Carol Gray proudly describes herself as an Ann Arbor townie who began acting in youth theater with Kate Mendelhoff, a University of Michigan professor of theater who taught acting classes.

“The first musical I ever did was with Kate when I was 8 years old,” Gray said.

Gray was a freshman at U-M in 2000, the year Mendeloff founded Shakespeare in the Arb.

The annual celebration of Shakespeare in the Nichols Arboretum was a happy accident.

“Kate actually founded Shakespeare in the Arb because she couldn’t book time for an indoor space,” Gray said. “She said, ‘Where can I do this play, let’s just try to do this outside.’ She had colleagues who worked at the Arb and she was ‘why not here’ and a tradition was born.”

There has been a performance of Shakespeare in the Arb every summer from 2000 to 2025 except for two years during the pandemic. Mendelhoff died in 2023, but the program continues with Gray and Graham Atkins as co-directors. They have both been with the program since its inception.

“I started out as an actress and then sort of morphed into playing a bunch of different roles since 2000,” Gray said.

This year's Shakespeare production is The Merry Wives of Windsor. The story goes that Queen Elizabeth I was amused by the character of Falstaff, the roustabout knight who leads Prince Hal astray until Hal matures, turns Falstaff out, and goes on to become King Henry V. The Queen thought it would be fun to see Falstaff in a comedy. And when a Queen demands, a playwright obliges.

The plot revolves around Falstaff pursuing two women at the same time. When the wives discover his unfaithful ways, they plot to teach him a lesson.

“There is a quote about the show that scholars hate this play but audiences love it,” Gray said. “It’s because it only has 12 percent in verse, the rest is in prose, so it’s the most prose of any Shakespeare play. I think there’s rumors that he wrote it in two weeks. There are a lot of subplots that don’t connect to the rest of the play. It doesn’t have the same structure that a lot of other comedies do.”

Gray made some alterations and cut some language and some attempted humor that would be unclear to modern audiences.

“But what we kept is the reason audiences love it. It’s clear comedy. It’s like Graham says, ‘It's like an episode of Cheers set in Elizabethan times’” Gray said.

The Matthaei Botanical Garden and the Nichols Arboretum have embraced the annual production, and the directors of Shakespeare in the Arb are careful to maintain the unique beauty of the park.

“We have come to view the Arb as a real museum,” Gray said. “We’ve really tried to respect the environment. We collaborate with the curators, we make sure we’re not damaging any areas and plants, and find areas where they’re willing to have 250 people come and sit in. I think we also try to make sure that the Arb is a character in the play every year and that actors can incorporate whatever environmental elements they want into their acting, such as using sticks for swords or hiding behind bushes. The costuming takes a lot of inspiration from the Arb.”

Gray's challenge this year is how to set a city story in a pastoral setting.

“In some ways, The Merry Wives of Windsor is Shakespeare’s most civically set play,” she said. “It’s in the city of Windsor, it’s a very tight-knit community that Falstaff butts his way into and tries to disrupt, and then the community bands together to kick him out. We’re setting it in the prairie and what I like about the prairie is that there are three main spaces that allow for the audience we expect [about 250 for each performance].”

The cast members walk through the park and the audience travels with them through the three-hour presentation of Merry Wives.

Usually, an amphitheater is not one of the stops because the Huron Towers loom above, but this year is different.

“It’s pretty obvious you are not in the wilderness but we thought this was very fitting because this is a show that tells a story that’s set in the city,” Gray said. “We don’t need to get the audience lost in the woods here. The forest doesn’t play the same transformative role as it does in Midsummer Night's Dream. Its background, in some ways, helps the cast to be spontaneous, it helps give a more organic movement and everything is so close together that they’re neighbors.”

Being good neighbors is a theme that runs through Merry Wives. The wives find ways to tease and scold Falstaff and show him the error of his ways.

“There is no lesson that’s been learned,” Gray said. “They decide to laugh around a country fire. It’s sort of about community justice and community care, and what I hope our production can show is that everyone has a relationship with everyone else. All of them know each other well and that Falstaff is not a villain, there is no real villain in this play. It’s really just about people testing the boundaries of marriage, testing the boundaries of infidelity, and realizing ‘What I have is good.’”

Gray said she hopes audiences enjoy a well-done Shakespeare production while they are also enjoying the Arb.

“It’s a jewel. Something special to preserve not just plants and trees, but some beautiful historic old trees given to the university by people from Japan,” Gray said. “There is nothing else like it in town, so we love showing how beautiful it is.

Hugh Gallagher has written theater and film reviews over a 40-year newspaper career and was most recently the managing editor of the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers in suburban Detroit. 

Shakespeare in the Arb will present the Bard’s "The Merry Wives of Windsor" beginning each performance at 6:30 pm on June 5-8, 12-15, 19-22, and 26-29. Tickets may be purchased at the Michigan Union Ticket office at 530 South State Street, Ann Arbor, and online at mutotix.umich.edu.