The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park is presenting an all-women cast in this summer’s staging of “The Taming of the Shrew” (through June 28), directed by Phyllida Lloyd. One might think that enough of an innovation—women doing all the roles usually played by male actors, a reverse of the custom in the Bard’s time, when women’s roles were played by men. However, Lloyd, known for her adventurous directing, is after more than that. She has aimed for a rollicking, wild, free-wheeling production that turns the play on its head, with women spoofing the male roles they portray.
How you take to this will depend on the extent to which you are willing to revel in an elaborately vulgar staging geared more for low-brow laughs than thriving on the wit in the Bard’s dialogue and the clever confrontations that the misogynistic play contains. Do you really want to see Janet McTeer as Petruchio feigning peeing up against a pole? Or swaggering around as if imitating John Wayne?
McTeer, of course, is excellent in the role in the context of what’s demanded, as are other cast members, including Cush Jumbo as Katherina and Gayle Rankin as her sister Bianca. But the battles between Kate and Petruchio become sharply physical rather than verbal, such as Kate crashing hard against Petruchio’s tender parts and physically thrashing around in general. Bianca is wildly physical too. It is all so very hyper throughout, which provides fun for those who delight in this sort of interpretation but does nothing to illuminate the play.
Great liberties are taken with the work itself, here trimmed to two hours. The show begins with a Padua beauty pageant, with women parading around and showing off their particular talents as if in a beauty contest operated by Donald Trump. When it gets down to the text, the production has a very earthy look, emphasized by the shabby, run-down carnival-like structures designed by Mark Thompson.
Those who accept the concept, embellished with some satirical contemporary comments, will enjoy some of the rowdy performances that can be quite funny, including that of Judy Gold as Gremio. As for the feminist gambit, at the end, after Kate makes her demeaning speech knuckling under to male chauvinist Petruchio, she can’t stomach what she has said, and defiantly rips off some of her clothes to show her disgust. Score points for her, and at this point for the most meaningful moment of the show.
There is somewhat of a tradition that when a play by Shakespeare is presented outdoors under a summer night sky, there is the leeway to have fun with it. People are in the mood. “The Comedy of Errors” was broadly performed in Central Park and it worked with that Bard play. But on this occasion, Shakespeare is all but abandoned for a vaudevillian romp that takes away from seeing how well women might more seriously perform traditional male roles with depth instead of a circus being made out of the innovation. At the Delacorte Theater, Central Park, approached from 81st Street and Central Park West. Phone: 212-539-8500. Reviewed June 14, 2016.