Theatre in Review: The Taming of the Shrew (Delacorte Theater)

	Cush Jumbo, Janet McTeer. Photo: Joan Marcus.

In the program notes for the new production at the Delacorte Public Theater, artistic director Oskar Eustis says that he has never before produced The Taming of the Shrew because "I have never been able to get behind the central action of the play, which is, well, taming a woman." He adds, "But then I listened to Phyllida Lloyd." Maybe he shouldn't have. It's probably fair to say that her take on Shakespeare's controversial romantic comedy is unlike any you've ever seen. Her approach isn't to stage The Taming of the Shrew so much as to blow it up, carpet-bombing it with scorn. I've never before seen a production in which the director's approach is essentially hostile to the text. Using a barrage of staging devices, Lloyd essentially creates a counter-narrative that brands Shakespeare's play as an unconscionable attack on women. It's a provocative idea, to say the least, and if it involved any real wit it might really have been something.

But Lloyd's ideas are sophomoric or self-congratulatory or both. (This is the latest in the director's string of all-female Shakespeare productions; her Julius Caesar and Henry IV have been seen at St. Ann's Warehouse.) The action begins with a Miss Lombardy beauty pageant, featuring many of the cast members decked out in big gowns and even bigger hair and a Donald Trump impersonator kvelling over their physical assets. It's the talent competition: One girl twirls a baton, another trills an Italian aria, yet another tap dances to "Yankee Doodle Dandy." For a minute or two, it's kind of fun, even if beauty contests have been satirized to death.

What does this have to do with The Taming of the Shrew, you may ask. Next, Cush Jumbo, our Kate for the evening, appears, riding a bicycle with her sister, Bianca, resting on her shoulders. Bianca, aka Miss Padua, is clad in antebellum finery. Bianca offers a dramatic reading, paraphrasing Scarlett O'Hara's I'll-never-be-hungry-again speech from Gone with the Wind -- which, of course, she delivers in horribly wooden fashion. Lloyd may be a feminist, but she still enjoys a dumb blonde joke.

The real problem isn't with the director's tactics; it's that her satire is so lame, so secondhand, so left over from television comedy sketches of three or four decades ago. It doesn't help that the world of the play is a strange hybrid, combining a New Jersey populated by made men and brutal vulgarians with a white-trash American Southwest loaded with macho cowboys. As an example of the former, Grumio, (Judy Gold) enters and announces that he is supposed to deliver a speech describing Petruchio and Kate's wedding, but because it's boring he won't bother; instead, Grumio cracks jokes about "Prostate Awareness Month" and "stewardesses" who have the temerity to be over 35 years old. (There's something almost repellent about the way the production sets up this crude caricature of male swinishness in order to disown it in the most self-congratulatory way.) Representing the cowboy contingent is Petruchio, who drives an RV with a pretty little blonde filly painted on the side and a license plate that says "Pisa Ass." Honestly, how many comedy clichés can one production stand?

I see I've left out Petruchio's dog, played by an actress in a dog suit, who enters and tries to hump the appalled Kate. Or Bianca getting falling-down drunk at her own wedding. Or Petruchio entering to "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy." He also farts and urinates on the set. Really, I could go on and on.

Because so much time is spent on this sort of fooling around, the actual play seems to have gotten very little attention. Whenever Lloyd stages a scene straightforwardly, the results are remarkably pedestrian. This points to a deeper problem: Her conception of the main characters forecloses on any possibility of their engaging our interest. Jumbo plays Kate not as a shrew but a mental case, screaming and carrying on like someone who needs a straitjacket; this naturally witty actress' knack for playing wisecracking tough cookies is lost just as it is needed most. Janet McTeer's Petruchio is a strutting, preening male action figure, a kind of Clint Eastwood parody. Because there isn't the tiniest spark between them, the fate of their marriage couldn't matter less. Gayle Rankin's Bianca, depicted here as a tippling, bubble-brained mantrap, is equally misbegotten; this is especially regrettable since Rosa Gilmore's straightforward Lucentio, her lover, is one the production's successes. (I also liked Donna Lynne Champlin as Hortensio, who also chases after Bianca; Candy Buckley as Vincentio, Lucentio's moralizing father; and LaTanya Richardson Jackson as Baptista, Kate and Bianca's put-upon parent.

Other plus factors include Mark Thompson's set, the exposed structure of a circus tent, with circus wagons upstage at left and right and Tivoli lights strung everywhere. That giant RV is an impressive stage piece, if not nearly as funny as everyone seems to think. Thompson's costumes tend toward the clichéd and the suits often look too big for those wearing them. Robert Wierzel's lighting creates any number of attractive looks; it also shifts fluidly between the play proper and its framing device. Mark Menard's sound design is a model of clarity; it also deploys a number of musical cues and provides solid reinforcement for the trio of electric guitars on stage.

The production ends in a kind of nervous breakdown, with Kate, disgusted at having caved to Petruchio, having a conniption fit and ending up consigned to the basement under the stage -- an effect that would work better if Kate hadn't already put Bianca into a wheelbarrow in order to dump her into the same hole. Interestingly, last Sunday's Times asked a number of women directors about how to handle Shrew -- and got some very interesting answers. Julie Taymor sees it as a kind of screwball comedy, suggesting that, late in the play, Kate and Petruchio are in cahoots, playing a game to earn social approval. She also notes that Kate is one of the strongest women characters in the Shakespearean canon. Tina Packer finds the play disturbing -- and, therefore, eminently worth wrestling with on its own terms. Such comments point to a more fundamental problem with Lloyd's brutally dismissive direction: Even if you intend to dismiss a play as pernicious, actively loaded with social toxins, you have to concede something to it -- the power of its language, say, or the skill with which it makes its argument. If not, then what is the point of doing it at all? -- David Barbour