No matter how you slice it, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew seems sexist to modern audiences, yet it's been a West Coast theatre staple lately. The Royal Shakespeare Company's "online" version toured to San Francisco this summer. The Bay Area's California Shakespeare Festival presented a hilarious, semi-slapstick Shrew, while the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's was less physical, with a deeply vulnerable Petruchio. In Topanga Canyon, Theatricum Botanicum went for a Vietnam-era setting. In February, the Bay Area's tiny Central Works boldly deconstructed Kate's plight in a radical reworking of the text. Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival in Thousand Oaks offered a Wild West version, Santa Ana's Rude Guerrilla Theater Company a female Petruchio. And A Noise Within and Shakespeare Orange County also staged Shrews this past season.
Like the equally problematic The Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew, written in 1591 or 1592, won't go away. And actors, just as they have through the ages, will continue to take on the challenging role of Katharina Minola, the feisty elder daughter expediently married off to a man determined to "tame" her.
"When I first studied the play years ago, I was a raging feminist—so young—and I hated this part," Deborah Strang of A Noise Within told Back Stage West's Polly Warfield last October. "I don't think I could ever have played Kate until now. But being in a long-term relationship and knowing the compromises one must make, I now see the play in a whole different light. It's not just Katherine but Petruchio also who gets tamed." As Ellen Geer, director of Theatricum's Shrew, has said, "What happens is that both of these hardened characters soften and learn through their battling."
Similarly, three recent Kates, discussing the role with Back Stage West, agreed that they saw their character as both tamer and tamee.
Mhari Sandoval, the Cal Shakes Kate, was fiercely, comically combative and punkish, stomping on in partial armor and short, spiky hair. British actress Monica Dolan was more imperious, with a softer, higher voice, and a tomboyish, determined gait in the RSC production, rarely yelling, she tended rather to hiss and spit. Robynn Rodriguez's Ashland Kate, in long golden curls, was the most deeply angry, with a ferocious scowl that reeked of lifelong rage. She often paced like a caged tiger.
Early Worries
Like Strang, all three professed to having extreme reservations about taking on the role. Sandoval was offered the part while her husband, Triney Sandoval, was offered Petruchio, which sweetened the pot. They brought to the table extreme trust acquired during a 10-year marriage, with a knowledge of one another that helped them through the play's rough spots. Nevertheless, Sandoval had qualms. "I don't want to 'fix' things," she said. "If you don't want to do the play Shakespeare wrote, do another play. I wanted [a director] who wasn't afraid of the play and didn't have an agenda."
She found her match in brilliant Los Angeles-based director Lillian Garrett-Groag. The two agreed that the play is a great love story. When Kate offers to put her hand below Petruchio's foot (in the last monologue: "And place your hands below your husband's foot:/In token of which duty if he please,/My hand is ready, may it do him ease"), Garrett-Groag compared that to a lion tamer putting his head in a lion's mouth. "That appealed to me as a metaphor," said Sandoval. "It's to do with trust and affection and care."
When Dolan was offered the role by the Royal Shakespeare Company, she was "very frightened." It didn't reassure her that all the decision-makers—director Lindsay Posner (whom she'd never worked with before), the assistant director, and the entire original design team—were men. "As an actress," she said, "it's your responsibility to make sure your voice is being heard. Otherwise the male standpoint is the overriding one." She'd also heard that her Petruchio, Stuart McQuarrie, was concerned that she would bring a feminist agenda to the part. "It would seem he felt inhibited by that," she said. "I think possibly he felt threatened because I was very outspoken about being a feminist in rehearsal. I needed to express that. If we had known each other as actors before, it would have been easier."
"The most agonizing time I had was right after I got cast," said Rodriguez. "It was not a role I was keen on playing nor a play I was keen to do. I felt there was no reason to do the play ever again, frankly." But as a loyal Oregon Shakespeare Festival actress for nine seasons, she couldn't say no. She was encouraged by talks with her director, Ken Albers, who thinks Katharina and Petruchio's is a love story second only to Romeo and Juliet's in the Bard's canon. But the most encouraging thing was to read the chapter on playing Kate from Clamorous Voices by Carol Rudder. "Fiona Shaw said that the key wasn't in what Kate says, it's in her silence," explained Rodriguez. "Yet she gets more eloquent as the play goes on. There is a transformation, and it's compelling. But it's predicated upon the way she must listen. That excited me and made me hopeful for a good experience."
Like Sandoval, Rodriguez was lucky in trusting her Petruchio, Jonathan Adams, a good friend. "But this play could ruin any friendship, my feelings were so strong," she added. "I had some trepidation, but we could truly talk about anything." And like Dolan, she had a male director. "The way Ken and I saw things differently was because of who we are genderwise," she acknowledged. "There were so many time I was the only woman in the room and a little defensive because I wanted to make sure her dignity was intact. But Ken and Jonathan were more than game. I didn't have to press my point in any dogmatic way."
