Playwright: translated by Christopher Kidder-Mostrom from the play by Niccolo Machiavelli. At: Commedia Beauregard at the Raven Arts Complex, 6157 N. Clark St. Tickets: 800-838-3006; www.cbtheatre.org; $25 . Runs through: Feb. 9
If Niccolo Machiavelli hadn't written The Prince, thereby coining the catch-phrase, "The end justifies the means," and if weasely public officers weren't still invoking that same slogan in defense of their shady tactics, there would be no reason for us to remember a 16th-century play titled The Mandrake. Nowadays, political theorists looking to art in illustrating their ideas make film documentaries, but in 1525, they wrote plays, the continuing popularity of which are often based more in their author's reputation than any inherent aesthetic value.
This doesn't mean that great plays can't be founded on social sermons ( consider George Bernard Shaw ). No one can say that Machiavelli doesn't make a coherent case for a virtuous wife becoming an adulterous whore in order to give her infertile husband the progeny he desires, with the hearty co-operation of the would-be sperm donor and his sidekicks, along with assorted moral advisors—the hapless matron's mercenary clergyman, frivolous mother and cuckolded spouse, himself—who also urge her toward patently immoral conduct for the ( all together, now ) greater good.
In order to ensure that we follow every step of his argument, Machiavelli leaves no opinion unexplored, making for a text closer to Plato's symposiums than to the Roman comedy we associate with the period. Modern productions typically adopt motifs drawn from the later playwrights refining the neoclassical comic form—Goldoni, Moliere and, of course, Shakespeare—but despite the Commedia Beauregard company's record of reaching across boundaries both chronological and geographical, director Lisa Cantwell appears not to trust the merits of Christopher Kidder-Mostrom's new translation, instead instructing her actors to play it as flat-out live-action-cartoon farce, often at the expense of anchoring the hijinks in an integrated universe.
The results are not without their clever touches: After withdrawing into Friar Timoteo's church vestry, Liguria—whose motley gown and insatiable appetite identifies her as the author's harlequin surrogate—later emerges snacking on the communion bread and wine, and when the lovesick Callimaco ( "I'm an all-out passion stampede!" ) disguises himself as a minstrel, his song is an acoustical arrangement of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky." The scenes involving Neil O'Callaghan's unflappable valet and Lina Chambers' sunny-faced Renaissance-rapping widow also project charm and imagination in quantities sufficient to overcome the production's overall collegiate ambience.
