Can we entertain the idea that The Taming of the Shrew can be performed and received as comedy in the post-Women’s March US? If so, would the laughter be empathetic and solidary rather than callous? The answer lies in physical theater which is uniquely poised to activate elements of farce in the play. Shrew is one of the Shakespearean comedies that tends to clash with modern sensibilities and is therefore generally considered challenging to stage. The Synetic Theater’s version reminds us that, after all, the foundation of this play is farce, a play-within-a-play to mock the worldview of Christopher Sly the drunkard and to entertain the impersonated lords who derive voyeuristic pleasure from watching Sly gawking at Shrew. The so-called play-within-a-play could also be a fanciful dream of the inebriated Sly.
One element stood out in the evolving relationship between Petruccio and Katherine. The musically enhanced, physically demanding banter between them mixed calculated cruelty with slapstick comedy to make the taming of Katherine a more palatable caricature.
In the banquet scene in Petruccio’s home, set up in the fashion of the Last Supper with a long table facing the audience and Petruccio sitting in the middle, Katherine found herself surrounded by lavish food but was unable to reach any dish. To Stomp beats, dishes were passed among Petruccio and his servants. Katherine hallucinated that the characters around her were humans with chicken heads. Her hallucination was represented by all the characters around her pulling out full-head masks resembling chicken heads in the middle of the dinner. As they swayed like chickens, they continued passing dishes around. In a few minutes they snapped back to reality and hid their masks under the table as if nothing had happened, leaving Katherine in a confused state. The Chaplinesque precision and dark humor added a layer of dramatic irony that is only possible in pantomime such as this.
The Synetic Theater’s ninety-minute dance, musical, and visual feast rendered the comedy in vibrant colors—without spoken words. Contrary to traditional images of a saintly, virginal Bianca in Shakespeare’s text, Nutsa Tediashvili’s Bianca was not a particularly likeable character. The production did not invite the audience to laugh at Katherine’s expense. We laughed with Irina Tsikurishvili’s Katherine and Ryan Sellers’s Petruccio as they tripped each other over and, in the final scene, as they schemed hand-in-hand for the wager money. The Synetic Shrew did not so much rehash Elizabethan ideologies of gender roles as explore the play’s farcical undertone through the comical self-importance of the male characters around Katherine and through pantomime as a caricature.
Excerpted from Alexa Alice Joubin, "Review of The Taming of the Shrew." Shakespeare Bulletin 35.4 (2017): 700-703. Full text at https://www.academia.edu/35519903/_Review_of_The_Taming_of_the_Shrew._Shakespeare_Bulletin_35.4_2017_700-703