Fueling Anger
Personal relationships aside, there is plenty in the text for the conscientious actor to fret over. "How do you play a character who's angry for three and a half hours?" said Sandoval. "That initially worried me." As it turned out, it wasn't so hard—she found specific reasons for being angry with everyone in the play. "I worked with whatever [the other actors] gave me," she said.
"That level of anger is difficult and has gotten more difficult as time has gone on," admitted Dolan, who toured with the play internationally for almost a year. "It's very exhausting. She's very self-destructive. As we've played it and played it, it's taken on more depth and in some ways gotten more confusing. You're playing someone who's mentally confused, whom someone else is mentally confusing because he believes it's for her own good. And she doesn't talk to the audience, she's too proud. She never says, 'This is what I really think.'" In fact, for Dolan, the hardest part of the play was to figure out what Kate is thinking when she's not speaking, which most of the time. She determined that Kate is "very critical, waiting for someone to get something wrong so she can blow a hole in it." She also noted, "In Shakespeare, when people aren't speaking, that's when they're learning the most and changing, taking in the most."
But, she added, "You've got a character who's highly rebellious, quick witted, and angry. So in terms of energy, there's a lot of sustaining to be done. Also, we see her in many extreme circumstances, such as being starved in Petruchio's house. You've got big emotional leaps to make, a sharp learning curve for her."
Rodriguez was able to easily identify with Katharina's nonstop snit. "No matter how she acts, she has no power," she said. "I'm a small blonde woman, an intense small blonde woman. When you're a woman with a particular voice, an inquisitive—perhaps a bit of a rebellious—nature, it's very easy to be labeled a bitch. I would imagine this young person questioning authority, being inquisitive, and being called names. She has no visible means of support, not even from her sister. You can imagine that she had a loving mother who was lost to her. I think that anger is justified. I think she is wounded."
Love at First Fight
To truthfully play Shakespeare's Katharina, modern actors must perceive the relationship as a love match between equals. That means, from the get-go, Petruchio must be Katharina's sun and moon (to co-opt images from the key sun-and-moon scene).
Rodriguez, Dolan, and Sandoval decided upon love at first sight, which worked particularly well in Garrett-Groag's version, in which the two, upon first meeting, stared at each other silently for what Garrett-Groag hoped would be a full two minutes (but was probably shorter). "She first realizes she loves him here," said Sandoval, "but she doesn't have a name for it, she doesn't know what love is yet."
"They're finishing each other's lines when they first meet," pointed out Dolan. "They're clearly on the same wavelength… Petruchio has the same sense of absurdity as she does. He offers the opportunity to work together to ridicule society, he's saying it's OK to be an outsider." She added, "The thing about Katharina is, she's extremely intelligent but not very self-aware. He teaches her self-awareness…. I don't think anyone can love someone until they reach a level of self-awareness."
Kate's Journey
How, then, does an actress work her way from Point A (he's a hunk) to Point B (but he's trouble) to Point C (get me out of this nightmare!) to Point D (the sun-and-moon turnaround, in which an exhausted and starving Kate—anxious to continue, unimpeded, their journey to her father's home in Padua—acquiesces to Petruchio's irrational demand that she call the sun the moon and vice versa) to Point E (the next-to-last scene, in which Petruchio challenges his wife to kiss him in a public street) to Point F (the infamous final speech in which Katharina scolds a group of women at a banquet, saying "Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper")?
"Somewhere in the sun-and-moon scene, she begins to understand what the game is with him," said Rodriguez. "They form an alliance. She discovers her sense of humor with him in that scene. By the end of the scene, she's opened herself up to him, finding a place of trust with him unlike anything she's ever known."
Dolan sees Kate's journey as quite gradual, as Petruchio teaches her about herself and gives her the gift of self-awareness. "When she really starts to laugh at him is where things change," she said. "When they're arguing about the sun and the moon, they can make each other laugh, become friends." Far from playing a beaten-down Kate in this scene, all three actors saw it as a moment of enlightenment and enjoyment.
All three also mentioned Kate's speech in Act IV, Scene III, the tailor scene, in which Kate at last says, "Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak;/And speak I will." Explained Sandoval, "She's saying, I am no child. I am an adult." She and her Petruchio agreed that Petruchio really listens to her here, and by adding a significant pause after Petruchio's next few words—"Why, thou say'st true"—the two actors were able to get that point across effectively. For Rodriguez, that speech was the play's most self-revelatory: "She's saying that she can be nobody else. And I don't think he's asking her to be anybody else, just to find other tools." For all three actors, the kiss in the street scene is yet another turning point. "Here she realizes that she really loves him—not just that he entertains her, not just that he's smart and interesting," said Sandoval.
