Falstaff stumbles into another merry mess
What do Jackie Gleason, Chris Farley, John Goodman and Homer Simpson have in common? If you guessed fat and funny, you’re on the right track.
But each owes a considerable debt to Sir John Falstaff, Shakespeare’s infamous “fat knight,” whose bumbling escapades over the course of three plays laid a solid foundation for most every comedic boob in English-language drama and literature since.
His appearance in Shakespeare’s comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” which opens Thursday in a production by Shakespeare in Delaware Park, was his last and arguably most exaggerated. Norm Sham, a local actor and relative newcomer to Shakespeare, will take on the role in a show directed by company alum Steve Vaughan.
The show is considered by scholars to be one of Shakespeare’s more trifling and weakest and was purportedly written in just two weeks at the behest of Queen Elizabeth, who had taken a shining to the Falstaff character in Shakespeare’s earlier “Henry IV” plays.
Vaughan called the show “an Elizabethan sitcom” and compared it to shows like “I Love Lucy,” “The King of Queens,” “Two Men and a Baby” and “Happy Days.” He opted to remove plenty of historical references and Elizabethan political jokes that he said would have distracted from the madcap fun of the whole affair.
The plot of the comedy, so deep as it goes, finds an aging Falstaff attempting to find a suitably well-off bride. To expedite the process, he writes identical love letters to two women, who quickly enough discover the plot and set out to lead Falstaff on, and ultimately embarrass him in a series of absurd practical jokes. This gives Falstaff ample opportunity to show off his conniving nature, all wrapped in a hilarious package of good humor and supreme confidence.
Vaughan, a fight choreographer and professor at Niagara University, specializes in the execution of physical drama, and he gets to exercise his hand in “The Merry Wives” frequently.
In one scene, Falstaff gets carried off the stage in a laundry basket (Vaughan won’t disclose whether Sham will actually be in the basket when it’s carried offstage) and dumped into a river. “In another scene, the Merry Wives catch Falstaff in a trap and have to convince him to put on a dress and impersonate an old witch woman of the town. Then, of course, he gets beaten up with a stick because he’s a witch,” Vaughan said. “That’s a lot of fun, that scene.”
Maybe for Vaughn. But for Sham, appearing in only his second show on the Shakespeare stage (he appeared in the 2003 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), the role isn’t exactly a walk in the park.
“It’s been an unbelievable amount of work and mental anguish, and it’s definitely taken its toll,” Sham said. “I see the light and the fun of it at the end of the tunnel, it’s just the journey to get there has been really hard for me.”
Sham called the show “the ultimate fat guy joke,” but also noted that he thinks it doesn’t quite deserve its shoddy reputation as one of the Bard’s most trifling pieces.
“I wonder if the powers that be sell this play short and play it for its silliness and not play it for its true situations and let the silliness evolve out of it.
But for Vaughn, who’s calling the shots, it’s sort of the opposite.
He pointed to concerns about the economy, the war in Iraq and the political rhetoric of the last year as a reason for a little escapism.
“You can’t get away from that,” Vaughan said. “But this is a chance, for 2 1/2 hours, [to] just come and be silly.”
