A Comedy of Errors
Jul. 31st, 2025 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI posted a while back that Julius Caesar was “my first and oldest Shakespearian love,” which in one sense in true, but in another sense is tragic A Comedy of Errors erasure.
When I was in junior high, the local university put on a production of A Comedy of Errors, which my mother and I loved so much that we invited my best friend and her mother to see it with us the next weekend. And then (I only learned this recently) apparently my mother snuck out one day and watched it yet another time, while I was at school! You can see why she didn’t inform me of this traitorous plan. Watching A Comedy of Errors without me indeed!
So of course I was delighted when I saw that one of the Indianapolis Shakespeare companies was going to Shakespeare-in-the-park A Comedy of Errors this summer. I retained dim memories of the plot (to be fair, the plot is basically “Two sets of identical twins separated at birth! SHENANIGANS!”) but intense memories of the hilarity, and I am happy to say that Shakespeare in the park delivered.
That formative junior high production was set more or less when and where the play was originally set, and featured actors who genuinely might be mistaken for each other as the twins. The Shakespeare-in-the-park version is set in Daytona Beach in 1984 (but a version of 1984 where you can’t contact the Coast Guard or otherwise use a telephone to try to track down your lost wife and children when you are all tragically separated in a shipwreck), and raised many chuckles by replacing the place names with cities around the Gulf of Mexico: Boca Raton, Cuba, Venice Beach.
(The merchant who is from Syracuse in the original is here from Venice Beach, and in perhaps a nod at The Merchant of Venice, dressed like the Rabbi from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, while everyone else is running around in Hawaiian shirts. Props to the actor for running around in a long coat on a hot humid evening.)
Also, every time they go to “the mart,” they replaced it with “Kmart.” I believe Shakespeare would have approved this pandering to the giggling crowd.
Also, the twins in this production were only vaguely similar, but dressed alike so you could definitely tell who was twin to whom. The Dromios were cross-cast, but the characters were still male, which made for a very funny moment near the beginning of the play right after the Dromios have been “born” (to a character who was pregnant with a beach ball): “male twins,” emphasizes the Merchant of Venice Beach who is narrating this flashback, and at once the Dromios slouch into a masculine posture and one of them grunts, “Whiskey club.”
All in all, just a grand old time, the kind of slapstick hilarity that you can enjoy even as a thirteen-year-old who is a little bit vague about what a lot of this Shakespearian language means.
Also, although I have at this point seen a number of Shakespeares, this was my first Shakespeare in the Park experience. We brought along a picnic and drank three bottles of wine between the four of us and had a wonderful time.
When I was in junior high, the local university put on a production of A Comedy of Errors, which my mother and I loved so much that we invited my best friend and her mother to see it with us the next weekend. And then (I only learned this recently) apparently my mother snuck out one day and watched it yet another time, while I was at school! You can see why she didn’t inform me of this traitorous plan. Watching A Comedy of Errors without me indeed!
So of course I was delighted when I saw that one of the Indianapolis Shakespeare companies was going to Shakespeare-in-the-park A Comedy of Errors this summer. I retained dim memories of the plot (to be fair, the plot is basically “Two sets of identical twins separated at birth! SHENANIGANS!”) but intense memories of the hilarity, and I am happy to say that Shakespeare in the park delivered.
That formative junior high production was set more or less when and where the play was originally set, and featured actors who genuinely might be mistaken for each other as the twins. The Shakespeare-in-the-park version is set in Daytona Beach in 1984 (but a version of 1984 where you can’t contact the Coast Guard or otherwise use a telephone to try to track down your lost wife and children when you are all tragically separated in a shipwreck), and raised many chuckles by replacing the place names with cities around the Gulf of Mexico: Boca Raton, Cuba, Venice Beach.
(The merchant who is from Syracuse in the original is here from Venice Beach, and in perhaps a nod at The Merchant of Venice, dressed like the Rabbi from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, while everyone else is running around in Hawaiian shirts. Props to the actor for running around in a long coat on a hot humid evening.)
Also, every time they go to “the mart,” they replaced it with “Kmart.” I believe Shakespeare would have approved this pandering to the giggling crowd.
Also, the twins in this production were only vaguely similar, but dressed alike so you could definitely tell who was twin to whom. The Dromios were cross-cast, but the characters were still male, which made for a very funny moment near the beginning of the play right after the Dromios have been “born” (to a character who was pregnant with a beach ball): “male twins,” emphasizes the Merchant of Venice Beach who is narrating this flashback, and at once the Dromios slouch into a masculine posture and one of them grunts, “Whiskey club.”
All in all, just a grand old time, the kind of slapstick hilarity that you can enjoy even as a thirteen-year-old who is a little bit vague about what a lot of this Shakespearian language means.
Also, although I have at this point seen a number of Shakespeares, this was my first Shakespeare in the Park experience. We brought along a picnic and drank three bottles of wine between the four of us and had a wonderful time.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-31 05:48 pm (UTC)...I feel better about the four times I saw one production of Comedy of Errors last fall now.
“male twins,” emphasizes the Merchant of Venice Beach who is narrating this flashback, and at once the Dromios slouch into a masculine posture and one of them grunts, “Whiskey club.”
LOL.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-31 05:57 pm (UTC)The Dromios were having a great time playing male twins, perhaps especially so as they're not actually particularly cross-dressed, unless men in the 1980s frequently wore pink and yellow Hawaiian shirts and sweatbands to Dayton Beach. Which they may have! Eighties fashion was very eighties.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-31 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-31 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-31 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-31 11:51 pm (UTC)So how did they modernize the twins' mom who became a nun? I assume she's Jewish like the dad so having her be a modern-day nun wouldn't really work even if they wanted to do that.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 07:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 11:32 am (UTC)BETRAYED!!
every time they go to “the mart,” they replaced it with “Kmart.”
Peak theatre tbh
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 06:53 pm (UTC)