A J. Antoon’s yippee-eye-ay version of “The Taming of the Shrew,” starring Tracey Ullman and Morgan Freeman as Kate and Petruchio, is that familiar and negligible thing—an alfresco production that’s sort of stupid but sort of fun, sort of pointless but sort of pleasant, sort of irritating but sort of entertaining, and sort of not quite really Shakespeare but who cares so long as it doesn’t rain. Like most Central Park productions, this one consists mostly of shtick, which here means silly voices. Every variety of regional American accent is employed: Southern, Western, Southwestern, Midwestern—no matter whether it’s consistent or recognizable, just so it’s broad. For the first five or ten minutes, the combination of exaggeration and eclecticism in the way people speak, superimposed on the Elizabethan text, makes the lines unintelligible. But even after your ear becomes adjusted to the various dialects, the words remain secondary; you laugh at lines because of how they’re being uttered, not because of what they mean.
In a way, it’s too bad that Antoon had to muck up the production with so much philological business: he could have allowed characters to speak normally and left it to John Lee Beatty’s set and Claude White’s music to establish the Western setting—and the setting isn’t such a bad idea. “The Taming of the Shrew” isn’t a play to be made or marred by the presence of a wagon wheel or a horse trough. The point—our purpose in being there—is to see how Kate and Petruchio will be played, and there’s no right or wrong here, either. There are only different varieties and gradations of “shrewishness” and bullying. We wait to find out how a particular speech or scene will be interpreted—the capitulation scene, or the duty-of-women speech. Will it be played in irony or in earnest? And how will they bring it off?
Antoon’s production reduces the issue between Kate and Petruchio to one of dire simplicity. Miss Ullman’s Kate is a a cross between Joe Cocker and Calamity Jane. She spits, picks her teeth, swaggers, downs shots of whiskey, shouts, brawls, and roars. She’s cross and mean and grouchy—like an angry, maladjusted child. The whole concept of “shrewishness” is reduced to bad behavior. The pièce de résistance is a wild temper tantrum she throws, halfway to being an epileptic fit, after which she seems drained or purged or just plain exhausted. It’s funny because everything Miss Ullman does is funny, but then Mr. Antoon has Mr. Freeman imitate it, thereby proving the not very interesting proposition that unattractive behavior is unattractive.
Again, it’s too bad that Antoon couldn’t do better than this schoolroom interpretation—that Petruchio “tames” Kate by showing her what she looks like. Mr. Freeman makes a delightful shrew-tamer; moreover, the idea of a black Petruchio has real possibilities. But although Mr. Freeman and Miss Ullman are mugging on the very highest plane, they are still mugging. And in spite of the wealth of truly talented actors in the cast—among them Robert Joy (whose Tranio is all speech mannerisms), Helen Hunt (who makes an amusing Bianca and does the best at delivering Shakespeare in a Midwestern twang), Tom Mardirosian (as Hortensio), and Graham Winton (whose Lucentio gets lost in a Southern drawl)—there isn’t any real acting going on. Consequently, nothing in the production is as much fun to watch as it could be. It isn’t until the last scene—when we find that Kate has put off her childish characteristics but retained her basic lack of femininity—that the play gets interesting, and by then it’s time to go home.
This production has the look and feel of something with Broadway aspirations: the set—a wall of barn siding with sliding platforms that wheel themselves out to provide a saloon bar or banquet table, and a painted mural of wild horses that appear and disappear depending on what kind of light Peter Kaczorowski throws on them—is quite beautiful, and more ingenious than any I’ve seen at the Delacorte in years. The music, too, is more sophisticated than usual. With such an ace cast and with stars like Miss Ullman and Mr. Freeman in the company, it’s easy to imagine that Joe Papp mounted this production in the hope of moving it. But I don’t think it would transfer successfully. The problem is really Antoon: he’s fine for a fine summer evening, but I doubt that he would play very well on Broadway.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, July 23, 1990