There are tales of "lost plays" by William Shakespeare, of which the most famous is Cardenio. At best we only have a few fragments, turned into new play by Stephen Greenblatt and Charles L. Mee. City Garage has just produced the West Coast premier, directed (as ever) by Frederique Michel.
So how is it? First, this is not a Shakespeare play. It is a contemporary play entwined with the fragments of the Shakespeare, in so very many ways and forms. Anselmo (Anthony Sannazzaro) and Camila (Devin Davis-Lorton) have just gotten married--a second time. First, they wed before relatives in front of a judge and now have done so again in lovely Umbria (a province in Italy) and with friends are now spending a week at Anselmo's mother's villa.
With them are the married couple Sally (Angela Beyer) and her husband Edmund (Jason Pereira), along with Camila's dour, sarcastic sister Doris (Kat Johnston) and the groom's best friend Will (Gifford Irvine). The former two are having some problems, although we only get hints of that at first. Amusingly, some semblance of what's wrong pops up when Edmund toasts the newlyweds and proceeds to spew forth the issues he's facing from his own marriage, much to the deep discomfort of everyone except Doris.
Meanwhile, Anselmo has asked Edmund to do him a huge favor. Given to overthinking and worrying, Anselmo fears Camila will cheat on him. He wants Edmund to try to seduce her, to prove she will remain faithful.
Which is nuts. This is exactly the kind of thing that leads to mountains of trouble, and most certainly does! Making things really funny and weird is when Anselmo's mother Luisia (Martha Duncan) and father Alfred (Bo Roberts) show up, with Susanna (Natasha St.Clair-Johnson) in tow--a former classmate of Anselmo whose presence clearly thrills and upsets him. The parents, actors both, will be performing some version of the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio in a few months and want to have a reading of it with the guests at the villa, as a kind of wedding present. And here's the kicker--the plot of Cardenio tells of a man who doubts the faithfulness of the woman he loves, asking a friend of his to try and seduce her while he is away.
From hence, mischief and misunderstandings commence, splashed with copious amounts of self-deceit, questioning, art, and that most dangerous of all substances in this world, Truth.
Rounding out the cast Simonetta (Loosema Hakverdian), a servant at the villa, Melchiore (Andy Kallok) the chef, and Rudi (Troy Dunn) the handiman and Simonetta's husband. This last is the nearest thing the play has to a philosopher, and he turns out to be a pretty good one, but also more than anything reminded me of Bottom from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Indeed when left alone on stage at one point, he decides to enact the entire original play by himself, Dunn delivers a tour-de-force which nicely portrays how art can impact life for the better. See the play to understand what that means.
The core characters of Anselmo, Camila, Will, Susanna, Sally, Edmund, and Rudi carry much of the play--and it is due to this cast as well as the direction we the audience care about what happens, and cannot quite guess what will happen next. Although in theory a romcom, Cardenio proves a little too grounded, too nuanced, too melancholy to fit into that formula. As a result what happiness there is feels deeper. Same with the regrets. And the confusion. Like life, but distilled. Such after all, is art.
Cardenio plays Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 4pm until March 26, 2023, at City Garage 2525 Michigan Ave. Building T1, Santa Monica, CA. 90404.
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