Finally, Point F: How does a modern actress justify lines like "serve, love, and obey"? For Sandoval and her Petruchio, the play's climactic moment is during that speech, when Kate offers to place her hand beneath his foot. She explained, "Up until she does the final speech, Petruchio's trying to figure out if she loves him, without necessarily knowing that's what he's looking for." When Kate says, "My hand is ready, may it do him ease," and Petruchio responds, "Why, there's a wench," for Sandoval, "That's when there's balance." Playing opposite her husband made every word and moment resonate instantly and deeply. "Either one of us would be completely willing to say that speech to each other," she said.
Adrian Brine (in A Shakespearean Actor Prepares) writes that Shakespeare's characters carry contradictions within them that Shakespeare didn't feel obligated to justify. So Kate can be a rebel, as well as a docile wife, not just one or the other. "Domesticity is something that's imposed upon her and that I can see her eventually enjoying," commented Dolan. "She'd love to have a big wedding. But that's not necessarily indicative of domesticity but rather of pride." She added, "That's an argument that came up in rehearsal from some of the male actors—'Oh, she enjoys it.' It's a common argument: If women are abused, they really enjoy it! The fact is, she doesn't have much choice. Having said that, male/female relationships are extremely complex, and there's no doubt in my mind she's in love with Petruchio."
Regarding the speech in question, Dolan said, "That speech is set in public. They're speaking for the public, and it is not necessarily what their private relationship is founded on." She sees that speech as a gift to Petruchio, a public acknowledgment in exchange for his gift of teaching her about herself and taking seriously her need to speak. "That speech is the epitome of the ideal Elizabethan marriage," she said. "It's almost like a pamphlet. The others at the banquet [and therefore the audience] shouldn't know if she means it." Dolan believes that in Katharina's society, she was a feminist but won't survive as such. "You can't be a feminist on your own."
Onstage, Dolan started out the speech in a sort of Stepford Wife trance that gradually got more exaggerated, as though she were giving Petruchio more than he bargained for.
Rodriguez's Kate was very much in control in her final speech, which she seemed to play out entirely for Petruchio's benefit as both a challenge and a reprimand. When she said, "…serve, love, and… " she spit out the word "obey" grudgingly. Then, she virtually yanked him offstage, presumably to bed.
But she had a hard time getting to that point. "Every time I tried to do it [in rehearsal], I wanted to go take a nap," she confessed. "How do you do it successfully? People are either going to take that speech in the spirit in which it was rendered or really not get past a word like obedience. There is great ambiguity in that speech. It means something very specific to her. I firmly believe this is not a broken spirit, this is a person who has found the power of words. If there's anything Petruchio's helped her find, it's the power of communicating."
Aftereffects
For all three, the play was ultimately an important theatrical experience. For Sandoval, acting with her husband added an extra dimension to the work. "This play has to be about people who need to be together," she said, "which is how [Triney and I] feel about our relationship."
Monica Dolan said there were times when the London audiences laughed every time something bad happened to Kate. "That depressed me. I felt angry with them." She confessed, "I don't think it's healthy to go through this every night—being bullied isn't a good thing." She was sure the role had changed her in some way but wouldn't really know how until the show ended. Despite all, she added, "I'll be sad to see it go. I've loved doing this play."
"I never in a million years would have thought that working on this play would be a gift for me," said Rodriguez. "It gave me the opportunity to work on some of my own stuff. [Like Kate], I'm the eldest of two daughters. I didn't find my partner in life until I was 35. I feel like it's the story of my life." She was able to personalize a lot of Kate's journey, "being an intense person, not quite knowing that when one speaks with passion, sometimes that's interpreted as being overbearing, demanding, argumentative. As a younger actor, I was devastated by the fact people found me hard to take. Now I'm far past apologizing for who I am." She also thinks that maybe, like Kate, her edges are softer now.
As for the play: "I no longer feel it's time to retire it. For the very reason that it's one of Shakespeare's more controversial plays, we should keep doing it." In fact, Ashland's choice of the play provoked one subscriber to vow to boycott the entire Festival, and engendered a volatile exchange of letters in the local newspaper. "I felt sick at heart," said Rodriguez. "It's hard to read about the play perpetuating the annihilation of women. Yet I believe this is a play about a great relationship, not about abuse. It's not about a woman who becomes less than she is…. Ultimately this is a relationship that's really lovely. Certainly, the next 25 years of Kate's life will be. I think they're going to make it."
Added Dolan, "I can see them arguing a lot." BSW