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Hit comedies
The Taming of the Shrew; The Comedy of Errors
BY CAROLYN CLAY


There’s as much violence in Shakespeare as in Quentin Tarantino. Some of it, like the mutilation and human-pastry making of Titus Andronicus, is grotesque. But the mayhem of the comedies is mostly knockabout, more in the mode of Punch and Judy than Pulp Fiction. In the now-hackle-raising The Taming of the Shrew, domestic abuse is made merry, whereas in The Comedy of Errors, the abuse is primarily of domestics. At Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, director Daniela Varon adds an Elizabethan fillip to the marital fisticuffs of Kate and Petruchio; at the Publick Theatre, Diego Arciniegas takes a Vittorio De Sica approach to the Bard’s vision of carbon copies torn asunder.

The Shrew program leads with a couple of quotes from the untamable Queen Elizabeth I. "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king," asserts the monarch. And "I will have here one mistress and no master." Director Varon, who describes herself as a feminist, adds that she’s more interested in the "astonishing mirror" the Bard held up to his society than in taking issue with the tenor of the times, when spinsterhood was probably the only alternative to subjugation — even for the head of state. The director sees Kate and Petruchio’s journey from war to peace as a joint negotiation with a sexist system. And though she eschews the winking overlay many modern productions put on Kate’s fifth-act paean to wifely duty and husbandly hand stomping, she does include a Judi Dench–worthy surprise.

Set in Padua in the 1590s, the colorful and richly costumed production moves from the giddiness of Carnival to the spirituality of Lent. The idea is to emphasize the principals’ inner as well as outer transformations, their deepening understanding of each other and of what’s socially expected. To finger further the gap between playacting and reality, Varon includes the oft-severed Induction, in which The Taming of the Shrew is presented as a play within a play set by an amused lord before a drunken tinker whom he and his servants have convinced is a swell with amnesia. It’s clear the Christopher Sly of Walton Wilson has been partying hearty at Carnival, as he spends much of the first scene vomiting and otherwise behaving disgustingly before passing out and proving still a rank Vesuvius. But in this insightful production, he too finds himself transformed — through the miracle of theater. He not only observes the play but also gets to play a part (the fake Vincentio), and that gives Wilson an opportunity to exhibit hilariously the all-agog enthusiasm of the transported amateur.

Sly is not, however, the heart of The Taming of the Shrew. Petruchio, who’s "come to wive it wealthily in Padua," and Katherine, the spirited dowry donor he determines to tame, are. And this production boasts a healthily thumping auricle and ventricle in the strapping, "half-lunatic" Petruchio of Obie winner Rocco Sisto and the short, cocky Kate of Celia Madeoy, who eventually decides, to her amusement, that if the male-chauvinist establishment isn’t beatable, it is manipulable. Sisto’s big, cheerful mercenary doesn’t just overpower Kate; he threatens everyone in his household, somehow without losing amiability. And Madeoy’s pertly snarling Kate manages something close to castration followed by strangulation with Gremio’s cane moments after her first entrance. Varon has fun with the disparate heights of her players: instead of cutting Kate down to size, Petruchio raises her off the floor to his level. And from the pair’s first balletic squabble, in which both realize they’ve met their match, there is sexual attraction, right down to a little circling dance in which they’re glued at the crotch.

With the Induction, the show goes on for three hours, but it’s a fleet, inventive three hours, with Varon throwing in everything from the Singing Nun to dish juggling ˆ la the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Kate, joined by Stephanie Dodd’s taunting handful of a Bianca, warbles an Elizabethan lute song; Petruchio offers a little Cole Porter; and all the players prove versatile, singing, playing instruments, and hanging the painted drops that indicate changes of scene. A cellist provides tootling little bridges, and actors climb in and out of costume on stage, pulling their weeds from a strolling players’ trunk. Throwing another wrench into the period sexism is some gender bending, with Meg Wieder an adorable, clown-suited Biondello complete with codpiece. Robert Biggs’s Gremio manages several somersaults without dropping his cane. Jonathan Croy brings deft irony to long-suffering dad Baptista Minola. And a quartet of valets serve many masters, stopping between jobs only to turn their velvet vestments. Although we’ve seen Shrew’s linguistically embellished skirmishes a dozen times, this edition surprises, amuses, and rolls smartly through the sticky wickets.

Varon told the Berkshire Eagle that transposing Shrew to the 21st century would make it "the story of an abused woman with Stockholm syndrome." Shakespeare’s starter farce, The Comedy of Errors, rides through two hours on a very shaky premise — if you were scouring the world for your twin and suddenly found yourself repeatedly mistaken for someone else, wouldn’t it occur to you you’d found him? But there’s absolutely no danger of invoking Patty Hearst. So at the Publick, director Diego Arciniegas spins things forward to the Italy of the mid 20th century, where smoldering gents in shades and linen pants give orders, jealous babes in full skirts agitatedly smoke cigarettes, and everywhere hovers Catholicism, lingering fascism, and the spirit of Sophia Loren. If only the production were as antic as it is thoughtful.

It’s apparent from the foreboding opening music that this will be a Comedy of Errors that reaches beneath the farce to consider the arbitrary cruelty — beginning with the first scene, in which, the burgs of Syracuse and Ephesus being so at odds that a citizen of one found in the other is sentenced to death, Syracusan merchant Egeon finds himself bound for beheading. But first he gets to tell the Duke of Ephesus the unhappy story of his life, whose center is a shipwreck that separated him, one of his infant twin sons, and one of twin servants to the sons from his wife and the other two twins. He is searching for the son and the servant he raised, who left home some years ago in search of their counterparts.

As luck would have it, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse have just hit the town where their Ephesian doubles reside, and a chaos of mistaken identity ensues, with the Dromios bearing the physical brunt of the comedy (whereas the Antipholi get to "dine" with women not their wives), until all is tidied up in a classical-comedy finish that finds everyone sorted and mated, including an Abbess. In the Publick’s sprightly if slapstick-stinting production, black-shirted policemen vie with the play’s incompetent exorcist as instruments of oppression. Nigel Gore brings a seasoned somberness to Egeon’s long, depressive exposition. Carolyn Lawton’s hot-blooded Adriana is more troubled than shrewish. And neither the laid-back visiting Antipholus of Lewis Wheeler nor the surlier at-home one of Bill Mootos is a particularly nice guy. The put-upon Dromios of Steven Libby and Harry LaCoste, in matching Bermuda shorts and caps, running all the wrong errands and getting their faces slapped silly for the trouble, are cuddlier.

Arciniegas has put together a solid acting company this summer, many of whom rotate between the Shakespeare farce and Tom Stoppard’s equally complicated, more satisfying Arcadia. This staging of the wordplay-riddled Comedy of Errors is not without giddy comic stretches, as when Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus, thought to be possessed, are kept at bay by all manner of crosses and rosaries, with one or the other set of twins popping up like ducks in a shooting gallery. But this play needs to be frantic, and too often it’s allowed to stand still.


Issue Date: August 5 - 11, 2005
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