“Intimate Apparel”

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Thus far, we’ve seen three plays at the 2021 Utah Shakespeare Festival.

The first was a production of Shakespeare’s seldom-performed Cymbeline.  (One of the many things that my wife and I like about our regular Festival attendance is the chance to see the entire canon, even more than once.)  It was performed in the fairly small Eileen and Allen Anes Studio Theatre.  The mostly-black cast was a small one, with all of the actors — including those in major roles — playing at least two characters.  I can well imagine that some found this confusing, but it worked pretty well for me.  My wife and I both enjoyed the play more than we had anticipated.  (We’ve seen it before, but it’s been a while and I didn’t remember it well.). It doesn’t rank among his best, but Cymbeline features a lot of the standard Shakespearean tropes (e.g., a high-born maiden in disguise as a boy, a basically good but misguided and over-hasty monarch, exiled nobility, and the like), and the actors did a good job of it.

In the evening, we saw The Comedy of Terrors on the stage of the Randall L. Jones Theatre.  Knowing nothing about the play, I expected a remake of the 1963 movie of the same title that featured Vincent Price, Joe E. Brown, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone.  But the play and the movie are completely unrelated; the play has only two actors, a man and a woman, who play multiple roles each.  I’ll be honest and say that this was perhaps one of my least favorite plays among all those that we’ve seen in many years of coming to the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City.  However, many in the (rather) sparse audience seem to have loved it.  It’s very slapstick and frenetic, and that soon grew tiresome for me.  But the two actors in the cast — especially, I think, the male of the pair (I’m told they’re married) — did a very good job with what they had.

The third play, which we saw last night, was Intimate Apparel.  To a considerable extent, it was performed by the same cast that did Cymbeline the night before.  My wife and I both liked it very, very much.  It was quite touching.  It illustrated the dignity and value of what might outwardly seem an entirely ordinary life and, oddly, seemed to me a call to love and respect those who have gone before and, perhaps unsurprisingly in that light, do family history.  (Lynn Nottage, who wrote the play, was apparently inspired by the life of her own great-grandmother.)  One subtheme powerfully reminded me of the short Swedish film The Intimate Touch, on which I led a discussion a few weeks ago at FreedomFest 2021 in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Posted from St. George, Utah