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If you are going to be able to see The Second Shepherds' Play at the Folger Library, don't read this! Some of this is anticipated in Joel Cohen's blog, which Ken Tompkins sent the list, but I'm glad I didn't read the blog before seeing the play. If you're not lucky enough to live within driving distance of D.C., however, I thought you'd be interested in some more details of the production than you will see in a review. Alan B. ================= The play was a delight. The acting could have been better, except for a wonderfully tough, fishwifey but not quite shrewish Gill, but the singing, the playing, and the production values could hardly have been improved. There was LOTS of medieval and early Renaissance music to supplement the couple of instances of singing in the play text, and they skillfully included the musicians into the play as characters (and sometimes props-one became the twisted thorn bush where the shepherds meet after they discover Mak's theft of the sheep). I don't think I've heard so many different early instruments played in a single night (several lutes and citterns, recorders of all sizes, uileann pipes, a zither, a hurdy-gurdy, an Irish harp, fiddle, viola da gamba, bells, and a sackbut). The music was well chosen. The shepherds appropriately sang "Sumer is icumen in" to warm themselves with wishful thinking. The play ended with a New Year's song set to the tune of "Greensleeves" and a rousing Gloucestershire wassail that I'd never heard before. In between, there was a beautiful rendition of "Lullay lullow" for the Christ child, which also made a nice additional echo of the fake Nativity at Mak and Gill's cottage (where Gill tells Mak to sing it to warn her when the shepherds show up) to supplement all the parallels already built into the script. But for me, the most interesting aspects of the production were in the staging itself. The director has a very keen sense of the theatrical and used the words of the text as visual cues in creative ways. They had a neat "wind machine," a wide-slatted barrel on a spit covered over with some kind of cloth, so that when they turned the crank, it hissed and whistled. The wind was represented visually by actors waving long purple ribbons on a pole, one for the first shepherd's speech about the cold, two for the second shepherd, and three for the third. When Coll complained about wealthy lords, an actor clad in rich clothes and a golden mask came onstage and posed haughtily in a tableau. When Gib complained about being henpecked, the speech was punctuated with a mime in which his wife came on and chased him all around the theater as he hid in various nooks and crannies (or comically in plain sight with his hands over his face). When Daw dreamt of Mak in wolf's clothing stealing their sheep, they acted it out with a very impressive wolf costume. The director cleverly solved two major staging problems by the use of puppets, as Peter Marks mentioned in his Post review. Since the stage wasn't big enough to have multiple acting stations for the shepherds and Mak's cottage, they indicated the characters' travels between the two settings by having a couple of cast members come onstage with a long jointed bamboo pole that they shaped into a mountain range while another cast member used puppets dressed like the actors playing Mak and the shepherds to show them climbing over the range with lots of comic business. The first time, the Mak puppet was carrying a smaller version of the puppet they used for the stolen sheep, which was very cute. Then, when the shepherds decide to punish Mak but tossing him in a blanket, they tossed the Mak-puppet. Oddly enough, during intermission I remarked to Louise and Bruce that the actor playing Mak was a really large guy and I wondered how they would handle his punishment at the end. In the Tony Harrison version, they dispense with the blanket tossing altogether and throw wet sponges at Mak. I was glad to see this production stuck with the text and figured out a way around the problem. I should have seen the use of the puppet coming a mile away, but somehow I didn't, so it came as a nice and very funny surprise. The sheep puppet was well done, too. They went for some cheap laughs with its puppeteer baaing at significant points (I laughed, too-sometimes cheap is good-and I wondered if this was inspired by the RSC's use of chicken puppets to tell "The Nun's Priest's Tale" last year), but also the shepherds carried the sheep with them to Bethlehem, so that one lamb could meet the other, tightening the parallel, as well as echoing the story of the animals in the stable when the sheep puppet bowed before the baby doll. The appearance of the angel was remarkable. Instead of just having her stand on the balcony above the actors, they gave her a long dress that extended all the way down to the stage, a drapery in dark blue below and light, silvery blue above, and she was standing in front of a backdrop with sun, sky and golden wings painted on it, so that she really did look like she was floating in the air above the shepherds. All in all, an intelligent and very entertaining production.