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ILLIAM
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HAKESPEARE
A
DAPTED BY
S
EAN
G
RANEY
Directed byDirected byDirected byDirected by Sean Graney
Sean GraneySean GraneySean Graney
September 16
September 16
September 16
September 16 –
OctoberOctoberOctober 1
at Court Theatreat Court Theatreat Court Theatreat Court Theatre
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C
HARACTERS
The Duke of Ephesus
Egeon,
father to Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse
Emilia,
Egeon’s lost wife, now Lady Abbess at Ephesus
Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse,
twin brothers,
sons of Egeon and Emilia
Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse,
twin brothers, servants
of Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse
Adriana,
wife of Antipholus of Ephesus
Luciana,
Adriana’s sister
Luce,
kitchen maid to Adriana and wife of Dromio of Ephesus
Angelo,
a gold merchant
Angry Merchantess,
to whom Angelo owes money
Doctor Pinch,
a conjurer
Balthazar,
a merchant
Courtesan
Boatswain
Officer Jailor
Town Crier
Executioner
S
TORY
The play opens with the Town Crier explaining a new law forbiddingSyracusians to enter Ephesus, at which point Egeon, an elderly Syracusian,arrives and is immediately arrested. As he is led to his execution, he tellsthe Duke of Ephesus that he has come to Syracuse in search of his wife andone of his twin sons, who were separated from him 25 years ago in ashipwreck. The other twin, who grew up with Egeon, is also traveling theworld in search of the missing half of their family. (The twins, we learn, areidentical, and each has an identical twin slave named Dromio.) The Duke is
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marriage between S.Antipholus and Luciana. The E.Antipholus and Adriana marriage remains more vague, but is radically transformed from theone-key farce marriage by this romantic influence. Shakespeare also adds Egeon and Emilia, characters who could (and did) walk out of mediaeval romance. Egeon’s quest to find his family, andEmilia, an abbess who literally plays
deus ex
machina
by letting Christianity save the day, are entirely out of place within farce. The play thus
contains a very powerful genre tension, appealing to two immensely popular Elizabethan theater styles simultaneously. The presence of thistension allows Shakespeare to start to explore a more complex world than Plautus’s simple farce logic can support. With Egeon comes theEphesus-Syracuse conflict, which creates a dark, political backdrop to the play’s humor. S.Antipholus’s presence in turn becomes dangerous – asmuch as we can laugh at the “jugglers” of Ephesus, we can’t forget they pose a real threat to Antipholus. The twin Antipholuses and Dromiosalso possess a type of intellectual understanding and depth lacking totally in farce. All four twins are seriously concerned and frightened by thesudden loss of their identities – as much as it is a source of humor, it is a source of crisis as well. Even at this early stage, we see Shakespearepushing basic Plautine construction to its limits, creating not stock characters but full humans who struggle to define their own identities in aninhospitable world.
“Deus Ex Machina”
(dey-uhs eks mah-kee-nah):
Latin for “God out of the machine,” a Deus Ex
Machina is a plot device in which a seemingly
unsolvable problem is abruptly solved withthe contrived and unexpected intervention
of some new character, ability, or object.
Erik Hellman as “Antipholus of Syracuse” and Alex Goodrich as “Dromio of Ephesus” in Court Theatre’s production of
The Comedy of Errors.
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P
LAYGOING IN THE
E
LIZABETHAN
P
ERIOD
Compiled by Production Dramaturg Will Bishop and Resident Dramaturg Drew Dir In the Elizabethan period, plays served a very different function than they dotoday. Playgoing was primarily a social experience. Audiences went to plays tointeract with each other in a large-scale social setting; the play itself was justpart of the whole. Most plays were staged in massive open-air amphitheaters,which allowed them to play out more like sports games than works of art. Theaudience was equally as visible as the stage, and what happened in theaudience was often just as important as what happened onstage. Playgoing was considered a crude, almost sinful entertainment, often likenedto going to a whorehouse. Playhouses in London were completely shut downin 1642 for breeding frivolity in a harsh political climate. Full-fledged brawls,either between audience members or the audience and the actors, shut downa number of performances. These events, which we would now call “external”or “incidental” to the play, defined the playgoing experience. The negativeconnotation of playgoing was rarely due to the plays being presented, butinstead by how audience members interacted with each other. Even when playgoing was not violent or criminal, it was still anaudience-centric experience. Audiences would eat, talk, laugh, yell, throwthings at the stage, try to converse with actors, and generally ignore every rule of theater decorum we’ve currently established. Going to a playwas less about seeing a work of art, and more about having a great time. If the play itself wasn’t amusing, you were free to amuse yourself asyou saw fit. Playgoing 400 years ago was in many ways similar to going to a bar with live music today: if you enjoy the performance, then youcan watch, but if not, then there is nothing wrong with socializing. Theater today is very different. Audiences come to see a specific show, and give it their undivided attention. Generally, audience participationoutside the guidelines of the specific production is frowned upon. However, theater today plays a very different social role than theater in theseventeenth century. At the time, theater was the only form of public entertainment. It had a massive popularity, both among the educatedwho loved hearing great poetry read out loud and the uneducated who could only experience great writing through theater. The playgoingexperience was, as a result, conditioned by the same strict social rules that governed daily life. The class-based stratification which drove everyinteraction was as much in place at the open-air playhouse; the more you paid for tickets, the “better” seats you got, creating a physicalstratification within the audience.
A
speculative rendering of the Globe Theatre’s interior.
