The Bard shines indoors as rain pours inside
By Howard Shapiro
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, July 31, 2009
At rush hour, the rain began to pound the region, and Wednesday's opening of the annual Shakespeare in Clark Park appeared, as the Bard might write, doom'd.
Well, doomed outdoors, at the popular West Philadelphia park where the theater company was to launch its fourth Shakespeare production in as many years. But Curio Theatre, which operates in Calvary Center on Baltimore Avenue, five blocks away, was coming to the rescue, and the idea of Shakespeare in a park shifted indoors.
This was no simple matter. The Shakespeare in Clark Park staff quickly moved a bit of the scenery from the park at 43d Street and up the avenue to the theater at 48th. The rest of the set would wait for a nicer evening outdoors before the run of free performances ended Sunday.
The 10-member cast of The Comedy of Errors regrouped at Curio Theatre by 5:30 for some quick rethinking (and restaging) before the show opened 90 minutes later. Strings of lights gave the stage a tent-top look. A sound system for outdoor performance stayed behind; the actors would have to endure the theater's natural bounce, an unwelcome echo with no sound designer's balance.
"It's a lot less distracting to be performing in this theater than it is in Clark Park," Maria Möller, co-artistic director of Shakespeare in Clark Park, said in a curtain speech to an audience of about 30 - far fewer than would have turned up at a normal opening, when people with chairs and blankets and sometimes picnic baskets drift into the park from around West Philly. "Be patient," she implored, "if there's any reason to be."
No such reason ultimately turned up. The cast ran through this Comedy of Errors, cut judiciously to under two hours without an intermission, with brio. I can't tell you with reliable analysis how the show will play outdoors - the opening-night situation precluded that. I can say that director Alex Torra's staging of this outright mix-up about two sets of twins, not blocked for an actual stage, did fine on this one.
Rain or shine, this is no deep-thought Comedy of Errors. The cast delivers many of the lines, often simple rhymes in this early Shakespearean work, with the full excitement of the characters they play but without much thought for interpretation. In fact, the farcical quality of the play - which some critics through the centuries have called low-grade, as they trashed Shakespeare for writing it - is what came across in the indoor incarnation. Or so it seemed Wednesday.
A few too many actors play a few too many different characters, a fact the cast uses as a joke toward the play's end. The actors play musical instruments as background and for songs, frequently in successful harmony. The wooden pipe instruments are handsome and, at times, haunting.
The play is merry and the performances entertaining, if not outstanding. Luigi Sottile and Bradley K. Wrenn bring off one set of twins with nice madcap timing, and Justin Jain and Benjamin Camp imbue the other set with a proper confusion. Marla Burkholder and Mary Tuomanen are game as the women central to the befuddlement. Despite such a quick shift in context Wednesday, none of them seemed befuddled in real life.