In its first half, The Two Gentlemen of Verona exhibits all the worst tendencies of Chicago Shakespeare Theater: it's a veritable festival of nudging, winking, tit-grabbing obviousness. You know the genre: Shakespeare on roller skates -in this case, literally. We're supposed to know that Proteus (Timothy Gregory) and Valentine (Brian Vaughn) are best friends because they punch each other on the shoulder. There isn't a single genuine person on the stage, only a succession of caricatures-or, as they'd say in the production's turn-of-the-century world, tintypes.
Director Penny Metropulos clutters the stage with competing movie images of the period: Proteus' lady-love Julia (Kate Fry) is decked out as silent comedienne Mabel Normand, while Silvia (Laura Lamson), for whom Proteus betrays both Julia and Valentine, suggests early Gloria Swanson. Valentine's band of robbers comes straight from The Great Train Robbery. The clowns-roller-skating Speed (the fluid Scott Parkinson) and long-suffering dog-owner Launce (Eddie Jemison) seem patterned, respectively, after the physical comedy of Chaplin and the self-deprecating verbal humor of Jolson. Roderick Peeples and Brad Armacost even manage to inject some Laurel and Hardy into their portrayals of Proteus's father and his servant. So, okay: this is Mack Sennett does Shakespeare.
But Sennett succeeds because his characters don't know they're in a comedy. Their situation may be ludicrous, but they're in dead earnest. Likewise, "Two Gentlemen…" begins to succeed when, in the second half, everyone shifts from archness and posing to actual creation of character.
The piece seems to go right from the moment it's entrusted to Larry Yando as Silvia's father the Duke, Noël Coward manque down to the silk smoking jacket. Though the scene in which he outsmarts Valentine is hugely comic, Yando remains utterly committed to its reality. And his genuineness is contagious: both Valentine and Silvia seem to catch the spirit during their battles with him. Julia, so fatuous in Verona, no sooner arrives in Yando's Milan than she becomes as real a romantic heroine as Viola from "Twelfth Night", whose precursor she clearly is. And the more Proteus pursues falsehood and a false love, the more convincing he becomes. Though the second half drags a bit from excess plot complexity, overall it's sweetly comic and romantically satisfying. It's as though the director finally stopped saying "Louder, faster, funnier," and let the actors do the play.
Yet Metropulos deserves credit for her discovery of one of Shakespeare's masterly parallels. Until the final tableau, Launce's schtick with his dog seems like so much comic fluff, though ably done in the face of the dog's penchant for running from the stage off-cue. But when Proteus is reunited with a forgiving Julia and Valentine with Silvia, Launce is reunited with Crab, a dog obviously more trouble than he's worth-just like that miserable cur Proteus. If from the opening Metropulos had pursued this tender insight–that Two Gentlemen is about the need for forgiveness in every kind of love–this would have been a lovely show instead of half a lovely one.