The Taming of the Soft Shoe?

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is not a nice play.

The new production by Theaterworks is not so nice, either.

Dramatically muddy and dubiously humorous, Taming shares with The Merchant of Venice a modern stigma for its Elizabethean prejudices. If, as some feminists suggest, pornography is anything that shows women in a degrading light, Taming would rank up where with Debbie does Dallas. A large part of the play's humour concerns the attempt of a man to turn his new wife into the slave of his will, not a very funny subjects to the feminists fighting for the positive portrayal of women.

The plot, like most of Shakespeare's comedies, revolves around a double courtship. The two daughters of the rich Baptista, Katherina and Bianca, are up for grabs; but the beautiful Bianca cannot marry until her sharp-tongued older sister is suitably bethrothed. The three suitors for Bianca's hand, Lucentio, Gremio and Hortensio, stake the gold-digging fool Petruchio into marrying Katherina and clearing the path to wed Bianca. While Petruchio engages in verbal duels with Kate, Lucentio and Hortensio disguise themselves and woo Bianca in secret.

So far, so good. Once Kate and Petruchio are married, he begins a regimen of brainwashing as Groucho Marx might have done it, and by the end of the play Kate is "tamed," a seemingly docile and meek servant to Petruchio's will.

Of course, little in Shakespeare is that simple-mindedly didactic, and many productions of Taming play up the irony of Kate's position, treating her surrender as a victory of sarcasm or love or something else. But director of this play as an unbridled assault of headstrong machismo against virtuous female independence, and tries "to image a Katherina who is truly made submissive, who really relinquishes her will, who is just as broken as nay hunting falcon or busted bronce."

Though McDonough firmly announces this interpretive viewpoint in the program notes, he then utterly undermines it with a second bright idea. He sets the play in the backstage of a thirties burleslque theatre, and transplants that all-American theatrical style onto the Renaissance text.

The choices of thirties models for all the characters are generally very clever, Baptista, the rich landowner, becomes the baggy pants petty bourgeois proprietor of the theatre. Played by Jim Kaufman, he is the very model of an alcoholic crud. Hortensio as done by director McDonough becomes a pseudo Mafioso a proto-Don Corleone complete with big blue suit and loud tie, Lucentio (Kevin Fennessy) and Bianca (Marianne Adams) are the very models of squeaky clean 30s youth.

If McDonough had stuck to nostalgic personalities, they play might have succeeded as amusing fluff. But the two principles have to carry the weight of the dramatic message, to the detriment of their performances. Mark Cuddy's Petruchio has a reason to deliver his lines like a third-rate caffeine-crazed vaudevillian, Since that is what he is supposed to be. But Kirsten Giroux, who plays Katherina, is clearly a talented if traditional Shakespearean actress, which makes her the wrong person for his role. Her mugging, posting and self-consciously exaggerated delivery make no sense; her gestures and poses look like they have been forced on her against her will. Too often Giroux's voice lapses into sincerity while her slapstick gestures scream of parody. Her transformation from ferocious to frail falls flat.

The set efficiently evokes the backstage of a rundown vaudeville house, with three large panels of circus-patterned scrim backstage. At several points, backlit actors pantomime the offstage action of the play, alleviating the inevitable boredom of this regrettable Elizabethean convention. But McDonough cannot stop with this modest tactic; he has to include pantomimed metaphor's of the onstage action. Of many egregious examples, the backstage portrayal of a catfight during Bianca's and Katherina's second-act sparring manages to be as insulting as it is cliched.

A PRODUCTION of theatrical lese majeste par excellence, this Taming of the Shrew is rich in intelligence and little strokes of genius, and wildly short of a unifying vision. The key dichotomy is between the feminist intent and the burlesque setting. Burlesque and Shakespearean comedy are close in many ways, and sometimes the technical devices have been successfully transplanted. But the spirit of burlesque is completely antithetical to McDonough's tragicomic conception of the Shakespeare work.

There are some moment's when the conceits and the text fall into sync. The little softshoe Latin lesson the disguised Lucentio imparts upon the eager Bianca is such a gem that the eyes dazzle for the next two scenes. Cue cards with handy translations of Key but obscure Shakespearean terms works so well they would be a welcome addition to very would be a welcome addition to every future production at the ART. But if the flourishes are brilliant, the total picture is murky.

About two years ago a movie version of Pennies from Heaven was released, starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. It sank like a stone at the box office, but it succeeded where this Shrew failed. In Pennies, the brilliant images of the 30$ musicals are shown as the only release of sordid Depression reality. In Taming, the sordid realities of the burlesque theater are stretched to-carry an anachronistic theme of female subjugation. Pennies, for all of its jarring idiosyncacies, was a thoughtful reinterpretation of the American myth of the big musicals; Taming is equally thoughtful, but the theme and the setting cannot be forced to connect.