Word: showing
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While productions of “The Taming of the Shrew” traditionally focus on the play’s portrayal of gender stereotypes and the domestication of women, what intrigues Bensussen about the show is the idea of transformation. In the director’s notes, she writes, “Within the world of ‘Shrew,’ everyone is playing at what they are not, and class, as well as gender, are exposed as performances in which performer and viewer are complicit...
...with all this emphasis on themes of change, the end product somehow seems stagnant throughout most of the evening. Bensussen uses Shakespeare’s lesser-known induction to the play as a sort of meta-theatrical framing device. This prelude to the show drops us into a typical bar atmosphere, complete with pretzels. A drunk stumbles in off the street, and the staff of the Wild Cat decides to play a prank on him, invoking the help of a drunken entourage who are forced to act out a play as punishment for not paying their...
...play trope to great success for the majority of the opening scenes. The actors take on their roles with the delightful awkwardness of children in a school play—scripts in hand, direction shouted at them mid-scene, and endearingly over-the-top line readings. Yet as the show progresses, the actors become more comfortable in their roles, and the production shifts from a clever tongue-in-cheek commentary on social performativity into a relatively normal presentation of Shakespeare’s play. The irony of this “Shrew” is that the better the acting...
...biggest mistake with this production lies in the fact that Bensussen’s greatest innovation is a technique for framing the show—not for staging the show. This meta-theatricality is not enough to sustain a two-and-a-half hour production, and once the actors lose their scripts and take their roles on more fully, problems abound. The barroom décor no longer makes sense. Actor Ross Bennet Hurwitz is left in drag in the role of Bianca for the whole show, an odd move that seems to invite the audience to find gender commentaries...
...design elements in the show do little to help the audience engage with the production. As mentioned, the scenery is mostly just barroom décor completed by a totally inexplicable jigsaw pattern painted on the floor. The lighting has a few select moments where it explicates the atmosphere of a scene, but otherwise it does little to aid the drama at hand. The sound is a dismal effort, relying largely on tacky, cartoonish underscoring that reduces the tone of any given scene to garish musical stereotypes...