Word: petruchio
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Like a play within a play, any production of this work turns on the final understanding between Petruchio and his tamed shrew. She may finish by agreeing with her husband that a woman's duty is to be a "most patient, sweet, and virtuous wife." Call this a medieval Kate. Or, having been frozen, starved and exhausted by her dauntless husband, she may cry out like a trapped and beaten Kate. In recent years she has been played as an ironic Kate, addressing her last speech, on the submission of wives, directly to the audience as a private joke...
...play unclear. The actors, dressed in a hodge-podge of costumes and too often blocked like isolated commentators on the action, come up each with their own interpretations. Jennifer Marre's shrew submits to her husband with an attempt at audience-directed irony. But Jonathan Epstein's Petruchio tries to woo her sincerely with love. Meanwhile the rest of the cast treats their courtship as a thoroughly entertaining battle of wills--a relationship would not be believed even if it could be explained. The audience is left to guess why, in the final festive scene, Kate is the only wife...
...confusion is Marre's fault. Her Kate is as easily distracted, inconsistent and uncontrollably violent as a child. Although she begins with a convincing psychological blend of jealousy (towards her sister) and craving (for Baptista's love), Marre fails to weld any emotional links. After her meeting with Petruchio, the first man who has ever silenced her--he answers her rails with songs and her frowns with eloquence--she is completely unimpressed. And when, after their hasty wedding, Petruchio determines to go home to the country, either with or without her, Marre vacillates too thoughtlessly between yielding and asserting...
...leading roles, Chita Rivera is a properly fiery and recalcitrant Katherine-Lilli; especially effective is her "I Hate Men." And Hal Linden, if no Alfred Drake, is a solid enough Petruchio-Fred, notably in "Where Is the Life...
...somehow the personae who speak those quotations have not staled. Caliban may be an imaginary primitive, but he has been legitimately interpreted as the Colonial Victim violated by Western Man. Kate, of The Taming of the Shrew, may succumb to Petruchio, but not before declaring herself the most eloquent women's liberationist. There is no father who can look upon Lear and Cordelia without pangs, and as for Hamlet, he is so real that he has been psychoanalyzed (and found Oedipal) by Freud's disciple, Ernest Jones...