Amy Freed’s riotously funny "Beard of Avon" to be brought before audiences
By: Michael Redmond
"A rose by any other name" might not be Shakespeare’s?
That’s the premise, more or less, of "The Beard of Avon" (2001), playwright Amy Freed’s riotously funny take on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, which has been going strong for some 200 years now, with no end in sight.
Equal parts erudition and eccentricity, the argument is simple that hayseed from Stratford-on-Avon, with only six years of documented schooling to his name, just couldn’t have written the plays and the sonnets, so he must have been serving as a front man ("beard") for … Sir Francis Bacon? William Stanley, Earl of Derby? Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford? Good Queen Bess herself?
On Sunday at 3 p.m., Princeton Rep/ Shakespeare Festival’s PlayLAB series will present a staged reading of "The Beard of Avon" in the Princeton Public Library, which is co-sponsoring the event. The reading will feature professional actors, some local, others from New York and Philadelphia. Expect a good time. The New York Times has described the play as "a clever, thoughtful and entertaining farce."
According to Victoria Liberatori, Princeton Rep’s producing director, the company has revived PlayLAB after a five-year hiatus to re-emphasize its commitment to original and contemporary scripts. So well-known has Princeton Rep become for its summer Shakespeare productions that some bloom may have gone off the rose of an equally outstanding reputation for introducing new works, such as the New Jersey premieres of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" and "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune."
There’s that. Then there’s also Princeton Rep’s ongoing relationship with local Equity artists, a small coterie hereabouts but they do count. Princeton lies more or less halfway between New York City and Philadelphia, two towns where there’s steady work for actors, but a chat with Susan Garrett of Princeton and Melissa Quilty of New Hope revealed that it’s the lifestyle, not the location, that has lured them here. This is a terrific area for raising kids, they agree.
Ms. Garrett, who will be playing the role of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, is wife to an emergency room physician and mom to three boys Jack, 11, Will, 9, and Andy, 5. She has put the motherhood experience to particularly effective use in "Mamalogue: Adventures of an Existential Mom," a one-woman show she wrote and performed at the Oak Street Theater in Portland, Ore.
"I want to work professionally but I don’t want to travel long distances you know, the kids are in school. I don’t know how film people do it. You can’t pull an 11-year-old out of school for months when you’re working on location."
Ms. Quilty, who will be playing the role of Queen Elizabeth, knows what that’s all about. Also a mother of three (Taylor, Roxanne and Mason), she recalls the time she directed a show in Philadelphia "and didn’t see my family for three weeks. What all of us out here like is the lifestyle the kids can have, but being able to work that’s a real challenge. The kids are in school all day then you go to the theater at night."
Princeton Rep allows both actresses to work at the professional level their training and experience qualifies them for while making a couple of statements they agree need to be made that seasoned professionals can indeed be found outside the big cities, and that there’s more to acting in the suburbs than the community theater scene.
"Not that there’s anything wrong with that," Ms. Garrett says, "but you do want to be recognized for what you really are."
So, then: Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
"I don’t know if we’ll ever know," Amy Freed told the Stanford University Report shortly before "Beard" was produced in San Francisco.
"On the surface, (the play) is a spoof or parody about authorship issues, but on a deeper level it’s about what makes a writer like Shakespeare. Is it talent? Is it access? Can you do it just by genius alone?"
For more information, call (609) 921-3682 or write to [email protected]. On the Web: www.princetonrep.org.

