Loving Love's Labor's Lost

I went to see Love's Labor's Lost at Brigham Young University. BYU always has brilliant productions. They put many hours into research and execution. The whole theater was a step into the 1940's. It incorporated the audience and really seemed to integrate everything together pretty well.

I found the acting to be pretty fantastic. Each character knew his/her Shakespearean role and had obviously studied it, but was well grounded in his/her 1940's counterpart role. A couple of characters had distinct accents that really brought new dimension to the role and were intriguing to watch. Don Armado's modified character seemed to be an effective lynch pin between both worlds. He provided a good 1940's persona integrating Shakespearean dialogue. I was also a fan of Biron, I felt like he was entertaining to watch and he also brought good Shakespeare to the 1940's theme. He wasn't dry when he spoke. There was life and color. I can only say that about only a couple of the characters, because most of them seemed to  become too dry and irritable to listen to. It's hard to create engaging Shakespeare because it is so easy to lose the momentum and movement behind it. This production did a very good job of keeping the pace and engaging the audience within it.

When I saw the production I kept thinking could I use this in my own project. It doesn't really tie into my paper since I looked at The Taming of the Shrew exclusively, but I definitely could have used this production of Love's Labor's Lost to talk about the influence that Shakespeare gives women. The women in this play had large roles. I was pleasantly surprised to see them taking up the stage, even when the characters are actually men, because they worked pretty well within the play. They played a trick on the men when the men sought to trick the women. It wasn't one-sided, but the women were very influential in the storyline. In the end when they said they wouldn't marry the men until the war was over, the men were so smitten with the women that they would have agreed to anything. The whole play was about the power that women held over men...now that I think about it, this play would have worked really well with my thesis.