THEATER REVIEW : ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’?: Maybe Not in This Version

Don’t believe the title.

All is not well that supposedly ends well, but William Shakespeare isn’t around for rewrites, and the staging by Sheldon Epps of his “All’s Well That Ends Well” in the Old Globe’s outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre has more problems than just the noise from low-flying planes.

This so-called comedy is infrequently done and it’s easy to see why. Like Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” “Measure for Measure” and “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “All’s Well” touches on tough questions of sexual conduct and personal integrity that are never satisfactorily answered.

When Helena (Oni Faida Lampley) applies knowledge acquired from her late physician father to cure the ailing King of France (James Cromwell), she is granted her wish: a husband of her choice.

But when the husband she chooses--Bertram (Neil Maffin), son of the countess Rossillion (Carolyn Seymour) in whose care Helena has been entrusted--proves to be a rude partner who sets up impossible demands before he’ll consummate the marriage, one’s first instinct is to send him packing.

Helena, alas, does not. When Bertram flees to Tuscany with the French army, she pursues him.

When, in the company of his unsavory buddy Parolles (Conan McCarty), a despicably self-inflated boob, Bertram attempts to seduce a widow’s daughter (Lyn Wright), we know he’s not worth the powder to blow him up.

Yet Helena persists, cleverly substituting herself in the seduction, which serves several ends: fulfilling her own yearnings, sparing the girl, beating Bertram at his game and, improbably, meeting the very conditions for validating their marriage that Bertram had set up.

Not a pretty picture and, aside from the major ethical questions that it never resolves, one that presents knotty problems of construction. How do you make as unpalatable a protagonist as Bertram miraculously recover his senses and undergo a profound personality change in the play’s final moments? And how can Helena come across as something more credible than a fool or a saint?

Rather than solve this, director Epps has hit on some unworkable ideas of his own. He has updated the play to 1940s Paris, overused an extraneous chanteuse (Melora Hardin) to bridge scenes with English versions of the songs of Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, and indulged in a bit of non-traditional casting that taints Bertram and Parolles as racists, among their other distasteful attributes.

Updating to make a point is one thing. But when the updating is as arbitrary as this, it becomes a trap. Unless you count De Gaulle as one, there were no kings in France circa 1940. Lampley, who has a measured dignity as Helena if not much vocal variety, is the only African-American in the cast, which lends an unwanted suggestion of racism to Bertram’s rejection. If that is intentional, it’s also unwise. To add racial bigotry to misogyny is no help at all. Maffin’s icy, Aryan-looking Bertram has problems enough without this poison.

For the rest, it is the Globe’s usual suspects who come off best: Richard Easton as a splendid, straight-arrow Lafew; Katherine McGrath as the hearty Florentine widow whose daughter has caught Bertram’s eye, and Jonathan McMurtry as the rustic Lavatch.

Wright is puckish as the widow’s daughter and McCarty thoroughly unpleasant as the cowardly Parolles. (It’s worth noting that in the scenes where he is “captured,” blindfolded and taunted by his army buddies pretending to be enemy soldiers, the thickness of their assumed accents make them virtually incomprehensible.)

Carolyn Seymour has a fashion-plate elegance as the Countess Rossillion, an image enhanced by a showy parade of costumes from designer Dona Granata. The question is why? Isn’t it her good friend Lafew, after all, who says scornfully of Parolles, “The soul of this man is in his clothes”? What about the soul of the countess? The excess suggests a more superficial woman than is really there.

Jeff Ladman’s sound and Robert Peterson’s lights serve adequately. But Richard Hoover’s multipurpose set suffers from the same baffling contradictions as the production, mixing the handsome curve of a balcony with railing and the richness of a parquet floor with prosaically functional stairs.

This denotes a certain absence of conceptual cohesion crucial to a play as harsh, dense and illogical as this one. What it does not need is incomplete ideas and failed follow-through to muddy the waters.

* “All’s Well That Ends Well,” Old Globe Theatre, Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, Simon Edison Center for the Performing Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 17. $22-$32; (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

James Cromwell: King of France

Neil Maffin: Bertram

Conan McCarty: Parolles

Richard Easton: Lafew

Jonathan McMurtry: Lavatch

Carolyn Seymour: Countess Rossillion

Oni Faida Lampley: Helena

Michael Nichols, Steven Zubkoff: French Lords

Katherine McGrath: A Widow of Florence

Lyn Wright: Diana, her daughter

Joanne Zipay: Mariana, a neighbor

Demetrio Cuzzocrea: Interpreter

Melora Hardin: Singer

A revival of Shakespeare’s play directed by Sheldon Epps. Sets Richard Hoover. Lights Robert Peterson. Costumes Dona Granata. Sound Jeff Ladman. Composer Larry Delinger. Stage manager Peter Van Dyke. Assistant stage manager Melissa Joy Morris.