Company takes its broad brush to 'Shrew'

August 03, 2006|Globe Staff

If you're looking to make Shakespeare accessible and comprehensible to today's audiences, as the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's annual free production on Boston Common aims to do, ``The Taming of the Shrew" is a tricky play to choose. From Katharina's first clawing, spitting entrance to her notorious final speech advising wives to submit to their husbands, every modern production has to figure out how to make an audience laugh and ponder, not groan and hiss.

In directing this raucous, raunchy ``Shrew," set in a vividly realized North End restaurant of the 1950s, Steven Maler has decided to grab the laughs by making everything as broad and extreme as possible. That approach works well in some scenes, including the battles of wit between Katharina (alias Kate) and her ``tamer," Petruchio, that leave them both seeming like loudmouthed, selfish jerks; it's as if their equally rough surfaces grate against each other until both end up smoothed. At other times, though, the jokes -- many of them introduced in irritating ad-libs and frat-worthy physical comedy -- get pushed so far that they fall over.

You could argue that broad humor is a way of getting people who think they don't like Shakespeare to change their minds, and certainly Shakespeare himself didn't hesitate to go blue or throw in some slapstick to keep the groundlings roaring. But a little goes a long way, and it's always a question of balancing the bawdy with the beautiful. This ``Shrew" doesn't always manage that.

Want evidence? Check the hideous, gigantic red codpiece that encumbers Petruchio in the wedding scene. Observe the humping and bumping and grinding that pervades every interaction between not just Petruchio and Katharina, but Petruchio and his male servants. OK, we get it, he's a macho guy who's fond of his endowments -- once the point is made, we don't need it ground in over and over again, and it's certainly not going to provide many yuks for anyone outside a locker room.

That's too bad, because otherwise Darren Pettie's Petruchio is one of the more elegant and carefully considered performances here. Pettie finds a way to be both laughable and dashing, a mix that serves the troublesome character of the tamer well: Here's a guy who thinks he knows what his Kate needs and gives it to her, but doesn't realize that he also needs -- and gets -- a taste of his own medicine.

Pettie's well matched by Jennifer Dundas, a small spitfire who sends Kate whirling with fury across the stage. When they start one confrontation by wrestling and end up in a fiercely struggling tango, the tension between passionate anger and erotic attraction is both funny and true.