Although Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals eventually emerged as a popular bedrock in English drama, enjoying frequent revivals until the later nineteenth century, its 1775 premiere was a debacle. Reviewers castigated Sheridan’s harsh portrayal of the Irish through the character Sir Lucius O’Trigger, and the performance was plagued by poor acting. However, the chief, recurring complaint was that the play’s run time was far too long. One reviewer chastised it for being “a full hour longer in the representation than any piece on the stage” (Morning Chronicle). Sheridan also came to acknowledge in his preface that the first night’s script was “at least double the length of any acting comedy” (4). The original version of Sheridan’s play was deemed, in a word, unwatchable.Thankfully, and to his credit, Sheridan listened to his audience and critics, acknowledged his youth and inexperience as a writer, and overhauled his script accordingly. The happy result was a much faster-paced play that has so far, more or less, stood the test of time. However, it is worth bearing in mind that the long-standing success of The Rivals as a crowd-pleaser was built first on a legacy of censure and modification. As Michael Cordner has remarked, Sheridan’s deft haste in rewriting “alerts us to the subsequent unlikelihood of his ever again straying far from what his audience would tolerate” (ix).Indeed, modification and close attention to what viewers would accept were no doubt integral to the success of the latest Rivals production, coming out of the eminent American Players Theatre (APT) of Spring Green, Wisconsin. This performance pleased and gave a nearly flawless evening of entertainment to its viewers. The acting was energetic and intelligent, with the direction full of humor and surprises. While some of this agreeable entertainment was made possible by cutting away the darker sides of Sheridan’s play, the overall effect was a triumph.Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this production was the acting, which was almost universally top-notch. The Rivals is a play about language above all, and it falls into the “comedy of wit” genre first made popular around a century before Sheridan. Yet, like its earlier precedents, this play demands that the cast members articulate, enunciate, and above all take their time with their lines. While watching this production, I was reminded repeatedly of Simon Callow’s astute observation: “Restoration comedies demand the most exhausting kind of acting: sustained thinking” (13). And Callow describes how a particularly adept player would “articulat[e] each phase of thought in an epigram almost as if she were placing it on a shelf in front of her”:This intelligent care for Sheridan’s language and his deliberate, unrushed pacing, combined with in-the-moment energy, was just what the APT cast delivered. It is hard to pick favorites among so many impressive performances. However, an obvious success was Tracy Michelle Arnold’s delivery of Mrs. Malaprop’s eponymous malapropisms—lines that always either live or die on that player’s lips. In a telling result of the dexterity of the actress, the crowd seemed not to miss a wrong turn of phrase, laughing in unison at each of the character’s verbal blunders (aside from the anomalous fellow seated directly behind me who uttered, “What did they say?” every time the audience laughed). David Daniel as Sir Anthony Absolute was superbly funny in his blend of genuinely alarming rage and (a tad pitiful) confounded cluelessness. And the romantically entangled Lydia Languish (Kelsey Brennan) and Captain Jack Absolute/Ensign Beverley (Marcus Truschinski) were so powerful and amusing in their own rights and in their own lines that it almost made their romance irrelevant—except that their romance was the McGuffin keeping them onstage and talking and together, all things the audience wanted more of. In fact, one of the most surprisingly welcome aspects of the performances was how very effectively each of these powerhouses could work alongside others deserving equal attention (also meriting commendation are Josh Krause as Bob Acres and Collen Madden as Lucy).But despite these laudable performances comes a reminder that substantial modification and a degree of whitewashing helped make this play more fitting for the twenty-first-century palate. Most notably among the script’s changes in its new, 1920s setting were (1) cringeworthy romantic age gaps reduced and obscured, (2) offensive language reworked (e.g., “Mr. Fag” becomes “Mr. Fig”), (3) violence edited out, and (4) the threat of sexual violence omitted entirely.1 In fact, the APT’s harshest and most recurring moral message in this production lay in its critique of those who disapprove of women reading, hardly a cutting-edge subject on which to weigh in.Largely, this tempering of controversy has been remarked on positively by reviewers, one noting, for instance, the director Aaron Posner’s “judicious edits ... [that] keep the play moving forward and allow us to simply enjoy the romantic intrigues” as well as how the production “takes a 1775 script by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and brings it to life with bold colors and gentle hijinks” (Christians). What could have been fodder for fascinating commentary on the darker side of parental tyranny/authority over (uncomfortably) young daughters or toxic civility in the “gentle” classes was nearly invisible or at least unidentifiable in the APT version of this story.Yet, in the end, as I departed down the trail leading to the vast parking lot at the base of the amphitheatre compound, I was reminded of Sheridan’s original 1775 prologue to the play, in which he lambasted (to put it lightly) the “little puny critics, who scatter their peevish strictures in private circles and scribble at every author who has the eminence of being unconnected with them” (5). With my objections about the missed opportunities to present hard-hitting, dark themes from Sheridan’s version, I was surrounded by the faces of people who looked genuinely pleased and probably felt real relief not only in getting to see the play at all on a night plagued by thunderstorms but also in getting to see a production delayed by COVID and pandemic shutdowns. In this spirit, this reviewer hopes to evade Sheridan’s early conception of a bad-tempered theatre critic and turn instead to his intentions in modifying this play so extensively based on his nightmarish first night reviews. Sheridan wanted his play to please his audience above all, and, in this case, The Rivals delivered good humor and relief when we all no doubt needed it.