Jacob Ming-Trent as Johnny Falstaff and Susan Kelechi Watson as Madam Nkechi Ford in the Free Shakespeare in the Park presentation of Merry Wives at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
Farce, with its antic misunderstandings and confused identities, can polarize audiences. Spectators may either be exhilarated by the pandemonium or left cold. With Merry Wives: A Celebration of Black Joy and Vitality, the sole production of this summer’s Free Shakespeare in Central Park, playwright Jocelyn Bioh gambles that, after a year of societal strife, she can unify audiences by updating William Shakespeare’s rambunctious farce The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Watson (left) and Pascale Armand as Madam Ekua Page are the merry wives in the contemporary production. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Written sometime between 1599 and 1602, The Merry Wives features Falstaff, the comic blowhard from the two parts of Henry IV. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I was so taken with this bibulous trickster that she asked Shakespeare to bring him back in a story all his own; and the playwright obliged with The Merry Wives. The Bard’s text feels underdeveloped—it contains less verse than any of his other plays, and the action doesn’t really take off until Act IV. Perhaps the Queen’s request (if there’s any truth to that tale) came with an impossibly tight deadline, leaving no time for a second draft.
For the Public Theater production, Bioh has streamlined Shakespeare’s dialogue, resolved textual inconsistencies, and clarified characters’ motivations. She has moved the action to Harlem, making the characters African-Americans and immigrants from Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Senegal. The time is this summer, when New Yorkers are fatigued from Covid-imposed isolation. As slacker/opportunist Johnny Falstaff (Jacob Ming-Trent) laments: “It’s been a long, hard year.”
“Scenic designer Beowulf Boritt has dressed the stage with a block of Harlem storefronts that are a mix of near-realism and zany cartooning. ”
Dressed up in togs as colorful and jaunty as a peacock’s tail feathers, Ming-Trent’s Falstaff is stir-crazy and ready for mischief. (The production’s dazzling costumes are by Dede Ayite.) “Couldn’t go to the clubs,” Falstaff laments. “Couldn’t hit up the bars. Liquor stores was closed all early. Been stuck in the house just eating snacks. Watching Netflix. Bored outta my Got-damned mind!”
Falstaff’s roving eye falls on the wives of the title—Madam Nkechi Ford (Susan Kelechi Watson) and Madam Ekua Page (Pascale Armand). They’re beautiful, socially prominent, and well-off. Or, as Falstaff puts it: “Those are some merry wives! Just as fine as they wanna be.”
His aim isn’t merely seduction; Falstaff also wants the women’s money. “I will be cheaters to them both,” he crows, “and they shall be sugar mamas to me.” But the wives are frenemies and, seeing the identical letters Falstaff has sent them, recognize his stratagem. In three loosely related incidents, the trickster is tricked by his intended victims and subjected to light-hearted humiliation for his attempted scam.
The merry wives’ husbands: Kyle Scatliffe (left) as Mister Kwame Page and Gbenga Akinnagbe as Mister Nduka Ford.
The play also features a romantic subplot about Anne Page (Abena), daughter of one of the wives, and her scheme to evade a parentally-decreed engagement. By making Fenton (MaYaa Boateng), Anne’s preferred suitor, a female, Bioh gives same-sex romance a prominent place in her “celebration of joy and vitality.”
Bioh is the author of the Off-Broadway hit School Girls or, The African Mean Girls Play, one of the most produced plays around the United States in 2019. In Merry Wives, she retains a great deal of Elizabethan-era dialogue while making the characters distinctly her own. Under the direction of Saheem Ali, a dab hand at farce, the top-flight cast of 17 covers every inch of the vast Delacorte stage with divine havoc. Scenic designer Beowulf Boritt has dressed the stage with a block of Harlem storefronts that are a mix of near-realism and zany cartooning. At the end of the evening, as the merry wives lure Falstaff into a park for his final punishment, Boritt’s streetscape vanishes into the wings, yielding the stage to a fanciful finale that—thanks to lighting designer Jiyoun Chang, co–sound designers Kai Harada and Palmer Hefferan, composer Michael Thurber, and drum composer Farai Malianga—rivals New York City’s Independence Day fireworks in spectacle and seeming magic.
Merry Wives is most engaging and its characters most endearing in the sections where Bioh interrupts Shakespeare’s text with a peppery modern argot that these Harlemites, with their varied backgrounds, might actually use. With bursts of vigorous, racy language and her up-to-the-minute take on Shakespeare’s wacky characters, this youthful Ghanaian-American dramatist has transformed a 400-year-old English farce into a celebration not only of vitality and joy but, most of all, the unity that shared laughter creates.
Merry Wives runs through Sept. 18 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Performances are at 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Tickets are allocated by digital lottery. For information, visit publictheater.org or call (212) 539-8500.
