24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Is ‘The Comedy of Errors' salvageable?
For all the people out there who think they're not Shakespeare fans, one of the biggest culprits is reading aloud a play's scene-setting monologue in high school English class. In real life, if someone went on and on in monotone, spouting all that convenient exposition, you'd probably get turned off, too.
If only all those 10th-graders could see how director Devin Brain does it in 'The Comedy of Errors.'
In the show, which I saw Tuesday, April 22, at American Conservatory Theater, as Aegeon (Diana Coates) embarks on his sob story, four other actors sit cross-legged in front, facing us, and Jared Gooding's lighting design shifts to suggest the glow of a TV set late at night. It's story time, the giddy hour your parents let you watch maybe once a week. Lindsay Jones' sound design conjures a staticky orchestra, like what you might hear during an old-school movie montage. The music plays 'Anchors Aweigh!' for sailing on the high seas, 'dun dun dun!' for danger ahead and a thunderclap for a decisive, life-changing moment. And it's all borne along by Coates' mad scientist voice, with the tone of a put-upon father whose tale of woe is always looking for the slightest provocation, that it might unfurl once more.
A curtain-raiser is just as inspired, with cast members unsheathing actual slapsticks. They terrorize each other with them, naturally, but then the clapping noise switches on the world of the play, with twinkling lights and the 'bing!' of a cleaning product commercial.
One only wishes Brain had taken on worthier material.
The show, which New York's Acting Company is presenting in repertory with the fabulous 'Two Trains Running,' might be more aptly titled 'The Contrivance of Errors.' In devising a way that two sets of twins, separated at birth, might find themselves in the same place and get mistaken for one another over and over again, Shakespeare isn't funny so much as exasperating. You picture him in a garret, quill in hand, going, 'Tee hee hee! But I'm not going to let everything straighten out yet! These shenanigans have only been going on for an hour,' while his wife rolls her eyes, pats his head and says, 'Sure, hon, whatever makes you happy.'
Christina Anderson's modern translation of the text supplies a few felicitous anachronisms. 'Come on, man, these jokes are not cool,' one twin says to what he thinks is his own servant. Then later: 'Hey now, sir, has your goofy humor altered?'
But mostly, 'Errors' isn't about the poetry or the plot, whose questions of who bought a necklace from whom and who carried money to whom you'd do well to gloss over. It works only as a platform for outrageous physical comedy, and here Brain and the cast succeed only intermittently.
At one point, actors James Ricardo Milord and J'Laney Allen are so delirious with confusion, so desperate to understand each other, that they embrace, but in the way drowning swimmers might cling to each other at sea. In another, Deanna Supplee as wife Adriana is so insistent to get to the man she thinks is her husband that she chucks his servant over a counter. (The set reuses the 1969 diner from 'Two Trains.')
But a few chuckles does not a 'Comedy' make. The show demands toe-to-crown animation and precision; it needs the expressive powers of the entire body zapped to life and pointed in sync. An effective 'Comedy' would be understandable almost without words, like a silent movie.
That's telling on its own, though. If a play's narrative and words aren't central, why mount it?
