CLASSIC COMEDY AT STRATFORD
Read our reviews of The Taming of the Shrew and She Stoops to Conquer,
The Taming of the Shrew (out of 4) By William Shakespeare. Directed by Chris Abraham. At the Festival Theatre until Oct. 10. 1-800-567-1600.
STRATFORD— The centuries-old problem of how to make The Taming of the Shrew work was solved on Friday night at the Festival Theatre. The answer is simple: cast Deborah Hay as Katherina.
For most of its three-hour length, Chris Abraham’s production is a solid enough job that yields plenty of laughs, thanks to some daring staging, brilliant comic performances from the likes of Tom Rooney and Gordon C. Miller, as well as a swashbucklingly magnetic, perfectly spoken performance from Ben Carlson as Petruchio.
But none of these fringe benefits did anything to ease the canker at the play’s heart: its sexist, demeaning and often cruel treatment of the play’s titular “shrew,” Katherina, so that she can be “tamed” by her husband.
Consequently, after a funny first act, filled with slapstick, I found myself sinking into a second act that grew increasingly loud, brutal and off-putting, until the final Gordian knot of a scene.
The play’s three males — Petruchio (the excellent Carlson), Hortensio (the hilarious Mike Shara) and Lucentio (the dashing Cyrus Lane) — all summon their wives to demonstrate their mastery of them.
The other two spouses provide cheeky defiance, but the newly tamed Katherina comes forward to deliver a minefield of a speech that includes the hot-button line, “I am ashamed that women are so simple.”
Coming at the end of a long and often exhausting evening, it’s a speech that I have heard many, many times over a lifetime of theatregoing, but never delivered like it was by Hay on Friday night.
I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that dozens of emotions simmered beneath the text, some of them bubbling up into laughter, pouring over into tears, or exploding with sheer passionate emotion.
It was a magnificent display not on- ly of what an actor of genius can do with the words of William Shakespeare, but of how much complexity lies inside every last one of our hearts — male and female alike.
When Carlson looked at her with gobsmacked adoration as she finished, you could only share his feelings and when he folded her tenderly in his arms and she countered with a boldly passionate embrace, the battle of the sexes seemed to have gone into détente, permanently.
Abraham’s direction has set the stage for this all, with a very amusing framing device that I won’t give away and the ability to convince his 21stcentury commedia dell’arte players to invent their own lazzi for our delectation and delight.
Not every piece of comic business works and Abraham should develop a sharper eye at separating the wheat from the chaff, but the bottom line is that the basic engine of the show chugs along merrily, while Carlson drives it with daring speed around the curves and Hay finally pulls it up the mountaintop to glory.
There are performances at Stratford which people boast for decades about having seen.
I’m going on record to say that Deborah Hay’s Katherina will be one of them.
Not every piece of comic business works but the basic engine of the show chugs along merrily, led by the genius of Deborah Hay