Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is a love letter, and not just the kind one sends to a potential paramour. While it does contain many of those elements, it is also a love letter to an entire community. It is a play about love, laughter, acceptance, and it is a joyous celebration of a socially progressive community.

Inspired by the decade of hope, indulgence and optimism that followed World War I in America and its similarities in spirit to Shakespeare’s play, we have loosely set this production around a Fourth of July weekend in 1920 in an imaginary version of St Louis itself, right here on the grounds of the 1904 World’s Fair. Shakespeare’s play, of course, was originally written to take place at the end of a different war, but the sense of hope and anticipation of a return to normalcy, and the opportunity to look inward again and indulge in matters of home and hearth seems to be true for both time periods.

The early 1920s was a time of significant social change in American society. Within the first eight months of 1920, women won the right to vote and prohibition was instated. We have embraced this sense of a society juggling newfound freedoms with new restrictions, balancing the realities of their lives with the new world order being invented around and by them. A new freedom of sexuality coincides with the birth of Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance. New lingo is invented to meet the times, much as in Shakespeare’s Renaissance, and a whole new kind of melting pot is being stewed.

Shakespeare’s wonderful play is peopled with characters we cannot help but know and love. From the outrageousness of Falstaff’s endeavors, the jealousies of Master Ford, the vanities of Dr. Caius, and the charming idiocy of Slender and others, to the wonderfully clever ways the Wives manage the men, and the utter sincerity of the young lovers Fenton and Anne, Shakespeare crafted characters clearly drawn from life and exaggerated just enough so we can freely find them laughable, loveable, and altogether recognizable.

Indeed, laughter is both the punishment and the reward of the play. All who misbehave ultimately have their follies exposed and laughed at—to their utter shame. And yet laughter is the cure-all. It is the healing, hopeful burst of humor that can save us all. When the play ends, folks’ foibles have been both exposed and, most importantly, accepted. Lovers have found their rightful partners, and the community itself has been stretched to accept new modes of behavior without breaking down. Windsor can move forward into the future as a healthy progressive community, expanding to include all types of people and ways of living, full of joy.
We hope you get as much pleasure out of this production as we have had preparing it to share with you.

Enjoy!

Jesse Berger