hermionesviolin | Entries tagged with shakespeare: the taming of the shrew

with Abby: Ahsoka 1.03-1.07 -- finale this week! but we won't get to watch it until Friday :/

music videos

"Love Love Love" by Tété with Abby -- which I feel like I had maybe seen before?
The HU - Wolf Totem [Mongolian folk metal band] & Disturbed - The Sound Of Silence [excellent cover] at Liz T's party

books

~read Abby ~7 picturebooks -- incl 4 big feelings picture books I'd gotten from the library because of nibling O
[feminist sff book club] A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (recommended by reflectedeve) -- first contact novel with a Jewish polyamorous mom; aliens want to rescue humans because they've been destroying the Earth, but some humans have been doing a lot of work to repair and live in better harmony with the Earth and don't want to leave; we get at least some exposure to 3 different Earth factions (with varying degrees of interest in leaving Earth).
We Still Belong by Christine Day -- middle-grade Upper Skagit, which manages to touch on a lot of things without feeling like it's doing too much or even feeling heavy-handed or teachy

movies

started watching Fast X with Abby
(In June, prepping for the impending 2 Trans 2 Furious zine put together by the person who does her favorite podcast, Abby started watching the Fast & Furious movies. I've seen a few of them at bad/fannish movie night, so having seen 8 and 9, I was interested when she started watching 10 -- but god, that movie is two and a half hours, so I was okay that we stopped about 40 minutes in.)

live theatre

ASP's Taming of the Shrew with Abby, Cate, and Allie -- which sounded interesting, but which we did not like. (I stayed for the post-show discussion with the director, which only helped a little.)

This production really leans into the opening framing device -- setting it at a 1970s nightclub, where Christopher Sly is a jerk to women and passes out drunk and the women decide to trick him into believing he's a woman. Hi, force-femming someone as punishment (as opposed to a sexy consensual "funishment") is really uncomfortable.

This is the official blurb:
Actors’ Shakespeare Project kicks off our 2023-24 Season by tackling one of the most controversial entries in Shakespeare’s canon – The Taming of the Shrew.

After a long night of drinking, disruption, and harassing barmaids, Christopher Sly finds himself trapped in the worst of predicaments: a stage play. Thrown into the role of Katherine – the titular "Shrew” – he tumbles headfirst into a world of witty wordplay, leering suitors, and the full force of the oppressive patriarchy. As the rest of the all-female/non-binary ensemble constructs the zany world of Padua around him, will Sly learn the error of his ways?
Everyone in the cast is female or non-binary, except Sly.

I had expected that they were gonna make him believe he's literally Katherine the character in the play -- like construct the play around him as if the play is reality -- but instead they tell him he's their friend Katherine and then they put on this play and tell him they're one person short and convince him to play Katherine. At first, he's reading lines from a script, and he and sometimes others sit on the edge of the stage watching while they're not performing, but after a few scenes that fades away and it's like the play is real? Everyone except Sly (and also except Bianca, my partner noted?) wears a red clown nose, which indicates that they're acting, and they occasionally take them off to break character (but this didn't seem entirely consistent?). So I'm not entirely sure how we're supposed to think of the events of the play -- like is Sly actually being tortured when Katherine the character is tortured? And they choose to keep in that final speech where Katherine talks about womanly submissive duty -- and Sly/Kate plays it completely straight, and the other characters try to sort of stop him and clearly indicate with their body language that they didn't want this. Which, okay, you decided to do this play; did you forget about this ending? In the post-show thing, the director talked about how this is a revenge play, and trying to use patriarchy to undermine patriarchy just reinforces patriarchy, which, okay, but, this did not feel like a particularly nuanced (or even effective, tbh) way to teach audiences, "You might think that if you could make your oppressor shared your oppressed status, they would repent of their oppressive behavior, but actually that is not the way." Like, Sly becomes a somewhat tragic figure because he has accepted the message the play seems to try to teach him -- that as a woman he should be subservient to his husband; he did what the society around him told him they wanted him to do.

On Sunday, we chatted with our friend Bridget (a theatre professional), who noted that the play is much more Bianca's play than Kate's (which is one reason she thought this production didn't work). Which made me think of my friend Cate's idea to do a production of Shrew with a trans woman as Bianca (1: it means you have lots of people talking about how beautiful and desirable a trans woman is, which is nice; and 2: it potentially does interesting things with the Bianca and Kate dynamic, since they would have grown up for at least some period of time expecting that Bianca would inherit as the son, etc.).
Central Square Theater's Angels in America, Part 2: Perestroika with Abby (having seen Part 1 in April)
During the first intermission, Abby said, "This is the most Mormon thing I've ever seen."

other

Harvard Powwow with Abby -- I've gone with my mom in years past, but she had other plans this time, so I just took Abby. We did meet up with my former coworker Meg (and I finally got to meet her partner), and also had a bonus surprise encounter with climbing/QERG-Meagan.

