Review: TAMING OF THE SHREW at the Livermore Shakespeare Festival
July 1, 2013 § 1 Comment
As Director Gary Armagnac disarmingly admits in the notes to his production currently running at the Livermore Shakespeare Festival, The Taming of the Shrew is now a “problem play.” In its time, it was a lightweight comedy about the battle of the sexes won only when the man showed his independent-minded bride some tough love and put her in her place. To play it that way now just reads as painfully misogynistic. If it were not by Shakespeare, it is entirely possible it would be dropped from the repertoire but because it is, the problem now is to figure out how to find something deeper in it. Like any good puzzle, it now has to be “solved.”
Conceptually, Armagnac goes a long way toward rehabilitating Shrew by setting his “Rosie the riveter” production just after the end of World War II, as the troops return home. Petruchio, the protagonist, is portrayed (along with the other male characters) as anxious to get married, settle down and get on with Eisenhower-ifying America – but the women they are coming home to are not the girls they left behind. Armagnac’s resetting highlights the greater social empowerment women felt (and were in danger of losing) from supplying the home work force while men fought the war. That goes a long way to explaining why Kate, the “shrew” of the title, resists with such vitriol the bevy of suitors who want her bucks but not her pluck.
Jennifer Le Blanc as Kate. Photo by Gregg Le Blanc / gregger@CumulusLight.com.
It is the psychologically insightful portrayals of the quarreling couple by Armando McClain and the simply wonderful Jennifer Le Blanc that make it all work. As Petruchio, McClain’s best moment is the soliloquy in which he asks directly if anybody has any better ideas than he does for taming his wife. Although the speech is an extended metaphor about falconry, through subtext he reveals that the only methods this returning army captain has in hand are the ones he used to discipline his troops, and he rightly worries about their current appropriateness.
Le Blanc, who both looks and sounds like a young Helen Hunt, showed us right from the start that the issue was not that she hates men, but that she loves – and fears losing – the scope of her unfettered life. Astonishingly, she somehow never lets us forget she is balancing her genuine fondness for the handsome and confident Petruchio with the desire to retain her independence, including in many scenes where the text has much less substance.
Not that fidelity to the text was much of an issue in the production. Armagnac’s other main conceptual innovation was setting the play right in the very California vineyard where it was being performed, which succeeded in incorporating the beautiful natural setting and led to some very clever moments. (A servant summoning Kate just stuck her head out a second story window and bellowed into the field, from which a grumbling Kate emerged with pruning implements still in hand.)
The mansion on the grounds of Concannon winery that serves as a permanent backdrop for the Livermore Shakespeare Festival
Less successfully, it also meant that all references to Padua were changed to Livermore, Pisa to New York, and from there the floodgates were opened. Horses became jeeps, servants became soldiers, and actual welcome home speeches from the war were inserted into the play. Although resetting the play into a period of rapid, and unsettled, social transformation (not unlike our own) was revelatory, the text was shoehorned into its new shape, and where it would not stretch to fit, just changed wholesale. In previews, many of the biggest laughs from the audience were not at the play’s humor, but at the incongruity of the very unShakespearean inserted material.
The best moments in the production came not from alteration, but from honest delivery of the plot in its new context. Patrick Moore, who already gave one outstanding performance this summer, portraying a loving father in The Liar (the repertory’s other production) delivered again here. As Baptista, he desperately tries to balance the happiness of both his daughters. He is quite moving during Kate’s wedding scene fearing that he’s made a mistake by hastily accepting the mad-seeming Petruchio as her husband to clear the way for Bianca. Rebecca Pingree, another terrific performer cast in both productions, played the minor role of the widow that a suitor must settle for when a rival outmaneuvers him for Kate’s younger sister, Bianca. Pingree brought illuminating gravity to the play’s final scene by playing the widow not as the typical doddering old woman, but as a young girl whose husband was lost in the war.
At least in its final preview, this was a production with an admirable aim that exceeded its grasp. However, with excellent and deeply felt performances from its leads, as well as from the afore-mentioned Pingree and Moore, it still managed to speak to contemporary concerns: it showed us two people negotiating a new kind of relationship in the absence of societal models for doing so. That is a lot to wring out of Shrew.
The production would have been stronger if it had remained faithful to this more serious reading throughout, but the subplots were less carefully considered, and overstuffed with tacked on lazzi. Genuinely successful comic moments were, however, provided by Brian Herndon as an Ensign Pulver-like Tranio, and Jeremy Tribe-Gallardo (an intern with a big future coming) as the funniest Grumio I’ve ever seen.
[…] gave the show a postwar flavor that was never really foregrounded (at least not in the way that a similarly situated Taming of the Shrew at Livermore Shakespeare Festival utilized this tension a couple of seasons ago) but made perfect sense as a background. The gorgeous […]