Ashland in July (part two)

The Comedy of Errors

The second production we saw on the Elizabethan Stage was of a play purportedly by Shakespeare. Unfortunately, it wasn't at all glorious. Director Penny Metropulos has mounted a high concept production of Shakespeare's only farce, setting it in the American West of movie myth and indeterminate date. The production comes complete with actors giving their lines in irritatingly grating Texas accents and breaking into musical comedy songs at the drop of a ten gallon hat. For the first time at Ashland, I (almost) walked out at the intermission.

What's the problem with that, you may ask. After all, I wrote a good review of this year's Midsummer's Night Dream, which did a very similar thing by setting that comedy in a radically updated and very hip contemporary "fairy land." Well, in fact all of this Wild West schtick would be perfectly OK with me if it wasn't for one very big thing. And that thing is, that a very great deal of this Comedy of Errors production wasn't Shakespeare at all. At least half the lines read or sung by the actors, including most or all of the song lyrics, sure as goll durn don't come from the pen of no dang Shakespeare dude, dag nab it. (That last sentence had several more or less direct quotations from this Penny Metropulos "adaptation," just for flavor. Can you find them?) That was most obviously the case of the lines spoken in Spanish, and delivered by a character identified as Jose Luis who doesn't appear in any Shakespeare play with which I am familiar. Certainly not The Comedy of Errors. And Jose Luis wasn't the only newly invented character to appear in this production, either.

The one good thing about reviewing a production as annoying and misdirected as this is that I don't feel compelled to spend much time or effort writing about it. Listing the actors who did their parts well just isn't worth the effort. For one thing, in view of the heavy handed schtick, added lines, ridiculous accents, and phony dialectical changes to the text with which they had to wrestle, it was impossible to tell whether they were actually doing their parts well. I will nevertheless mention that several of my favorite OSF performers were in this production -- notably, Tasso Feldman and John Tufts as the two Dromios, Emily Sophia Knapp as Luciana, David Kelly as "The Colonel, a mine owner" (Angelo the goldsmith in the original), and Armando Duran as "Doctor Antonio Pitch, a snake-oil salesman" (Dr. Pinch in the original). Those individuals all did superb jobs laboring under the unnecessary burdens imposed on them by their director and the additional lines and lyrics composed by her and others. I can't speak for the other actors I saw on stage. I will simply assume that the campy performances they gave were the director's fault, and not theirs.

That's about all I have to say on this production, except that The Comedy of Errors is one of my favorite comedies, and I had been very much looking forward to seeing this one. I was therefore pretty pissed off at witnessing the way a ham handed director could ruin a perfectly good farce by loading it up with schtick and anachronisms beyond its limits of endurance. Simply put, Metropulos succeeded in draining the humor, the real comedy, and most of the laughs out of the play by forcing it to fit the silly concept she was determined to impose on it. I'm sure Shakespeare could have written a very funny farce about people like such directors, all too common nowadays. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly necessary to distinguish between productions of the real Shakespeare, and misbegotten pastiche productions like this one, cobbled together from a cannibalized Shakespearean text and pop culture cliches. Pity the poor dead Bard.