By Jeff Smith
Published March 15, 2007

In Amy Freed's Restoration Comedy, Amanda's married to a philanderer named, appropriately, Loveless. He ran off to the Continent and, for a decade, celebrated "the diversity of God's creation."

Hearing she died, Loveless returns to England. But she's still alive and has remained as patient as Griselda, as true as Penelope at the loom. To win Loveless back, however, Amanda decides to become the consummate libertine. At the Old Globe, her education in the wiles of dalliance is one of the funniest scenes in recent memory.

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that somewhere, somehow, someone is enjoying himself." The Restoration era sprang from the repressive Puritanism of Oliver Cromwell like an arrow from a bow. Caralyn Kozlowski's Amanda embraces the new liberation -- and may be one of the world's quickest studies. She stands too stiff, her teacher and secret admirer Worthy (Peter Frechette) tells her: "A woman of pleasure leans on things. This suggests that she might be...toppled." As Amanda warms to de-regulation, Kozlowski does a swift, hilarious thaw.

Kozlowski has the smarts, talent, and comic timing not only for Restoration comedy and Shakespeare (I'd love to have seen her Rosalind) but also for the plays of Amy Freed. Her plays The Beard of Avon, Safe in Hell, and Freedomland combine thought, history, and humor in fresh, inventive ways. In Restoration, for example, she makes intelligence feel bawdy and -- no mean feat -- the bawdy, intelligent. Freed also teaches acting and, unlike many who practice her craft, knows how to write for actors. The Old Globe recently named Amy Freed playwright-in-residence. Hear! Hear!!

Restoration combines Colly Cibber's Love's Last Shift (1696), which has a happy ending, with John Vanbrugh's hastily composed riposte, The Relapse, which doesn't. Act One of Restoration rounds with a sense of completion (and is one tough act to follow); Act Two, having to tie countless loose ends -- including a trio of love trysts -- tends to sprawl. But no matter: by then the production's buoyant energy builds to a resonant conclusion.

Much of that energy emanates from Marco Barricelli. He gives Loveless a baritone voice so expansive you'd swear he's miked (he isn't) and a Lust Writ Large swagger. Like the cast in general, Barricelli conveys the joy of playing someone who's the opposite of neurotic: sensually and verbally free, unafraid, or ashamed, to be alive.

(Historically, the Restoration only lasted around thirty years, from 1662, when Charles II issued an edict allowing women to appear on a stage for the first time, to 1700-ish; the Age of Reason lurked around the corner to squelch enthusiasms with lockstep rigor.)

Restoration is both an homage to, and a parody of, the period. Freed includes many an anachronism, and the Globe production adds more. For the seduction scene between Amanda and Loveless (in which he "cuckolds himself"), the Rolling Stones sing "Start Me Up"; when Lord Foppington (scene-stealing Danny Scheie in a lion's-mane wig and several of Robert Blackman's majestic costumes) chooses new clothes, director John Rando adds a gratuitous, but funny, Chippendales fashion show. At first the anachronisms irk, as if the production (and Rando has done this before) has to apologize for its subject and pad it with shtick. But soon they make sense as modern correlatives for the play's unrepressed spirit.

Restoration theater was more interested in sensuality and wit than in scenic designs, which slid flats on a proscenium. Ralph Funicello's set begins with this principle. A thick rose-colored curtain, cupids floating above, opens on a traditional Restoration look. But then Funicello layers in flats and drops and creates three-dimensional depths (including a sweeping panorama of London). Like the production, and the play, the set celebrates diversity.