If you’ve ever chatted Shakespeare with director Dawn Monique Williams or heard her talk about his works, you’ve likely experienced the enthusiasm she often unleashes for her favorite play.

“Anybody who knows me knows that it is no secret that Romeo and Juliet is my favorite play of all time, ever,” Williams says. “I think some people are sick of hearing me say it.”

For years, however, Williams—who “fell in love with the muscularity” of Shakespeare in college—was no great fan of The Merry Wives of Windsor, though fortunately she changed her mind in time to direct it for the outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre this season. She’d seen some creative takes but hadn’t been able to connect with the work. Then she caught a production with traditional Elizabethan costumes at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and the play finally clicked.

“All the other things that people had been doing, you know, puppets and 1950s kind of Lucy/Ethel concepts, had maybe been too much for my brain,” Williams says. “When I saw it at the Globe, I was like, ‘Oh, I get it!’ It’s actually kind of simple, and made me really appreciate the play with all its moving parts”—the legendary Falstaff, the cunning wives and, above all, Anne Page.

Williams was captivated by this young woman who is basically being sold into marriage but who schemes to marry the man she loves, a match forbidden by her parents. “I saw the flip of the coin to Romeo and Juliet, where we have the two young lovers who secretly wed, whose families are feuding and it doesn’t end well for them.”

Realizing that Merry Wives is essentially a romantic comedy cracked the play open for her, and that realization played heavily into the vision she pitched to OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch in 2015. “I thought of the genre of romantic comedy and my own development as a young woman, having school-age crushes, starting to break the rules that your parents said about dating and courtship, and it really made me think of the ’80s.”

And Williams doesn’t mean the 1580s . . . not entirely, at least. She and her creative team have embraced the Elizabethan façade of the theatre by designing Elizabethan-inspired costumes with colors reminiscent of the 1980s, the first full decade of Williams’s childhood, and giving the production an ’80s pop soundtrack.

An Elizabethan silhouette

You may think: Hold on, the woman who just declared that the play made the most sense when presented traditionally is really using fluorescent-pink fabric and Whitney Houston to help tell this story?

“As a gross oversimplification of what I feel,” Williams says, “I don’t believe in ‘traditional Shakespeare.’ For me, when people say ‘traditional Shakespeare,’ what they mean is what they believe to be an Elizabethan silhouette, a Jacobean silhouette, maybe a Medieval silhouette, but something that for them is distinctly old—long dresses, ‘pumpkin pants,’ codpieces.”

Some theatre patrons and practitioners take it several steps further, wanting “original practices Shakespeare”—practices that would have included longer productions devoid of intermissions, amplified sound or female actors.

“But what we should understand about those original practices,” Williams insists, “is that they were born out of doing contemporary plays. So each of Shakespeare’s plays, when he wrote it, was a new play. The actors wore modern dress; they didn’t do Julius Caesar in togas. Maybe they’d drape a little sash, maybe they’d wear a little laurel wreath, but that was over their regular breeches. Cleopatra showed up dressed as Queen Elizabeth did. Shakespeare had little to no concern with historical accuracy.”

He was, according to Williams, a “radical adapter,” and his disregard for historical accuracy is hyper-evident in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is set in Elizabethan-era England yet stars Falstaff and references the likes of Prince Hal and Poins—who are based on people who lived about 200 years earlier. “That’s very Elizabethan, very much those customs and norms of the time that Shakespeare was living and writing in,” Williams says. “So I thought, ‘Thank you for that permission, Shakespeare, and I will go forth in the spirit of radical adaptation, in the spirit of offering the audience something contemporary.’ ”

An ’80s pop soundtrack will stand in for the music that would have been played by Elizabethan musicians but has largely been lost to us, a choice Williams considers particularly apropos due to the script’s reference to Elizabethan pop hit “Greensleeves.” Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” for example, will be used to reference Anne Page’s desire for a partner with whom she can, as the lyrics state, “feel the heat”—to dance “with somebody who loves me.”

Other contemporary touches include downplaying the xenophobia and sexism in the play and increasing the presence of female actors. Despite the strong female characters in Merry Wives, they only represent 4 of 19 speaking roles (this production features 24 total), and for Williams that level of imbalance and lack of opportunity is unacceptable.