***

Currently reading: Dear Mothman by Robin Gow -- middle-grade autistic trans boy. reminds me in some ways of Kyle Lukoff's Too Bright to See, but it's much more ... "bittersweet" isn't quite the right word, but...

Reading next: 🤷🏻‍♀️

Someone posted to LJ:

I'm directing a gender swapped production of Taming of the Shrew being done in Arlington on March 22, 28 and 29. We've got the men playing the women's parts and vice versa. Some people view Shrew as a misogynistic, outdated play. The experiment I wanted to try was whether by swapping the roles it becomes simply a love story between two socially maladjusted people. While I expected this to be interesting, I have been fascinated at what swapping the genders has done. In the hope that some of you will come see it, I won't say more so your own experience won't be tainted one way or the other.

I was really intrigued, so Cate and I went last night. [Verse and Vodka's website; tickets to this show via Brown Paper Tickets]

However, (a) they didn't genderswap the opening frame story (which confused me because I was expecting gender-swap); and (b) they kept all the language intact (so it's all, "your sister Bianca," etc.), which I think lessened a lot of the impact of the gender swap.

Given the LJ post, I was expecting the gender swap to do more than I experienced it actually doing. Petruchio was great -- and the genderswap enables some stuff one couldn't do in standard productions (like, I think it was the first wooing scene, Kate is sitting down and Petruchio sits on her lap, straddling her, which I think would have read much differently if it were a male-presenting person on top of a female-presenting person) -- but mostly I felt like I was just watching any other production of Shakespeare (possibly in part because my brain has gotten somewhat used to parsing people as their character even when that is ostensibly at odds with the gender I'm reading them as).

In the frame story (which I always forget exists), they put a guy in a dress, and when the drunk !lord was wanting to hook up with the "woman" and "she" was putting him off, I felt super-uncomfortable because the expectation is that the audience is laughing because they know that if the guy does get under "her" skirt he'll realize she has a penis and won't that be a terrible shock and ha ha ha -- and hey, that's a very real fear that lots and lots of trans women live with every day. I've read lots of trans women pushing back about the "guy in a dress as humor" trope, but I don't think I actually internalized it until that moment.

When I think about this play, I so want to read Petruchio/Kate as a consensual BDSM relationship, and in the first "wooing" scene it feels plausible; but then when Petruchio is keeping her from eating or sleeping it's clear that Kate hasn't consented to this dynamic and while I understand how we're supposed to parse Petruchio's plan, it makes me uncomfortable -- and as it continues with the sun/moon etc. thing on the way back, to think of it as leading up to a consensual BDSM relationship makes me think of lots of sketchy narratives wherein the guy dominates the woman without her consent and she ends up liking it (despite her expectations) and that somehow retroactively makes his boundary-crossing behavior okay.

I also didn't get much sense in this production of Kate herself coming to be sort of in on the joke -- she does during the encounter with the old man after the sun/moon bit, and Petruchio's whispering to her at some point (I forget if it was during that scene or the closing scene), but while I want to read Kate's final speech as her being super over-the-top saying shit she doesn't believe to just piss off all these other women, I didn't really get that sense from this scene.

They don't close out the frame story, and I was thinking about what the (existence of the) frame story suggests about the main play (reversals, illusions, etc.), but I wasn't really coming up with anything -- so I went to Wikipedia, as one does.

Which wasn't helpful for this specifically, but which did quote [RSC] director Conall Morrison:

By the time you get to the last scene all of the men – including her father are saying – it's amazing how you crushed that person. It's amazing how you lobotomised her. And they're betting on the women as though they are dogs in a race or horses. It's reduced to that. And it's all about money and the level of power. [...] It is so self-evidently repellent that I don't believe for a second that Shakespeare is espousing this. And I don't believe for a second that the man who would be interested in Benedict and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet and all these strong lovers would have some misogynist aberration. It's very obviously a satire on this male behaviour and a cautionary tale

I found this interesting because I know I didn't even think about the contest from that one-level-back perspective or about the implications of everyone's glee at Kate's having been tamed.

