Ideas circle back in a Shakespeare cycle

It’s the summer of love at the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park. But it’s different from the “make love, not war” idyll in 1967 San Francisco. The Old Globe’s interpreter of love is William Shakespeare, and his viewpoint on the subject is somewhat more comprehensive than, say, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s.

Take “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” the most unfamiliar of the three plays that make up the Old Globe’s Shakespeare repertory festival. Written with John Fletcher, this last play in the Shakespearean canon contains the Bard’s final thoughts on the subject of romantic love. Let’s condense them into two words: Love stinks.

After all, the young cousins Arcite (golden-throated Brian Sgambati) and Palamon (Graham Hamilton) are the best of friends -- until love rears its beautiful head. The young Thebans are in an Athenian prison, vowing eternal friendship, when Emilia (Karen Zippler), the comely sister of the Athenian queen Hippolyta, passes by.

To quote another poet, just one look was all it took. Soon the cousins are at each other’s throats over Emilia, who doesn’t even know they exist. When Arcite is released -- but banished -- each of the two is in despair over the other’s possible advantage with Emilia.

The jailer’s daughter (Bree Elrod) has a similar crush on Palamon, helps him escape, then literally goes crazy when he doesn’t rush to her side.

This may not sound like a comedy. But the first part of Darko Tresnjak’s staging in the Old Globe’s outdoor theater plays like one. After a brief prologue that establishes the upcoming nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta -- in which Tresnjak borrows language from the royal couple’s similar scene in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” -- the director deletes a distracting subplot about three queens who seek Theseus’ succor, in order to get straight to the funny stuff.

The biggest laughs occur as the men are held captive in a towering, Ralph Funicello-designed cage that enables the actors to scramble up and down its sides with each passing emotion. Emotions pass so quickly that their clambering becomes as fascinating as the movements of monkeys in the nearby zoo.

Because “Two Noble Kinsmen” has been produced so few times, the details of the ending should remain in suspense. But let’s just say that the second half is a much grimmer affair. Although Tresnjak adds a silent, ironically happy coda for two of the least likely characters, the main plot will lead no one to conclude that all’s well that ends well. Instead, we leave reflecting on love’s labours lost.

We also reflect on the whims of the gods. They become more tangible in Tresnjak’s staging than they are in the script. Wearing vivid costumes by Linda Cho, Venus, Mars and Diana make guest appearances, endowing the second half with an impressive sense of ceremony.

The play’s bifurcated mood requires mental adjustment from the audience. Events feel arbitrary. Developments are also arbitrary in the festival’s “As You Like It,” but in that case, the audience eagerly plays along because the unlikely narrative twists ensure a happy ending.

Yes, in Karen Carpenter’s staging of “As You Like It,” we get a vision of love as most people like it. As in “Two Noble Kinsmen,” we see the loyal friendship of two aristocratic, same-sex cousins -- in this case Rosalind (Katie MacNichol) and Celia (Edelen McWilliams) -- superseded by romantic love. Fortunately, the two women don’t love the same guy. Rosalind falls for Orlando (Daniel Jay Shore), and Celia eventually ends up with Orlando’s formerly wicked but now reformed brother Oliver (James Joseph O’Neil).

Carpenter’s staging emphasizes the gloom at the beginning of the play, in the troubled court of the usurping duke. Thunderclaps mark the transitions between the early scenes, and a procession of people carrying black umbrellas crosses the stage as if in the last act of “Our Town.”

The period, as reflected in the costumes and in the employment of the courtier Le Beau as a photographer, is Victorian. This helps suggest the ravages of urban industrialization, Carpenter wrote in a program note -- although we see no smokestacks.

As soon as the play enters the countryside, it lightens up. It’s winter, but the Duke’s exiled followers are playfully throwing snowballs. The pastoral glow reaches its height in the second half, when a handful of little toy lambs lightly baa and serve as steeds for the characters.

Despite the well modulated melancholy of Jaques (Charles Janasz), this production clearly favors the view of the clown Touchstone (Gregor Paslawsky). His original costume is frighteningly inhuman, but he sheds the extreme clown look as he becomes more of a man.

Carpenter attempts to give Celia extra dimension in the second half by giving her a deer dream that could be interpreted as vaguely sexual -- as if to show that Celia, like her cousin, is thinking about sex, though her sexuality is deeply repressed.

Then again, it’s unclear that this Rosalind has ever thought about sex. MacNichol plays her with a feminine flutter and an impish sparkle that’s more akin to a ‘20s socialite who’s planning to bag a husband than to the more common interpretation of Rosalind as someone who would actually enjoy being a husband, at least for a while.

MacNichol’s performance is so arch that one wonders why Shore’s wide-eyed Orlando doesn’t flee from this Rosalind’s mannered exuberance.

It’s the festival’s only seriously miscalculated performance, however. Generally the casting lives up to the promise of repertory. The use of the same actors in concurrent productions highlights similar aspects of the texts, as when Dan Snook and Sara Surrey -- who are first seen as the title characters in the festival’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” a dissection of more mature love -- play Theseus and Hippolyta in “Kinsmen.” The same device can also demonstrate the different guises that one actor can assume -- as when O’Neil jumps from the cautious Caesar in “Antony” to a deliciously oily Oliver in “As You Like It.”

Likewise, repertory enables set designer Funicello to use a little pond at the edge of the stage for a dozen purposes in “Antony” and “Kinsmen” and then turn it into a flower garden in “As You Like It.” It’s a summer of versatility as well as a summer of love.

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‘As You Like It’ and ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’

Where: Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, the Old Globe, Balboa Park, San Diego

When: “As You Like It”: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, July 20, 23, 29; Aug. 1, 3, 7, 12, 15, 17, 21, 27, 29; Sept. 1, 4, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 25; Oct. 1

When: “The Two Noble Kinsmen”: 8 p.m. Friday, Sunday, July 22, 24, 28, 30; Aug. 4, 5, 11, 13, 19, 22, 24, 28, 31; Sept. 5, 7, 11, 23, 24

Price: $19 to $55

Contact: (619) 234-5623

Running times: “As You Like It,” 2 hours, 45 minutes; “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” 2 hours, 5 minutes