Shakespeare Out Loud: The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Is Inviting You Into the Room Where the Work Actually Happens — To Read a Play Together

Most people who attend productions at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey experience the organization from its public-facing side: the stage at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre on the Drew University campus in Madison, where the professional company presents its main-stage productions to audiences that number approximately 75,000 adults and children annually, making it the largest professional theatre company in New Jersey dedicated exclusively to Shakespeare’s canon and classical work. The Thomas H. Kean Theatre Factory at 3 Vreeland Road in Florham Park is the other side of the organization — the facility where the work gets made before it reaches that stage, and where the accumulated evidence of that work-making is visible in every corridor and room. A mural hallway called the Boulevard of Dreams features facades of fictitious theater-based shops. Props, set pieces, and costumes from past productions are displayed throughout, giving the building the specific quality of a working museum — not a museum of completed things but of ongoing creative process, of the materials and methods through which professional theater comes into existence. It is, as Artistic Director Paul Crowe has described it, a glimpse into how the magic happens.

It is also, on June 30 and July 7, the setting for Shakespeare Out Loud: The Merry Wives of Windsor, the Shakespeare Theatre’s annual participatory reading series that brings a small group of participants together to read through one of the Bard’s plays in the company of fellow enthusiasts and experienced facilitators, discussing characters, conflicts, and the specific qualities that have kept Shakespeare’s work at the center of global theatrical and literary culture for more than four centuries. The sessions run from 7 to 9:30 p.m. on consecutive Tuesdays, with registration at $80. The series welcomes both experienced Shakespeare readers who come with detailed knowledge of the text and complete newcomers who have never encountered the play before — the format is designed to be equally accessible to someone who has seen the Merry Wives staged five times and someone who does not know the story at all.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of Shakespeare’s most distinctly comedic and most distinctly English works, the only play in the canon in which Sir John Falstaff — the enormous, dissolute, endlessly entertaining knight who first appeared in the Henry IV history plays — is the central character rather than a supporting presence in another story. Where the history plays give Falstaff his full tragic dimension alongside his comedy, the Merry Wives puts him squarely in a domestic farce: a fat, self-aggrandizing knight who attempts to seduce two wealthy married women simultaneously, sending each of them the same love letter, and who is foiled repeatedly and humiliatingly by the women themselves — Ford and Page, the merry wives of the title — who are far more intelligent, resourceful, and possessed of better judgment than the man attempting to exploit them. The play has an unusual origin story in Shakespeare’s biography: the tradition holds that Queen Elizabeth I, having become fond of the Falstaff character from the history plays, commanded Shakespeare to write a play showing Falstaff in love, and that Shakespeare produced the Merry Wives in approximately two weeks. Whether that tradition is historically accurate is disputed by scholars, but the play’s specific energy — quick, broadly comic, built around physical humiliation and clever deception — is consistent with the compressed creative timeline the story implies.

What the Shakespeare Out Loud series offers that a conventional production does not is the experience of the play at the level of language rather than spectacle — the encounter with what Shakespeare actually wrote, word by word, in the company of people who are also encountering it in real time, with the conversation about what the text means and how it works happening in the same room as the reading rather than in the private reflection that usually follows a theater performance. The read-aloud format removes the interpretive layer that a director’s production decisions impose between the text and the audience, which is both a loss and a gain: the play does not have its best Falstaff, its most precisely timed comic beats, its most inventive staging. But the play also does not have anyone else’s Falstaff either — the character takes his shape from the voices of whoever is reading him on a given Tuesday evening at the Theatre Factory, surrounded by props and costumes from productions that have been, and against the specific energy of people who have come because they want to spend two and a half hours inside Shakespeare’s language.

The reading series also functions, this summer, as a direct preparation for the outdoor Rogue Shakespeare production of the Merry Wives of Windsor that the company will present at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre in Madison from August 14 through August 23. Rogue Shakespeare is the Theatre’s outdoor, minimally staged, maximally physical production format — an approach to presenting classical work that strips the production to its essential elements and delivers the play with the directness and energy that the open-air environment requires. Participants in the Out Loud series on June 30 and July 7 will arrive at the August production having spent two evenings inside the play’s language and structure, which is a different kind of preparation than reading a plot summary or watching a film adaptation. They will have heard the play in their own voices, argued about what Falstaff’s self-delusion means, and encountered the women’s collaborative intelligence as it appears in the actual lines rather than as it is summarized in a program note. The Rogue Shakespeare production in August is where the company’s professional interpretation of all of that takes shape on an outdoor stage. The Out Loud sessions are where the audience does its own interpretive work first.

Registration for both the June 30 and July 7 sessions is available through the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s website. The Thomas H. Kean Theatre Factory is at 3 Vreeland Road in Florham Park. The sessions begin at 7 p.m. and run through 9:30, in a building that is, by the account of everyone who has been inside it, unlike any other theater facility in New Jersey — a working creative environment full of the evidence of past productions, inhabited on these two Tuesday evenings by a small group of people reading a comedy about a very foolish knight and the two far more intelligent women who make him regret his foolishness.