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St. Louis Shakespeare suggests why misogynistic play is still pr
In our third-wave-feminist or post-feminist age, or wherever we stand in our progress toward the end of patriarchy, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew would seem to be a poor choice for a comedy. What do you do with a play about a man who deprives his new bride of sleep (a practice considered torture by some) and who attempts to starve her into submission — and apparently succeeds?
Todd Pieper, director of the current production by St. Louis Shakespeare, plays it pretty much straight and lets the laughs and offenses fall where they may. Alexandra Scibetta Quigley’s costumes do take us back to Shakespeare’s time, when at least the male half of society may have thought such behavior by a husband acceptable.
Cristie Johnston’s exuberant set of a cartoonishly distorted Italian Renaissance town reminds us that we’re watching a comedy, and the multicolored backdrop hanging on a line looks like what a commedia dell’arte troupe would hang in the town square for a performance. In fact the program describes four of the actors, who, with two others, sit on stage throughout, as zanni, the commedia clowns. Don’t take this too seriously, the staging seems to say; it’s just actors doing a show.
But of course we in the audience do not want to think that these are just actors doing a show. We want to believe that Suki Peters and Andrew Keller really are Katherine and Petruchio. And by and large, this company succeeds in making us suspend our disbelief.
So we have to take the play seriously. Why is Katherine so ill-tempered? Is this a misogynist’s depiction of a high-spirited, strong-willed woman? The playwright does make her look purely mean at first. But he then gives her an attractive wit and intelligence in her first encounter with Petruchio. And she grows more sympathetic as she suffers Petruchio’s irrational behavior.
(Shakespeare does suggest a reason for her temperament when Petruchio says, “Why does the world report that Kate doth limp?” Someone who’s had to put up with pain and mockery from a limp might well turn sour, but I’ve seen only one production where Kate actually limped.)
Eventually Katherine surrenders. She agrees to call the sun the moon, if Petruchio will have it so. Has she been humbled? Or has she decided that if Petruchio wants to play games, she will play them too — that it’s better than going hungry and sleepless.
I didn’t see in Peters’ performance clearly a moment when Katherine decided to give in to Petruchio, nor the reason that she decided. But I did see in the final scene, in her speech of submission and in his acceptance of it, an exchange of love between the two that makes them equals. That makes it a happy ending for our age, whatever may have gone before.
St. Louis Shakespeare’s casts continue to improve their mastery of the Bard’s language and the Grandel Theatre’s acoustics, though they still can rush the ends of sentences and drop the volume just where the playwright often places his most important words.
Alfred Erickson makes a dignified and troubled father to Katherine and her long-suffering sister, Bianca, played by the tender and appealing Katie Puglisi. Aaron Dodd, Ben Ritchie (film reviewer for this paper) and Jason Puff are Bianca’s suitors, and Brian Kappler, Rahmases Galvan and Josh Cook play servants to the suitors, with risible broad comedy from the latter two.
Paul Devine and Nathan Schroeder embody comedy’s mistaken identities as a true and a false father. Greg Fenner, Serena McCarthy, Drew Pannebaker and Robert Strasser, the zanni, become servants, tradespeople and a widow, as needed.
Despite its questionable attitudes, The Taming of the Shrew continues to be one of Shakespeare’s most produced plays. This St. Louis Shakespeare production suggests why.
It continues through July 25, with tickets available at 361-5664 and at www.stlshakespeare.org.
• Bob Wilcox also reviews theater for KDHX-FM, 88.1, and for Two on the Aisle on Charter Cable in St. Louis city and online at kdhx.org.
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