The Taming of the Shrew (review)

What if Petruchio were old? This problematic hero is often staged as a charismatic young gallant, eager to "wive and thrive" in Padua, dexterous in word and deed. But in ShakespeareNYC's recent production, directed by Beverly Bullock, Petruchio was a world-weary middle-aged man, with Geoffrey Dawe sporting a pot-belly and gray hair. Bullock's decision to age the hero (and, only slightly less emphatically, the heroine) gave this spirited production of Shrew a touch of melancholy. The love-match became a thing unlooked-for, a consolation that comes to Petruchio and Katherina after they thought they were too grown-up for such fantasies.

The daring choice to age the two lovers, which oddly but compellingly suggests that Petruchio resembles a wayward Hamlet running away from his dead father to be cured by love, was the highlight of this production. The actors and director, who proclaim "trust Shakespeare" to be their motto, were committed to what we might call the Branagh school of acting, in which clarity is all. The staging was clear, entertaining, and always high-spirited. Highlights of the production included a lively and full rendition of Sly's Induction and a scene-stealing turn by Steven Eng as Petruchio's servant Grumio, whose farcical high spirits reminded the audience that Petruchio's manic temper never made him threatening. At times the physical comedy was quite broad, as when Petruchio tossed Katherina over his shoulder after the wedding (3.2). The Induction was another case in point: Benjamin Curns's wonderfully expressive Sly got slightly upstaged by the extended stage business in which the Lord's servants could not quite lift his ale-sodden body onto the couch. The audience laughed at the physical play, but at the cost of turning its attention temporarily away from the language.

The sub plot of Bianca, Lucentio, Gremio, and Hortensio, often a distant second in this play, seemed more distorted by its parallel manipulation of the ages of the characters. Miriam Lipner's Bianca was babyish, especially with her father, while David Bachrach's old man Gremio spoke with an exaggerated quaver in his voice. Marc Greece's Lucentio made a congenial young lover, but since Bianca's own cunning and manipulative practices, especially in the schoolroom scenes, were largely omitted, it was hard to get too worked up about this narrative thread. This production was all Petruchio and Katherina, as indeed most are.

The test and climax of any production of Shrew is, of course, Katherina's final speech, and here Bullock's desire to play it straight caused trouble. It's one thing to say (as she did in a post-production talk-back the night I saw the play) that Petruchio and Kate are "soul mates" who find true love and happiness by the play's end. It's another implicitly to celebrate the masculinist and hierarchical assumptions of Katherina's speech. Bullock did soften the antifeminist blow of the final scene, but it was at the expense of the play's complexity: when Petruchio described his future with his bride as "peace . . . and love, and quiet life," Bullock cut the harder-to-swallow next line, "And awful rule, and right supremacy." The play's ironic point may be that "love" and "supremacy" are disparate concepts that Petruchio imagines (or hopes) to be compatible, but by cutting the second line Bullock's production doesn't engage this tension. The performance did not fully assert, as some modern productions do, that Katherina mouths the pieties of female submission in public but then will live as an equal with her husband in private. Instead the...