Local playwright Katherine Dubois has long regarded Shakespeare’s early comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost as the ideal candidate for a sequel. The shocking twist ending of the play left plenty of room for further development, which began to take shape during a discussion of the Bard’s work at an Upstart Crow Theatre Company board meeting.
“Joseph Illingworth [board president and actor] turned to me and said: ‘You should write the sequel,’” she remembers. “And we all just laughed, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.”
The conversation inspired Dubois to reread Love’s Labour’s Lost. “My husband and I had seen the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production in the 1980s with Kenneth Branagh, and I had read the play before,” she says. “It’s not one of his more popular plays — and, admittedly, it’s a little uneven — but there is a lot of really funny stuff in the show.”
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the King of Navarre and three of his friends make a three-year commitment to forego women in order to focus on their studies and fasting. Their plans are jeopardized, however, when they fall in love with the Princess of France and three of her ladies, who arrive at the court shortly after the men take their oath.
Don Adriano de Armado, a Spaniard visiting the court, and his page, Moth, deliver a message to the King, asking him to intervene in his relationship issues with Jaquenetta, whom he suspects is seeing Costard. Two scholars named Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel also appear in the original, though Dubois says “they have no plot,” something she was determined to address in her sequel.
“After reading the play, I wanted to pare down the cast, but I didn’t want to cut out a pair of lovers,” Dubois says. “And how could I cut the shenanigans of Armado and Moth? Ultimately, I decided to cut Jaquenetta, Costard, Boyet [a servant], and a few other small characters so I could focus on expanding the story that was left hanging at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
Dubois’ continuation picks up a year after the events of Shakespeare’s play and uses contemporary language to depict the Princess, Lady Rosaline, Lady Maria and Lady Katharine’s return to Navarre. But when they get to court, things are different between them and the men they left behind. Armado and Moth are still at court, but Armado is heartbroken because Jaquenetta ran away.
“I love what I have come up with for Sir Nathaniel and Holofernes,” says Dubois. “Mirroring the play-within-a-play that happens at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in the sequel, Sir Nathaniel and Holofernes find Sophocles’ lost tragedy, Amphitryon, which they perform at the end of the show. I tried to make it as silly as possible. I won’t claim it’s as funny as the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but that was the goal.”
Raising the curtain
Dubois hosted the first reading of Love’s Labor’s Won in her living room in October 2018 and the first public reading the following March. Dubois recalls rewriting Act 1 in response to hearing the play read aloud. “Most of the edits were cuts,” she says. “Sometimes you hear a reading and think it needs work, but it read well, so the revision process was tweaking more than big rewrites.”
Those readings continued through Zoom in the early days of the pandemic, when Melissa Castaldo — who had been assisting with social media and participating in shows with the group — took a particular liking to the script.
“I just thought it was a lot of fun,” Castaldo says. “At one point, I said, ‘We need a show for our season. Why don’t we do [Love’s Labor’s Won]?’ And Kathy asked me, ‘Are you volunteering to direct?’ And I said, ‘I guess I am!’”
More than a year after the Omicron variant delayed the play’s first attempted rollout in January 2022, the show has adapted to go on, and now Love’s Labor’s Won will make its world premiere on May 4 at the Dairy Center Arts Center.
“The last play I did with [The Upstart Crow] was Bury the Dead, and although it had some dark humor, it was about a very serious topic,” says Mark Bradford, who plays Don Armado. “This role was very enjoyable because I was asked to bring a lot of spunk to this over-the-top comedic character. It’s a homegrown production you have to see live, because you won’t find it on Netflix anytime soon — unless Kathy gets really lucky.”
“Hey, you never know, Kenneth Branagh might pick it up,” Castaldo jokes.
“That’s true, and he definitely should,” Bradford says. “But until then, you have to come to see it live.”
ON STAGE: Love’s Labor’s Won by Katherine Dubois. May 4-21, Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. The Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. Tickets here.