My Riverside Shakespeare (2nd Edition) says:

Northrop Frye once remarked that the Katherina of Act I is not really dissimilar from the Katherina of Act V; at the beginning of the comedy she is persecuting her sister Bianca, and at the end she is engaged in precisely the same activity---except that now she has learned how to do it with social approval on her side. (Anne Barton, p. 139)

and

the stage convention which allows the actress playing the part to show plainluy in her face that she falls in love with Petruchio the moment she sets eyes on him has much to recommend it. Heartily sick of a single life, not to mention all the adulation showered on Bianca, she is really more than ready to give herself to a man but, imprisoned within a set of aggressive attitudes which have become habitual, has not the fainest idea how to do so. (Ibid)

I think one of my difficulties with Kate's trajectory through the play is that I know so little about her pre-Petruchio. We see her fighting with Bianca, but we know almost nothing about either of them. We're told that Kate is shrewish bladdy blah in a way that suggests she acts like that to everyone and has for a while. Offstage she breaks the lute (of the tutor who's just there to woo her sister, so possibly she's not just being peevish for the sake of being peevish...). We don't really know why she's so upset at Bianca -- when she's asking Bianca which suitor Bianca wants to marry and Bianca's all, "Whichever you want to marry you can have," there's lots of room for Bianca to play that in various ways (is she refusing to answer Kate's question to provoke her? does she really desire Kate's happiness, as a plain reading of the text would suggest?) and this production just played it as a plan reading of the text, so we get no insight into why Kate is so upset with Bianca, and Bianca herself remains flat and uninteresting. (Not that I'm saying you have to stage this scene against the plain reading of the text in order to make sense of Kate's crankiness at Bianca or in order to make Bianca and interesting and/or complex character, just that this scene is one of your only opportunities to do so -- well certainly for the former; admittedly we do see Bianca with the tutors picking a favorite and participating in a ruse, so she's not entirely the flat paragon of passive virtue that the early scenes might suggest.)

My Riverside also says of Petruchio's "taming" of Kate:

he goes on assuring her, despite everything she can do and say to prove the contrary, that she herself is gentle, rational, and loving: exactly the hidden qualities in her that he needs to foster and encourage. Petruchio wins in the end not because of superior force but because he succeeds in showing Katherina both the unloveliness of the false personality she has adopted and the emotional truth of the self she has submerged. (139)

I don't buy that, because whatever he actually believes about her (and I do think he genuinely likes/cares about her), all this rhapsodizing about her is entirely enmeshed with the "taming" such that everything he says to her feels false or cheap or insincere or IDK the exact adjective I'm looking for here.

The Riverside also says of Bianca: "Once married to Lucentio, she ceases to be 'sweet Bianca.' At the wedding feast itself she reveals an unexpected streak of bawdry, willfulness, and arrogance" (140), which I thought was interesting -- I think we tend to have a fairly flat impression of Bianca (because there's not much there there), and we interrogate Kate's closing speech to the exclusion of interrogating anything else about that closing scene (and I include myself in that "we").

( more details about the performance )

Current Music: "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" in my head

Community Night: Miss Conduct Tames the Shrew
Thursday, October 15th | 5:45pm to 7:00pm
Upstairs on the Square

Boston Globe blogger, Robin Abrahams, will read from her new book, Mind Over Manner: Master the Slippery Rules of Modern Ethics and Etiquette, and lead a discussion about sex, communication, Petruchio and Kate. In the Zebra Room at Upstairs on the Square, we'll eat, drink and discuss all the Shrew-ness we can handle!

Okay, so it didn't start until like 6pm, and they wrapped it up at like 6:45 (to allow people time to buy her book and stuff, I guess). There were waitstaff walking around with appetizers -- most of which were actually vegetarian (unlike most of the entrees on the menu) and OMG shot-glass of creamy tomato soup with a tiny grilled cheese sandwich! However, Cate and I did split an entree 'cause we thought we'd be excessively hungry otherwise. I knew from having had lunch there during Restaurant Week that their portions are small, but still, wow... How is this our default restaurant for taking candidates? Anyway.

( Miss Conduct & The Taming of the Shrew -- reading/talk/Q&A )

The house didn't open until 7pm, so we went to Herrell's (which is apparently open through Head of the Charles -- this weekend -- and ambiguous after that). I got Hazelnut Cream, though I couldn't really taste it what with the hot fudge.

So, the show.

( ASP does The Taming of the Shrew )

Hyperion Shakespeare Company is doing an all-female Richard II (10/21-10/24 ... I think I'm going to go Fri. 10/23).

burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

when faced with my demons I clothe them and feed them

Entries tagged with shakespeare: the taming of the shrew

culture consumed (September, 2023)

[V&V] The Taming of the Shrew [2014-03-22]

[ASP] The Taming of the Shrew [2009-10-15]

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