Behind the Scenes of Merry Wives, the Post-COVID Return of Shakespeare in the Park
Over a year after the Delacorte went dark for the first time in 58 years, Tony Award–winning set designer Beowulf Boritt returns with a love letter to New York City
By Marcus Scott
August 10, 2021
The Shakespeare in the Park production of Merry Wives is running at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park through September 18.Photo: Joan Marcus
Known for his eye-popping ocular spectaculars, no one has captured the allure of New York quite like influential production and scenic designer Beowulf Boritt. In fact, as the theatre industry slowly pulls itself out of the COVID-19 era, the scene-stealing master builder is amongst the first to design for the rollout, kicking off the season with Merry Wives, a much anticipated rollicking romp by acclaimed dramatist Jocelyn Bioh (School Girls, Nollywood Dreams) now playing in Central Park.
An adaptation of the Shakespearean folk comedy A Most Pleasant and Excellent Conceited Comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor, Bioh’s contemporary Harlem-set reimagining is not only a love letter to New York City but a celebration of immigrants. Bioh, a first-generation Ghanaian-American, relocates the setting to 116th Street, centering the narrative around the local African immigrants (many of them hailing from Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone) of the neighborhood known as Le Petit Sénégal and bringing to life a modern-day Pan-African cultural mosaic yet seen on a major American proscenium.
Under the helm of associate artistic director and resident director Saheem Ali, the production marks the return of Shakespeare in the Park after nearly two seasons. Following in the footsteps of the Kenny Leon–directed Much Ado About Nothing presented at the outdoor 1,800-seat Delacorte Theater in 2019, Merry Wives (overseen by the Public Theater) also features an all-Black cast. Originally from Nairobi, Ali wanted to tell a story that spoke to the immigrant experience in the U.S. and the Black experience in New York City, which quickly led to the creative team telling the story through the Pan-African diaspora community. Boritt immediately connected with this impulse: The son of an Eastern European immigrant, his Hungarian father was born during the Holocaust and ultimately fled the country when he was 16, during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
One of Boritt’s major trademarks (or “tics,” as he calls them) is hiding elephants within his designs, often leaving one in plain sight; there are three in this production. Courtesy of Beowulf Boritt
“One of the things I really love that I hope we captured in the set is the kind of juxtaposition you get [in Harlem],” says Boritt, who paid close attention to the 19th-century architecture and moldings of the weathered brick buildings that now house mom-and-pop business storefronts. “It repeats all over New York. Chinatown has it, Koreatown has it, Brighton Beach has it. These immigrant communities exist all throughout the five boroughs in exciting and unique ways, where, when you go there, you almost feel like you’re in those countries.”
Whether it’s the overworked vintage window air conditioner units overhead or mock cast-iron manhole covers at the lip of the proscenium below, Boritt captures the inner-city urban ecology of Harlem with fine-tooth precision. Taking inspiration from local clinics, African hair salons, and restaurants, Boritt incorporates the color schemes of various African flags to highlight the cultures of the nations the characters belong to. The interior of a laundromat owned by a local businessman (played by Gbenga Akinnagbe) and his wife (played by This Is Us star Susan Kelechi Watson) is painted in the colors of the Nigerian flag, an impulse that supports the text and its sundry references to palm wine, jollof rice, and cocoyams. The shock of effervescent Day-Glo hues also brings to mind the 1990s sitcom boom, something this production shares tonally.
Perhaps the most striking is the purple zebra-striped wallpaper in the apartment of Falstaff, the boastful and buffoonish rotund rogue with a bloated ego played with hammy bravura by Jacob Ming-Trent. Boritt says the set piece was inspired by a tour of 40 apartments when he and his wife were looking at real estate.
A model of Boritt’s plans for the stage showing Falstaff’s apartment. “He had been this ladies man Lothario in the 1990s, and he was still living in the same apartment he had decorated twenty years ago,” Boritt says. Courtesy of Beowulf Boritt
Boritt says hip-hop influences are prevalent throughout the set, such as an on-the-nose homage to a Barron Claiborne photo of The Notorious B.I.G. with a parental advisory label on the bottom right corner. Courtesy of Beowulf Boritt
Street art is another aspect of city life that Boritt pulled from, as gleaned from a polychromatic Black Lives Matter mural etched on the brick face of an urgent-care facility. The mural’s design is reminiscent of Gee’s Bend quilts, created by the descendants and ancestors of enslaved people from this community in Alabama. This is a striking visual, compelling viewers to remember the martyrs before and the martyrs to come.
“George Floyd’s murder affected all of us,” Boritt expressed, as his concerns pivoted towards the future of the industry. “I was aware that there were fewer people of color in the theater than in the population at large, and I think I naively assumed it was liberal industry, and it wasn’t lack of opportunity, it was lack of people not wanting to do it for whatever reason… I was wrong about that.”
“It’s a play of big personalities, and I felt it could sustain that kind of intense color that is a little more intense than real life in a way,” Boritt says. Courtesy of Beowulf Boritt
Since previews began, Merry Wives has had a whirlwind of stratospheric highs and melancholic lows. Following an injury sustained by Ming-Trent during a July performance, the Shakespeare in the Park production postponed its official press opening to Monday, August 9. Shortly after, a member in the 12-actor ensemble tested positive for COVID-19, causing the production to shutter for two days. Despite the tribulations that come with opening a show during a pandemic, Boritt says being in a live setting is an improvement over the influx of Zoom theater presentations that have been in vogue since the beginning of quarantine.
Since regulations loosened, the Public Theater granted a maximum of 1,468 masked theatergoers, with both full capacity and physically distanced sections available, and the surge in demand has been monumental. Boritt says the overwhelming response was evident the evening of the second preview (when the maximum of masked theatergoers allowed was 428) during a particularly nasty downpour that lasted two hours.
“Finally, at 10 o’clock at night we started the show, and we still had an audience of about 400 people who sat there for two hours of really heavy rain to watch a Shakespeare play in the park. It was really magical. There’s a hunger for it, for that experience, that a live performance with live actors interacting with the audience... There’s no substitute for it.”