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Kurt Ehrmann as “Dr. Pinch”, Elizabeth Ledo as “Luciana”, Stacy Stoltzas “Adriana”, Erik Hellman as “Antipholus of Ephesus”, and Steve Wilsonas “Officer Jailor” in Court Theatre’s production of
The Comedy of Errors
The second form of xenophobia isprimarily cultural, and the objects of thephobia are cultural elements which areconsidered alien.
Xenophobia
is an irrational, deep-rooted
fear of or antipathy towards foreigners. Itcomes from the Greek words ξένος(xenos), meaning "stranger," "foreigner"and φόβος (phobos), meaning "fear."
Xenophobia can manifest itself in manyways involving the relations andperceptions of an ingroup towards anoutgroup, including a fear of losingidentity, suspicion of its activities,aggression, and desire to eliminate itspresence to secure a presumed purity.
The
Dictionary of Psychology
defines it as "a
fear of strangers". It can mean a fear of oraversion to not only persons from othercountries, but other cultures, subculturesand subsets of belief systems; in short,anyone who meets any list of criteria abouttheir origin, religion, personal beliefs, habits,language, orientations, or any other criteria.
While some will state that the "target" group is aset of persons not accepted by society, in realityonly the phobic person needs to believe that thetarget group is not (or should not be) accepted bysociety. While the phobic person is aware of theaversion (even hatred) of the target group,he/she may not identify it or accept it as a fear.
Xenophobia has two main objects:
The first is a population group present within asociety that is not considered part of thatsociety.
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RIEF
RIEF
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RIEF
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ISTORY OF
ISTORY OF
ISTORY OF
ISTORY OF
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OMEDY OFOMEDY OFOMEDY OFOMEDY OF
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RRORSRRORSRRORSRRORS
Information compiled by Production Dramaturg Will
Bishop and Resident Dramaturg Drew Dir
There are only two recorded performances of
The
Comedy of
Errors
that occurred in Shakespeare’s
lifetime—once in 1594 for a rowdy crowd ofGray’s Inn law students, again in 1604 at the courtof James I—though there were probably more.
For the next
two hundred
years, the play received little attention.
In 1780, W.W. Woods presented his version called
The
Twins, or Which is Which?
in Edinburgh
;
the author claimed
to have
“endeavored to use the pruning-knife only to make
the
shoots of genius spring forth more vigorously.” In 1819,
Frederic Reynolds composed an opera of the play,
adding
lyrics from other Shakespearean songs into the
libretto; it
ran twenty-seven times in one season.
It was not until Samuel Phelps revived the play in 1855
using Shakespeare’s
more or less original text that
The
Comedy of Errors
received a complete,
unadulterated
production.
Ten yea
rs later, the play was included in the
Shakespeare tercentenary celebration of1864 with two
Irish brothers, Charles and
Henry Webb, as the two
Dromios. Other
notable productions in this period
included a
1905 London production by Sir Frank Benson’s company (featuring Benson in therole of
Antipholus) and Sir Philip Ben Greet’s
1915 production.
Despite these exceptions, the play continued to receive fewproductions, compared to otherShakespeare comedies, bycompanies like the ShakespeareMemorial Theatre (later renamedthe Royal Shakespeare Company).
The most influential production of the twentieth century,however, may have beenTheodore Komisarjevsky’s 1938production of
Comedy of Errors
at Stratford. Dressing the actorsin a “gloriously undisciplinedconglomeration of styles,”including a flock of pink bowlerhats for the officers,Komisarjevsky’s productionemphasized the playfulness ofShakespeare’s farce, even whenthe fun came at the expense of the text.
In 1938, Rogers and Hammerstein adapted theplay into the musical
The Boys
from Syracuse,
filmed two
years later as a Hollywoodfeature film.
In 1983 Robert Woodruff collaborated with the Flying Karamazov Brothers and Avner the Eccentric to stage avisually outrageous version of
Comedy of Errors
adorned with virtuoso juggling and circus tricks.Woodruff’s production, which premiered at Chicago’sGoodman Theatre, boldly warped and even rewrotemuch of Shakespeare’s text to support the antics of theperformers; beloved by audiences, it divided critics andShakespeare scholars for years. More re
cently, a touring production titled
The Bombitty
of Errors,
touted as an “ad-rap-tation” of
Comedy of
Errors,
features four actors in a hip-hop retelling of
Shakespeare’s play.
The most recent production in Chicagowas Chicago ShakespeareTheater’s version,directed by BarbaraGaines, which embeddedthe play within a playabout a movie studiofilming their own versionof
Comedy of Errors
.
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D
ISCUSSION
&
F
OLLOW
UP
Q
UESTIONS
Court Theatre’s production of
The Comedy of Errors
mixes Shakespearean text with modern English. In your opinion, what might this
imply?
Sean Graney, who directed last year’s production of Charles Ludlam’s
The Mystery of Irma Vep
, adapted and directed this production of
The Comedy of Errors
. What elements of farce are present in the show? What does “farce” mean to the characters in this production?
Are there elements of realism mixed in? If so, what are they?
One of the themes of
The Comedy of Errors
is xenophobia, or the fear of the “other”. How does this play out in the production? How
does it relate to -- and drive -- the action of the play?
Emilia, the Abbess, serves as a “Deus Ex Machina” at the end of the play. What are some other examples of “Deus Ex Machina” in plays,TV shows, and movies?
Money and debt play a large role in this play. Is the play making social commentary? Why or why not?
Throughout
The Comedy of Errors,
characters’ identities are mistaken and misidentified. How do the characters’ definitions of
themselves differ from how they are perceived? What might this mean about the nature of identity?
What does this play say about love and marriage? Does it seem to view it favorably? Why or why not?
What does this play say about gender and the role it plays in identity?
