E-Mail This Article to a Friend Girls’ nights out (continued)

The red-headed Rafferty can be appealingly goofy or romantically rapt, and she captures the barely-in-control dizziness of Rosalind’s manipulation of the action. But she can also put too much cuteness into what she’s doing, whether it’s feigning youthful lustiness as Ganymede or counseling Phebe to "Sell when you can. You are not for all markets." Anne Gottlieb is a take-charge Celia, aptly skeptical when Rosalind starts to flirt with romantic daredeviltry. And Susannah Millonzi’s pertly crinolined, street-tough, heavy-breathing Phebe is a particular astonishment. One look at Orlando and this physically adroit actress is like an ad for lust at first sight, at one point jumping her prey and having to be pried off by Dan McCleary’s stolidly sincere love soldier of a Silvius. Having done so, he holds her by the legs as she pursues Rosalind while walking on her hands — like a little leering wheelbarrow. Whenever she’s on, Mellonzi’s Phebe walks off with the production — as surely as she does with her little flock of stuffed sheep on carts.

In Lettice and Lovage, Packer does not so much walk off with the show as bear it up on the back of her own earthy and commanding personality. The play was written for Maggie Smith, who originated the role and won a 1990 Tony for her Broadway performance as eccentric livewire Lettice, whose motto is "Enlarge! Enliven! Enlighten!" In three acts clocking in at almost three hours, Shaffer’s too-easily-resolved battle between dull fact and romantic embellishment is both too long and too slight. And with its pitting of passionate aberration against what Lettice decries as "the Mere," it’s like a drag version of the author’s Equus or Amadeus. This is the sort of play that gets a pass largely as a linguistically high-octane vehicle waiting to be enlarged and enlivened by an actress of mighty powers, like Maggie Smith — or Tina Packer. What’s notable about Packer’s performance is the way in which, rather than gird Lettice in an armor of performance tics, she refashions her as her own mighty, full-throated, and theatrical self, right down to the heavy timbre and disarming lack of inhibition.

Not that Packer is alone on stage — though she is alone on stair. Lettice, whose passions include Tudor cuisine and English history, is a tour guide at Fustian House, an old manse in Wiltshire whose history is singularly dull, its one claim to fame, from the reign of Elizabeth I, being more a molehill than a mountain. That event did, however, take place on the house’s Grand Staircase, and the first and best scene of Shaffer’s play telescopes, in four capsules, the guide’s increasingly ornamented account of the place’s boring history. This gets her called on the Fustian carpet when Lotte Schoen, from the personnel department of the Preservation Trust, turns up for a tour that has come to include deformed domestics and the composer Henry Purcell. At Shakespeare & Company, this opening gambit is performed by Packer racing up and down the grand stair of the Spring Lawn mansion that is part of the company’s Lenox digs before the audience is directed into the parlor theater for the rest of the play.

Middle-aged spinster Lettice, unrepentant about giving History a leg up when it needs it, is, no surprise, fired by middle-aged spinster Lotte. In act two, however, the ax-wielding bureaucrat, plagued by conscience and an exit-interview performance she can’t forget, turns up at her victim’s shabby digs with a letter of reference. Lettice, whose mother headed a touring female theater company specializing in Shakespeare, lives in a crummy basement flat furnished with stage props, from a bloody head on a pole to mediæval weaponry and "Falstaff’s chair." Unemployed and overjoyed at the possibility of a job, she prevails upon the straitlaced Lotte to accept a "coif" of the 16th-century cordial she brews herself from, among other things, vodka and the herb lovage. A few goblets of this stuff and the two are faster friends than the Olsen twins, bonded by a love of spunk and a distaste for modernity, especially as represented by the monolithic concrete gloom of post-war English architecture. It’s clear the playwright and the Prince of Wales are on the same page about this.

From there, the play gets more preposterous, with the ladies’ game of connecting to England’s more halcyon times (before Cromwell closed the theaters) by re-enacting executions getting way out of hand and a priggish lawyer being brought on to get lubed by Lettice’s gusto. The flamboyant dialogue, however, is juicily arch and amusingly overwritten, a picnic for Packer. Andrew Borthwick-Leslie, as the lawyer, and Catherine Taylor-Williams, as Lotte’s nervous secretary, draw their characters too broadly for the small space. But Packer earns her florid stripes. And when Lettice temporarily breaks down, admitting that she may have lost her self in history and that her contempt for the gray, machine-driven present stems from feeling a foreigner in it, Packer’s raw, blubbering delivery rips through the ridiculousness. She has an apt foil in Diane Prusha, whose Lotte moves from prim chill to bohemian warmth without ever losing her respect for the facts. The actress, a 26-year mainstay of the parlor theater, underplays affectingly, even when the play is spiraling heavy-footedly in the other direction.