To judge from this production, the only reason to do "Love's Labor's Lost" is a grim determination to do the entire Shakespearean canon. The play is utterly lifeless in its predictability: the King of Navarre and three of his fellows agree to foreswear women for three years, whereupon the Princess of France and three of her maids arrive to make them change their minds. The idiot Spanish nobleman Don Armado competes with the peasant Costard for the love of Jacquenetta, while a pair of faux-learned men comment on it all. The comic romances are pale imitations of (or rehearsals for) the lively encounters between Beatrice and Benedick or Rosalind and Orlando. The clowns combine the most labored elements of the Rude Mechanicals in "A Midsummer's Night Dream" with the most extreme sexual crudity of "The Merry Wives of Windsor." And the whole thing ends with an unwelcome surprise that doesn't twist the plot so much as distort it. Under these circumstances, the clarity and fidelity to text for which Chicago Shakespeare, and director Barbara Gaines, are justly celebrated only serve to make things worse. What Love's Labor's Lost needs is some enormous weird concept that can distract the audience from the utter worthlessness of the play.
What it gets instead is a pretty pastorale. Though Gaines reports having set the piece in 1913, in the shadow of the impending First World War, the men's costumes suggest an earlier date and the women's a later. Moreover, Gaines does nothing to foreshadow the darkness to come, which would be the only possible way to make sense of the loss and separation inflicted on the lovers at the end. The World War I metaphor requires that the injury feel like a bolt from the blue to the characters but somehow inevitable to the audience. That tension is entirely missing here.
Nor does the play's weakness bring out the best in the actors. As the semi-hero Berowne, the usually excellent Timothy Gregory (a stunning Orlando in last season's "As You Like It") looks beautiful and smiles but conveys nothing of love or longing. Maybe he just can't gain any purchase on the hard surface Kate Fry presents as his lady-love Rosaline: she's all raised eyebrows and superior titters behind the fan. The King (Timothy Edward Kane) and the Princess (Karen Aldridge) do better: they try to immerse themselves in the characters' reality, and though that reality is too shallow for them to succeed, at least they don't spend the whole play nudging each other and winking at the audience.
The show's saving grace is its clowns, particularly the superlative Scott Jaeck. In his lisping, mincing, clueless Don Adriano de Armado, it's impossible to recognize Caliban from last season's production of The Tempest, but the performance is equally brilliant. Jaeck's willingness to introduce himself to the audience wearing little more than a girdle and heels is the more commendable for the toll it must have taken on his vanity. Don Armado's lines may or may not be funny, but he always is. Likewise Ross Lehman as his rival Costard: though less assured in his solo moments, he fires on all cylinders in the comic give-and-take with Don Armado and the pedant Holofernes (Paul Slade Smith<b/, in ludicrous wig with affect to match).