Utah Shakespeare Festival’s delightful “The Book of Will” is a can’t-miss production
“The Book of Will” at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City is a play for people who love Shakespeare. But it’s also the must-see play of the summer.
A wonderful ensemble cast makes the most out of every word in Lauren Gunderson’s brilliant, funny, and poignant play. And Melinda Pfundstein’s masterly direction ensures that we feel each heartbeat with them.
It’s simply delightful. It’s enchanting. Plays like “The Book of Will” are why we go to the theater.
It begins with a group of William Shakespeare’s friends — most of whom worked with him at the Globe Theatre — waxing nostalgic as they mourn his death, celebrate his words, and lament how the Bard’s life work is being lost to bad acting, altered dialogue, and unauthorized printings of his plays.
They have to save the words. That means collecting the plays and preserving them by publishing a folio of Shakespeare’s work.
At the heart of the ensemble are the legendary King’s Men actors Richard Burbage (Todd Denning), Henry Condell (René Thornton Jr.), and John Heminges (Chris Mixon). But Gunderson’s moving script doesn’t let it devolve into a boys’ club. Instead it smartly creates room for their families — Condell’s wife, Elizabeth (Sarah Hollis), and Heminges’s wife, Rebecca (Katie Cunningham, also excellent as Lady Macbeth this season), and daughter, Alice (Betsy Mugavero) — to become part of the story and, in many cases, a driving force behind it.
All have moving and memorable moments, with Mugavero in particular standing out for her expectedly strong showing. She’s spot-on with every line, as usual. Impassioned one moment, the next she’s adding the precise intonation necessary to get the most out of a joke.
There are some seriously funny moments. Denning later returns in the hilarious role of Shakespeare’s rival Ben Johnson. And Mauricio Miranda is awkwardly comedic as Ralph Crane.
But the heart of the play is Thornton, whose performance is love personified. That love is in his endearing delivery and written across his face.
In fact, these actors playing actors all deliver their lines with a love and reverence for the legacy of Shakespeare. That sentiment is written into Gunderson’s script. And Pfundstein deftly brings it out of every moment of the play.
Shakespeare is responsible for some of the greatest romances in the Western canon. “The Book of Will” returns that love to the playwright. This is a love letter to William Shakespeare.
It’s a play about friendship, family, and feelings, from exuberant joy to “a tempest of loss,” and how powerful feelings are part of being alive.
Shakespeare’s work often espoused underlying messages, and “The Book of Will” is no different. There are smartly written feminist undertones throughout Gunderson’s words, from the women celebrating Shakespeare’s portrayal of women (“They spoke!”) to their reveling in the emergence of Emilia Bassano Lanier, portrayed in the play by Hollis and known as the first Englishwoman to become a professional poet.
There’s even a point when Rebecca “Becky” Heminges notes that not everyone doing good work gets applause. It seems to subtly nod at the often ignored and underappreciated emotional labor carried by wives and mothers throughout the world.
Even though so many of the powerful moments are found in the words, perhaps the most memorable comes through Pfundstein’s direction, itself filled with a love for the art of theater.
It’s impossible not to smile as the printing process begins and strings of pages stretch out across the theater. It’s magical — a magic enhanced by the production’s staging in the outdoor Engelstad Shakespeare Theatre, which has a classic “Wooden O” design like Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre.
It’s simply delightful. It’s enchanting. Plays like “The Book of Will” are why we go to the theater.
We go to see the magic.
The Utah Shakespeare Festival’s production of “The Book of Will” continues through Sept. 5 in the Engelstad Shakespeare Theatre at Southern Utah University’s Beverley Center for the Arts in Cedar City. Tickets are $20–$77. Visit bard.org or call (800) 752-9849.
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