THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
Theater Oobleck
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Forsythe’s notion of imposing a commedia scheme on the script isn’t a bad one. Commedia relies on comic and grotesque masks to distinguish its various stock characters, and masks can be a good way to distract an audience from actors’ inadequacies; the masks (and costumes) Michael Biddle has designed here are fun to look at. Furthermore, the play’s characters certainly have parallels in commedia’s archetypal figures: the befuddled old father (Baptista, whose efforts to marry off his daughters Katherina and Bianca propel the plot), the fatuous young lovers (Bianca and her suitor Lucentio), the crafty, scheming servants (Lucentio’s valet Tranio, who disguises himself as his master to aid in his wooing of Bianca), the willful wench (Katherina the shrew), and the braggart out-of-towner seeking a mate (Petruchio). And masks can provide a key to revealing the inner logic of this story of men who use disguises to win the women they want: Petruchio poses as a madman to disorient his tempestuous bride Katherina long enough to tame her, and Lucentio pretends to be a tutor so he can clandestinely pursue Bianca. When Petruchio takes off his mask to reveal the loving fellow under the facade, it serves as a reminder of the understanding of psychological nuance that lifted Shakespeare far above his contemporaries.
The rest of the production is dotted with minor but annoying inconsistencies. In a nod to nontraditional casting, Forsythe has the wily servant Tranio played by a woman, Joan Deschamps; then he fudges on whether Tranio is supposed to be female or gender-neutral (meanwhile, the presence of a woman in the role clutters the play’s original structure, with its parallel male-female relationships). Similarly, the fact that Jacqueline Williams is black is sometimes ignored but other times exploited–for instance, when Orendorf responds to a particularly sassy line reading from Williams with a “get-you-girl” snap of the fingers. Occasional anachronisms–a telephone book, a snatch of phrase from the theme song to Franco Zeffirelli’s film Romeo and Juliet–intrude for no apparent reason.
Stein herself literally towers over the girls’ experiences, in the form of a huge rose-colored puppet; opposite Stein are two other puppets representing those illustrious champions of Great Ideas (Western European white male variety), Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. The contrast between the conservative traditionalism represented by Hutchins and Adler and the proto-feminist exploration symbolized by Stein is played out in Penelope’s and Verandah’s peculiar life journeys, acted out in the form of children’s games on a playground set littered with cutout images of eternity (a moon, a star, a pentagram).
