The Taming of the Shrew at the Delacorte Theater
(L-R: Janet McTeer as Petruchio and Cush Jumbo as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew.)
The three Shakespeare works referred to collectively as his “problem plays” -- Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida -- are so called because of their dark, ambiguous dramatic choices, choices that seem off for the man who wrote Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. But I would argue it is more accurately applied to those plays which are so mired in the social politics of their own times that they are impossible to produce today. And I would further posit that at the top of that list belongs that often (and rightly) maligned 1592 work The Taming of the Shrew.
It’s that play, the basis for innumerable adaptations including Cole Porter’s 1948 Kiss Me, Kate, that starts the Shakespeare in the Park season at the Delacorte. And it’s that play that the director Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!, the Donmar Warehouse Julius Caesar and Henry IV) attempts desperately to rehabilitate with an all-female cast, girl-power musical accompaniment, and jarring modern inserts. It’s an admirable effort, but a vain one. The Taming of the Shrew is a misogynistic play from start to finish -- its language is beautiful, but the crux of its drama has no redeeming qualities, dealing as it does with the gradual breaking of a woman’s (Katherine’s) spirit to be subordinated to her chauvinist husband (Petruchio). Many a scholar has tried to find the reading of Katherine’s climactic fifth-act speech encouraging her fellow women to “place your hand beneath your husband’s boot,” with most clinging to irony as a last resort. It doesn’t work. This play cannot be saved. Shakespeare was a man of the sixteenth century -- that is to say, he was a sexist, and an anti-Semite to boot, though at least that other problem play, The Merchant of Venice, can be reinterpreted in view of changing times since Shylock is, at least from some viewpoints, a sympathetic character, while Katherine is left no recourse but to be domineered and trodden upon, into eternity.
Ms. Lloyd’s attempt to salvage the ending starts with a slightly funny but mostly dissonant beauty-pageant joke at the expense of a presidential candidate who will remain nameless, which is left dangling for most of the show and fails to pay off until that final scene. Cush Jumbo, as Katherine, has throughout the production given one of the most purely energetic performances ever on the Delacorte stage (and helps to convey the humor of the play admirably as it falls flat from her cast-members). Now, as she beckons her fellow women, calling them “worms,” “weak and smooth,” telling them to “kneel for peace,” her voice breaks. She barely seems able to hold herself together. It’s traumatic to watch, and the audience is deadly silent. Then that joke pays off, and there goes the dramaturgy. It’s not that Ms. Lloyd’s ending isn’t plausible, it’s that it’s not entirely creative. The philosophy seems to be that men collectively work to smooth the edges of women and force them to fit predetermined roles, which, while true, is not exactly a revelation. Those who sacrifice the text for topicality and topicality for text, in turn, are doomed to get the better of neither.
The same could be said of most -- most but not all -- of Ms. Lloyd’s choices. Judy Gold, as Gremio, breaks the fourth wall entirely too much for my taste, and the set and costumes (by Mark Thompson, an Australian) betray an everything-but-the-kitchen sink attempt at Americana. It’s impossible to tell whether we’re in a circus, a trailer park, a Mafia wedding, a college town, or all of the above. At one point, in a visually arresting (probably unintentionally) tableau, there are simultaneously actors on the stage in three-piece suits, leather jackets, ten-gallon hats, and fringed vinyl Davy Crockett coats. Feeling so out of place does wonders for the wild and wonderful dance numbers that begin and end the show -- the music of all kinds that fills the production is, indeed, one of the best choices Ms. Lloyd has made, Shrew being such an intrinsically musical play -- but it fails to ground the action sufficiently. The whole thing is far too broad, and it proves that Ms. Lloyd doesn’t trust the text. And who can blame her?
The saving grace of the show comes from where you’d expect. Janet McTeer plays Petruchio, and she owns the stage from the minute she steps onto it. Her shrew-tamer is a crass, sadistic biker-boy, betraying only moments of sympathy towards Ms. Jumbo’s Katherine before she starts in on her again. She is consistently and genuinely funny where the play isn’t, intelligent about motivation where the staging isn’t, and specific where most of the cast isn’t (a couple of holdouts excluded -- Gayle Rankin as Bianca is just the right mode of brat). Her presence is absolutely remarkable, and she and Ms. Jumbo make their scenes together pitch-perfect at every turn. When they’re alone on the stage, their chemistry immediate, their movement is intelligent, and their diction is flawless. Everything they do is right, and after they meet, their sense of infectious fun begins to bleed into the rest of the production, and even though it doesn’t entirely make sense, even though some of the unmasked sexism is cringe-worthy, you kind of can’t help enjoying yourself. He that knows better how to tame a play -- or an audience -- now let him speak.
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