Costume sketch by Melanie Watnick for Smeraldina in Juilliard’s production of Carlo Gozzi’s The King Stag.

What happens when true love, evil ambition, and the commedia dell'arte collide? Well, throw in a pair of lovers, a magic spell, and two or three clowns—and you've got yourself the makings of a great piece of theater.

Carlo Gozzi's The King Stag opens in the Drama Theater on December 11 in a production featuring the Drama Division's fourth-year students, directed by Andrei Belgrader (who also co-translated the work with playwright Shelley Berc). It is a fantastical and at times satirical look at the destructive vices of ambition, jealousy, and lust, and the power of true love to transform and transcend them all.

Set in the make-believe Kingdom of Serendippo and the Forest of Ronscislappe (pronounced raunchy-slap-y), it tells the story of the wise yet lonely King Deramo, who—after years of searching for an honest woman to be his queen—discovers true love in the virtuous Angela, daughter of his second minister, Pantalone. However, Deramo's ambitious prime minister, Tartaglia, jealous of the king's power and lusting after Angela himself, devises plans of his own to usurp both the crown and the king's newfound love. The truth of Deramo and Angela's love is put to the test as Tartaglia's schemes threaten to destroy them and the order of the kingdom.

Gozzi (1720-1806) is one of the most internationally produced playwrights from Italy; his Turandot and The Love of Three Oranges have been adapted multiple times into operas, and he was compared to Shakespeare in his day.

Which begs the question: What makes this seemingly innocent, unsophisticated story a theatrical classic?

Carlo Gozzi was by no means unsophisticated and was certainly no innocent, but he would have been considered quite politically conservative by today's standards. Born in 1720 into the minor artistocracy of Venice, he was a fierce opponent of the social changes and movements sweeping through Europe in the 18th century. He despised the rising middle class, or bourgeoisie, which threatened the stability of the long-established social hierarchy of Venice. They had new money and new power, and accused Gozzi's class of being financially ill-equipped and lacking a sense of familial and moral responsibility.

In Gozzi's time, the long-respected form of Italian theater known as commedia dell'arte was under attack as well. Once seen as the pride of Italy, it had lost favor with the public; the middle class claimed it promoted bawdiness, and held it responsible for the moral decline of Venetian society. This rejection of commedia was, for Gozzi, a sign of the rejection of the Venetian class system. He defended the validity of the "authentic and spontaneous" commedia dell'arte in his writings, calling it "one of the glories of Italy," and accused the "realistic" plays of his rivals of being "low," "vulgar," and "common."

Costume sketch by Melanie Watnick for Truffaldino in The King Stag.

On one hand, the cantankerous, old-fashioned Gozzi seems an unlikely author of a play as fantastical and naïve as The King Stag. On the other, Gozzi seems to achieve in his imagination what he cannot do in real life: he restores stability and order to a world wracked by social disorder.

Despite Gozzi's social agenda (or perhaps because of it), the dominating voice in The King Stag is not political satire, but the fairy-tale innocence of his artistry. He admits in his own writings that, in creating it, he "thought it necessary to be even more daring and to allow my imagination even freer reign in my new genre…And truly the readers of The King Stag will soon note the boldness of a whimsical mind."

Director Belgrader believes that the key to making the play work lies in its whimsicality: "To me, it's very moving," he says. It is this fairy-tale aspect, along with his mix of realism and "pure theatricality," that speaks to and intrigues both audiences and directors.

When asked what he thinks the play is about, he responds simply: "Love."

"I think it's 'love survives anything,' whether it's magic or evil or circumstance," agrees fourth-year actor Michael Urie, who plays Pantalone in the show. "Love—true love—will always survive."

Urie admits that the deceptively simple style of the play presents a challenge for actors. "It's hard, because there are not many boundaries to what we are doing. We don't have furniture; we don't have many props. It's very free, very fluid, the rehearsal process. It's hard to keep yourself specific in that kind of [imagined] environment."

The King Stag Drama Theater Wednesday-Sunday, Dec. 11-15 For time and ticket information, please see the Calendar.

Gozzi would have agreed. In his preface to the play, he acknowledges that, "in an unrealistic play, the serious actors need twice the skill required to perform a realistic role, for they must illustrate truths that the roles themselves do not contain." Gozzi goes on to describe the "vigorous, tragic circumstances" and the "broad comedy of the masks intertwined with the serious material." It is this crossing of genres, and the juxtaposition of the melodramatic characters and the commedia characters, that sparks comparison to Shakespeare.

Urie admits his curiosity as to what people are expecting from the show. When asked if it resembles the improvised commedia/clown project, The Fiasco Bros. Circus, in which he performed in his third year with Christopher Bayes, he says, "It's totally different."

Belgrader is certainly aware of the author's unique style. "The truth is," says Belgrader, "most people believe that commedia means only broad acting and lots of fun, in terms of pretty hard-core comedy—which this has, too. But I think the core of the play, really, is full of soul—a fairy tale that appeals to the depths of our desires. Who doesn't want to be loved, and be loved forever?"

Set in a rich, imaginative world, peopled with characters dressed in "oriental garb," The King Stag seems both a director's and a designer's dream. To costume designer Melanie Watnick, this translated into a look that is "kind of Zen, sort of ethnic, but not specifically one place or time period. It lends itself to a more magical place that we haven't imagined yet."

As set designer Kelly Hansen considered the look of the whole show, "it was very important that it was naïve," she says. "That was a word that Andrei used a lot in pre-production—very innocent, 'low-tech.'"

She describes the style that they settled on as emerging from both East and West. "We looked at a lot of Indian art, a lot of Thai art and architecture. I also looked at Italy a lot. The idea was not to choose a style in that sense—not to be Indian, but to be influenced by that. If you look at Indian and Persian art, there's a real, beautiful naïveté. And also western medieval stuff. They hadn't quite figured out how to draw in perspective, so there's a funny scale issue. We looked at that awkwardness; it's very charming."

Naïveté and charm seem a bit impractical nowadays, in a world where love can be determined through a survey and disorder has reached new heights. Gozzi offers us a visit to a place where good vanquishes evil, love conquers all, and innocence can be found again. In light of current events, perhaps Gozzi's nostalgia for a safer, simpler time is not too far from our own.

"I don't necessarily think we're going to change anyone's life," says Michael Urie, "but I sure hope it will lessen any stress for at least those two hours. It's gonna cheer people up, and that's good. I think that theater's important, and kind of rare."

Dawn-Lyen Gardner is a fourth-year drama student.