Summary 
Awkward combination of low comedy and morality play, with an aged and obese Falstaff repeatedly humiliated with increasingly uncomfortable intensity. Enhanced by original music, Ford is the comic star and the titular wives the heroines within a tightly knit communal atmosphere threatened by Falstaff's greedy, lascivious vanity.
Design
Directed by Barbara Gaines. Set by Donald Eastman. Costumes by Nan Cibula-Jenkins. Lights by Donald Holder. Sound by Robert Neuhaus. Original songs and music by Alaric Jans.
Cast
Peter Van Wagner (Falstaff), David Frutkoff (Nym), Ted Koch (Pistol), Thom Van Ermen (Bardolph), Tom Roland (Shallow), Patrick Clear (Evans), Paul Slade Smith (Slender), Larry Yando (Page), Lindley Curry (Anne Page), Kristine Thatcher (Margaret Page), Joan Schwenk (Alice Ford), Scott Parkinson (Simple), Neil Friedman (Host), Susan Hart (Mistress Quickly), James Fitzgerald (Caius), Greg Vinkler (Ford).
Analysis
Shakespeare Repertory's traditional The Merry Wives of Windsor maintains the Bard's setting within Elizabethan England. Utilizing the Ruth Page Theater's thrusting stage, the designers create a sprawling set with a large variety of locations and entrance points. With an abundance of side-lighting, including hand-held spots, the main section of the stage is entered from upstage and from small sets of stairs. A smaller section, a step down from the main stage, protrudes into the audience and can be approached by actors from the aisles of the theater itself. Single steps lead to this smaller stage from three sides downstage, providing unobtrusive places for onstage townspeople to stand, sit, crouch, or lie. At stage right, a curving staircase leads to a deeply recessed overhead bridge that spans the entire stage. The resulting set evokes a sense of busy community, representing the sprawl of Windsor that throughout the play bustles with characters rushing on and offstage.
Director Barbara Gaines effectively employs a cast of twenty-one to establish a hyperactive but picturesque rural town. The production is replete with songs and original music that advance the communal atmosphere: the young Robin shares a duet with Margaret Page, Slender has several lilting solos, and the Host frequently leads the townspeople in song. In Gaines' vision of Windsor, domestic values reign supreme, and consequently, someone as greedy and self-centered as Falstaff is a conspicuous outsider. Doctor Caius and Parson Evans also are portrayed as peculiar, with absurdly exaggerated French and Scottish accents. The two men are, however, a physician and a man of God, and therefore people of respect and a part of the moral community. Falstaff, a physical outsider in Windsor, is more importantly a moral outsider due to his wickedness. His attempts to seduce and fleece the merry wives are depicted as ludicrous and egotistic; the aged and obese knight behaves with comical ignorance of the severity of his limitations. Unlike the witty prankster from the Henry IV plays, this Falstaff is the butt of jokes and a scapegoat-like lesson for the citizens of Windsor.
Peter Van Wagner, a slender actor with a craggy voice, is heavily padded, especially around the belly, and aged for his portrayal of Sir John. With his years and infirmity, however, Falstaff's attempts at wooing married women smack of pathos rather than comedy, and pity for the character creeps in after the initial humor. The tone of an Elizabethan romantic comedy fades before intermission as the flip side of the play, the morality tale, becomes dominant. The overall impression may be that Windsor is a delightful and righteous community, but the mistreatment of Falstaff nags with discomfort, much like in Twelfth Night, with its depiction of the mean-spirited degradation of Malvolio.
Falstaff's initial appearance reveals Gaines' effort to directly involve the audience and bring them into the thematics of the play as part of the community. As Falstaff bustles to center stage, his cronies scurry around the stage at the level of the audience, and Pistol even snatches a purse from a woman seated in the front row. They behave with lascivious crudity - Pistol frequently sneaks peeks up ladies' dresses and Falstaff often makes obscene gestures - representing the moral antithesis of the townspeople around them. Falstaff himself sports rags of lavender and muted green that contrast with the rich and colorful Elizabethan costumes of the Windsor citizens.
Van Wagner's balding Falstaff dons an assortment of wigs: his first attempt at courting, for example, begins as he prances onstage with long, curly, flaming red hair. He holds his love letters, enclosed within big white envelopes adorned by large red hearts, as if they - and he - are entirely irresistible. Initially funny, Falstaff eventually reveals himself to be an ineffectual old fool, and his humiliation becomes more wincingly painful than amusing to behold. The episode with him hiding in the basket (then being tossed in the Thames) elicits peals of laughter, but the subsequent scene, during which he disguises himself as an elderly woman, but is beaten with a broom and chased offstage, brings only scattered chuckles. Finally, in 5.5, this pathetic old man, wearing an absurdly large head-dress of antlers, is frightened and degraded by his supposed friends. As the Fairies, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym prance around him with lanterns while wearing glistening plastic robes, the bemused audience can only respond with uncomfortable smiles.
The inherent dichotomy between romance and morality play is furthered by the portrayal of Master Ford, who upstages and overwhelms Van Wagner's Falstaff in nearly every scene. Ford is a seething whirl of suspicion and jealousy, wound so tightly at moments that he cannot speak, much less stand still. He delivers his forced "apology" to his wife after 3.3 in a manic mutter that draws the biggest laugh of the evening. With Falstaff diminished, the moral aspects of the play come to the fore.
Ford's wild pursuit of Sir John includes the audience in a pair of scenes that advance the audience's discomfiture, because now they become an active part of Falstaff's humiliation. During 3.3, when Ford frantically searches the laundry basket, he flings and tosses garment after garment high into the air and deep into the audience. When he is humbled and must replace the laundry, he steps into the seats to retrieve the clothing. Later, in 4.2, he pursues the hunched "old woman" Falstaff in a slapstick chase all over the set, flails a broom, and in frustration at Sir John's escape, pauses to take a mock swing at the front row of the audience.
With Falstaff humiliated, then humiliated again, then yet again, Van Wagner's old knight shows understandable reluctance to join a festive dance with the rest of the cast as the production reaches its supposedly happy conclusion. He finally accepts calls to join the townspeople of Windsor onstage. With a gesture that eases the audience's discomfort and draws a welcome laugh to conclude the production, Falstaff hands a young woman in the audience yet another of his heart-adorned love letters, then joins the celebratory dance onstage.
Gaines' production places emphasis on the merry wives, their spirit, cunning, and defense of their way of life, especially within a communal context. Falstaff is a mere foil, at first a blast of overblown humor but more a morality play archetype than the complex friend and advisor of the Prince Hal plays. Without a sense of balance, however, the production is never a pure romantic comedy nor a simple Elizabethan morality tale. The Merry Wives of Windsor shines when clearly one or the other, or even better, when played in all its complexity, as Shakespeare intended: as both.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.15, No.2, Spring 1997.