'The Taming of the Shrew' (Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, D.C., 2007)

[On 3 April, I posted a report by my friend Kirk Woodward on the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate.  In my introduction to the post, I mentioned that I’d seen a Washington, D.C., production of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in 2007 and that I’d written a report on it.  It predated Rick On Theater, so I’d never posted it on the blog.  I suggested that I might pull it from my archives and run it on ROT—so here it is. 

[You’ll see that I had some serious problems with the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production, but you’ll also find that I express my difficulties with the play itself, which was the point of both Kirk’s report and my remarks.]

I spent ten days in Washington, D.C., through the Thanksgiving weekend because there were several art exhibits and some shows that seemed worth visiting.  (And we’ve just come out of a stagehands strike that shut down most of Broadway since earlier this month.)

I took my usual bus (the “Kosher bus”) down on Friday morning/afternoon, 16 November 2007, and on Sunday, 18 November, we went downtown to the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre to see The Taming of the Shrew.  (The Shakespeare has just opened a new space, Sidney Harman Hall, essentially around the corner from the Lansburgh, which is débuting with a pair of Christopher Marlowes, Tamburlaine and Edward II.  Mom and I saw Edward II when I came down for another visit at Christmastime; a report exists which I may post on ROT sometime in the future.) 

The production, which received a pretty good review in the Washington Post and some anticipatory good press in advance of the opening because director Rebecca Bayla Taichman staged a highly praised production of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House for the capital city’s Woolly Mammoth company in 2005, had several problems, but first I should admit that I have trouble with Shrew to start with. 

Okay, I know we’re not supposed to judge a work from the past by current standards, but I’ve never really been able to get around Petruchio’s treatment of Kate in order to tame her.  I’m not sure this analogy will go over real well, but I’ll float it anyway: I once had a dog who got uncontrollably violent when he met another dog.  I spoke to a trainer and her analysis was that she needed to take him away for a time, but I had two choices of outcome.  She could break him entirely of his hostility, but he’d be spiritually broken.  Or she could make him manageable; he wouldn’t be out of control but he could never be let alone with another dog off his leash. 

We decided that the second option would be best for the dog (and for me)—but Petruchio seems to have gone for option one.  And for far less cause.  (Now, I’m not really comparing a woman to a dog—please don’t start that—though Petruchio does use animal-training techniques to “break” Kate.) 

I also understand that Shrew is a comedy—but if you play it entirely for laughs, then you make fun of what amounts to domestic violence.  If you make Kate so shrewish that she seems to need taming, in order to try to justify Petruchio’s behavior, then she ends up not just a strong-willed and independent woman but a truly insane one.  If you play her as a sort of protofeminist (which I maintain is what Shakespeare wrote, though she, of course, is way out of her time in the Renaissance), then Petruchio’s actions are all unwarranted (and even, by our standards, criminal). 

Those aren’t really funny situations.  We don’t even make fun of drunks anymore.  So, maybe I’m just a stick-in-the-mud.  Okay, no maybe about it—I am; but I’ve never been able to reconcile this dilemma.  I don’t have the same problem with the racism of Othello or the anti-Semitism of The Merchant of Venice, but the sexism of Shrew defeats me.  So, sue me!

Now, given that small problem (!), let me try to evaluate as theater what I saw, not as social commentary.  Here goes.

I’m going to start backwards—for me, anyway—and talk about the acting first.  Overall, the acting just wasn’t what I’ve grown to expect from the STC.  I won’t say the cast were grad-school level; they were better than that, but they were closer to Off-Off-Broadway than Broadway.  They were all technically competent, but it seemed as if they didn’t really believe their own characters.  No one seemed human—there was no blood flowing in anyone’s veins.  The worst problem stemming from this failure is that neither Kate (Charlayne Woodard) nor Petruchio (Christopher Innvar) conveyed strong enough personalities to pull off the roles. 

Woodard was spunky and loud and active on stage, but she had no intestinal fortitude.  (She was no Renaissance Kate Hepburn, f’rinstance.)  Woodard’s a thin, small woman so she needed to do something to project inner strength—and she didn’t.  The same acting fault made Innvar especially work overhard to seem gruff, but he couldn’t pull it off as far as I was concerned.  Ironically, I remember saying the same thing about Rex Smith in a Kiss Me Kate I saw in D.C. some years ago—he’s just not a powerful persona.  Now, leaving aside my problem with Shrew, this kinda left a biiiig hole right in the center of the production.

I’ve never seen any of Taichman’s directing before, so I don’t know anything about her work with actors.  I have to assume, however, that this was her fault since it pervaded the entire cast.  Either she cast actors incapable of giving strong and committed performances, or she misdirected them, or both.  What she has to take full responsibility for, though, is the concept of the production, and boy did I have problems with that, from the philosophical/thematic concept to the design.  I’ll start with the overall theme because it touches on the design decisions anyway.

