The Comedy of Errors

June 6- Play #1 The Comedy of Errors (Chesapeake Shakespeare Company)

There's a lot to admire about The Comedy of Errors. It is an incredibly flexible play- perhaps Shakespeare's most flexible. It lends itself to bending and twisting and does not lose its form. I've seen it many times before, but this is the first time I directed a production of the great early farce. I appreciate Shakespeare's avoiding the temptation to fill the play with a lot of topical humor (unlike the difficult Love's Labor's Lost and the near-wretched Merry Wives of Windsor).

The great strength of the play is that the characters bridge the gap between the stock characters of Roman comedy and, 1,000 years later, commedia characters with that of modern comic stock characters. In my book, The Comedy of Errors does this better than the later post-commedia Italian comedies. Maybe it's the "Englishness" of it.

A problem with the play is that the author spends so much time with the details of minutia of the plot (like who gets what chain at what time) and pays little attention to giant logical questions (why do both twins have the same name? for instance).

The poetic element to the play is really non-existent. The character of Adriana has some immature attempts at poetry, but it doesn't really hold much weight and comes off unsatisfyingly. Aside from that, we're left to a closing line by one of the Dromios. It feels like Taming of the Shrew in that sense.

So, I directed this production and so I'll talk a little (subjectively) about the structure of the play. You often hear about the interludes and jigs that existed in productions- much like Lazzi in old commedia dell arte. It was my desire to add something resembling these in my production. What I learned is that rhythmically, it feels right. It certainly helps the internal rhythms of the passages of time.

There's so much craftsmanship in this play, I sort of wish that we could mix the attention to plot in this play with the beauty of language in As You Like It.

The more and more familiar that I become with Shakespeare, the more things about the work fascinates me. One of those things is the variety of imperfections in his plays. All seem imperfect but in different ways. This play's imperfections are almost the direct opposite of the imperfections of Hamlet.