all's well that ends well // director's note

no comedy of shx’s so explicitly and so anxiously insists upon its happy ending, and few are as difficult to steer toward that ending than all’s well that ends well.  for a romantic comedy it’s pretty unpleasant.  a culture of toxic masculinity prevails and everyone is anxiously, and aggressively attempting to enact the expectations of their gender—and failing.  death is everywhere—at the beginning, two fathers are dead, and it seems likely that the king will shortly join them.  we have a romantic heroine who repeatedly considers suicide and fakes her own death, and, instead of running off to flounce in the forest and talk about flowers, our young heroes take refuge in a war zone. this strange fairy tale is the only one of shx’s plays in which the title is delivered as part of the dialogue, and like much of the play, even that title seems to be a riddle.  on the surface, it seems to mean that “it will all be fine in the end,” it’s possible to read it in machiavellian terms—“the end justifies the means.”  an alternate meaning of the word “well” in shx’s time was “dead and in heaven,” which allows an even more nihilistic interpretation: “you’re better off dead.”  in this darkly funny play about gendered archetypes and the fairy-tale endings we all hope for in our love lives, sometimes you can’t help but wonder.