Taichman’s idea was that Shrew is all about marriage as commerce, and there is textual support for this notion.  After all, Petruchio has “come to wive it wealthily in Padua,” a line Innvar actually sang to the Kiss Me Kate tune.  (Just to make sure we didn’t miss this point, the first thing in the program was a three-page essay by Literary Associate Akiva Fox called “The Business of Marriage” which began with the sentence, “In The Taming of the Shrew, marriage is nothing personal; it’s strictly business.”)  

This focus generated two problems for me, however.  First, if marriage is brokered for profit and commercial advancement, then Kate’s rebellion is all the more justified.  If she resists being bartered to the wealthiest suitor or sold off to the man who makes her father the most enticing promises—the scene in which Lucentio (Michael Milligan) and Gremio (Louis Butelli) bargain for the hand of Bianca (Lisa Birnbaum) is performed as an auction with each suitor one-upping his opponent’s last offer while Baptista (Nicholas Hormann) knocks the final bid down with a gavel—my response is a forceful, “Right on, Sister!” 

You wonder—or at least I do—why the women don’t all go on strike, à la Lysistrata.  (There is, in fact, a Jacobean sequel to the Shakespeare, The Tamer Tamed by John Fletcher, which posits this.  The RSC brought it to D.C. three years ago in rep with Shrew, but it’s a terrible play; I posted a short report on this production in “Some Classics from the Archives,” 19 February 2019.)  If a director had taken this same theme and put all the characters in Middle Eastern dress, we’d all be aghast at the barbarity of it, wouldn’t we?  So, Taichman’s main production point undermined her own text.

The other reason this concept bothered me was the way Taichman and her designers (Narelle Sissons for the set, Daniel Baker and Ryan Rumery for the sound, in particular) pressed it on stage.  The principal stage element was a long (plexi-)glass wall which served mostly as Baptista’s house.  It was obviously modeled on the front of a large department store or some other such emporium, with a revolving door in the center and two large box-like display windows stage right and left.  Scenes were staged within the window boxes—that auction of Bianca took place with one suitor in each box, a little like a TV game show of yore. 

Over the top of this glass wall hung a large billboard-like painting of a woman in a red dress, reminiscent of the Vargas drawings in Playboy in the 1960s and ’70s (I only read it for the articles, obviously); she was lounging provocatively on her side.  (This billboard was replaced from time to time with a banner reading “Congratulations Baptista” in Italian—when Bianca was “engaged” and later when the three brides were married.  It is, of course, the father who profited from this deal, not the brides.) 

Aside from the fact that this expanse of plexiglass and steel looked somewhat cheapjack, what I objected to was the obviousness of the imagery.  Like Taichman’s inclusion of the up-front essay in the program, the director underlined her idea rather heavily throughout the show.  The Playboy-like billboard commodified women, and every time someone articulated a plan to broker a marriage, there was the sound of a cash register just to make sure we got the point again.  There’s nothing wrong with Taichman’s concept logically (dramatically, as I said, it did undermine the comedy), but did she have to smack us over the head with the idea? 

I’m reminded of New York City’s Theatre for a New Audience production of Merchant with F. Murray Abraham last March which was set in a high-tech Wall Street.  (I posted my report on this Merchant on 28 February 2011.)  It was also all about money and commerce—Portia’s contest for her own hand in marriage was a treasure hunt of sorts, another TV game show—but all the elements of the money-grubbing and love for sale were embedded in the production, which was actually enhanced by the plan and its—admittedly very clever—execution.  All the smart phones, PDA’s, laptops, designer clothes, and expensive accessories helped make the point that money made this world go ’round.  No one had to hold up a sign saying, “It’s the money, stupid.”

I never got to like the set for Shrew.  The plexiglass enclosure looked somehow unfinished, as if we were watching a late dress rehearsal.  Petruchio’s house, which was essentially the stage without the glass wall, was all draped in red curtains and ropes.  (Red was a focal element in the design; one Washington Post article before the opening discussed the color scheme.)  I don’t really have any objections to mixing periods or styles, but I didn’t see the reason that the Baptista/Padua set was post-modern and cold, while the Petruchio/Verona set was almost Victorian (with a huge medieval chandelier). 

In addition to its look, that plexiglass wall forced all the action for the Padua scenes—the bulk of the play—downstage, except for the ones Taichman played inside the glass boxes.  These latter, of course, were played at the extreme sides of the stage; we were sitting in the far left of the house, so scenes played in the stage-right box were obscured.  The center third of the wall was little used for playing—it served almost exclusively as an entrance/exit through the revolving door.

(The costumes, by the way, were sort of ’80s Italian to my eye.  Set designer Sissons, however, made reference to “a Fellini-style motorcycle with a sidecar” in which Petruchio rode onto the stage, which would be ’50s/’60s.) 

