The Taming of the Shrew (review)

Approaching The Taming of the Shrew as a wish-fulfillment narrative is nothing new: a masculinist view continues to have its representative productions, wherein Katherine is a shrew in need of taming and Petruchio is the man strong or crazy enough to perform the act. Feminist productions have relished the challenge of inverting that approach by offering the play as a condescending cautionary tale of sexual failure wherein Petruchio's taming is abusive and Katherine's final speech is its tragic conclusion. More recently, attempts have been made to rediscover the comic potential of the script by downplaying the sexual warfare, focusing instead on the leads as damaged individuals finding happiness through one another. New Mexico State University's production was a wish-fulfillment of a different type: it was the story of Kate as a misunderstood woman freeing herself from the shackles of being judged. In this way, director Laura Grace Godwin embraced a complexly comic angle while refusing to ignore the sexual warfare of the play. Developing such an interpretation requires a savvy approach to the play's language that would challenge any university-level drama department, but which the NMSU group managed with great confidence. Moreover, the production was marked by a broad palette afforded to the department's design teams, who reinforced the play's message of structured social expectations using a markedly extroverted visual scheme.

NMSU's production forced the culture of Padua to the forefront. To explore Katherine as a social aberration, Godwin opted for a stylized visual presentation: upper-class, image-obsessed Paduans sported costumes that were brightly-colored and excessively large, like something out of manga, cosplay, or the club scene, their silliness a commentary on the arbitrary and often ridiculous social expectations forced on Katherine. To further emphasize the themes of perception and scrutiny, the Padua set featured a variety of suspended picture frames that functioned variously as windows, doorways, or walls.

This Katherine was not a shrew, but she was perceived as one because of her failure to conform with the image-obsessed, highly-structured Paduan culture that produced her but was too restrictive to allow her an individual voice. Her first costume in the play was a strange, obviously failed attempt to fit into Paduan expectations, a concoction of awkward boning and warped proportions. When Petruchio arrived in Padua in his plain, loose-fitting clothing, he was immediately marked as an outsider, but one that the audience could not fail to find more sensible than the people of Padua. Katherine's understanding of that same fact was not far behind the audience's, and her ultimate decision to throw her lot in with his was a deliberate choice to step out of the frames into which she had theretofore been restricted.

The notion of "taming" was therefore questioned by this production, becoming an example of forced conformity to a culturally-determined set of expectations. Each character in the play was defined by his or her degree of integration into the world of Padua, and as much as Katherine's arc was one of finding her voice, it was also about her acceptance of her own permanent liminality: having existed at the edge of Paduan society, she was the only character who was able to cross over the cultural boundary separating the restrictive Padua from the world outside. Petruchio, by comparison, remained resolutely himself in Padua, even when doing so left him permanently branded an outsider: in...