Love’s Labor’s Lost, one of three plays performed as part of Shakespeare Santa Cruz 2010 ~ now in its 29th season ~ opened July 21 in the Festival Glen, a natural amphitheater in the redwoods of University of California, Santa Cruz.
Directed by Tony award-nominated Scott Wentworth,
Love’s Labor’s Lost is Shakespeare’s most profoundly Elizabethan comedy, replete with witty debates, dazzling wordplay, and strongly drawn comic characters.
The play is set in Navarre, a kingdom devoted to the quest for self-improvement through bookish study. The king’s youthfully naive self-imposed command not to allow the distraction of women into the court is all but shattered with the arrival of the Princess of France and her feminine entourage.
The men, who had vowed to avoid all women in favor of intellectual pursuits, immediately fall head over heels and begin finding ways to allow the power of love to take its natural prominence over learning and the affairs of state. But the realities of life finally intrude on the revelries.*
The relaxed atmosphere and park-like setting of this outside venue invite theatergoers to enter into another world for a few brief hours. Many families, enjoying this regional cultural treasure, bring a picnic lunch and recline on blankets on the forested slopes. Glen tickets are reasonably priced so more of the public is able to attend performances here and benefit from the offerings Art provides.
As the 2007 commencement address speaker at Stanford University, award-winning and internationally acclaimed poet Dana Gioia presented an impassioned argument for the value of the arts and arts education:
Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.
Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers.
Due to underfunding, Shakespeare Santa Cruz almost closed its doors last year. However, thanks to efforts of theater lovers and donors from far and near who recognize the value of Art (read Donor Notes), Shakespeare Santa Cruz survived and continues to inspire and educate young and old alike.
* Text from website of Shakespeare Santa Cruz.
Formerly Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia currently directs the Harman-Eisner Program in the Arts at the Aspen Institute.
