Young girl, get out of my mind.
Ever wonder what women will have to put up in a world run by Donald Trump? Look no further than Shakespeare In the Park's current all-female production of Taming Of The Shrew, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, which is just as over-the-top, and almost as incoherent, as the man it's satirizing.
Framed by a beauty pageant whose voiceover announcer is
modeled on a New Yorker whose name rhymes with The Ronald, and containing a
character (Gremio) who’s a cross between Trump and Sinatra, with a Vegas Rat
Pack attitude towards dames, this production has a ton of energy and a RV full
of great ideas, but because it panders by going for easy laughs instead of the
jugular, it’s like a complacent liberal: it thinks it’s a lot sharper than it
really is in exposing misogyny. If the road to excess leads to the palace of
wisdom, we should be getting a lot more wisdom than we do by the time that
raucous curtain call starts. Instead, we just get patted on the back for being
smart.
But fun? God yes. The play’s been trimmed down to two hours
with no intermission, and you don’t miss a thing. (Although what I got was a
renewed impatience with the whole Bianca subplot. It felt like there was a lot
less of Petruchio and Kate in this play.) Instead of the Christopher Sly
Induction, we get the beauty pageant, which pretty much tells you all you need
to know about Bianca and Katherina right from the start. The Latin lesson
between Lucentio and Bianca is replaced with an extended quote from Gone With
The Wind. Gremio’s report of the wedding is done totally meta—he comes out with
a copy of Shrew in hand to tell us what he’s supposed to say, and then goes off
on a sexist rant. The curtain call dance is done to Joan Jett’s “Bad
Reputation,” and in a brilliant touch, it includes elements of the Maori Hata war
dance. And towering above it all is Janet McTeer’s Petruchio, a lanky cross
between a totally pissed Peter O’Toole and a totally entitled rock and roll bad
boy, whose every move and line is just magic. If some of this production comes
across as a raucous shit-show, it’s McTeer who is the shit and the show. If the
rest of this production was as good as her performance, this would be one of those
Park plays people talk about for years.
But it’s not. Cush Jumbo’s Katherina is a study in exuberant
overkill, but her final monologue—which should be the coup de grace of the
play—totally misses its target because you don’t know what it’s aiming at. She
delivers it simply and honestly, with no spin or subtext, and for the first
time all evening, you wonder just what is going on with this woman who has been
so vocal and forthright about what she feels and believes. Is it a pose? Is it
sincere?
And then you realize that you’ve been asking the same
question about a lot of things in this production: “What is this supposed to
be?” Like the set. It looks like a traveling carnival, but it also seems to be
a trailer park. It’s specific enough so that it should be one thing, and
thematically represent something meaningful; but it doesn’t. Or like the fact
that, when they get married, husbands get paid off like crooked politicians,
with briefcases of cash. Are they being bribed? Are they being rewarded?
(Both—right, ladies?) Or like Cush Jumbo’s visual look as Katherina, with those Pippi
Longstocking pigtails and those baby doll dresses. Are we supposed to inhale
the whiff of pedophilia this implies? Or get creeped out because we’re even
smelling it?
Thematically, the beauty pageant frame is meant to be Meaningful with a
capital M—at the start, Bianca enters on a bike that Katherina is pedaling, and
her performance is interrupted when Kate, like a protester at a Trump rally,
hijacks the microphone and denounces the whole event. Which tells us, right
from the start, what to look for in what we’re going to see. And sometimes it’s
there, but other times it’s not; and it’s not like it has to be there all the
time, but the whole point of staying on message is that you don’t mix them, and
in this production, those messages have been put through a Waring blender. In
a show where everything is out there, to hilarious effect, it pulls back in
crucial places instead of taking that firm extra step, or at least committing
to the premise behind its shenanigans. Is this the destruction of a
“disobedient” woman, or is it saying that such a thing is impossible?
The perfect example of how it goes right and then wrong at
the same time is the final scene. Katherina extends her hand for Petruchio to
step on, and what do you know? She wins the beauty queen title! Which makes
perfect sense, given the beginning: you tame a woman to win male beauty prizes.
And if it had ended there—with Katherina becoming either the trapped or the willing beauty queen
bride—pretty, subservient, a trophy—THAT would have been the perfect sting to
the tail of this production. But no sooner does Kate win the contest than she
does exactly what she did in the opening: hijack the mike and denounce the
whole event—whereupon she’s hustled down a trap door and locked away. While
Petruchio just stands there. (While. Petruchio. Just stands there.) And Bianca
is named the Beauty Queen, and everyone gets their picture taken together, the
end.
If that doesn’t leave you scratching your head and saying
“Huh?” then you are going to adore this production.
Me, I feel like it was a great concept that wasn’t fulfilled
with a lot of great ideas that weren’t tied together. But it has a lot going for
it. It’s appealing and enjoyable and full of itself. It blusters, and it
preens; it pats itself on the back for being enlightened; it says a lot but its
words cancel each other out; and it makes promises that it never commits to.
In other words, how perfectly male.
