Marin Shakes' 'The Comedy of Errors'

By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent

(First published in the Marin Independent Journal, June, 2008)

TAKE ONE PART "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," one part "Road Runner" cartoon, add a dash of "Keystone Kops," spin around three times and do the funky chicken, and you'll begin to get a picture of Marin Shakespeare Co.'s new, wildly funny - if unnecessarily confusing - production of William Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors."

With his return to MSC, veteran director James Dunn is back in fine, high-handed form with his best comedy in recent memory, a mish-mash of ancient and contemporary pop culture that opened Friday at Dominican University's outdoor Forest Amphitheater.

What Shakespeare borrowed from the Roman dramatist Plautus, Looney Tunes borrowed from Shakespeare, and clearly director Dunn decided to borrow a little back. Lovingly drawing on the vaudeville slapstick of a Warner Bros. cartoon, the rat-a-tat-tat of Borscht Belt comedy and a broad visual style that can only be described as a kind of hip-hop Commedia dell'Arte, Dunn's knockabout farce succeeds primarily because it is so outlandish, so over-the-top in its burlesque, that - human error notwithstanding - its comedy borders on the divine.

In this, what many scholars believe to be his first play, Shakespeare extended Plautus's 'The Two Menaechmuses" and gave us this delightful absurdity about two identical twin brothers with identical servant/clowns, a funny story with loneliness at its wistful heart.

The plot line is pure screwball comedy: Behold Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, played by Andrew Fonda Jackson and Brandon Roberts, both decked out in full hip-hop "gangsta" regalia (designed by Patricia Polen from a palette of enough tie-dyed yellows, purples and greens to make your eyes bleed). They wreak havoc on the lives of their counterparts, Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus (also played by Jackson and Roberts). All four confuse family members, paramours, each other and audience alike, as both sets of twins keep crossing each other like, well, Crips in the night.

And here is where things break down a bit. Sadly, where Dunn's experiment does not succeed is in the area of clarity. His choice to cast the same actors as both sets of twins, while common, seems odd, as it takes an already absurdly confusing situation and renders it nearly impossible to sort out. With both sets of twins "thugged out" in the same hip-hop threads and speaking in identical "surfer dude" patois, hilarious though it may be, it is not enough to discover that the only way to tell who's who is that one Dromio turns his yellow cap backward and the other Dromio does not. Ditto Antipholus' bling-bling vs. no bling-bling. The distinctions are far too subtle, and leave even careful students of Shakespeare behind.

Still, this was of little consequence as the action whooshed by on Friday night, mostly because of the pure entertainment factor of rim shots, "Keystone Kops" interludes, telegraphed burlesque (as in pink-clad, vestal virgins who cross the stage like card-carrying, ring-side, prize fight bimbos, with signs that say DROMIO'S BALD PATE BIT and DROMIO'S KITCHEN WENCH BIT) - plus a few standout performances that ultimately ruled the day.

Chief among these was an inspired comic turn by actress LeAnne Rumbel as Luciana, sister of Adriana, wife to Antipholus of Ephesus. While Roberts' energetic Dromio of Syracuse is the acrobatic source of much of the slapstick in the play, and Jackson's Antipholus is the Dean Martin to Roberts' Jerry Lewis, it was the floating comic grace of Rumbel's Luciana that frequently stopped the show.In a giddy love scene where Antipholus of Syracuse calls Luciana his "sweet mermaid," Rumbel appeared to be swimming in a veritable ocean of love - quite literally, as she proceeded to do the backstroke, the crawl, the breaststroke and the Hully Gully, with a final, quick flutter of her feet as a kicker to bring the house down.

Other standouts included Stephen Dietz's drunken Duke Solinas of Ephesus - picture Dudley Moore's "Arthur" as Nero - whose "spit-take" upon sipping a goblet of water from a fountain (because it wasn't alcohol!) brought a roar from the house; Mary Knoll as Adriana, who nailed it with broad strokes and with her usual traces of Ethel Merman and Lucille Ball; MSC co-founder Robert S. Currier as exorcist Dr. Pinch, who took obvious relish in chewing, not just the scenery, but the moat; and the ever-elegant Jack Powell as the elderly father Egeon, who demonstrated a range that went from a Gallagher-style prop comic and puppeteer to surprising poignancy in the reunion with his long-lost wife, Emilia. The abbess Emilia is also played with poignancy and elegance by Maureen O'Donoghue.

Indeed, it is the honesty delivered in these final scenes that makes this incongruous mixture of eloquence and Valleyspeak truly succeed at day's end. There is something ultimately satisfying about a comedy that has something tragic at its core - about a tale in which love conquers all, after all; where all sins are forgiven; where "every why hath a wherefore;" and every wherefore a whatever.

Photo: Ron Severdia