Shakespeare’s War of the Sexes
Greenstage Theatre Company opened its 24th season of outdoor Shakespeare with The Taming of the Shrew, one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays, in the amphitheatre in SewardPark.
Taming of the Shew is in many ways structured like a Jane Austen novel. It tells the story of courting couples, and various types of engagements. There are three couples who emerge at the end of the play to marry: among them are 1) the purely practical marriage of Hortensio and a widow, 2) the hormonally driven classic romantic couple, Lucentio and Kate’s sister Bianca, who has all the appeareance of being a pleasing submissive woman but who is anything but. 3) Kate and Petruchio the couple who fall in love through verbal sparring.
However, there is a deeper serious message about the nature of love. Kate is the unloved daughter who copes by being hostile, but Petruchio, who originally married her for money, finds that he loves her enough to “tame” her by mirroring her unpleasant behavior back to her.
The play also is an inverse of most romantic comedies where the woman “tames” or civilizes the man, Belle tames the Beast, as does Elizabeth Bennett “tame” Mr. Darcy. Shakespeare’s retelling of this archetype is hilarious because it is the man who “tames” or civilizes the woman.
The strength of this production was the acting with strong performances by Tom Dewey as Petruchio, Chris Maxfield as Baptista and Allison Standley as Kate. The weakness was the direction, costumes and the “set”.
The director lacked an overall concept, there was a little bit of slapstick, a little bit of copying of William Ball’s commedia dell’arte production from the 1970’s, but overall, the show lacked a specific style. The blocking was more or less “chorus line” that is to say, everybody lined up in front of the audience and spoke their lines.
Since Greenstage produces touring shows, the shows have to be easily transportable from one space to the other. Greenstage has a portable tent/room which was placed in front of the amphitheatre stage. This was an unfortunate choice because the landscaped amphitheatre of SewardPark is every outdoor Shakespeare producer’s wet dream. Paved in stone, it has two levels, stairs between them, lots of trees and bushes which could have been used creatively. All this was almost completely underutilized because it was all played in front of the amphitheatre and the show was extremely visually unappealing.
Except for the costumes Kate and Petruchio wore in the last scene, none of the costumes were attractive, there were all thrown together randomly, using clashing colors which were hard to look at. They did not represent any particular era just generalized pre-modern era.
For an audience, costumes speak volumes, they can telegraph character and class distinctions. In the script Lucentio, a rich man’s son, has to trade clothes with his servant, Tranio, in order for Tranio to impersonate him; however the costumes did not suggest any class distinction. Since there was a lot of double casting, the costumes for the actors playing different roles should have been clearly different, so as not to confuse the audience; however, this was sadly lacking. Also in the first scene, Kate was in a red dress, now Kate was many bad things, but she was not a fallen women.
There were some good strong performances, and it was well worth seeing; however a little more creativity on the part of the director and the costumer would have made this a stronger production.
Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Greenstage Theatre. Parks inSeattle, Burien,FallCity,RedmondBainbridgeIsland, Lynnwood Thurs-Sun, matinees and evenings. Through August 18. Free. www. Greenstage.org