Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’ reimagined in a modern workplace
In Thinking Cap Theatre’s take on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” a modern-day company has hired a troupe of actors to come into its workplace. The office staff is dealing with an alpha male CEO who also has a bit of a drinking problem. And that’s not his only flaw.
“It’s a DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) workshop,” says Karen Stephens, who plays the character of Kate. “The premise is that the office workers take on the roles of the characters as our workshop. The purpose for the workshop is to make our boss, Christopher Sly, come around … you know, teach him a lesson about decorum and equality.”
“The Taming of the Shrew,” currently playing at Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center for the Performing Arts through Wednesday, April 3, is a frame play.
“There’s an outer play and then it uses the playwithin-a-play structure,” explains Nicole Stodard, producing artistic director at the Fort Lauderdale-based theater company.
The original, written in the 1590s, is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays. “Scholars don’t agree on whether it was his first, second or third play,” she says.
In the original outer play, a character named Christopher Sly is in a public square in Padua, Italy. He’s drunk and rambling about the alehouse that tossed him out. He’s approached by a group of actors who tell him that they are going to put on a play for him. And that’s when the actual “The Taming of the Shrew” begins.
In the inner play, Katherine (Kate) is notoriously difficult, especially with men, which makes no man want to marry her. Petruchio decides he’ll marry her and “tame” her because he wants her family’s money. He’s determined to conform her to become what society expects, a submissive wife.
There’s a secondary plot about Kate’s kinder sister, Bianca, who has met the
love of her life but can’t marry until her older sister does.
“We set it in modern times and it works,” says Stodard. “Because Shakespeare’s plays are ultimately about basic things: human relationships, which are work relationships, family relationships. … I want people that think they might not like Shakespeare to walk away saying, ‘I understood that and I’ve also been entertained by it.’ ”
The play is performed using Shakespeare’s text, adapted by Stodard. The director says the comedy is a perfect fit for her company.
“It is one of Shakespeare’s most memorable and controversial plays because of the power dynamic
between men and women. … It has divided audiences since Shakespeare’s time. There has been a sense that, ultimately, the play puts women back in their place at its end.”
The reimagining of the classic is part of Thinking Cap’s “The People vs. Shakespeare’s Shrew,” which Stodard describes as a multifaceted project that invites audiences to explore perceptions of the play, including a 1611 response play by John Fletcher.
“He writes a very different ending, and we’re doing a staged reading of
that after ‘Shrew’ closes to give audiences a chance to experience a work by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries that took the same storyline and treated it very differently,” Stodard says.
From a casting standpoint, Stodard also took a different approach.
“I did something I’ve never done before. I did not assign parts to the actors until I had cast all 10. And I did that because I wanted a diverse cast — along gender, age and race lines. One of Thinking Cap’s priorities is diversity on stage and behind the scenes,” she says,
adding that “with this play especially, because of our concept, it was important to me that we were putting actors on stage that represent the diversity of society. Also, to make us think about how power and gender and race come into play in workplace settings and how people struggle to navigate across those lines.”
There were many sources the director and her actors used to help navigate how “The Taming of the Shrew” would translate into a 21st-century workplace setting. Among them, she says, were “a lot of episodes of ‘The Office.’ ”