Rachel Brun (Luciana) and Claire Hayner (Adriana).
There’s nothing subtle about the Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s production of Comedy of Errors, and I suspect The Bard would have wanted it that way.
I’m sure you’ve all seen Shakespeare reduced to mush because the director and players were too reverent to the material. Sure, Shakespeare was a great dramatist, molder of language, blah blah blah. But he was also a guy who had a side hustle writing erotic poetry. He was the Elizabethan equivalent of a B movie producer, and nowhere is that more evident than in the setup for Comedy of Errors. As TSC founder Dan McCleery noted in his opening address to the crowd at the University of Memphis, this play was basically a ripoff of a Latin play called Menaechmi by the Roman playwright Plautus. Shakespeare looked at the story, in which a set of twins separated at birth meet years later, causing an escalating progression of mistaken identity gags, and said ‘If one set of twin is funny, TWO sets of twins would be HILARIOUS!”
[pullquote-1]I’m as big a Shakespeare fan as the next English major, but I had never seen Comedy of Errors produced before. It’s pretty clear that most of the play is just Willy Shakes having fun riffing. The two Dromios, Syracuse (Blake Currie) and Ephesus (Nicolas Dureaux Picou) take the brunt of the slapstick violence meted out by their increasingly flustered masters Antipholus of Syracuse (Joey Shaw) and of Ephesus (Colton Swibold). Among director Tony Simotes’ more interesting experiments is the casting of the twins. Shaw and Swibold share a strong resemblance, but their characterizations mark them as quite different people. Shaw’s Syracusian brother is bold and not a little mischievous, while Swinbold’s Ephesian Antipholus is a decadent noble elevated by good connections with the Duke (Stuart Heyman). The Dromios, on the other hand, are completely different physically while being functionally nearly identical in character.
All four male co-leads (I guess that’s what you’d call them) acquit themselves admirably, as do the always great Phil Darius Wallace as Egeon, the father of the two Antipholuses whose imminent execution by the Duke provides the comedy’s ticking clock tension. On the distaff side, Ephesian wife Adriana (Claire Hayner) and her sister Luciana (Rachel Bruin) serve as capable straight women for the increasingly convoluted comedic conundrums.
Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest works, but the plotting is amazingly tight. The playwright throws gags fast and thick, and isn’t about to wait around for you to get the jokes. The players have the unenviable task of breaking through the smartphone addled modern brains of the audience who are likely struggling with the cognitive overhead of interpreting Elizabethan English on the fly. Director Simotes has his cast going big, telegraphing the gags, giving everything the hard sell. Combined with the Ottoman themed stage dressing, it gives the proceedings the feeling of authenticity. I can’t imagine Dromio of Syracuse’s extended fat joke was delivered with much subtlety to the groundlings in 1594. And let’s face it, despite what sounds like flowery language today, none of these characters are terribly bright. Thanks to the performers’ energy, TSC’s Comedy of Errors is an entertaining romp.
