THE SHREW UNTAMED

posted by James Reel

    On Friday night, I plopped myself down on the Reid Park grass (allergies be damned), and much to my surprise thoroughly enjoyed the Parks & Rec community theater production of The Taming of the Shrew. This was the first time in its 19 years I had attended one of these “Shakespeare Under the Stars” productions; I’d always figured that, as so often happens in community theater, a lot of enthusiastic but stilted amateurs would plant themselves on stage for some stiff declaiming. I whole-heartedly support amateur theatricals, but it’s not something I care to attend unless I know somebody in the cast, and neither is it something that should be subjected to critical scrutiny. Well, now I wish I’d had space in the Tucson Weekly to review this show; much of the acting, mainly in the (many) principal roles, was as good as you’d find in any of Tucson’s non-Equity theaters, and director David Felix kept the action lively and fluid, the expression clear and meaningful.
    The one element that dissatisfied me was the delivery of Kate’s final speech. The actress had done a splendid job all evening, but at this critical moment she grew affected, and it was difficult to tell exactly what tone she and director Felix had in mind. This is the scene that invariably draws criticism today; the “shrewish” Kate—that is, she is lively, aggressive, outspoken, suffers no fools—has turned submissive, surrendering to husband Petrucchio’s intense psychological warfare, and declares that now that she has changed her ways other women should follow her example.
    I can imagine two ways to play this scene that would be true to Shakespeare while also satisfying our anachronistic objections to a play written 500 years ago for an utterly different society.
    First, there’s the feminist approach. Kate has been made subserviant, but only because she realizes the futility of her struggle. So she delivers that speech with sarcasm and bitterness. I think that might be what the Parks & Rec performance was hinting at, but not very strongly; the actress spoke with more detachment and faint mockery than anything else.
    There’s a second way to do it that pulls the entire play together. The evening begins with what seems to be a totally irrelevant episode, in which a drunkard named Christopher Sly is taken up, unconscious, by a nobleman who devises an elaborate practical joke. Sly is to be persuaded that he himself is actually a nobleman who has just awoken from a 15-year derangement or coma, whereupon, before he can make jolly with the person presented as his wife, he is asked to watch a play, which turns out to be The Taming of the Shrew. Thus, our “main” story is a play within a play, full of dissembling and disguise, presented to a man who is not the person he has come to think he is.
    Given this atmosphere of duplicity and false identity, and considering that Kate and Petrucchio obviously enjoy sparring with each other from their first meeting, wouldn’t it make sense for the “taming of the shrew” to be a huge practical joke that Kate and Petrucchio are playing on the people around them? Kate and Petrucchio are in on the joke together, and after all it’s the servants who suffer Petrucchio’s direct abuse as he attempts to bring Kate into line. What if Kate and Petrucchio are pulling a fast one, in effect pretending to be people they are not, in order to mock the expectations of their little society? All this reading would require are some conspiratorial glances, and somebody onstage during Petrucchio’s soliloquy when he lays out his plan to tame Kate—instead of confiding to us, he’s duping one or more of his servants or neighbors.
    In the end, Kate and Petrucchio would be thumbing their noses at the people around them, while embarking on a well-matched companionate marriage, which was a hot new topic in Shakespeare’s England.
    But then, I’m not the director. I’m just a guy sneezing in the grass, being entertained by a secure, unpretentious production of Shakespeare in the park.