway steps; and Workman can be lip-read miming "WTF" from the last row of the house.

Michael Urie's Shakespeare manages to be both adorable and as obnoxiously narcissistic, arrogant, and sexist as Monahon depicts him. Urie can also carry off physical comedy as if he were a Python: he's "dis-arming" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). There will be blood. Ryan Spahn plays Francis, the only fictional character in the play. Ah, but Francis transforms into EveryActor; Monahon writes him as if he were in one of those sketches on "Whose Line. . . ?" in which Wayne or Ryan must act out 2000 years of the history of something or other in 60 seconds. Spahn finds both perfect manic energy and the courage needed to race through aisles in the dark.

The playwright plays Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway. So few facts are known about her; Monahon writes and plays her mewlingly at first--a whiny, needy, lower-middle-class drone without an intellectual bone in her, well, head. But this Anne Hathaway evolves under the tutelage of Jane Anger and turns into a sympathetic lower-middle-class drone.

Outside of her pamphlet, little is also known about Jane Anger. But Workman, while giving her a downmarket, pre-Henry Higgins-Eliza accent, also gives her the savvy, sophistication, and self-awareness of a fully formed feminist. She offers war and never kneels for peace. Smarter than everyone in the room, Workman's Jane Anger embodies the long way women have come. Only 17¢ to go.

Jess Chayes directed the 90 minute play which runs through January 8.

Photo Credit: DJ Corey Photography

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