The Beard of Avon

The Beard of Avon

The Vortex, through April 28

Running time: 2 hrs, 30 min

William Shakespeare: Hick or hayseed?

Those are pretty much your only options in Amy Freed's The Beard of Avon. From its opening glimpse of young Will staring glumly at the rain from the inside of a Stratford barn, the comedy paints this celebrated Englishman as a barely literate bumpkin easily dazzled by the illusions of theatre and even more easily hoodwinked by city folk, the nobility, his wife, and, well, just about anyone with half the sense God gave a goose. Oh, he has a bit of native wit, a wellspring of poetry deep within that, when triggered by his seemingly boundless empathy for the world and its creatures, produces bursts of lyricism and rhyme. And it isn't that he's an uninteresting fellow, especially as portrayed by Scott Tesh in this Different Stages production. Watching his eyes glaze over in rapture as he gazes at an actor or his lips broaden into a beatific grin as he contemplates a life in the theatre is a real delight; Tesh makes him so sweet a simpleton. But you can no more picture his Will penning those plays that stand as the hallmark of great dramatic literature than you can imagine them being authored by Larry the Cable Guy.

Now, that Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, he seems a much more likely candidate: cultured, sophisticated, a bit of a drama queen. He even has a batch of plays he wrote stashed in an old trunk. And to hear him tell it, he practically lived Hamlet. Putting it down in iambic pentameter is just a fancyass version of a tell-all autobiography. Of course, he does come off as a little cool, a little cynical, a little … what's the word, stuck-up. Not that de Vere's completely unpersonable, particularly as he's impersonated by Marc Balester. The actor oozes charm, that sort of manicured allure of the well-bred and well-read, saving his aristocratic disdain for a little patronizing cock of one eyebrow or a supercilious curl at one corner of his mouth. But even with the breeding, the erudition, and the trunk full of scripts, this frosty, existentialist earl seems to lack the embrace of humanity found in those masterworks of drama.

It shouldn't be hard to see where this is going. In Freed's comical consideration, writing Shakespeare's plays is too much for any one human to have accomplished solo. So she brings together the gifted yokel and cultivated nobleman and has them create the great works in collaboration. It's a simple conceit, but it's swathed in a comedy of delicious complexity, with an Anne Hathaway who disguises herself, then beds her wayward hubby in revenge (and later cuckolds him to boot); a virgin Queen Elizabeth with her own secret script (one involving a certain shrew who needs taming); yet more royals with literary aspirations in need of a good front; extravagant wordplay, cheek by jowl with fart jokes and other cheap gags; subplots that give nods to those in Shakespeare's plays; and liberal lampooning of all things theatrical. Some may find it too clever by half, but the play is more Will than de Vere, spurred on by its expansive embrace of humor in all its forms and its own giddy sense of invention.

What grounds the play – and certainly grounds Norman Blumensaadt's staging here – are the actors playing that Elizabethan odd couple, Will and de Vere. Like the leads playing Felix and Oscar in the Austin Playhouse revival across town, Tesh and Balester find the wonderful extremes in their characters' opposing personalities, then bring them together in delightful balance: Will's warmth and de Vere's cool, de Vere's vanity and Will's naïveté. Their scenes together are the crackling wit and heart of this show, which, it must be said, sometimes strains under the creative burdens of Freed's script. But one is inclined to forgive the sometimes cumbersome changes of scene and awkward blocking, the inconsistencies of accent and less fully fleshed performances, and the unfortunate bald pate on Shakespeare when one sees Balester and Tesh smoothly trying to one-up one another as their characters describe how much life they've experienced. "I was captured by pirates, you know, did I tell you?" Balester tosses off ever so casually to the rube who's just boasted in desperation that he once saw a girl drown in a duck pond. Tesh is all knotted brow and puppy-dog eyes as he strives to impress this man of the world, and it's a beautifully calibrated exchange, building to his explosive "I was trapped into marriage by the first woman I lay with!" We can only guess what the real Will must make of this fuss over who wrote his plays, but I think I know how he'd respond to this scene about it: He'd laugh himself silly.