Court Theatre’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” with Alex Weisman/Photo: Michael Brosilow
A question looms over any theater thinking of staging Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” in 2025, four-hundred-plus years after its debut: How should a director deal with its notorious and undeniable sexism, its wholehearted embrace of patriarchy, chauvinism and all-around prickishness—not to mention its depiction of Gitmo-style torture as the key to achieving marital harmony—while maintaining its comedic quality?
It’s a question that Marti Lyons, adapter/director of Court Theatre’s handsome but ill-conceived production, can’t seem to answer. From its showy but pointless opening (“The Shrew Experience,” an updated, mimed replacement for the play’s tedious, oft-omitted prologue) to its campily cartoonish first act to its darkly kinky second act to its tantrum of an ending, this is a show that never finds a steady tone, rhythm or style. Always either too light or too heavy, this “Shrew” doesn’t really bite, satirically speaking.
There’s another big question hovering over “Shrew”: How could a playwright who created such strong, vibrant, intelligent female characters as Viola, Olivia and Maria—just to cite one other play, “Twelfth Night,” written almost a decade later—have written this paean to caveman-style male dominance and female self-negation? The answer is that “Shrew” was written during Shakespeare’s apprenticeship period, when he had no choice but to take whatever work was available, including adapting and improving existing plays. His “The Taming of the Shrew” appears to have been based on a somewhat earlier comedy called “The Taming of a Shrew” by an unknown playwright. (The parts of “Shrew” that seem borrowed most directly from the earlier script, such as the plodding prologue, suggest that the original writer’s anonymity is well-deserved.) The young Shakespeare polished up the writing and added some poetic touches, but left the initial play’s basic storyline intact. This includes the defense of Elizabethan-era “family values,” which would have been politically wise at a time when secular theater was under constant attack from an increasingly puritanical state church. The “Shrew” we have is definitely Shakespeare, but Shakespeare writing with his left hand.
Court Theatre’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” with Melisa Soledad Pereyra and Jay Whittaker/Photo: Michael Brosilow
The play’s main appalling plot concerns the attempt by roving adventurer Petruchio (played in macho fashion by Jay Whittaker) to woo and wed Katherina (aka Kate, played by Melisa Soledad Pereyra), described as “an irksome brawling scold,” thus availing himself of her sizable dowry. Katherina’s father, Baptista (Mark Montgomery), offers this payoff to Petruchio as a way to get a difficult older daughter off his hands, so that he can then find a suitable mate for his favored younger daughter, the more agreeable Bianca (Netta Walker).
The first act teems with both incident and characters—including three rivals vying for Bianca’s hand, plus one mock-suitor—but the plot never really thickens and the characters have no arc to speak of. In part, the lack of compelling drama or sustained humor reflects the story’s own limitations. However, director Lyons does the audience no favors by eliciting self-conscious, emotionally flat performances from her ten-person cast. Pereyra’s Kate has a noticeably detached, robotic delivery that fades somewhat over the course of the play but never completely vanishes, while Walker’s Bianca’s nonstop flirtatiousness is short on playfulness. Nate Santana’s Lucentio, supposedly the most ardent of Bianca’s suitors, comes off as smug and equivocal, while as Tranio, Lucentio’s resourceful servant Ryder Dean McDaniel does a lot of posing and preening, but not much acting. As Hortensio, who woos the popular Bianca by pretending to be a (talent-free) music master, Samuel Taylor has some genuinely funny moments, in contrast to the poker-faced stiffness of Montgomery’s Baptista and the hard-edged arrogance of Whittaker’s leather-clad Petruchio. The cast as a whole—including Dexter Zollicoffer as aged suitor Gremio, Alex Weisman as foolish fool Grumio and Monica West in a variety of smaller roles—has a curiously airless, disengaged quality, as though the play’s comical hijinks were beneath their dignity. The show has its share of hamminess, but lacks the zany energy and anarchic spirit of good farce.
Court Theatre’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” with Samuel Taylor, Jay Whittaker, Ryder Dean McDaniel, Dexter Zollicoffer, Nate Santana and Mark L. Montgomery/Photo: Michael Brosilow
The second act is in a different register altogether, as the frivolity and romance of courtship give way to the earnest business of marriage, which in “Shrew” means Petruchio—who refers to his bride as “my goods, my chattels … my horse, my ox, my ass, my anything”—breaking Kate’s spirit the way he would train a hunting hawk. It’s not easy to turn Kate’s honeymoon, a nightmare of starvation, sleep deprivation and gaslighting designed to make her into a willing slave, into something funny or even bearable. But to stage Kate’s post-wedding torment as an S&M encounter, attended by a retinue of Petruchio’s male servants outfitted like the Chippendales at a bachelorette party, is to evoke more cringes than laughs from the audience. The show begins to crumble under the weight of its unresolved questions: Is Kate a beaten victim or a plucky survivor? Is she complicit with her abuser? Is this a comedy or a tragedy?
At the very end, the tone shifts yet again. Kate’s closing monologue—a plea, redolent of Stockholm Syndrome, for wives/captives to love and cherish their husbands/captors, whose tyranny is strictly for their own good—goes deliberately off the rails. The newly married Bianca takes over mid-speech, turning it into a tearful, rage-filled tirade against male arrogance and privilege.
One well understands the director’s anger at the play’s vicious condescension and her desire to play against the script. But the ending, with its raw emotion and blatant political posturing, just doesn’t work. Coming out of nowhere, it seems almost like a different play, one jarringly out of tune with the comedy that precedes it. The sheer heat of the final scene melts down all the characterizations and makes the stupid, self-defeating ideology at the core of “Shrew” appear more serious and powerful than it is. How much better to end on a note of mockery, with all the characters, male and female, having a good giggle at the closing speech’s idea that the world would be a happier place if grown-up women would become clingy, simpering pets instantly upon marriage.
At heart, “Shrew” is a comedy of cruelty, arguing the necessity of coercion and torture to maintain social order and hierarchy. Rather than spoofing and neutralizing that argument, this production tortures the play itself, crushing its comical spirit and reducing its already-thin characters to something less than human. It is truly painful to watch.
Court Theatre’s “The Taming of the Shrew” runs through December 14 at 5535 South Ellis. Tickets are $60-$90, with student, group and military discounts available. To purchase tickets, visit CourtTheatre.org or call (773)753-4472.
