The Comedy of Errors (review)

Director Sean Graney's work can typically be categorized as either explicitly experimental or engaging with the tradition of adaptation. These aesthetic trajectories merged in the Court Theatre's The Comedy of Errors, a meaty 90-minute production focused on skirting buffoonery in order to find translatable humor within William Shakespeare's farcical language. As Graney stated during a post-performance discussion, "I wanted the play to feel funny in new ways," which is an often-difficult task given the play's archaic humor. Indeed, Errors has a performance history marked by the inability to reconcile its absurd elements, on which the plot and play depend, with contemporary tastes. Graney addressed this problem by focusing on issues of identity confusion and the farce tradition. The result was a pliant dark comedy anchored by bodily representations of humor and highlighting the problem of Renaissance comedic anachronisms.

The cast comprised six actors playing 21 individual parts: the Antipholus and Dromio twins were double-cast, nearly all of the actors cross-dressed at some point, and each had more than 20 costume changes. The set and costumes were a pastiche of Napoleonic, cartoonish, 1970s- hippy, and contemporary aesthetic stereotypes. It was as if bits and pieces of every staging ever done of Errors had been gathered up and cobbled together. In fact all of the play's material aspects were employed to hyper-expose basic stage spectacle tactics. For example, the final set replicated Rowan and Martin's Laugh In joke wall from the late 1960s, whose tiers of windows allowed the actors to get all of their characters on stage at once. At times a stray mustache or article of clothing made its way onto the wrong character. These time-capsule-like qualities reflected the explicit billing of the play as an "adaptation," a genre with a historical tradition contingent on experimentation to succeed.

The Shakespearean text was intentionally made secondary to the stage action. Basic stage conventions like quick costume changes exposed staging logistics to the point where the exaggeration rather than the language became the central focus. When Dromio of Syracuse was mistaken for the guard of the home of Antipholus of Ephesus, he stood on the balcony, looking down on Antipholus of Ephesus and refusing him entrance. When Antipholus summoned Dromio of Ephesus to help, the Dromio on the balcony disappeared, only to reemerge from the entranceway beneath

Photo by Michael Brosilow; Erik Hellman (Antipholus of Syracuse) and Alex Goodrich (Dromio of Ephesus) in a moment of confused identities.

outfitted in an entirely new costume representing his twin. Both Dromios were engaged in the dialogue but never with each other, a trick that tested how far the audience's comprehension could be pushed.

Errors put heavy stock in participation: the actors worked hard to cajole audience members into cheering or hooting their approval of and during the stage action. The Wife-as-Globe scene was re-crafted as commedia dell'arte. For Chicago, with its rich tradition of improvisational theatres and companies, this was fruitful territory. Instead of simply reciting the list of archaic fat jokes, the Syracusian Antipholus walked into the audience to request suggestions for unlikable countries to use as puns. By reaching out to the room, this moment worked to overturn audience expectations not once, but twice: initially breaking the fiction of the play in order to garner audience participation, but then reverting to the country and joke from the original play...