Playwright: Scott Lynch-Giddings
At: Oak Park Festival Theatre at Austin Gardens, Forest Avenue at Ontario, Oak Park
Phone: 708-445-4440; $20
Runs through: Aug. 25
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
There are several ways to shape a page-to-stage adaptation of the Robin Hood legends. You can have the Disney version, brimming over with slapstick scuffles and sprightly songs; the scholarly version, weighted with footnotes and annotations; or the Mel Brooks version, liberally festooned with double entendres and contemporary satire. But every last member of this production company knows the swashbuckler genre from Douglas Fairbanks to Johnny Depp, acumen enabling them to maintain just the right balance of wordplay and swordplay; smiles and thrills; and romance and roughhousing.
Scott Lynch-Giddings' script incorporates material from the 12th-century folklore, as well as such Elizabethan fillips as the girl-disguised-as-a-boy trick, and even adds some flat-out comedy—the three-part gag involving an effete aristocrat's much-abused valet, for example, or the Moose-and-Squirrel byplay of the brawny woodsman Little John and the meek gentlewoman Sabina. These diverse elements are united, however, by the tone of the articulate and uncluttered text, its lyricism recalling 16th-century verse while always retaining an edge of modern vernacular.
Fight choreographer Geoff Coates decides wisely to scatter a number of small skirmishes throughout the dramatic action—the outlaws sparring playfully among themselves, or strangers testing one another's mettle—so that the full-stage fights involving several combatants ( Robin and Marian stealing a kiss mid-combat during one ) rise naturally from the story without disrupting the narrative momentum. And playgoers recalling 1993's seminal success, The Fair Maid of The West, will recognize the expertise of director Kevin Theis in forging an integrated suspension of disbelief allowing the patently phony deer of Sherwood Forest to co-exist quite comfortably with the clash of actual steel.
Steve Pickering, upholding his reputation as Chicago audiences' favorite villain in the role of the scheming Sheriff of Nottingham, along with Signal Ensemble's Christopher Prentice, playing the Fameous Robyn Hood ( assisted by some Keira Knightley-heroics from Meredith Siemsen's feisty Lady Marian ) , lead a group of actors so uniformly fluent in classical oratory, you'd think Billy Shakespeare himself had been their schoolmate. Oak Park Festival Theatre is lucky to have assembled a cast with the training to deliver performances that retain control of both the exuberant spectacle and the playwright's pointed arguments on the importance of civil disobedience when lawful governments fail in their duties.