The American Shakespeare Center’s travelling troupe is consistently excellent, and their production of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Jemma Alix Levy, lived up to that high standard. The ASC’s distinctive performance ethos is one of the major factors in their success. Their performance style is a blend of the modern and the Elizabethan, as they perform in fully lit spaces and incorporate music (both Early Modern conventions), but give the plays a distinctly modern twist with modern music and attitudes.

Taming can be a really tough play to do well because the performance needs to navigate how the anti-feminist elements will be presented in a way that works for a modern, post-feminist audience. The high plot focuses on Katherina (whom Petruchio insists on calling Kate), known throughout Padua for being a fearsome and tempestuous woman who will endure the company of no man. The problem is that her beautiful and agreeable sister Bianca is being courted by several suitors, but their father Baptista has said Bianca cannot marry until Katherina has found a husband. When Petruchio arrives in town looking for a wife—any wife, as long as she’s rich—the suitors ask and Petruchio agrees to marry Katherina (to get her father’s money). Against her will, she is married off, and Petruchio begins the process of “taming” her, which essentially involves depriving her of food and sleep until she gives in absolutely to his will. While this is going on, a young nobleman named Lucentio has also come to town and fallen in love with Bianca. In order to circumvent both the existing suitors and the suspicious Baptista, Lucentio dresses up as a tutor to teach Bianca Latin and Greek. Through the strategic use of love poetry, Lucentio wins Bianca’s heart. When all parties involved come back together at the end for Lucentio and Bianca’s wedding feast, they make a wager on the submissiveness of their wives, and Katherina is the only one who obeys, at which point she makes a speech scolding the other wives for not looking upon their husbands as lords, masters, and gods.

Obviously the anti-feminist element is a major problem for contemporary audiences, which are unlikely to be all that sympathetic to a figure like Petruchio who essentially tortures his wife until her will is broken, or even to Katherina’s closing speech in which she declares an ethic of slavish subservience. In order to counteract this problematic subject matter, it’s crucial to have a strong comic performance.

In the ASC production, many of the funniest moments actually came from supporting characters. The funniest performance of the night was Calder Shilling, who played Petruchio’s servant Grumio and Lucentio’s father Vincentio. As Grumio, Shilling was all that one could want from a bumbling comic servant—he vacillated between terror that Petruchio (Ronald Román-Meléndez) would beat him, exhaustion after walking back to Petruchio’s estate, drunkenly attempting to defend his master with various foodstuffs, and trying desperately to lift a suitcase that every other character picks up with ease.

Another particularly funny performance came from Kyle Powell, playing the elderly suitor Gremio. Powell would laugh raucously at others’ misfortunes, particularly when the other husbands lose their money betting on the obedience of their wives, and his slow shuffle to get anywhere was comically over-performed. Similarly hilarious was the pairing of Constance Swain, who played Tranio, Lucentio’s servant who takes his master’s clothing and place to allow Lucentio to go undercover, and the slow-witted Biodello, played by Topher Embrey. As Lucentio’s servants, Tranio and Biondello needed to keep their master’s true identity a secret, which proved unusually difficult with a series of comic mishaps, including Biondello’s continual inability to remember that Tranio was pretending to be Lucentio and the arrival of Lucentio’s father (Shilling) after Tranio had employed a decoy (Hilary Alexa Caldwell) to pretend to be Vincentio and give permission for Lucentio and Bianca to marry.