The Bed Trick Response by Cole Songster

Once confronted with the question of the ethics within All’s Well That Ends Well, they weigh heavy on Harriett’s mind, affecting her ability to work soundly on the show through rehearsal. Her director responds, in an attempt to disregard her worries, that the show is from “a different time.” That isn’t enough, she still sits with all the issues of the play, unable to fully enjoy a show she once had so much excitement for. “But we’re doing it now,” Harriett responds, unsatisfied.

It begs the question; why do we return time and time again to the classics, building up and reinforcing this “canon” of works? These stories largely are born out of the past, they come from times that are not all that similar to our own. We, today, live very different lifestyles than the Elizabethans that Shakespeare wrote for and, perhaps more importantly, we live by a completely different set of customs and moral standards. Often we look to history as a sort of marker of the ways we’ve progressed societally, but we can’t escape the fact we are born out of this history – that it shapes our world and influences us. We inherently carry on hints of their norms and we treasure their stories by extension. Often, in an attempt to square this, we aim to deconstruct these stories and connect them to new and modern contexts. This is done quite well in Green’s The Bed Trick, placing All’s Well as far from the halls of nobility as one can be: the messy dorms during one’s freshman year of college.

All’s Well makes its presence clear in two different ways throughout the play. The first is in a very literal sense: it is the play that Harriett is spending her time rehearsing. She grapples with the same question as playwright and audience, wondering what we can learn nowadays from a script so riddled with problematic conclusions. Meanwhile Marianne deals with the plot of All’s Well playing out in her own life, her mom having perpetrated “the bed trick,” something that has haunted her dad throughout his life despite his attempts to repress it. On top of this, her parents seem to carry a religious guilt around sex (her father claiming the trick was part of God’s plan) making the topic somewhat harder to discuss openly. We see the weight of this press down upon Marianne – she cannot avoid the scars of her past. Marianne acts out throughout the story, she does not know how to engage with sex or romance in a healthy manner because her parents never did. Her basis is flawed, and without a thorough examination of that, she returns to what is familiar. Romance that is, to some extent, genuine but is built out of infidelity, lies, and pretending to be someone else. In this way, the character reflects the play – both are returning to their history, repressing it, grappling with it, repeating it.

Additionally, it makes us turn our attention to what happens when we make sex out to be a simultaneously important and taboo subject. We end up fostering an environment where there is no one to turn to in times of need, and yet a constant pressure to engage. Marianne at one point says that she is “tired of everyone placing so much importance on [her] virginity.” It’s no coincidence she is the youngest character in the play, the only one whose parents are around. This connection between sexual desire, youth, and innocence is a hallmark of fairy tales – you see it in Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty. The one who is pure and young causing everyone to in equal parts want to protect them and control them, it is very much engrained into the larger western canon. And it is an element of our history that mystifies something we ought to discuss more openly, it is an element that scars us.

At The Bed Trick’s end, we get the start of the answer to the question that Harriett has spent the whole play wondering: what can we gain from exploring this story in the modern setting? Can putting the two together, past and present, provide us with the clarity to undo these pressures and scars? If we examine it and come away with answers, does that mean all ends well? We watch as characters apologize to one another, strip and cry and hold one another. But we don’t know how it all turns out. The actors turn to us, once again just actors, and let us know this. They can’t provide us with answers. Neither can the play. Neither can the past. It’s why we’re always deconstructing the canon – it’s a crucial first step, but the answer is never there. We must continue to live, to return to our past, to make sense of our present. Again and again.