Taming (and brawling ) of the Shrew.
The Taming of the Shrew Theatre: Freewill Shakespeare Festival Directed by: Marianne Copithorne Starring: Mary Hulbert, James MacDonald Where: Myer Horowitz Theatre, Students Union Building, University of Alberta Running: Wednesday through July 27 Tickets
Mary Hulbert and James MacDonald have spent a pleasant morning brawling, slapping and generally bashing each other around. So they’re ready for a spot of lunch before resuming the battle.
“I accidentally hit James’s Adam’s apple this morning,” beams Hulbert cheerfully. Her cohort shrugs amiably, and tucks into mac and cheese. There’s nothing like Shakespeare for working up an appetite, they seem to feel.
What’s in progress, for the pair of lanky actors, is a play that pits a snarly spitfire of a woman with a history of outrageous behaviour against a macho swaggering bully who doesn’t even bother to deny he’s fortune-hunting when he marries her against her will. The Taming of the Shrew is, incidentally, a comedy.
That, and its title, are enough to make the most audacious of contemporary directors flinch and duck. For more than 400 years, though, audiences have known what to make of the Taming of the Shrew — with their laughter. And the witty, bantering co-stars of Marianne Copithorne’s production have discovered riotous fun in the rough-and-tumble early Shakespeare comedy.
MacDonald knew it before, but not as an actor. One of the founders of the Free Will Players, MacDonald — who hasn’t acted in Shakespeare since a 2010 Free Will Macbeth — has directed Shrew twice. In fact, MacDonald’s fast and funny 1996 joke-Italian production, in which Petruchio roared up to the Heritage Amphitheatre stage with his surly valet on a motorbike — they crashed — was his directing debut with the ensemble. “After one Fringe show (Trevor Anderson’s The Appointment), it was my first time directing.
And I was the first guy who jumped out of the chorus to direct,” he laughs. “It turned out to be an easy experience; we all knew each other so well.”
Those were scrounge and Dumpster-dive days in the history of an enterprising troupe, perhaps Edmonton’s only true ensemble acting company. MacDonald remembers shopping with his cast for costumes at Value Village. “Actors would run up, holding something, ‘what about this’?” They were ecstatic when they discovered Katharina’s wedding dress at Goodwill.
MacDonald’s second Shrew was a 2006 hit set amid the get-rich-quick lust of the Klondike, complete with vaudevillian sideshows; fellow Free Will founder Annette Loiselle was Kate.
This time, he gets to “forget the staging and the discussions” that inevitably surround the provocations and nuances of Kate’s final speech — she advises women “thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper” — and find the beating heart of the piece. “I thought about the end SO much,” he grins. “But it’s about people who find their true love ... The journey has to be about two people finding each other, a journey of discovery. There are obstacles; you’re not sure if they will. Will they be too headstrong?”
Hulbert’s journey to the romantic brouhaha in Padua, and her Free Will debut, has been more unexpected, full of revelations and U-turns. For one thing, she taught high school drama for a time until she realized, via “a big awakening in Thailand,” that “it was making me sad inside my soul.” This is a woman who knows how to stage Seussical The Musical with a cast of 75. That’s when she went back to acting.
But Shakespeare, so beloved of her co-star? “I hated it,” says Hulbert, a droll, straightspoken sort. “The monologues intimidated me, made me so anxious.” It can’t have helped that her Shakespeare debut was Escalus, a 75-year-old man, in the thorny “problem comedy” Measure For Measure.
MacDonald just shakes his head sadly.
A small role in Much Ado About Nothing was “a hoot and a holler,” she concedes. But it wasn’t until the Citadel/Banff professional program, with MacDonald a prominent mentor, that she and Shakespeare started getting along. “I approached with stress,” she says. “That program bumped me up, on all levels, gave me an idea of what my strengths really are, and how to offer them without apology.”
For Hulbert, Shrew is “one of the most beautiful transformations of a character I’ve ever run into ... People have a need to win in our culture. And this is about the opposite. To serve someone, to be of service to them, give all of (oneself), to someone, ‘I’ll do anything for you’, is real love. Power struggles are not how true relationships are formed.”
“Petruchio is the only person in Kate’s life who has stuck around, to show he cares ... Very romantic.”
Petruchio’s transformed, too, says MacDonald. “He could be 20, he could be mid- 40s.” He grins. “I know a lot of those men, unable to adopt responsibility ... He boasts about everything, what he’s done, what he can do. Nobody is as smart and confident as him. And then, for the first time, somebody stands up to him ... Kate holds up a mirror to him.”
“It gives you a gift,” says Hulbert. “It says ‘I care enough about you to start this fight’!”
The afternoon’s roughhouse awaits.