This early (circa 1594) Shakespeare play is often presented as a broad farce with lots of slapstick, mugging, leering and physical hijinks. The Carnegie Mellon School of Drama show directed by the well-traveled Don Wadsworth lives up to that convention, if not more so.
It’s 90 minutes of uninterrupted comedy that the young and fit CMU students perform without letup, jousting with long metal whisks, brooms, umbrellas, a round squash painted with an angry face and even a baguette that functions as a club and part of the male anatomy. Parisian bakers would not be happy.
Wadsworth throws in some Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, gymnastics, weird accents and a crazed conjurer with a pleated beard and a magic stick. The effect of all this stage business – at times too much – is one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in a while, but its goal to play everything for a laugh wipes out the serious sides of “The Comedy of Errors.â€
Although it falls early in the canon, the play deals with real themes — the difficulties of marriage, the low estate of slaves and their violent treatment and the pain of family separation. Shakespeare even throws in a little Christianity, albeit Roman Catholic, at a time when the Church of England rejected anything smacking of Rome.
They’re wrapped up in the farcical plot of confused identity when two sets of twins throw the town of Ephesus into a tizzy. It involves a shipwreck, a familiar Shakespeare device, but to make things simple, let’s say that Antipholus and his slave Dromio of Syracuse find themselves confused with Antipholus and his slave Dromio of Ephesus.
(Does the fact that Shakespeare himself was the father of twins – son Hamnet and daughter Judith – lend a touch of reality to this play? There are probably dozens of studies of the subject gathering dust somewhere. CMU dramaturg Carley Johnson ignored it.)
This Ephesus is a bizarre place to the boys from Syracuse:
“They say this town is full of cozenage (trickery):
As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many suchlike liberties of sin.â€
Sasha Schwartz created a fantastical, if overstuffed set with a massive door at its center, a creation of bells and whistles, knockers and panels and a casino slot machine.
It’s the door to Antipholus of Ephesus house where he and his guests are barred while his wife Adriana thinks she’s “entertaining†the Syracuse version at a meal. The scene is the centerpiece of this production which inspired Schwartz to hang various kitchen utensils everywhere. There’s also a clock tower with spinning hands and blinking lights.
Wadsworth has taken a butcher knife to the text, trimming it to the bone so much that several lesser characters just show up unannounced including a guy who stands around for minutes doing nothing. It turns out his job is to arrest the Ephesus twin for stealing a necklace which leads to more antics.
Missing for most of the play are the twins’ father Egeon who’s come to Ephesus in search of his sons, and Solinus, the duke of the place who wants to execute Egeon simply because he’s from Syracuse. (Must be an old football rivalry.) And appearing late in the game is the sons’ mother Emilia posing as a Catholic abbess.
Shakespeare adds a sister-in-law, a prostitute and a few merchants who all mistake both sets of twins for the other to keep the laughs coming.
We know where this all ends – happily for everyone, especially the audience.
Wadsworth employs the talents of the CMU drama students to the utmost, headed by Will Harrison and Scott Kennedy as the Antipholuses and Sam O’Byrne and Jasjit Williams-Singh as the dueling Dromios.
The cast is costumed in colorful, attractive outfits from Stefan Romero and the sewing brilliance of the student garment department. Despite occasional glitches in the complicated door installation, the production sparkles with the technical talents in sound and lighting.
Comedy of Errors plays at the Philip Chosky Theater, Carnegie Mellon University through April 27. Tickets: $35-$10. Call 412-268-2407 or visit their site.
Bob Hoover retired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as its full-time book editor and drama editor in 2011 after 28 years with the newspaper. He continued to write part-time for the PG reviewing books, theater, and articles on literary, historical and local topics until 2014. Hoover has reviewed myriad entertainment productions from the circus to children’s theater in Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Canada. As a book editor, he reviewed an average of 50 books a year, wrote regular columns on the local and national literary scene and organized and edited the newspaper’s weekly book section. He provided extensive coverage of Pittsburgh’s literary community as well as reporting on events, readings, and festivals around the country. Hoover was a theater journalism fellow at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California and the winner of state and local writing awards.
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