“My philosophy is simple,” she says: “Women and people of other marginalized genders can play these parts. Full stop! We know the plays were written for a uniform gender at the time but relied on some gender fluidity in the young boys who were playing women, and they kind of leaned into gender stereotypes and embraced that there are some performance aspects to gender. So, if that’s how they were written, then what are we afraid of? I don’t even know why we’re still having the conversation; to me it’s just ridiculous. Yes, a woman can play Lear. Yes, a woman can play Prospero. Yes, a woman can play Falstaff, Mark Antony, Julius Caesar. A woman can play all those parts.”

And so, at the center of a production with 11 women in the cast is K. T. Vogt, now in her 10th OSF season, playing Falstaff—one of Shakespeare’s most iconic and beloved male characters.

“I thought K. T. was just perfect to play Falstaff,” Williams says. “She’s a tremendous, tremendous comedic actor, very generous in the room, very playful, fearless, and I feel like that’s what you need for Falstaff.”

As a self-described “woman of size,” Williams did not want to go with the frequent casting choice of putting large amounts of padding on a thin actor, since roles for actors of size—especially female ones—can be so hard to come by.

In the rehearsal room, says Williams, the fat jokes “are landing a little bit different because K. T. is somebody who’s navigated the world in a fat-phobic society; she just lives with it as a reality, so she knows how to have the thick skin and let the thing roll off.” That’s a skill set Williams recognizes because of her own experiences, knowing what it means to come from “a genuine place of living life as a larger person and knowing when there’s value or strategy to using self-deprecating humor or when you are actually insulted, or when somebody actually lobs one at you and it’s a good one.”

Intentionality

Unique life experiences can add depth and authenticity to actors’ work onstage and off, which is why OSF's art is enriched as the company becomes increasingly diverse across the board. This movement in the direction of equity has ramped up during Williams’s four prior seasons as an associate and assistant director and is currently actualized in her being one of six directors of color this year, including Lileana Blain-Cruz (Henry IV, Part One), Carl Cofield (Henry IV, Part Two), Chay Yew (Hannah and the Dread Gazebo), Robert O’Hara (UniSon) and Juliette Carrillo (Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles). 

Williams’s time at OSF has provided her with the benefit of greater familiarity with the acting company and with the beauty and challenges of directing in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre—her favorite OSF performance space. First and foremost, however, Williams can’t speak highly enough about what she has gained working on Richard II, Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline with OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch and witnessing his leadership in the rehearsal room as well as the organization.

“That is just unparalleled,” she insists. “I don’t know if people really understand the magnitude of the choices that Bill makes here. I know we get American Theatre and a little New York Times coverage about how OSF is being diverse. Maybe the focus is on the acting company, maybe even on who the playwrights are, but how he hires directors and how he partners directors to the plays that they’re directing is very intentional and very thoughtful. There’s probably not another theatre of this size or scale in the country that has hired three directors of color to do Shakespeare in a single season. I suspect that that is unheard of outside of a theatre of color.”

From artists to audience, OSF’s work in equity, diversity and inclusion is about providing greater access and removing barriers—goals embedded in Williams’s preferred approach to staging Shakespeare, which is neither wholly classical nor contemporary. 

“My particular aesthetic, honestly, is ‘mixed period,’ ” she says. “For me it’s about determining the healthy, hearty mix of the things we love about the period, and then how can we also keep it sumptuous for our audience but give them a point of entry? Because some people sit down and they see the ‘pumpkin pants’ and the big dress, and they’re already like, ‘It’s gonna be one of those, and I’m not going to understand anything,' because that’s already a layer of distance.”

Williams suggests that the Elizabethan costumes in Shakespeare in Love, for example, aren’t a likely entry barrier for those same audience members because the play is written in contemporary modern English. “The great achievement of Shakespeare is the language, and, for a new audience, the number-one barrier is the language, and [understanding that] requires cultivation and time and learning. If somebody’s sitting down hearing it for the first time, they might not catch as much as we would want them to,” says Williams, who this year also directed a reading of Octavio Solis’s Play on! translation of Edward III. “Everybody’s point of entry for every play is going to be something different, and I’m all about removing as many barriers as possible.”