What is it about William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” that attracts progressive, feminist directors who hope to tame its inherently violent sexism and then spend their entire show fighting against a play, a comedy, that did not demand a new production in the first place? I, for one, do not know.
Chicago Shakespeare Theater learned its lesson years ago with a famously epic fail. But the latest disaster in the “Shrew” Chicago oeuvre is Court Theatre’s ill-conceived new staging, a joyless, weird, creepy, barely comprehensible and thoroughly unpleasant theatrical experience that lost a good portion of its head-scratching audience at intermission on Sunday night and surely alienated many of the rest who stayed.
The stated intent here was to offer a “fresh interpretation focused on feminine desire.” Right. Because you open “The Taming of the Shrew” and think, now here’s a play that wants to be focused on feminine desire.
I can’t remember seeing such a disaster before at Court (well, one time, some 20 years ago), a theater with the highest standards. Moreover, the talented director-adaptor Marti Lyons has done very fine work for years all over town. This one, she will want to erase from her resume, especially since it was not essayed in an experimental black-box theater, but on a distinguished mainstage at the holidays, a time of year when audiences reasonably are expecting the kind of warm-hearted coming together that Court has offered up in this slot for decades. It’s totally perplexing artistic decision-making.
If you do find yourself at this show, my first advice is to read the insert in your program, without which you will be at sea (that’s a warning, right there). In essence, the heavyweight conceit here is that we are watching a play within a play.
Fine. That’s true of the original, conceived as the fantasy of a drunken tailor. But here, we are watching a group of amateur actors doing the show for the first time — maybe donors who won the kind of casting auction that Victory Gardens used to do back in the day. So, in essence, Court’s cast is playing actors, with ages scrambled from what is typical, who are in relationships with others also doing the play, outer-life relationships that get messed up by their sexually charged actions as these fictional characters. The whole thing has a writhing, “Eyes Wide Shut,” bondage-y vibe at times, which I get was intended to be a progressive take reflecting the aforementioned desire but really ends up making the play even creepier than is usually the case.
Granted, an argument always can be made that Kate and Petruchio are playing one big sexual game to which they both have consented, thus explaining away all those unpleasant scenes of domination and the like. I’ve seen that several times and it can half-work. But even if you stipulate that approach has merit, this still is a comedy. Surely, the two of them are having fun.
Here, Petruchio and Kate are intended to be stuck in some joyless experience which progressively arouses them both, not that you believe for a second they really are attracted to each other. We get chocolate smeared on the body of Melisa Soledad Pereyra, the actress playing Kate, by Jay Whittaker, the actor playing Petruchio, in a truly excruciating scene that is intended to be erotic, but just feels wildly uncomfortable in the context of these performances in this play. And that is one of the more interesting scenes. Overall, the show cannot buy a laugh, even though the actor Alex Weisman, who plays Grumio and belongs in an entire different show, does his level best to find one. Not in this world, alas. There’s no warmth, no vulnerability, no fun whatsoever to be found in this world with this play.
One big problem is that there are almost no lines outside the original text, which may get you academic points for staging cleverness but surely doesn’t help you introduce the outer characters, which is kind of essential to make this idea work. The end is especially confusing, and while I think I tracked the deconstructive intentions (Jackie Fox’s beautifully rendered set suggests such a clash), I’ve no idea what statement Lyons was trying to make about marriage or relationships at the end. Maybe it was just about the danger of showmances.
In fairness, this is not an unserious, cynical or exploitative show, and certainly not one lacking conceptual ambition (hence the second star below). But it’s pretty terrible when it comes to the execution. It feels like it flows from a group of artists who spend a lot of time in academic echo chambers and were intrigued by the idea of deconstruction and/or reclamation. Alas, they seem to have forgotten to address the most important question of all, especially for a theater that produces a small number of shows: What do we expect the ordinary person in the audience to feel, and why are we taking up their time with this play?
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Taming of the Shrew” (2 stars)
When: Through Dec. 14
Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Tickets: $27-$94 at 773-753-4472 and courttheatre.org