Director James Vásquez talks about staging The Merry Wives of Windsor at The Old Globe, the musicality of Shakespeare, and what the 1950s have to say about the play's themes.

INTERVIEW by SONIA DESAI AND DANIELLE MAGES AMATO

What is most exciting for you about tackling The Merry Wives of Windsor?

What both excites and scares me, to be perfectly honest, is the Shakespeare of it all! I trained in Shakespeare with Barry Edelstein at Juilliard many years ago, but I haven’t had many opportunities to direct Shakespeare. I’ve gotten to do world premieres, and I’ve gotten to do big musicals. So the musicality and the size of this play feel right in my wheelhouse, and it’s very exciting to be doing Shakespeare at this grand scale here at the Globe.

So are you approaching this play like you would approach a musical?

I tend to find musicality and a dance in everything I do. Even a straight play, a drama with no music at all, eventually begins to find its rhythm and its own music. Everything to me has a little bit of a musical underscore. Shakespeare’s language lends itself so beautifully to the rhythms of song and dance, and the characters have a real boldness to them. There’s not one subtle thing about these characters, and I love that. It gives us permission to dangle off the edge of the cliff, to take chances, and, of course, to sing and dance.

What’s the story at the heart of the play that you’re most interested in trying to tell?

There’s both a grandness and a silliness to this story, which feels perfect for right now. It’s an epic, playful journey about learning to laugh at ourselves again. It’s about taking chances and putting yourself out there, even when it might be a little embarrassing. I think that’s what a lot of these characters are doing. They’re so passionate about what they believe in that they’re willing to step forward, be silly, and be laughed at a little bit.

There’s an apocryphal tale that the whole reason this play exists is because Queen Elizabeth wanted to see a play about Falstaff in love. So I wonder, what it is about Falstaff as a character that makes people want to see more of him?

Well, he’s fearless, for one. He’s doing everything we wish we could do, but that we thankfully have the smarts not to do. Falstaff is one of those characters you love to hate: he’s overly boisterous, but he’s got a real charisma about him. In our world he’s a bit of a traveling salesman, who goes from town to town and swindles people until he finally gets caught in this little town. In the finale he ends up being poked and prodded and punished, for lack of a better word, by this entire small-town community. At the end, he’s shamed—but he’s not kicked out of town; he’s immediately invited to dinner, so that everyone can laugh and move on.

Would you talk a bit about the community in this play? It’s set in a small English town, which we don’t see often in Shakespeare’s plays. And it’s the women in this community who really force Falstaff to face the things he’s done.

Yeah, I think the women in Shakespeare don’t often get celebrated as much as they should. We’re setting this production in an era—America in the 1950s and 1960s—when women were stepping forward culturally into their own power. So it’s been fun to lean into the ways in which the women in the play are making demands about how they deserve to be treated, how they deserve to be acknowledged. Obviously their actions in tricking Falstaff come from a place of fun, but also from a place of saying, “See me. See the place I deserve in this system.”

As you mentioned, you’re setting the play in a 1950s sitcom-inspired American suburb. I’m curious what that setting has illuminated for you about the play, or what the play has illuminated about that setting.

I think the 1950s were a time with very rigid gender roles, which led to very rigid family structures—at least as they were portrayed on television. You had a husband who worked, a wife who didn’t, 2.5 children, a dog, a picket fence, a perfect lawn, etc. It’s a great backdrop against which to push the limits and chip away at those expectations as the play goes along.

How did that time period shape the design?

One of the big inspirations for our production is sitcoms from, and set in, the 1950s, so we looked at “Leave It to Beaver,” we looked at “Happy Days.” We had a lot of fun with research. I spent a good two weeks on Amazon Prime and Hulu just watching all these old sitcoms and pulling out the iconic elements they had in common. And with shows like “I Love Lucy,” Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz invented the three-camera style of sitcom filming, where everything was shot live in front of the cameras. As you go back and watch those episodes, you can hear coughs from the audience. You can see where they made mistakes but kept going. They played those episodes like mini theatre pieces. The shows had such a natural theatricality to them, and there was something larger than life about all the characters, which fits this world perfectly.

And there were so many iconic locations in those shows, which we wanted to convert to locations in the play. For example, could The Garter, the pub in The Merry Wives of Windsor, become a 1950s diner with roller-skating waiters? Could those gyms and rec centers, which were such a huge thing in the 1950s, become where Dr. Caius and Hugh Evans meet? Absolutely. And then with costumes, we pulled from some recognizable characters: the nosy next-door neighbor Gladys Kravitz, the Fonz, the mother in “Bewitched.”

One of the most special things about the play is the friendship between Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford. How have you been thinking about that relationship and the way it shapes the play?

Like I said, we really took a lot of inspiration from “I Love Lucy,” and especially from that iconic duo of Lucy and Ethel. They always defied traditional roles, they didn’t stay in the box where they were put. It’s been so fun to celebrate the relationship of these two women who lift each other up, encourage each other, break the rules, and then laugh about all of it. I think we could all use that kind of laugh right now!