That red color theme also confounded me a little.  (It also appeared prominently in Miranda Hoffman’s costumes—as well as in the Vargas billboard.)  Red is the color of sex.  (We’re talking costume theory here—let’s not get carried away!)  It’s a hot color.  Commerce and business is cold.  (It’s color tends to be green, a cold color—or maybe gold and silver, which are metallic and hard.) 

If you’re going to make a point that this is a world up for sale to the highest bidder, even to the marriages of your daughters, then sexiness strikes me as an conflicting force.  Glass and steel—the principal materials of the main set piece—is a cold, harsh image.  Auctioning off your daughter is a cold-hearted act, not a passionate one.  Red, hot sex was not a prevailing dynamic here, and using it for a central design element was contradictory.  (It also wasn’t borne out in the acting—no one on stage was especially passionate.  That may, of course, have been an acting failure, however—though I don’t think so.)

I don’t think that my impressions of the production were off base.  In an interview at the time she started rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew, Taichman said, as quoted in a local publication, “Instead of ironing out the play’s contradictions, I want to open and stretch them out.”  The director continued, “And like all truly great theatre, [the play] should present these contradictions in the truest, rawest ways without explaining them away.”  I read these statements after having seen the production.  I don’t see how this approach benefited the performance.

[The Taming of the Shrew ran from 25 September to 25 November 2007 at STC’s Lansburgh Theatre on 7th Street, NW, in downtown Washington.  The production received four Helen Hayes Award nominations (Washington’s local Tonys): Outstanding Set Design, Resident Production (Narelle Sissons), Outstanding Lead Actor, Resident Play (Christopher Innvar), Outstanding Director, Resident Play (Rebecca Bayla Taichman), and Outstanding Resident Play; it didn’t win in any of the categories.

[I wrote this report before I started including a survey of published reviews.  I won’t give the same detailed summaries I do now, but here are some reviewers comments: Calling the production “smashing,” Peter Marks of the Washington Post felt that director Taichman “blazes her own dazzling trail with one of the most politically freighted plays in all of Shakespeare.”  He added,” What she confidently unveils in this chic, funny and marvelously acted modern-dress production is a divinely contemporary, off-center comedy that embraces the play's contradictions and shortcomings, its wisdom as well as its absurdity.”  Of the lead performances, Marks wrote, “And when in this world of mysteries and delights Innvar and Woodard seal their mutual admiration with a kiss, all definitely feels right with it.”

[In the Washington City Paper, Trey Graham acknowledged that Shrew is a “knotty” comedy, due to “that uncomfortable stretch in the second act” that “more civilized modern-day Shakespeare fans tend to find those scenes a little worrisome.”  Taichman’s production “feels knowing and worldly and witty, smart and seductive and even a little rueful now and then.”  In his opinion, the director “comes at [the play] not with a chair and a whip, thank heavens, but with a coo and a wink.”  Of the leads, Graham said, “Charlayne Woodard makes a pint-sized pit bull of a Kate, . . . playing opposite Christopher Innvar’s strapping, hirsute brute of a Petruchio.” 

[Kate Wingfield described STC’s Shrew as “modern but with a twist: This is a Shrew in the here and now but it is also a 1950s movie poster come to life, a Fellini-esque dream and an MTV video all rolled into one.”  Wingfield saw the production as “first and foremost a fun, frivolous and happy parody.”  The reviewer, however, found that Woodard “never quite fully connects with the rest of the character, especially when she comes to love Petruchio,”  who, “try as he might, . . . can’t get the chemistry going with Kate.”

[The Washington Diplomat’s Lisa Troshinsky warned that Shrew “is brutally misogynist, which none of the characters oppose,” and that Taichman’s production “does nothing to gloss over the play’s brutishness, instead fanning the flames of controversy that the script has evoked over the years.”  Troshinsky reported that Woodard, “a dynamic spitfire,” portrays “Kate as both an aggressive, independent feminist and a vulnerable daughter who suffers under her father’s callousness”  and felt that Petruchio was “forcefully played by” Innvar.

[On the website Frederikcksburg.com, Lucia Anderson declared that “Taichman's ‘Shrew’ dazzles and delights” and that the director “is having a blast with” the play.  She found that “Taichman concentrates on the fun that bubbles throughout this play, skipping merrily over any dark shadows.”   Innvar “plays the dashing Petruchio to perfection, while” Woodard “gives a vivid performance as the tempestuous Katherina.” 

[Taichman “summons up [some] creative tricks,” asserted Roy Meachum on The Tentacle, a Frederick, Maryland, website.  “Director Taichman has turned out a splendid example” of Shakespeare’s tactic of replacing” sensibility with nonsense.”  “But ,” felt Meachum, “she left relatively untouched the play's most important characters.”  Meachum found that Innvar “brings more testosterone to [Petruchio] than any player I’ve ever seen” and Woodward “radiates a very strong female glow of her own.”

[It looks like the Capital area reviewers all disagreed with my sense of the production.  Although, it sounds to me as if they all swept any contradictions under a rug.  I guess I get to be the odd man out in this instance.]