"The Comedy of Errors" - Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre, 2010

The Comedy of Errors

by William Shakespeare

Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre, Conway, AR

June-July 2010

Comedy was the biggest production of my career to date (though it will be surpassed in a few months by Arkansas Shakespeare’s As You Like It), and the best opportunity I’ve ever had to collaborate with larger-scale design teams. AST’s performance space, Reynolds Hall at the University of Central Arkansas, is a 1200-seat proscenium road house, an enormous amount of space to fill. Fortunately, the company of Comedy was up to the task.

Comedy is a fairly simple play despite its byzantine plot twists; most of the characters are fairly one-dimensional, and the script reflects the simplicity of early Elizabethan comedy. The more I read it, the more the Antipholus-Dromio dynamic reminded me of early twentieth century comedy teams: Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, and the Marx Brothers. When I came to the Antipholus-as-Bugs-Bunny / Dromio-as-Daffy-Duck comparison, the show started to gel in my mind. My rubbery, athletic lead actors, Paul Major as both Antipholuses and Josh Rice as both Dromios, embraced this idea whole-heartedly, making a challenging rehearsal process playful, joyful, and completely successful.

The most common stage direction in the play is “Antipholus beats Dromio,” and masters beating their servants isn’t nearly as funny to us now as it was to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Creating a cartoonish environment served to defuse any potential seriousness to the violence. That idea led to a “those were the good old days” aesthetic for the entire production, an idea rooted in the script’s own hearkening to classical Roman comedy. In our case “the good old days” were less an accurate retelling of the early twentieth century and more what we imagine those golden times were like based on our grandparents’ stories and our occasional glances from Turner Classic Movies. We used somewhat stereotypical character representations to reinforce older-fashioned storytelling techniques; the Duke as a benevolent mafia don, Dromio in a golf caddy outfit, and cartoonish costumes, physicalizations and voices for the secondary characters. A pair of non-speaking vaudevillians (Joe Carlson and Stephanie Love Olson) added atmosphere and helped link the more disparate elements of the show together.

Set designer Doug Gilpin and I came up with a forced-perspective set representing an old Southern town square set on an angle, with a Civil War memorial in one corner and the buildings’ roofs set on Chuck Jones-y angles. The memorial statue and the balcony of the sisters’ house were both climbable, giving my athletic lead actors many levels to scale and hang on. Shauna Meador devised a color scheme for the costumes that resembled nothing so much as a pack of highlighters; bright argyles illuminated the stage, and she created iconic looks for the extreme cast of types and tropes I demanded, from beat cop to sea captain to drag queen courtesan. Ken White’s lighting brought the shapes and colors popping off the stage, and told the passage of the day’s time with clarity and beauty. Joe Carlson’s fight choreography was as vital as any other element, establishing the non-threatening comic nature of the violence.

For the reveal of the twins, I used a similar technique as I had two years earlier for the five-actor As You Like It, having actors in the twins’ vicinity hold empty hats in the air to represent the non-speaking Antipholus or Dromio. The two actors playing the twins frantically ran from place to place, ducking underneath hats to switch characters, masterfully changing dialects and physicalities instantaneously. This artifice, simple in idea and challenging in execution, would never have worked with lesser actors.

Josh Rice said of our rehearsals: “This is just a great ensemble process. Every idea the actors have is on the table, and every one is respected, but we all know whose hands are on the wheel.” This is perhaps the finest compliment I’ve ever received from a collaborator, as Josh beautifully described the process I shoot for. This was in many ways the most successful production with which I have ever been involved, in that each member of the company, from design through performance, was empowered to bring their best ideas and work to the process. In the end, The Comedy of Errors must be considered the most complete realization of a vision in my directing career.

The Comedy of Errors was performed in repertory for the duration of the 2010 Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre. It played in Reynolds Hall at the University of Central Arkansas.

The town musicians and vaudevillians sing "Babes in the Woods" for Aegeon. The old man is quick to realize that this is not a song to cheer a father looking for his lost children. L to R: Stephanie Love Olson, Dan Matisa, Joe Carlson (on the floor), Caleb Keese, Tom McLeod. 

Antipholus (Paul Saylor) has tangled with the wrong merchant (Greyson Lewis).

Dromio (Josh Rice, center) enlists the help of two traveling vaudevillians (Joe Carlson and Stephanie Love Olson) to describe his master's madness.

Adriana (Katie Campbell) has neither the time nor the patience for Dromio (Josh Rice) to enjoy balloon animals made by a vaudevillian (Joe Carlson).

Dromio (Josh Rice) is understandably challenged by his master Antipholus (Paul Saylor)'s luggage. The sea captain (Caleb Keese) is unconcerned.

Dromio (Josh Rice) and Antipholus (Paul Saylor) were not expecting this kind of Courtesan (Brian Hamlin) to emerge from the Centaur.

Luciana (Paige Martin Reynolds) doesn't know what to make of musical-theatre-style romantic overtures from her brother-in-law Antipholus (Paul Saylor).

Old Aegeon (Dan Matisa) tells his tale of woe supported by impromptu puppetry from the vaudevillians (Joe Carlson and Stephanie Love Olson).

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "The Bard would breathe easy at the Arkansas Shakespeare Festival’s Comedy of Errors - provenance is given short shrift. No, this production is a mixed bag of 17th-century story and 19th-century American Old West set pieces; costumes that range from three-piece suit to busty form-fitting sweater to argyle sweater; a beat cop, a nun, a man in drag?  Director Andrew Hamm threw everything in the old playbook out but the lines and the jocund intent and scored big. Not only is the festival’s Comedy of Errors a salutatory show, it makes a wonderful introduction to Shakespearean theater for those in need of it.... The production brims with howling slapstick and some surprise camp, then manages to finish on a tender moment. "

Arkansas Times: "There are a lot of things to like about Shakespeare, not least of which is the flexibility of his plays. The Arkansas Shakespeare Festival's production of 'The Comedy of Errors' has certainly taken advantage of this flexibility to come up with a loudly colorful and goofily anachronistic show.... That’s another part of this show that’s executed very cleverly — rather than use separate actors for each twin, requiring greater suspension of disbelief from the audience, there’s only one actor for both Antipholuses and both Dromeos. The problem of the twins confronting each other in the final scene is craftily resolved in a gag that stays in line with the wackiness of the rest of the show.... It’s an amusing bit of Shakespeare, to be sure, and if you want to expose your kids to the bard but don’t think that 'Henry V,' the Festival’s other option, is quite the right entry point to his oeuvre, 'The Comedy of Errors' will work just fine."